Universe Part Five: The Invention Of Boats

Now, I am not actually promising it will all be straightforwardly additive, but…

Let’s give it a whirl anyway. And start with my friend Jack, who tells me that the computer model of human consciousness is poorly-founded basically because thought precedes logic; because as useful as logic is, it’s not the foundation of thought but instead merely one of thought’s tools. This is the view from poetry and mathematics, if you like.

But what’s really interesting about that, is its curious similarity to the view from physics and biology: in that trying to answer a simple question like “well, what about dogs, cats, mice, spiders…do they think?” rather necessitates having some idea to proceed from of what constitutes “thinking” in the first place, and it just isn’t that easy an idea to get hold of. Seriously, how do we know what to call by that name, and what doesn’t merit the name? It’s a much tougher nut to crack than it seems at first glance, since we only have the one real-life definite instance of thinking to consider (that being: us) and our thinking is not just one thing but instead a whole multifarious netting of things…in other words we provide ourselves with an example of “thinking” right enough, but it is very hard to find an example of “simple” thinking in our heads: just these absurdly complex tangles. One hardly knows why we should believe they should submit to any easy classification in the first place, or admit of any reduction. And indeed from a strictly (I should perhaps say “aggressively”) logical perspective they do not — as the biological “computer” in our heads is more an evolutionary midden than an edifice. How does the whole “brain” thing work, how does it function, what rules does it follow? The answer is: we don’t really know. It’s very hard to know. The brain is a very ancient structure, made of accident piled on accident, a trillion dead ends collected by many species besides our own, and then handed over to us for further messing-up. And the very oddness of the thing is most apparent in comparisons with the digital computers we make ourselves…in the image of the logic we similarly invented, in the exercise of that profoundly strange and exotic brainwork: those machines being astonishingly good at crunching numbers in a way that, for all our complexity, we find utterly impossible…and yet still, despite that sheer numerical firepower of theirs, failing miserably at tasks we consider absolutely everyday. To the point where, as the good Dr. Hopfield pointed out, if you build a digital computer that’s as good as we are at recognizing human faces then you’ve probably built it wrong.

And then he also pointed out something else: Gay-Lussac’s law.

Which is an interesting and elegant result of human scientific thinking, that digital computers simply have no need of taking into account. Right? Since the “computer” way of finding out the same thing is much less macro and much more micro: you just have to count and label every molecule in a gas, do a bunch of complicated mathematical operations at the speed of light…and out pops the answer, laws need not apply. It’s just all differential equations. So complicated is simple, and simple is complicated. This is, perhaps, where many adherents of the computer model of consciousness goof up by coming at Turing’s famous test questions from the wrong angle — since answering them is not just a matter of running a million Jeopardy computers, is it? Because no amount of simulation, no matter how perfectly transparent its great speed allows it to be, is enough to qualify as “this is probably a human being” in our estimation. As I think I said somewhere else around here (or will say in very short order someplace else), thinking is surely still thinking whether it is fast or slow, and the computer just keeps getting faster and still keeps not thinking, until at a certain point you just have to ask how fast it does need to run simulations of us, to be one of us…or even close enough as makes no difference to us…

But in any case, all philosophy aside, the fact is that the Gay-Lussac thing is in our authentic style because it suits and attends to our authentic intellectual capabilities, and even computers that could “beat” the Turing test would not need to know it….especially if they beat it by doing what computers do best, only unimaginably better.

Controversial enough for you?

We’re just getting started. Time to talk about sex. No! Music…

…No!

Boats.

In my crazy countryman Farley Mowat’s delightfully insane piece of outsider art called The Farfarers, he imagines the invention of boats. And Farley being Farley, of course he lays it at the feet of the Scots: one day a man’s walrus-hide tent blows away into the water, lands upside-down like a coracle, and the man thinks…

“Och, that’s a bonny wee…!”

No no no. Absurd, Farley! Rather, he thinks:

“Hey, I betcha I could get into that thing and float around!”

Yes; might make the whole “I hunt walrus for a living” thing a bit easier, at that! Sheesh. And so “floating around in stuff” is born, but of course not really, because (as I hope anyone can see) human beings didn’t invent boats anymore than we invented our immune system. Rather, just as the immune system, boats are something we inherited. “Floating on stuff”, that isn’t a thing one sits down and thinks up by putting one’s chin in one’s hand, that’s no Newton-and-the-apple moment, that’s something prior to epiphany right there: in other words it just is. One doesn’t need to get all Rousseau with it. It doesn’t have an origin that makes any sense to talk about. In the version of history that seeks a logical (aha!) ordering of cause and effect (as if there could be any other kind!), the invention of boats is a piece that just won’t fit into the puzzle. Boats, like the brain, are bigger than us and older too; boats are something we are inside, as logic is inside thought.

And the whole thing is wrapped inside something much bigger than boats or the brain, which is, of course, as promised, sex. How old is sex? Answer: older than just about anything biological, that we’re part of. Sex is beyond Rousseau; sex is Stapledon, a story billions of years old. Which is probably why we just cannot figure out a good way to talk about it at all. You see, I really am suggesting that there are two systems involved in your average human being’s daily existence: a little one, that runs tirelessly on logic and generates vastly productive insights, and a bigger one, that runs on…?

We can’t be sure what it runs on. But that’s the one where all the sex-stuff lives, I figure. Along with the communication stuff…you know, the thing about human communication is that we are never going to fully enumerate all the modes of it, are we? Probably we will never even be able to guess at the number of them. How many tests would we have to come up with, to figure them all out? You could probably spend a lifetime just testing the eyebrow. There could be something to do with elbow twitches, for all we know. Forearm muscles. Feet. Sniffing. How in the world could we ever hope to catalogue all these things? Surely our imagination would run out before our bodies did, and maybe (for all we know) there is no end to the signals that our bodies can produce (or for that matter the complexity of even those sensations we think we know all about)…like the particles you can knock out of the proton, or like the embedding of clauses in Chomsky’s syntactical structures, the universe just keeps on bringing finer and finer details as we zoom in on it. So just calling it all “body language” really won’t do, obviously; that’s like talking about “instinct”, it’s just a crap excuse for a category, you can’t use it for anything! Hmm, except poetry…lovely, lovely poetry…

