Universe Part One: A Short Walk To A Cold Beer

It’s getting interesting, now. Or, really, a while ago.

The analysts have gotten out of their cages.

Some of the analysts I respect, and some of them I don’t; but that doesn’t mean the ones I like are perfect generators of (what I consider) cogent readings. Indeed, for me the real split here isn’t between blindsighted culture warriors and intelligent people, but between people interested in extracting meanings from the Wikileaks Affair, and those interested in reducing those meanings. And oddly enough for me, in this case I think the reducers are the ones striking closer to whatever capital-T truth the whole sprawling mess conceals. In many ways, the folks who brand Julian Assange as a terrorist get closer to the heart of things than many others I agree with far more, and are fighting the more relevant fight even if they are on the wrong side; because what’s being contested here is something about governments, not something about Internets. In other words, the main dispute isn’t ethical — it’s political.

By which I mean to say: if the question is about pragmatism, it’s the wrong question. If it’s about theories of information, it’s off-base. If we’re talking about larger questions of democracy in the twenty-first century, we are talking about the wrong things. Well, of course they’re really the right things, and we should definitely be talking about them anyway, but as far as Wikileaks goes they are beside the point. Could Julian Assange really justify a single life being lost from the release of an unredacted transcript, if it was in the greater name of transparency and freedom? That’s an extremely important question, even if it’s only a hypothetical one, but it’s still a question of ethics. Is the transparency he wishes for, the curbing of conspiracy, potentially a bad thing for many of us here in the West, not to mention for other people around the globe, in terms of ultimate effect? Again, that isn’t politics: it’s a Phil 100 essay question. It’s a very good question! But it isn’t the only one, and it isn’t the most urgent one. Even if the question is a more nuanced one, maybe along the lines of asking what makes a government vulnerable to Wikileaks “attacks” — Jaron Lanier asked this question just the other week in the Atlantic, and the answer comes back, perhaps unsurprisingly, as “the more democratic they are, the more damage can potentially be done to them this way” — it is still, ultimately, a question that’s overwhelmingly ethical in accent: as in, “what are you going to do about Wikileaks?” And as such, it too manages to evade the matter of politics, for the matter of conduct. Even Julian Assange’s own manifestoes, as engaged as they are with systems analysis, flow-charts, and grouping rules — and if that’s an ideology in practice, then it’s one that’d be shockingly coarse-grained, if it weren’t so weak-kneed — hey, that’s actually a compliment, Julian! — nonetheless betray a sort of obsessive focus on the social responsibilities of individuals, as though it really was the wake-up call that held pride of place over the sausage-making exposures.

But, this isn’t the only way to view the situation. We are all political actors of course, but though undergraduates rarely recognize the fact in end-of-term papers it is still more a Platonic vision that controls us, than a Machiavellian one. The Wikileaks Affair is a wake-up call for us, and that’s extemely important…and it’s a wake-up call for government in general, “Government” if you will, and that’s important too…but the clash, the clash, in that construction is an ethical one. Because individuals are what counts, in ethics; and if you can even treat the government as a kind of individual, a “person” in the sense of a corporate entity we all together compose as ethical individuals, then you can fairly charge at it from the inside using ethics as your spear-point. But in politics, you see, the government is not our corporate self.

The mob is.

Or, the people, the citizenry, whatever you want to call us. The electorate. The public. Whatever we are in any other light, in politics we’re not the government but the governed. Except — which is important — when we’re not. “Governed”, that is. Or perhaps rather: “governable”. And so here’s what I can dope out so far about the capital-T truth that’s implicated in this whole extended-news-cycle thing, no matter how anyone spins it:

In the West at least, our governments are overdrawn at the bank of public acquiescence.

Now, that’s not Obama’s fault, nor Hillary Clinton’s either. It is not even entirely George W. Bush’s fault, or Tony Blair’s…although their fair share of the blame is probably running at about 90%. Blame goes back a long way in this game of political deficit-spending and cheque-kiting, even if it wouldn’t matter just so long as no one made any truly provocative moves while at the helm of government; but of course once someone does, the danger is that the whole account of blame is likely to come due, and land at somebody’s feet. And I’m not talking about the Tea Party, here! I’m not even talking about the people who have the courage to protest, or even dissent in any sort of semi-public way. Hell, I’m not even talking about the grumblers; I’m talking about the politically apathetic. We think we know the dark side of apathy — politicians can get away with murder, and they never have to pay for it. Rights and freedoms can be eroded, and so long as the apathetic are getting their daily fix of whatever it is that they need, the system’s inertia can be hard to overcome, even for a person with power of their very own. But, that’s not actually the dark side of apathy, that’s the bright side of it — well, if you’re a politician it’s the bright side, or at least is often the bright side. If you’re an evil politician it’s practically as bright as the full moon. You don’t have to worry about apathy; apathy’s your friend. Apathy helps you.