…Which as may recall is good for quite a lot, but is it really much good for logical dissection? Certainly the logic of poetry’s form is very beautiful, but I’m not sure that’s enough to make it actually a scientific endeavour. So maybe poetry represents an odd intersection of the two systems, straddling the line between them, existing partly on one side of that membrane and partly on the other? After all, poetry does just a dandy job of talking about sex…

…Which, as I said, is really not as easy as it looks. Recently I had occasion to talk to someone who was contemplating doing some research into “queerspace” in Vancouver, and as we talked around and around it we finally got to a topic I might as well call “Historical Homosexuality”. A Rousseau-style conjectural history of human sexuality? But the thing is, you see, it can’t be brought off. Human sexual freedom is always being retroactively contextualized according to contemporary bias. There’s a story somewhere, I wish I could remember where I came across it, about what kind of terminology was used in America in the 1950s, well before the drafting of the word “gay” sparked an interest in “gayness”…gayness as a thing, you see: as something that can be logically, scientifically investigated. But in the Fifties we did not know of “gayness” yet, and the nomenclature of the Fifties would not accept what we know of it now…or what we think we know. The story, you see, made it clear that the operative word for a gay man at that particular coordinate point in spacetime was fairy, and talked a bit about how gay-bashing incidents in those days were often concluded by the gang-leader raping the victim…but the rapist was not considered a “fairy” himself, for doing it! I know I’m always going back to Achilles dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, but I think in this case it’s a particularly apposite comparison: the victim is made more a “fairy” by the brutal act intended to bestow violent shame on him, and the one who commits it on him is made more a “man’s man” because of it too. Of course today we would not characterize it all that way — we would say it was an act of self-loathing and self-repression and fear on the part of the rapist, that seeking to produce an image of oneself as a victor by finding some unsettling reflection of your human foibles to turn into a victim is an act born of a psychological sickness, a twisting of self-medication with self-harm that dives into the criminal, into the vicious and the shameful itself, and that doesn’t get to ask for forgiveness…

…But then of course we would, because “gay” is our word. Our concept, our context. And we don’t have any difficulty applying it as a valid term and valid concept to any period throughout history…I know I don’t have any trouble with that, myself…and yet it isn’t really scientific, is it? Because perhaps the science goes something like this: Nature doesn’t care about the psychological dimensions of human sexual freedom. In nature there is no distinction of that kind between sexual actors, there are organisms and they engage in sexual behaviours and that’s all there is. It’s a blunderbuss approach — lots of sex gets had, as a result a lot of reproduction gets done as well, therefore the system works perfectly and what else could there possibly be to say about it all? It’s all just polymorphous, I’m a part of it and so are you and therefore the individual variations in preference don’t matter…these distinctions exist nowhere at all but in the psychological depths. To ask about the History Of Homosexuality is really at a certain point to ask what gayness is, why it exists, what causes it…but perhaps it is not caused, because perhaps it is not real. Not real in that sense, I mean…though certainly the adoption of “gayness” has created a wonderful kind of culture, a wonderful spread of communities! And some freedom too, yeah. But to Nature it is still all just sex. And you know, it often reminds me of good old Emily Noether and the explanation of the principle of inertia that can be drawn from her symmetries: i.e. maybe inertia is nicely explained simply by isotropy, and nothing else is needed! With the universe the same in every direction, there’s no reason for inertia not to exist, is there? So in that case we could think of inertia as the name for a nothing…you’d have to add something strange to the universe, to not have it. Because the word isn’t positively attached, to any thing.

It is not quite a satisfying description — in fact I think there’s much more to say about it even without allowing (as we probably must) inertia’s “positive existence”! — but it’s a satisfying enough illustration, I think: after all, many things we have names for don’t (strictly speaking) exist in Nature’s eyes, but do mark regularities, do indicate connections. And very often this results in a bit of confusion, both linguistic and cognitive — we could argue over these words, concepts, contexts, if they fail to admit of a nice clean one-to-one representation in reality, with hard edges. In the physics that Noether revolutionized one of the words we argue over is mass; well after all it’s only the most basic thing! Heck, why wouldn’t we argue over it? It’s only the thing everybody can see and touch and understand extremely well from the mere experience of living! Pshaw, like we’re not gonna fight over that! Ha ha. Why it is to laugh. Laugh, I say…!

And from there on up, it all just gets crazier. Science and philosophy are all about logic and words and ordered definitions, which is a pretty great thing for them to be about, but on the small system they run into Godelian implications, Wittgeinsteinian failures of perspicuity…limits. The problem of knowledge; practically the most ancient thing that system has. How do we know what we know?

Well…how do we?

The thing I’m fond of calling “high history” is in many ways the greatest example of the small system’s fascinating ability to create models inside itself, that may correspond to things on the outside: it probably happened this way, sort of. But of course as fascinating as it is, it is still just a model, and it has the strengths and weaknesses of all models. Historical causation is something we will never be able to grasp in any real sense, because there are too many untraceable influences (hee hee), too many actual occurrences we will never know of, too much tangle in general…too much detail, even if one believes the knowledge-system solid and its discoveries immutable. “How did human beings begin to practise homosexual behaviour” is probably a good example of question-begging in any scheme of knowledge, but even if one accepts that there was such a time when some factual change in behaviour occurred (which of course there wasn’t, but we are just saying), then the theory necessary to explain it gets too big too fast anyway…there’s too much to know in terms of antecedent causes, things become thermodynamical…the rules start falling apart, and in the end there’s no such thing as time-travel. The deep causes of the past are actually bottomless, the fossils in the swamp just go on and on, and down and down. Human sexual freedom is inexplicable in these terms, like inertia and like mass — all you can do is create models, but some models are no good. Some are not even good or bad.

Because sex is probably too big for worded description, as human communication is too big for comprehensive enumeration…as consciousness is too big for logical organization. Just too big for the small system to comprehend, no matter its brightness and quickness. But…

There is another way. The way of the Gay-Lussac law; the way of elegance, and evolutionary agglomeration of interreacting skills, if indeed those two things are substantially different one from the other. “Holistic” causes, I think we might somewhat fairly call them: strategies for exploring relationships in the bigger system, and even effecting changes in them. But we have to get our heads around this: what does it mean, to try to operate a system that we can never know everything about? That we can never even know how much we don’t know about? The small system gives us little mental consoles where all the causal relationships are drawn together. Picture yourself standing at it: it’s pretty big, but you can see that if you just bash away randomly at the buttons there is some possibility of getting something right, because anyway you are standing in front of it, you know where all the key activators are, even if you don’t know what they do. And one way or another there are only so many of them, which means that even if that number is quite large all the connections the number governs are still internal to the console.

Except…

What if it is so large that it covers every inch of the room you’re standing in, floor ceiling and walls?

What if it covers every inch of the whole building, that contains the room?

Pretty soon there starts not to be a situation in which you can claim the switches are all “inside” something after all…when the whole world may be “console”, and you just wandering around inside it like Ant-Man. But we don’t actually need to take things that far, to get this sense of realization! All we really have to do is imagine that we can’t quite see the console’s borders. Make them fuzzy, let them bleed off into the peripheral…imagine just that you can’t see them, like you’re a dog wearing one of those protective cones. It’s a much more fun way to do the Allegory Of The Cave, right? Or the Blind Men And The Elephant, for that matter: okay, so you’re a dog standing in front of a computer, with one of those cones on your head…and as you move down the computer’s face, a bunch of monkeys gleefully take the part of it you were just looking at, and stack it up against the part you’re going to be looking at. So to you, the computer just seems to go on and on forever — you’ll never come to the end of it.

Or, will you?

We could do it with the dog being a pirate and the monkeys being ninjas (oh, Internet), but any way we do it the rude facts are the same: you have to make an accomodation with the limits of your knowledge, and accept that you may never know the nature of the system you are trying to operate. You may even get it backwards, or I guess more properly get it inverted… But for me — as long as we’re talking about inversions anyway — I like the idea of two systems, you know? Two states to flip, with the occasional function straddling their boundary…

Like music, perhaps. Man, haven’t you ever wondered just what in the hell is music? Why on earth does it exist, why on earth do we subjectively perceive it in the way we do? Is there some cosmic principle of musicality operating within us, all around us, and everywhere? I’ve asked it before:

Do birds know their song is sweet?

It’s like a little Zen koan. Of course on one level music is just math: mathematical proportion. But, that doesn’t really explain anything. Because math is the new mass, eh? We’ll always be arguing about it. However the key thing about music probably isn’t its mass so much as its energy: it does something to us, it’s a mood-altering drug (just look at how people regulate their intake of it! LIKE CIGARETTES), it’s a time machine, it’s consciousness fuel. Everywhere we look, there it is, in some form or another…musicality…but also everywhere we see it we are affected by it. “Elegance”, now there’s a word that starts fights too…mathematicians talk about it all the time, it’s their Muse, but not a one of them can pin down just what it is, or how to recognize it. It can certainly be created, though: as Rudy Rucker once had it, maybe human beings have just a slight “mathematical sense”, maybe our minds jut out with just a bit of higher-dimensional “thickness” into a much larger space than the one that answers to our eyes and fingers and tastebuds. Or else how would we know mathematics, how would we know “elegance”? It’s a bit like the old saw, perhaps: “whatever is possible to be believed, must contain some measure of truth”…

…But maybe that saying also could be flipped, as Wittgenstein might flip it, to show that the relationship it describes is not the one we’re looking for, or even at. That it is, in fact, a dead end. “The ‘foundations’ of maths? They are no more foundations of maths than the painted rock is the support of the painted tower.” After all, we were talking about Holism, not Hippie. Weren’t we?

And so here is the math, if you like.

Kinda spooky, huh?

In the end, we may know nothing of the bigger system…at least, nothing logical. “I mean mathematics is NOT logic. It’s almost as if one tried to say that cabinet-making consisted in glueing!” But Chopin is still Chopin either way, isn’t he? And yet how can he possibly know how to make music, and how can we possibly know how to hear it? Where on earth could the tendency come from? Why would he do it?

Why would he care?

And how would he even know to care. Look out, here comes the music! Now, can you feel that? Can you feel that doing something to you? All over the world, human beings make music. There are no human beings who don’t make music. And are we alone? Does the bird know about its song?

Do the stars know about their own?

We have no way of knowing. We will never know. We’re inside the console, pulling out wires and plugging them back in: we don’t know what evidence of our actions may be showing up on the monitor, wherever it is, if it even exists. If there’s a God, if it even makes sense to speak of there being a God in the slightest, then he has to be the God of Descartes, of Leibniz, of Einstein…right? A God without an objective frame of his own that we can logically apprehend, a God that defies simple cogitation…a God of paradoxes. And yet what do paradoxes tell us, apart from the fact we’ve posed the wrong questions? Music is a different matter, though…music, at any rate, is something that we can’t help but know exists.

Even if it seems, to me at any rate, fabulously unlikely that we invented it. Because it does not really seem that we can understand it, does it?

However, that may not be the main thing. We don’t understand the brain either, after all — but we certainly use it. We don’t seem to understand sex very well, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t of it. And even if we were to stop believing in boats, it seems very unlikely that they would ever go away. We can use all these things, lucky for us, and apparently even use them quite well: even if we can’t understand their workings. The changes in the computer feed back into the computer, somehow or other. Though we may be blind to the details of that feedback, it doesn’t mean we aren’t touched by its movement. What is it the Sufis say?

“A student is always eager to understand the workings of the teaching, when in reality he is in desperate need of its benefits. Without receiving its benefits he will never understand its workings.”

And also:

“Until you have real knowledge, your belief is mere coalesced opinion, however it may seem to you.”

And so…I know what you’re thinking, Plato…

…What does all this have to do with quitting smoking?

Well, maybe nothing.

But then again maybe a lot. How do we do it, beyond theories and rulebooks and useless crutches that only lend support to the limp? When you want it all the time, and it’s everywhere, how do you stop wanting it? The answer is surely that you actually don’t want it all the time, but you don’t understand the difference between wanting and not-wanting. You don’t make that distinction. Well, why should you? Nobody else does, either. They always say you have to replace the smoking with something else you enjoy, but what does that mean? What kind of crazy console-fixing is that?

“Holistic causes”. It’s a rather silly construction, that. Isn’t it? After all, what in the world is an “holistic” cause? There are things we know, and things we don’t know…there are always correlations we observe that go unexplained for a time, but with increasing knowledge their causal mechanisms are inevitably revealed. Holistic causes must just be what we would call reductive causes, if we only knew just a little more about them. Once we know the system, we understand what it makes and how…we know how to intervene in it, interpose ourselves in it. We see what the real cause was, all along. What the real relationships were.

Yeah, okay.