And so you come to think that’s all it can do.

But that’s not the whole story. Hardly anyone is truly, soul-deeply, apathetic for real — most people are not just Bullshitters Without Ideals, they’re just sort of Hard To Bestir, that’s all. Kind Of Selfish, even. But, this doesn’t actually mean “bereft of belief”, because how can it? When the ability to absent yourself from matters political is the very essence of political freedom, it can’t. Like it or not, there is nothing wrong with being apathetic, anymore than there’s anything wrong with being different — there’s the core of representative democracy right there, if you want to take a look at it. Down at the very bottom of things, all freedoms are the same, and they’re fused with equality in the Tocquevellian sense, so the opposite branches share a root and the root is good…so how can apathy be “bad”? When no exercise of freedom can be bad, just so long as it does not outrage the principle of liberty. So when that’s really all it has to do, then by doing that it must be good…right?

Hey, but you’re gonna call that “sophistry”, and I’m not gonna blame you for it, okay? I’ll admit it sure does sound like sophistry. But here’s the thing, if apathy was “good”, we never had any positive proof of it before now — no matter anyone’s interpretation, if it was “good” that was just because some vague and practically-unsupported theory said it had to be, or else the logic of the system would fall apart. I’ll very readily submit to you that apathy has never been seen to enact a good in the Western democracies, sure enough…!

But then again, Western representative democracy isn’t that old, and no historical democracy’s ever had to be as adaptable as our young one here has, and therefore is it so impossible to imagine that this most inert-seeming of its attributes has hidden capabilities? Think of “apathy” as the appendix of freedom, perhaps: the place where “the good bacteria” gets stored against the eventuality of a catastrophic virulence that wipes everything else out. The back-up files of modern democracy; well, and isn’t every idealist’s goal dependent on its eventual activation? Don’t we talk about that all the time, “if only everyone would get out and vote”, “if only people knew they would care”? The truth is, though, things have rarely reached that fever pitch, and the true sleepers have rarely been sufficiently energized to awaken…as idealistic goals go, that’s a pretty tough one, actually, and even though that’s probably what makes that species of idealism so precious, so indispensible — whatever would we be, if it ever passed away? — there’s no denying that it still is hard, and so that’s about the size of it, there you go, that’s the world we live in. Adaptable modern democracy: it takes a lot to precipitate a true crisis in it. Any day of the week, you can see individualistically-birthed, ethical Dunkirks…even some with political consequences!…but ones that are actually political in their fundamental causes, those ones are rare. If you stir fifteen percent of the population for an hour and a half, that’s a full-blown revolution-in-the-making…if it only lasted two hours. But it doesn’t. And apathy returns.

But there’s a third road. Why yes, as a matter of fact (okay: as a matter of my opinion) there is. And that’s the dark side of apathy, which is also paradoxically the only possible movement within it short of an actual Storm-The-Bastille tsunami, a total game-changer, a catastrophe in its own right. And that’s the colossal inaction of a democratic mob, or as Buber says (oh, you knew I was going to bring him up) the action of the whole being, that comes to resemble inaction. Man, let me tell you, this sort of thing, it’s like an ocean gyre, it’s like an atmospheric wave, its motion is so big that it’s bloody hard to notice. But in these times, maybe it’s the information technology that does it, or maybe it’s the evaporation of authoritarian religious structures, but if we look we can see it working. Like:

In a generation, same-sex marriage will be the law of the land everywhere, because of apathy. People just don’t care what other people get up to sexually anymore, at least in the political sense they do not; though in ethical terms the debate over human sexual freedom will go on and on as it has since the beginning of the world, and though there will always be bigots, the question “what are you going to do about homosexual behaviour?” now has no answer even if one is a bigot, because the mob no longer cares about that conduct enough to try to interfere with it. No longer cares enough about it to sanction unethical measures. As in fact it’s been asked to: as the very last-ditch straw-into-gold Hail-Mary-pass gambit of the actively reactionary forces arrayed against it was the proposal of the “traditional marriage” Constitutional amendment, the only thing with sufficient power in the United States to conceivably hold off mass tolerance for two generations instead of one…and then it, too, would have toppled, but they couldn’t even get that.