But what if we never do get to know the system fully? As long as we don’t, we might as well be dealing with one that can’t be known, right? Just like we can’t tell acceleration from gravity in General Relativity; an unknown system, a system known as yet only partly, is indistinguishable by us from a system that can’t ever be fully known. Isn’t it?

And yet: Chopin. And, y’know: love.

So as Point Number Seven in my little fun list of possible stop-smoking tips, I guess I’d say: try different things. It doesn’t matter what they are. Science may discover their rationale later on or it may not, but hindsight isn’t where success is located, here. Maybe you start with tai chi, eh? You don’t even bother quitting smoking for it. Or maybe you might try showering a half-hour earlier in the evening, or eating more radishes in your salad. Any of these might work, but before you do any of them you will want to know why you should do them…why tai chi? Why radishes? What’s with the showering? But maybe you are more in need of their benefits, than of the knowledge of their workings. Why tai chi, hmm, that’s a good one, I have no idea if that even would be a good idea, but let’s suppose it is…in which case…

Maybe tai chi is cheap?

Maybe anyone can do tai chi?

And these are not complicated things, you will notice, but then again I am not convinced they need to be. Radishes, for example, have a very strong taste, almost laughably strong…I mean, why would anyone just sit there and eat radishes, who didn’t like them? I could also suggest bathing in apple cider vinegar and dried thyme for a cold, it works, but it won’t work if I tell you why it works. Showering, let’s just say it screws with your internal smoke-clock or something. Lets your pores exhale? Sharpens your sense of smell, maybe. Who knows?

Does it matter?

Have you ever known anyone who was just determined to change their lives? Have you ever watched to see just how they bring the trick off? They always start in exactly the same way: by having no idea.

And perhaps this is the only way to do it, really.

Well, anyway it’s gotta be better than chewing the damn gum.

Further Interlude: No One Is Going To Be Naming Their Baby After PayPal, Part 1

Unfortunately, I find I must go off the program for a moment, Internet…

For BREAKING NEWS.

This is pretty bad, but I can’t whip much up about it at the moment.  I just found out about it.  It’s quite a serious development.  But I haven’t fully digested it yet…

…Just enough to notice that the two web-based enterprises I was about to engage in are now dead in the water, because their payment methods have been grotesquely politicized.  And, is this just the leading edge?  Actually the leading edge was when MasterCard and Visa and Twitter and PayPal all cut off funding/communications avenues for Wikileaks…then when PayPal started to cut the services of people who had supported Wikileaks through them in the past…

So, no:  not the leading edge.  But it’s probably the bleeding edge, isn’t it?

And, just on a personal note (as crudely self-serving as that may sound, but I’ll definitely be coming back to this later!), what it means in practical terms for me is that I can’t use PayPal even if I wanted to (which I am beginning to think I REALLY DON’T), without opening the door to them trashing my web-based business for unanticipated, undeclared and probably unsavoury reasons of their own at any time in the future.  So to deal with PayPal, it seems multiple redundancies are required — or a willingness to try and think what PayPal thinks about politics and freedom of speech, and think like that too.  Ahhh, of course, of course…because it isn’t enough to fear Big Brother, is it?  To be safe, one must love Big Brother…

So the only answer that makes any sense is:  don’t use fucking PayPal.  I’m SHOCKED by this, and you should be too.  And we will come back to it.  But in the meantime you’d better keep your ear to the ground, because PayPal just became a straight-up anti-democratic force on the Internet.  We’re not talking about bleeping dirty words, here.  We’re talking about shutting shit down, and clearing the fucking square.  And would you care to say where that’s bound to stop?

When already you can’t raise money for someone’s legal defence, if PayPal doesn’t like that person.  Doesn’t even matter if they think they’re guilty or innocent.  Think about that.

Do something about that.

Interlude: Presented Without Commentary

Okay, this makes me laugh…

…And then wonder if I should cry.

You mean there are people out there who actually prefer it when their readers don’t leave essay-sized comments on their blogs?  And they want everyone to learn not to do this!  I love WordPress more than I can say, but…

One notices this, eh?  The rush to market on the Internet, social media blah blah blah…services thrown out there into the great unknown, for people to decide what to do with them.  It’s a business model:  make it, put it out there, find out what it’s for later on.  But I guess for most people the urge is always to lock things down, encourage rationalized behaviours, allow a little bit of craziness just so you can then consolidate what it throws up…and not let it just go on, by any means!  You just can’t help yourself, you want to figure out what it’s for so you can make people use it the right way, so you can build it out.  Thus all big communications technologies seek a flattening of difference in their own way, or rather (to be accurate) the people helping to run them do.  Note that questionnaire:  there are only two choices on it, which means only one option…but the option is illusory, isn’t it?  Because those two things are both the same thing, or at least from my perspective they are…

What are blogs for, anyway?

You can sense people starting to ask the question, but it isn’t really a question, and they’re not really asking.  Which is why the answers are all going to be gobbledegook, because what the question needs is analysis, not begging…and yet there’s a lot more money in begging, and that’s just the plain fact.

Huh, I guess I presented some commentary after all.  But seriously, WOW!  I thought I was a bit farther ahead of the curve than this, and yet here are all these factors starting to come together into a perfect storm.  Like a thyroid storm, really;  except it’s on the Internet and it’s about getting paid.

Just wait ’til you guys see what happens next, it’s either gonna be real interesting or it’s gonna be real depressing.  I have a timeline of this tacked up on my wall, and it clearly shows us coming up to the major fork in the road.  I think Bill Clinton said it best in that dream I had last night…

…That I will tell you all about, I promise, but first we must just get this pesky Universe business sorted out.

 

Universe Part Four: Through The Looking-Glass Self

So, as I was saying earlier…

It’s a little bit counterintuitive, this stop-smoking method of mine. Or, rather, it isn’t counterintuitive at all, but we’ve just learned to think really counterintuitively about smoking in the first place. Surrounded by dogma, we don’t see forests and we don’t see trees, we just hear stuff…and then we repeat it to one another. Cutting down doesn’t work; you gotta do it cold turkey or nothin’. Cigarettes are harder to quit than heroin. There’s no safe dosage for tobacco. Secondhand smoke kills.

It doesn’t quite add up to reality, even though it makes — on the surface — a nice consistent picture. Or even: makes a nice consistent picture out of a surface? Secondhand smoke can kill, but it doesn’t kill like a gun, it doesn’t kill like plutonium…there are actually some specifics involved, it isn’t just all about finding categories that click together with other categories in a way that satisfies one’s demogogic agenda, the confusion in play here matters. Matters, because it absolutely distorts the hell out of any sort of quitting-smoking process — until even the meaning of “quitting”, that seemingly so-straightforward word, becomes cloudily elusive when you get up close to it, nothing but a very fine mist when you are finally right in the middle of it. What are we talking about, when we invoke “quitting”, as a thing that’s harder to do with cigarettes than with heroin? It is, I hope obviously, not about how arduous it is to suffer withdrawal! I’ve quit smoking a hundred times, and never yet seen a crib-death baby on my ceiling…so I think we can assume it isn’t about the visceral. Therefore it must be about the statistical, but what kind of statistics are we talking about here? How long does it take, to be considered “quit”? What are the recidivism rates? What are the contributing factors? Well, for one thing — although it is, please note, not actually just one thing — to reacquire the smoke habit is significantly easier than reacquiring the smack habit, in that it requires no more effort than sharing a table with a group of people in a public place. But, really if we start listing contributing factors, even in just unpacking this one we may be here all day…so maybe we should start at the other end?

What isn’t a contributing factor?

You see, the assertion is hollow. As hollow as the notion that there is no safe dose of tobacco: because if the meaning of “quitting” is misty, the meaning of “smoking” is positively foggy. No safe dose for tobacco? And yet tobacco does not even come in “doses”, because tobacco itself is not a drug. No one smokes cigarettes or cigars, or a pipe, because they just can’t kick the tar habit, you know! There’s no such thing as a dose of tar! But at the same time if there were, we must figure there would be some dose of it that would be safe…or at least statistically insignificant as far as disease is concerned. A friend of mine was telling me recently about a new thing called “third-hand smoke”, stuff that gets onto your clothes as a non-smoker who is breathed on by smokers, that then gets to your skin and through your pores, and is bad for you. But now, we really are talking plutonium if we’re talking about that, aren’t we? And therefore something for which the concept of “safe dose” must be replaced with “safe distance“, the likelihood of escaping encounter with even a single atom of the stuff — of which, thankfully, there is a finite amount to reckon with even in hypothetical cases. Smoking — I should say, “smoking” — isn’t like that, though. It’s a complex substance, far from elemental…why, it isn’t even as “elemental” as heroin. Smoke, for want of a better word, is smoke the world ’round: cheap plant-based hydrocarbons, burnt and flung into the air. Microparticles.

We’re actually surrounded by them.

And they’re not good for you, but say this for them if you say nothing else: that they’re not particularly hard to quit. “Smoking and heroin”, that’s a verb and a noun, and therefore hard to compare sensibly…”tobacco and heroin”, and that’s not much more commensurate. What’s at issue is the nicotine, of course: how do you quit taking the bloody nicotine?

In truth, it’s all down to the method of administration. We say “smoking”, but there’s a big practical difference between burning the weed and sucking it into your lungs, and burning it and swirling it around your mouth…or not burning it and parking it between the cheek and the gum. Or, you know, baking with it. Who bakes with tobacco? Man, you can’t get high that way, let me tell you! Take a drag on a cigarette and the nicotine hits you mighty fast, the action and the hit are all but perfectly coincident…and the hit is large. Smoke a whole cigarette in (intermittent!) puffs over five minutes or so and the hit is profound…a gram of tobacco burned, maybe a good three-quarters of it or more turned to blissful gratification. Because nicotine, like any drug, isn’t cognitively-neutral; nicotine smashes into the circuitry of the brain like a freight train, and it does something to it. The subjective apprehension of time is stretched, briefly twisted like Silly Putty before the charge clears the system in the tearing hurry that it does: so if you want to know what nicotine does, that’s what it does. I use it while writing, to stay on a thought, stay on a line…in fact I’m using it now, you think I could do this spattery coalescence of tangential thoughts without nicotine, at three thousand words a post or whatever it is? THINK AGAIN…but there are more everyday uses for it too. Many of us smoke on the phone, a great many of us smoke at one in the morning at the party just when everything starts to fall into the groove. Because we smoke to stretch the moment. Physically addictive, sure: it is. But how much traction can addiction hope to gain without benefit? Even for heroin, this principle applies…though not, it must be said, for plutonium…and so it’s also the way you take the drug, that forms part of the addiction. Cigarettes are fast; cigars are slower; chewing tobacco’s slower still. The vast majority of smokers moderate their own smoking by playing tough with chunks of five, ten, twenty, forty minutes. This is around about the dose-clock of a pack-a-day smoker. But for a chaw-type addict the delivery’s different.

And it’s no good pretending it isn’t. Nico-gum gives what I presume is a chewing-tobacco-like boost, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts the boost is less, too…as all these boosts are less, just like it tells you on the label. The nico-inhalers, they deliver less as well, practically boast about doing so…and as for the patch…

Let me tell you something about the patch. I tried it a couple years ago, but got hold of a much stronger dose than I needed. The way this works is that it isn’t any more graduated a step-down system than you yourself make it, it is just three levels and you have to jump down to each on your own. High dose, medium dose, low dose. A dumb system? Yep, it sure is…

…But for me, going on the high dose when I didn’t really need it worked wonders. My body super-saturated with nicotine, I quickly forgot there was even such a thing as smoking cigarettes…and the high hit me so hard that after I’d forgotten that for five minutes, time stretched out so much it felt I’d never known it in the first place. Thirty-six hours later, I tore the patch from my arm and flung it into the garbage…three hours after that, I found myself at the drugstore trying to answer shockingly pointless questions from the pharmacist, one of which was “how long have you been on this patch?”

To which I replied: “I don’t know, about a week? Ten days, maybe?”

Which is quite an amazing mistake to make, right?

But anyway: as well as it worked, I had to get rid of it after thirty-six hours because I started to suffer serious O.D.-like symptoms. The patch was too strong for me! So I tried to step down from it, but even on the weakest dose it only took four hours, this time, for the O.D. stuff to kick in again. So I just gave up on it, filed the remaining patches away somewhere.