Or consider the “War On Drugs”: within two generations, it too will be gone for soft drugs like marijuana — even if it is a gigantic engine of wealth in the same way discriminating against people on the basis of their sexuality is not. Which is why it’ll take slightly longer to collapse. Well, but these things can’t last forever, you know! Rome didn’t last forever. The Soviet Union lasted only about seventy years, though the whole world thought it would go on for at least two hundred, and maybe forever. That was really the killer of the Cold War, you know: the idea that it would go on forever…

Can you imagine?

So what are you going to do about kids smoking pot down by the river? You can’t do anything, because we’ve already been over this, and over it, and over it. And so the ethical positions people cannot help but take in their own name and for their own reasons, are not things that the mob feels any need to make concessions to any longer at this point. Refractory and inscrutable, if there’s even any difference to make between the two, the mob takes no notice of the judgement of consistency as individuals must, but simply either cares or does not care…and is under no obligation to render service to anyone, for good or bad…

…But you see, what that doesn’t mean, is that it must always be bad. “Bad” has certainly had its innings, as far as popular opinion goes…now, with victory for sexual tolerance and defeat for radical criminalization of drug use, good is getting its share too.

And such examples could be multiplied with ease — there is so much small-mindedness that won’t last, because small-mindedness takes energy, just like suicide takes energy. That’s not to say that activism, and positive exertions of democratic freedom like voting, don’t make any difference: they do. A word in an ear, like a pebble thrown on the slope of a mountainside, in twenty years can make a change as impossible to prevent as any avalanche…but the ultimate engine of an avalanche is still gravity, just as the natural force that’s enlisted to do most of the Superman-style “change the course of mighty rivers” work in this world is still the force popularly known as “the path of least resistance”…

Which is also making itself felt NOW, with the Wikileaks business, in the following way:

Which is that the general public has no sympathy whatsoever for their governments. Or, to be a bit more precise: no sympathy whatsoever with their governments. So right now, those governments are working just as hard as ever they can, to reframe the Wikileaks Affair as something that is not so much about them, as it is about us…what are we going to do about Wikileaks?…because without the sanction of the governed, they can’t actually shut it down. But, that isn’t working. Right now, though perhaps we can’t see the movement because it is too vast to notice, the same governments that recently found it so easy to assemble crypto-fascist sentiments and legislative game theory into the apparatus of a nascent police state — because of apathy, because no one really cared, because it didn’t impinge on the acquisition of their fix — because they hire people to stop that kind of thing for them, which is what checks and balances are all about — those same governments are suddenly finding themselves hard-pressed to not have to directly ask their public for approval of their increasingly-corporatist methods. All of a sudden. All of a sudden!

All of a sudden, they need our help: our positive aid.

And they won’t get it, because it’s too much work.

The average apathetic person is morphing into a leading member of an apathetic mob, that doesn’t want to lend a hand, that sits back after work with a beer in front of the tube and nastily chuckles to see their leaders’ discomfiture. And does not even bother to smash the bottle afterwards. It’s all just so much Reality TV, now, to us: we don’t fucking care anymore. And this is the dark side of apathy, which is the moment of the worm’s non-turning…Wikileaks releases evidence of a banal secret culture, a stupid culture with massive privileges regularly abused, and it is not the serious and horrible evidence they make available that is the main thing for us, but it’s the Dumb Shit that causes that Whole Movement. In parallel, the remaining vestiges of real journalism (hooray for the remaining real journalists!) go to war with their governments over press freedoms and war crimes both-at-once, while the governments’ not-so-secret shame is that they’re motivated more by the stupid embarrassments than by the shocking revelations…but now that the two are made into one they can’t win on either, they’ve picked the wrong fight, they’ve brought a serious knife into the circle instead of a pranking pen-laser, they cannot try to stop the dumb shit without also being seen trying to stop the important shit, and maybe if they hadn’t been so lulled by our apathy they would’ve chosen more wisely but they WERE, and now they’re FUCKED.

And so here is the power of the reducers: Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and everybody else with a hated name is ready to blow this shit right up, in the name of core democratic freedoms and the right to be intolerant to evil…ready to go absolutely to war over it. And they’ve got the ammo, too. God, for once, is on their side; they don’t have to be consistent, they just have to get in there…

Because that’s how politics works, baby!