And I tell you all this, because I tried the patch again just the other day, figuring that after a couple years, and back up to the pack-a-day thing, I owed it to myself to go for a non-O.D. type of run at the problem — reasoning that the efficacy of the replacement therapy might be less, but then the overdose wouldn’t happen so at least I could keep wearing it. Worth a try. So on went the patch, then ten minutes later the tingling started, then ten minutes after that I started to trip. So far so good. But then…

I had to get rid of this patch too! After about four hours. Because I got the overdose again.

So, what was going on? What had happened? The patch was too strong for me, but how could it be? When it says right on the label that it delivers less nicotine to my body than smoking my usual pack a day…

But of course that’s a fudge, isn’t it?

Because here’s my contention: that if the government were to set some maximum allowable daily dose figure on nicotine (which is something, I confidently predict, that they will never do), the amount of nicotine you can absorb out of a smoking habit would go way past it. But what can they do, it’s just a LEAF! They can’t regulate the amount of nicotine in a leaf, and they already permit the sale of tobacco, and so there’s nothing much they can do about a situation like that (although this may help to explain why the government didn’t do much of its usual hemming and hawing with respect to tobacco companies’ right to sell toxic shit, when it came to them adding nicotine to the leaf)…and so posting some notice about how much nicotine it’s safe to have is something they pretty well can’t do either. BUT. If you’re making some sort of a stop-smoking aid that delivers nicotine to the system in a less natural way, one thing you can be sure of is that you are not going to be allowed to match the levels of nicotine available from tobacco! And that’s why all those products boast loudly about having less of the good stuff in them, than you’d get from a smoking habit. Because it isn’t us they’re boasting to about that…

And anyway it’s still a fudge. Wherein lies, at last at last, the beginnings of my theory about what a good way to quit smoking would be…because though the patch may deliver only about half the amount of nicotine to my bloodstream over a day as my smoking habit would, my smoking habit doesn’t involve a constant drip of nicotine into my tissues. To tolerate that kind of chemical assault really takes decades of acclimation: one pull off a cigarette instantly renders a sharp spike of nicotine, but it is also a short spike, and so one’s intake is very finely controllable in a way the patch cannot be. In one second, in one long drag, the sharp peak of a craving can be smoothed and blunted, as by a million years of erosion…in one more it can be annihilated, shorn clean off as by a million pounds of TNT. And after that, what you do about smoking is pretty much your business. Because in fact every smoker does plenty of things to brake their intake of this drug over the course of a day, it is not really about “keeping the levels up” once the craving’s been smashed if one really thinks about it…few people experience cravings for tobacco while taking a shower, as is borne out (I believe) by the fact that even fewer people feel the need to charge up before stepping into the shower in order to time their tobacco consumption out properly so they don’t get the shakes! And so here’s where the stop-smoking method really finds its root: in the voluntary (if unconscious) braking of the urge to get more, that smokers already apply several times a day. For myself, for example, I only very rarely feel the compulsion to light up when I’m outdoors, now that I’m an adult. In fact I can go quite a long time out there, without the thought of smoking even crossing my mind! Though it is not quite as blanked-out as it was in my first experience with the patch, it is more than manageable, it is actually easy. Oh, and here’s a thing about that patch, again…

…This time around, it didn’t even work!

You see, I had thought the super-efficacy of the first patch was linked to the overdose symptoms I experienced, but it turns out that isn’t so — since I got the exact same symptoms from the patch’s regular efficacy on the second time around. And yet, still experienced cravings! So maybe there is even more specific detail to the business of nicotine than we have yet got to — outside the method of administration, what kind of drug is nicotine? It’s possible, at least conceivable, that it’s a drug that operates a lot like anaesthetic drugs: a shade too little and the patient doesn’t fall unconscious, a shade too much and they’re dead. Trickily liminal sweet spots, in other words: the reason anaesthesiologists have to stay in school twice as long as anybody else, and possibly even the reason that smokers do exercise such fine control over their intake of nicotine. A big hit, it sure is…but it clears the system so quickly that you don’t satisfy your addiction so much as you drive the thing, like a high-powered sports car. Hand on the stick, braking with the clutch: that does the job. But the constant drip-drip-dripping of the stuff into your system, no…that doesn’t work too well. You get too much to stand, and simultaneously not enough to work, and so the whole thing comes up short after just a few hours of steady absorption. As a recreational drug, the patch is actually pretty interesting — who couldn’t use a bit of stretched time, to apply to the sight of a tree silhouetted against the evening sky? — but as a replacement therapy it sucks. And so, hmm, are any of the other stop-smoking aids much better? The gum, perhaps effective for those who chew tobacco, is obviously a terrible mismatch for smoking: much as the patch, you have to start chewing the gum before you get the cravings if you want to head them off, and if you try to speed that process up by chewing more aggressively you get a headache for your pains — once again in overdose-land. Because the margin, apparently, is just that slim! So maybe the puffer is a better solution? Hey, it may be, I don’t know…I didn’t try it because even though in Canada it is now priced competitively with tobacco (only because of tobacco’s 900% tax mark-up, natch), it’s a massively more serious piece of hardware: forget a bunch of cut-up leaves being crammed into a paper tube, this is an atomizer than runs off a little ampoule of concentrated nico-juice the same way a nuclear reactor runs off uranium, what we’re talking about here after you’ve used it all up is basically medical waste…and I couldn’t try it, because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it into the landfill when I was done with it. Like: I can’t say for sure, but I think if you took the ampoule’s contents and splashed them on your skin you’d want to call 911 in a bit of a rush…!

…And so it appears the major problem with tobacco is simply that it’s the cleanest and safest and least environmentally-damaging and CHEAPEST way to get the stuff into your body, and its method of administration is the most user-friendly as well…all while it delivers a bang so tremendous that no one is allowed to simulate it in an artificial delivery-system, as well as associated benefits that no one has yet been able to match. In other words: as a way to wean yourself off tobacco, the best replacement-therapy may well be…

…Tobacco itself, which brings us back to the “cutting down doesn’t work, you have to go cold turkey” thing. Except that cutting down does work; so much so that even the makers of the relatively-ineffectual puffers and patches and nico-gums can legitimately claim in their marketing materials that their stuff makes quitting smoking twice as easy versus going cold turkey. So: only half as hard as it is to quit something that’s harder to quit than heroin?

Categories. Well, you knew I’d get back around to them, and here I am. Just made-up things, so time-sensitive in their believability, and yet we do cling to ‘em…we cling for so long, we forget they’re supposed to deliver a benefit too. Take smoking for example. You know what the really funny thing about it is?