And therefore the crazy post-Bush Republican fringe groups, the brown-suited flat-earthers (gone in a generation!), find themselves with no choice but to engage in this amazingly losing battle…

(Along with, it must be said, those who’ve unfortunately had the flat-earthers’ bill come due down at their feet…but don’t let me for an instant give you the impression that makes them innocent…!)

(Because they’re NOT…!)

…Only because the belief they can win is so massively built-in to every move they make, that they can’t figure out how to let go of it without letting go of their casus belli itself, and so the fight is always over who gets to say they’re the fighters, and practically nothing else. Indeed, the most awfully inevitable thing about the entire scenario is that the bad guys are exactly right about where the battlefield is, they’re just terribly wrong about the lay of its land…but to adjust to that reality they’d also have to adjust to all the other realities they’re out of step with, and therefore they can’t both win and fight, and therefore even the smallest retreat is impossible: they must be the aggressors, always. For thirty years they’ve worked hard and steadily to fold every issue into the same issue, into One Big Issue, into an Excuse Ideology that satisfies no higher ideals but only scratches deep itches…until now there is no battle they can fight that is not, by their own successful definitional insistence, decided in the overture: in the very first trumpet-blare. And every time they lose, it was their last chance to win, but they’re too pot-committed to sever the losses, and they’re too wilfully dumb to see (as any good reality-show contestant would) that as soon as the voting goes against you the first time, you’ve already lost the control you were relying on to establish or keep your position…and so even though this is actually a REALLY big battle they’re totally unprepared and underequipped for it. But worst of all. Worst of all. Worst of all…

Their traditional supply line — apathy! — has been completely cut off.

And so, as odd as it sounds, their only remaining friend is the intelligent public, that reads Jaron Lanier articles and cares about ethics in a way they themselves never have. If they were smart people (which they’re so evidently, provenly not that I involuntarily snorted just a bit as I typed that), they’d look their own shit in the face and realize that their ethical talk is all just cover for their real biases — just an excuse — and so even if it’s a really fun game to employ ethical issues in what we might call a trolling fashion against their political opponents, it’s a game they should be more than willing to give up once it isn’t helping their political agenda anymore. Julian Assange a terrorist? They only call him that because it’s a magic word, like “Shazam!” — if it works then it gives them power, which is all they want. It has nothing to do with the ethical component of Assange’s actions, obviously; it has entirely to do with securing the sympathy of the electorate. And if intelligent people are likely to then spend their energies in debating the ethical suitability of the label, once it’s been falsely called…well, that’s just a bonus!

So they think. But it isn’t true; because they’ve grown too used to “sympathy” and “acquiescence” being functionally indistinguishable, as far as the electorate goes…and in this case, those two quiddities have split apart. You could probably get the sympathy if you were only willing to work hard enough, or at least what would ordinarily be “enough” of it — which will be enough to make it not matter if you can’t actually make the word “terrorist” stick — which you can’t! — but governments and their spokespeople have really had such a fantastically easy ride these last few years that their estimate of “hard” is probably pretty screwed-up in the first place, and in the second place their idea of what would constitute the “work” is also, very probably, off by a million miles. Because while in the past even a little bit of sympathy has been proven to be enough to get people to do nothing, it doesn’t follow that any amount of sympathy on its own will be enough to get them to do something…but something is exactly what they need, because without it the “terrorist” claim falls apart from sheer ethical incoherence, and as soon as you’ve presided over an implosion like that you won’t look like a person who’s great at gaming the system by raising ethical issues, you’ll look like a lousy game-player who can’t be trusted to speak on those issues…because you’re too damn dumb to pass Phil 100.

So, where’s the percentage in playing that game? There isn’t one; the horns have already sounded, to call the faithful to the field, and they haven’t bloody come. The game’s up: no one believes that a vote for Assange is a vote for Osama, and a vote against Jesus and America. They’re having too much fun snickering. They’re staying at home. They won’t support the reactionary reducers because trust in apathy has kept the Brown-Suited Ones from re-investing in the psychic infrastructure of their bullshit as much as it’s kept them from re-investing in the physical infrastructure of their country, and now the levees are busting.

You know?