There’s no sympathy for it.

Not even from the smokers. Because alone out of all the legal and illegal drugs people take, it’s the one no one ever blames society for. Smokers don’t blame society, but themselves; why there isn’t even enough rage available there to justify criminal behaviour! Someone who uses heroin, cocaine, even alcohol, they might do things to feed their habit that requires blaming society as a justification…but no smoker knocks over a gas station just to get money for one more carton, just one more carton please God, you know I’ve had such a hard life… It doesn’t happen, that’s all. No one feels they are owed anything for not being able to quit smoking. No one medicalizes a nicotine addiction, and no one socializes a nicotine addiction: these things, in our society, for whatever reason, are taboo. So the ethical implications of the practice of smoking do not touch anyone but the smoker, in a cultural construction we might easily identify as sinfulness, rather than addiction; just as the administration and the hit are closely conjoined in the act of smoking, so too are the characterizations of self-harm and social harm conjoined in its practice, until it becomes an act that despoils the commons — an act of selfishness, that cannot be made up for. Thus the pressure to quit is immense; the respect for having tried and failed is nonexistent; and “giving up” is an option that delivers no relief, only the necessity of acceding to a negative social judgement you don’t have the power to change anymore. Even now, it may be that anyone who’s managed to read this far is feeling some hackles bristle at the idea that I am complaining about it all, trying to justify it all. But no: I wouldn’t dare, you see. And more to the point, I simply don’t feel as though I can blame anyone or anything for this bad habit of mine. Heck, I don’t even feel like I can give it up to my Higher Power. It’s just all my fault. I try everything, and nothing works, and there’s the smug guy at the bar again telling me that the only way to quit is cold turkey. But I’ve tried that too, and I can’t do it either.

So where does that leave me?

Well, on a curious road, perhaps; looking at the categories of the nice shiny surface, the superficial consistency of them all, and wondering if it wasn’t the superficiality that made the consistency, rather than the other way around. Here you go, if I’m personally trying to quit smoking or not at this moment or any other then it’s just my business, since there is no one else whose feet I can lay it at, and no one else I can look to for ideas about it…and so that’s no longer what I’m thinking about when I think about this stuff. I’m off on my own with that, and you don’t need to follow me. But as far as the systems analysis goes, I think that is, or at any rate should be, of some wider public interest. Many an attempt to change things for the better is hamstrung at the beginning by a sort of casual confusion…these things are like these other things they’re not like, these complicated things are simple, these approximations are exact and require no updating, these pieces of evidence for competing views are inadmissible because they go against orthodoxy…especially if it’s an orthodoxy we don’t care very much about for any other reason but our own cognitive convenience. Because essentially, we don’t care if changing social attitudes toward smoking have changed what it means to quit, too…if it isn’t our problem, we are comfortable leaving the ethical questions about it to somebody else. And ignore the fact that this wasn’t always how it was: when my father and his friends all quit smoking in the Sixties, they did not all find it more difficult than quitting heroin, they found it fairly easy to do by that comparison…and so what are we to believe, that the general availability of willpower was higher in the past than it is now? No, it seems far more likely to me that the subject was simply less socially fraught…in part (I am convinced) because real incomes were higher then and so it was much less necessary to use all the willpower you’ve got just to deal with how it looks like you’ll never get ahead — hey, never underestimate the power of success, even the illusion of success, to help you stretch moments and hang onto them, own them and inhabit them! — but also in part because the decision to quit smoking at that time was no more than a decision. Not a test of citizenship or moral fibre, not an ethical obligation owed to others more than to oneself, not a seperation of the wheat from the chaff, the elect from the damned, the anointed from the untouchable…the victors from the vanquished. Well, but it’s a funny old world we live in, really: every aspect of our social lives is shot through with power relations, yet with every year that passes we trim our laws and our governments and our practices so as to blunt the unrestrained exercise of power. And we can pat ourselves on the back for it, I certainly think we do deserve to pat ourselves on the back for it, but that doesn’t mean the power relations don’t still seek a level. This is not the ancien regime of France where the meeting of two social equals was a logical impossibility, nor even the world of my father’s youth where it cost practically the whole earth to have, and keep, your own head in personal matters. But the will to power and the will to punish are still out there, just dressed in slightly different disguises, and they still rely on what they’ve always relied on:

Category mistakes. Sloppy thinking. Bad histories, that leads to bad definitions…or, possibly, it’s the other way ’round: since the ultimate barrier to all explanations is the existence of facts, and discovery is where all narrative founders.

And mind you, this is all just a probably-too-long example…a case-study of something no one really sees as a case and no one really wants to study…because no one really wants to care about it…

But finally, in any case, here is how I think one should go about the process of quitting smoking, in a nice neat bullet-pointed list:

1. SMOKE WHEN YOU WANT TO. Take advantage of your already-existing power to brake your smoke-intake, and use it to defer and delay the practice of taking that shit into your lungs. Don’t think of it as quitting, think of it as not always smoking. Because you already don’t always smoke, and you already choose when you’re going to light up and when you’re not…you already choose when you’re going to stub out and when you’re not, too. There’s a big part of this that’s compulsive, but there’s also a much bigger part than you’ve been told, that isn’t. So start with smoking when you want to; and when you don’t want to, don’t. That is something you know you can do, because it’s something you’re already doing. Just do it more consciously. Just do it when you want to.

2. SMOKE INDOORS. The last thing anyone who’s trying to quit needs is more fucking triggers, so resist having to make new activity/environment couplings. Because I smoke indoors, when I go outside I don’t feel compelled to light up because some part of my brain is whispering “this is your opportunity, you’d better take advantage of it”…and so whenever I want to avoid smoking all I have to do is go outside, and the temptation is eased, while at the same time I find that there is no craving I experience that is so intense it will keep me from going outside. So this is a good trick, I’m telling you: decoupling triggers where you find them. Smoking bans in Canada and elsewhere actually act to reinforce triggers, in my humble opinion, by making you want to be somewhere else so you can smoke — by keeping you in motion, keeping you going out through doors, keeping you from sitting down or relaxing. The idea, one supposes, is that eventually you’ll get tired of doing it…and, well, you do get tired of doing it, but that doesn’t automatically mean you’ll stop. Often it just means your whole life gets more effortful, and makes you want to smoke more because you come to feel you deserve a bigger break from all the bullshit. Because there’s a name for aversion therapy that isn’t carefully-conceived and carefully-controlled, and that name is punishment…and in uncontrolled circumstances the one who is punished often grows to think themselves unworthy of not being punished. SO THIS DOESN’T HELP. Compulsively chasing things all the damn time never helps, if what you want is to quit them. So find a place you can smoke without the anxiety that comes from punishment. Call it “recovery space” if you like, even if the world would say it doesn’t count as recovery space if it’s a place to practice the undesired behaviour. Nevertheless, it helps to have it.