So if the bad guys were smart, they’d up stakes and get the fuck out of the battlefield — forget trying to dry off Wikileaks’ wet dynamite by dragging it into the warmth of The House That The War On Terror Built, let Lanier and Sterling and even me (extractors by nature, all of us, but I only wish I was in their league!) try to confront the mob’s snickering and bloody-minded sentiment with an ethical, analytical scolding instead, and hope that the non-apathetics out there will find themselves sufficiently motivated by the high-minded tale of how it’s better to be an Eloi than a Morlock, that they’ll be happy to turn on one of their own…or possibly, more accurately, turn him off…

And just pray that nothing happens that really amuses the guy drinking his beer in front of the tube, like…oh, I don’t know…maybe Colin Powell giving a press conference in which he announces his support for Wikileaks, because if Wikileaks had been around when the Iraq war started then he wouldn’t've had to lie about the WMDs?

Well, but even if that doesn’t happen…

…This is still all over, now. Because the reactionaries would actually be smart just to hunker down and hope Wikileaks’ disclosure-tornado somehow passes them by — better off in that, even if it doesn’t pass them by! — except they can’t get out of their own way: if they’re not the fighters! then they’re nobody. They just don’t know how to stop charging, even if it is over a cliff. Heck, they’ll just charge all the harder! Screw you, heathen cliff, you’re not a real American! Jesus Christ, they don’t even know what they’re not fighting for anymore. It’s just sad. And it really is over. But give them this, if you give ‘em nothing else: that at least they’re never confused about what they’re fighting against…

Politics, you see?

It’s a lot like the Jerry Springer show.

No one watches it just to hear the Final Thought.

Look Back At Gerber

Or, as I might have called it…

“FLASHBACK! To “A Trout In The Milk…!“

Although possibly I am a little late with that, but then you see it was a very strange Winter Festival Period around these parts:  my little nephew was born, for one thing.  And I guess I got myself a little distracted.

A lot distracted, okay.

Hell, I’m still distracted…

But late as I am, while it is still the middle of the month of Janus I can’t be completely too late, and this is a very good thing because I have just one or two things to say.  Since it’s about five years plus a little bit since the Great Girlfriend Meltdown, five years minus a little bit since I yammered on at Jim Roeg about Batman Begins and realized it might be more fair on him to just start my own blog…and now here we all are, Bloggers, all together and conveniently somewhat close to the turn of the year, the turn of the screw, the turn of the tide, the turn of the page…the Big Hinge.

Hey…thanks for coming!

And don’t worry, I’m not quitting, so you don’t have to sit through any happy-birthday-to-me-ing, at least not very much, and not in any too-general sense.  Not that I disdain that sort of thing, you understand — not by any means! — and not that I don’t have many, many. many people to thank for this enormously-prolonged, almost tantric Sting might say, and so very rewarding, Big Conversation.  But for one thing, there’s a reason my blogroll is labelled “You Know Who You Are”…and for another…

Well, y’know…

Once, not long ago (hm, actually quite a while ago, now that I think of it) I was all prepared to write a post called “On The Lifespan Of Blogs”, my own little survey of how people get into it, and then sometimes out of it, and how sometimes that takes and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes even looks like it’s doing one when it’s really doing the other…but then I thought “no, maybe I’d better save that one for when I retire from blogging, if I do”, and then I thought “well, maybe if I stop wanting to do this so much I might just simply tail off, and not bother marking the occasion”…

And then finally I found myself thinking “well, maybe I just plain missed my opportunity to write that post”, and now finally, finally, here we all are and not only have I missed the post but I’ve missed the chance to quit.  Meaning I missed the chance to quit what I was doing and start something else, because I just did start doing something else but lazily failed to mark the occasion, and in retrospect that marking would have been a making, actually, and so since I missed the making at the time I now couldn’t mark where it happened if I tried…

…Because it didn’t happen, and so there’s nothing to see on that downslope, no place where I fell and got up again, no scar I left in the scree, no footprints, no tracks.  Which in a way is a shame, from a certain non-perspective — because I do miss that post’s existence, now.  I had so much to say about how one gains an audience, loses it, gets it back again or changes it in, how one peters out and pumps in and re-buys and levels up on the shifting sands of Internet attention which one is also part of…just so long as one is here.  But then after that post came another new versional perspective called “The Restaurant At The End Of The Internet”, and then I let that one go too, and now I’m not sure I could even muster up any such final statements, not sure I could manage to erect any such data-cairns or Internet roadsigns along my way.  In part, it’s age that’s probably working against me there:  as my brain gets less plastic I switch from seeing trees to seeing forests anyway!  And so find it much harder to distinguish where I’ve been from where I am, as all old tough sailors do when they’re far away at sea…

And no, that’s not me playing…

…But it is my manifesto, at least as much of one as I’ve pretty well ever been able to get, and by a very peculiarly happy fault in this particular rendition it is even a bit more mine, than it would’ve been otherwise.  Eh?  Because YouTube doesn’t play Dylan anymore I guess, but Dylan’s still gone friably through the prism into public life, and thus become really and nicely liminal;  that song won’t be public domain for going on another century or so, and that’s good, because I only want to sing it off the karaoke machine anyhow, I don’t want to fully own it any more than I want to fully hijack it, I just want to play with it in the space between, where it only kind of belongs to the whole world…

…Where it is neither inside nor outside, of course. No, I’m not meant to be the guy singing at this link, but then neither is the character in the song meant to be Bob Dylan himself, though undeniably it was only Bob who had the dream…

…But then this is my dream, and so what good would it do me to link to Dylan anyway?  I like that guy doing the cover in the link:  he seems so happy, doesn’t he?  Playing just to play, playing something we all know the words to.  I’m not singing along with him, as I would be if it was shaggy old Bob up there, but instead in a way he is singing along with me;  and in a manner of speaking he is even singing this song for me, since I couldn’t find the original in any case.  So there’s no money here, because there’s none of the sort of authenticity that can make money…but on the other hand, that isn’t the only kind of authenticity there is, either.

Is it?

So, making money…no.  But that guy’s making my gratitude, anyway;  just as all of you have been doing too, obviously, lo these five-or-so years while I myself have been playing “just to play” out on this soggy Internet soccer field.  A fan press;  a fan conversation, about all that we have in common.  Even if most of it was made by others, and owned by others still.  I dunno, really, folks…maybe it is all about the ludic nature of the reading, and maybe indeed the ludic reading is also a kind of ludic habitation:  a claiming of the waste spaces and the fallow fields, for new purposes-in-common.  Yeah…because there’s authenticity, and then there’s authenticity…right?  You know at times I really do feel like my voice comes unstuck on this blog, like it is not really about anything, like it is not really me speaking…because in fact “me” is a thing to be about, “me” is a thing that lives in the centre of someplace and bends straight lines into a circle around itself:  “me” is another name for a kind of purpose, but this blog never was made for any purpose other than diversion, even in the earlier funnier posts that were probably much better written.  So it’s just a journeyman effort, a space like a Purgatory, untented and possibilistic…heck, I think that’s what drew me to it in the first place, the strange marginal promise of all that:  that maybe it was made to avoid all the normal attractors, just so in the act of such diligent avoidance it could end up being a sort of an attractor too, somehow.  And:  maybe even its own special producer of Art?  Now you’re like me: expanding out laterally, horizontally, peer-to-peer.  Growing to include what you imply, as all fractal patterns do — even, inevitably, taking in the outside observer.  I never watched Lost myself (only, as I’ve said, the last episode), but I watched the folks watching it, and I watched its weird occupation of the particular fan/reader eco-niche that fascinated them all so, and that was quite interesting, actually.  Our little sector of Blogland is such a knowing sort of place, eh?  Everyone is so obsessed with the relationship between Art and Constraint, and the problem of creating new space…like the problem of salvation?  Less religiously:  like the problem of independence in a very prescriptive sort of world, a world bound around in convention and consensus — and fairly deep matters of ownership and value, that slink around in the darkness outside the campfire-circle of desire.

But then, don’t listen to me! You all know how I like to try getting the conversation to chain, when in comes to topics in fantasy!

Honestly, I’m absolutely terrible that way.  I don’t know how you stand it.  It’s just a blog, right?  It doesn’t really need all this lugubrious crap squeezing down around it like an accretion disc, and getting overheated.    I mean, I already said it:  I’m not going anywhere.  So why don’t I just write something about something already, and get on with it?

Well…since you invite so prettily, I’d be pleased to.  As it happens, I do have a couple things simmering away on the back burner, that are pretty much ready to serve…and whether they’re a whole lot different from all the crap I’ve been serving all this time remains to be seen (“Sleet!  My favourite!”), but I think I can promise that we will, at any rate, see them…

But in the meantime, before the old time’s all run out, let’s take a bit of another look backward, shall we?

Specifically, at my old weird project the Seven Soldiers Of Steve, a tribute to the late great Steve Gerber’s massive maxi-series that was perpetrated on 1970s Marvel Comics, and what I called way back at the beginning the longest graphic novel ever, though I think I’m pleased to say that over the last five years Grant Morrison may have broken that record at DC using a similar “comics intranet” strategy…the creation of a private Morrisonspace within the corpus of mainstream shared-universe comics, something I’d hardly believed possible anymore:  the carving-out of new territory and new possibilities from the moribund-seeming coal face of established superheroic fiction, and O LORD, did I just mix those metaphors, AGAIN…?!

Christ, I am such a slob.

But the project is still going on, happily:  our old friend Mr. Disharoon, surely the very happiest recipient of the blessings of blogland that I know, whose two current contributions can be found down at the bottom of the SSoS links on my sidebar, is even working (so I am told) on a third essay about the Gerberverse’s most lovable denizen, that same Ruth who was James-Michael Starling’s frustrated nurse in Omega The Unknown…a project that reminds me strongly of Ed’s old notion for the very last Narnia book possible to be written, the biography of Susan Pevensey…

And of course Ed’s piece on the Headmen/Nebulon sequence of The Defenders is still one day to come…so, no, we’re not finished by a long shot, but there is still something to say here, at this time, looking back on how we’ve arrived at where we are.  Which is:

I fancy it’s almost become a truism in the world of elementary physics and astrophysics both, peculiar twinned disciplines of Biggest and Smallest, that the best description of our Best Descriptions might best lie in the descriptions of the things they describe:  the Study Of Path-Making, you might otherwise call it, where “spacetime” is just a convenient higher-order summation of otherwise-indescribable particle freedoms — where in fact “geometry” becomes “languaging”, to tie together the bunched sheets of those oddest of bedfellows, computer science and feminist lit-crit — but, dude, you knew those guys had to get together sometime, with the way they were always going at each other! — in which all the fields are only fraternities, and all the objects only affections.  That’s what elementary physics is now, dear Reader, really:  a mathematical soap-opera, a shifting histogram of kisses traded, handshakes accepted or declined, desire lines worn into trails, letters mailed or sent.  With reference to an old strange enthusiasm of mine, turned now to high-schooly metaphors:  the Kissing Force and the Note-Passing Force, those are the forces passed when teachers and parents aren’t looking, the Desire Forces…and then there’s the Hand-Holding Force and the Same-Car-Riding Force, the ones active in the sight of parents and teachers that are just as important:  the Declaration Forces.  In between those forces’ various mixtures is found the concept of Relationship…or as the Ancient Greeks and I call it, the mystery of Matter and Motion.  Meaning, of course…

…That all attempts to group similar things together, are attempts to similarize things by putting them in groups.  Just as Steve Gerber’s Defenders, naturally enough, but also like some larger groupings too…

…For, what’s a field without its particles?

Or what, for that matter, is space and time?

As the margins don’t exist without the border, nor the border without the margins, nor any of it without the centre nor the centre without any of it…but it’s all just one big Hilbert space of hopes and fears and maybes.  Nothing real except the changes:  as above, so below…

A motto proven out nicely in astrophysics too, as it happens:  where once again there’s not really any core nor any hinterland, no centre and no no outskirts.  The universe, in the classic modern formulation, is not an expanding cloud but the skin of a balloon being blown up:  the planets and the galaxies only like dots marked in felt pen on the balloon’s surface, and thus the only real  “centre” is outside the space we live in.  And the space the centre is expanding into is outside the space we live in, as well.  Everything we see and everything we know is of the border, things neither inside nor outside, the ever-expanding locale that cannot exist apart from its manner of habitation.  Irreducibly interrelational:  because in 4D or perhaps even (of necessity) 5D space there may be such things as True or False, Real or Unreal, Yes or No, Off or On…One or Zero…

…But those things aren’t like what WE are like, quite fundamentally.  Because we stalk the margins.  We are of the margins.  We define the margins.  So we’re cursed, right?  Or:  blessed, right?

Cursed or blessed, you would think it’d have to be one or the other, but those absolutes are just a reverse-holographic illusion that the state of being neither one fully creates.  In other words, Grant Morrison has got it all so gorgeously backward, so beautifully precisely backward…

…That it couldn’t be any righter!

And hey, well:  maybe that’s worth thinking about, you know?

But in the meantime it’s The Defenders we”ll be thinking about, because it happens there too — maybe even begins there.  In all these essays, the main theme has appeared to be “pushing outward”…except it hasn’t, because none of these essays has a centre either, you see.  Because their subject doesn’t have a centre.  Look at the titles on the sidebar, none of them betrays any meaning but “end”.  End, and end, and end again…a finality that never comes is baked deep into every perspective, not just the feeling that finality never comes, no:  nothing so logical as that.  But the concept of “finality” as something that never itself comes, never becomes so much as a viable scan or gloss of the world;  never is more than an abstraction that doesn’t apply:  that’s what this is all about.  Epilogue followed by revised epilogue, a failure to conclude followed by a deuterocanonical failure to “really” begin, and then even in the very beginning is explicitly an end, for heaven’s sake…!  And yet we just keep going.  We’ll never run out.  There will always be wiggle-room;  room for things to seek a resolution without finding it.  Sunk deep within the event horizon of the Mandlebrot Set, deep within the complicatin’ forry of the world-as-is you-broke-it-you-bought-it, we are fascinated by higher-dimensional intuitions of definiteness, belonging, being one or the other, on or off, one or zero, and no two ways about it.  True identity.  The pure teleology.  The revelation of the mystery of Cause…

But…well…

There really is no such thing, though:  which is probably what’s so bloody fascinating about it.

And that — I think — is what I wanted to say here.  There is no centre and no Cause, thus no borders and no End.  From somewhere the balloon inflates, and the marks move apart, turning themselves into distance as they go.  “Centre”…that’s only the name of the ultimate fiction, the one we extrapolate from reality because we feel we must.  But there really is no centre.  There really is no antipodal position, either.  There’s really no space between, or inside, or outside, or (even!) neither inside nor outside.  None of this stuff is written down anywhere, by Nature.  It actually doesn’t have to make sense.  It’s all just theoretical.  All just language.  We’re the only centres there are, to any of it:  people, personalities, powers.  Oh yes:  just you watch, I’m going to tie the whole thing up right here, this will be bloody James Bond or my name isn’t “That Guy Who Reviewed Final Crisis Without Having Read It”…!

…Because, I don’t know, I’ve got to try to get it out of my system or something?  Not that I’m changing this blog’s focus, you understand, but…I mean, what was the reason I got into this blogging game in the first place, really? It was to write some stuff about my first comics love, the Fantastic Four.  But now I don’t care about the FF at all anymore, and I’ve got to look at that fact as the taking of some kind of temperature…don’t I?  I’m so turned off by what the shared-universe concept has become, at DC and Marvel.  And y’know, I used to be turned off while still keeping up, but I haven’t been doing that for a while now either.  I have written so much about the symbolic ordinal relations in both fictional and non-fictional “space” — maybe you’ve noticed? — and how the conversation between the two sparks how each gets inhabited (how both get inhabited?), that now I can barely stand to look at places where fallow space is aggressively co-opted before it can even be revitalized, which means I can barely stand to look at a lot of places that are available to be looked at.  Yes, how I would’ve loved it if my local video store, or newspaper, or bar, or downtown strip had been allowed to find a new way to thrive, in a new set of relations, before someone had swooped in and smothered, occasionally even strip-mined, its newfound and rejuvenating narrative!  Even so it is with Marvel and DC and their universes, I just don’t know anymore…caring even slightly just seems like good money after bad, these days.  Most of the time.

Though not all the time.

No, by no means all the time…

Or didn’t you notice that All-Star Superman #10 is Grant Morrison’s response to Laurie looking into the snowglobe, at the little Martian castle inside, where a little tiny Jon watches a little tiny Laurie throw the perfume bottle, and break everything to bits?

Even Amy didn’t get that one, if I recall right.  And so you see, new space can be found, even in the frozen lattice of the uttermost centre.  And even especially there.  The principle of opposition becomes the principle of harmony at last, and All-Star Superman as that which finally, finally picks up the gauntlet of Watchmen, yes:  I’m going to say it.  But only, y’know, because it’s true…

…Even if it probably isn’t quite enough.

But then again, maybe it is.  Nothing ever ends?

It doesn’t have to, you know.  When you break it down, philosophy is nothing but an ordering of verbal propositions, but even though the order is externally-imposed, that still doesn’t mean it’s imposed from the top down.  And even Wittgenstein doesn’t insist we pass over that which we can speak of, and weird old Godel would (I think) agree:  if the field shapes the particle movements, and the particle movements form the field, then since neither one is dictated to by the other our conversation may not come to any end, because there is no end out there waiting for it…because no end has been made.

And perhaps nothing is made…

…Except to go on and on, much as this blog.

But, maybe that’s a story for another time.