3. REALIZE THAT STOP-SMOKING AIDS AREN’T WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE. They’re not effective replacement-therapies, for the very simple reason that they are not designed to be effective replacement-therapies. They’re not effective at quelling cravings, because the cravings stem from the addiction, and the addiction is not just dose-specific but administration-specific…the method of administration, in a manner of speaking, IS the addiction. So no matter what it says on the side of the box, that doesn’t matter, that’s just advertising copy, and you’ve got to use these things for what they actually are, instead of what they say they are…and if you do that you may find some real use to them. The gum may be useful to you for “breakthrough pain” (if I may borrow that term) even if it does give you a headache…the patch may forestall cravings for an hour or two, or three or four, where you are not inclined to put these off yourself. All these are, are tools; and not every tool is right for every job. Nobody knows anything about how these things work but the people who use them, it’s like Pokemon, or Beyblade, or Yu-Gi-Oh or something…and I think it’s fair to rely on that, that only for the users is it anything more than an abstraction, a puzzle, a gimmick, a toy. You are probably not expected to exert any expertise or agency in your stop-smoking effort, you are probably just supposed to suffer like they tell you to…but my own feeling is that the exercise of control is at least as helpful as having ministering angels swoop in to solve your problems with Science, so long as you just follow the instructions. So don’t worry, Mokuba; we’ll get off this island somehow…

4. START WITH THE EASY STUFF. And save the hard stuff for later. Is this basic? It isn’t, but I think it oughtta be. If you couple smoking with an activity that smoking makes easier, whether that’s writing or having fun at parties, you should recognize that you’ll be better off saving your effort for erasing that most-ingrained link ’til LAST. Me, I sit down with pen and paper and the smokes come right out; that’s the most serious part of my habit, the part that’s scariest to think about quitting. I need to modulate my attention and my mood this way, I have gotten so damn good at it I’m not sure I even remember how I used to get along without that skill. So the last thing I’m going to do is start with getting rid of it…! You have to build up to these things, you can’t just go all-in willy-nilly with a crap hand. Similarly, I am not going to make myself go to a party and be all pissed-off about not being able to smoke around all my usual triggers, just so when I finally get a head of steam on I’m going to cave in anyway and then feel bad about it later. That’s just masochistic. That’s a really unfair expectation. I’ll get to that, you know? But this isn’t a goddamn contest, I don’t fail just because I refuse to enter a rigged game. This is just more weird social pressure: first, fight the biggest guy! Then fight all the smaller ones. It’s a set-up, and it’s meant to make you blow it and get discouraged…

5. DON’T HIDE YOUR SMOKING. Because it’s shameful, right? It’s a shameful thing, to try and fail. Everybody looks at you and sees “FAIL” written all over your face. But this is fabulously counter-productive, to put such moral pressure and irony-flavoured comeuppances on yourself, and worse even than that it manufactures new triggering environments. A friend of mine used to say “the guilt over not going to the gym, is what keeps you from going to the gym”, and she was dead-on right about it: the prospect of the moral consequences of failing feeds back into the tendency to say “fuck it”…fuck you, and fuck me, and fuck the whole stupid situation! But this bright and positive rebellious act soon turns to poor self-regard and creeping nihilism…and more of the same barriers, put in place by the social environment in the false guise of encouragement, that actually makes it more difficult for you to simply do things, that you wish to do. When “doing things” is actually easy, if the truth be known…but it’s the one truth that (in my experience) no one will ever tell you. So this is a test, it’s a gag, it’s a game; and you shouldn’t play. If there is someone you choose not to smoke around, being around that person will make you want to get moving so you can smoke again…and thus limiting yourself from encountering that person can start to equate to freedom. But a little farther down this road and all “freedom” means is agoraphobia, the freedom to stay inside and never go out. It’s worth facing a curled lip or coercive look of disappointment, to avoid that outcome. If that shit was going to work, it would have. But if it didn’t work, then now it’s only making it worse. If you’re going to avoid seeing someone, it’s much better to do it because they’re being a dick, than because you don’t want to feel like a dick. And in much the same vein…

6. TREAT HAVING CUT DOWN AS A WORTHY GOAL IN ITSELF. As I said, if you live in a city you are walking through a sea of airborne particulates anyway, every day, and most all of them are pretty harmful. So being “either quit or not” is another cold-turkey all-in-with-the-worst-hand sort of power-seeking definition; if you’re having a cigarette a day, that is probably a good enough thing for you to be happy with if you want, because now you’re massively more likely to get sick and die from the fucking diesel fumes than from the smokes. And anyway there are lots of ways to die. You know what the world’s number one killer is? STAIRS. So yes, smoking’s not good for you, it’s a bad habit and all that…yes, yes, yes, fine fine fine, we all know that. But the presumption of its so-extreme voluntariness is the only thing that makes it such a target for the danger-hounds, and that’s the same thing that makes cutting down so much you could quit, and yet still refusing to, look like an act of vile perversity. This whole “you could quit” thing is really so demeaning, isn’t it? It’s tougher to quit than heroin, and yet you should just get off your ass about it, is that the presumption there? On Star Trek, Captain Kirk makes computers blow up by saying shit like that to them, so what’s with the smug guy at the bar? Well, I’ll tell you what’s up with him: he’s a bullshitter. I use that in the now-technical sense of a person who is unlike a liar in their indifference to truth-vales, you know? “I quit cold turkey, why can’t you?” But you do not know he did that; he’s just saying he did that. He might never have smoked at all; he might be a smoker still, just hiding it. It might be passive-aggressiveness you’re seeing there. It might be the looking-glass self of sociology, the way we see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others: feeling worse when the reflection is ugly, better when it’s good. There are ways to make this work for you without being passive-aggressive, I should remember to say: I often advised depressed friends of mine to invite someone over for coffee and be seen to be chopping up vegetables next to a stock-pot when they arrive. Because they don’t need to know that as soon as they’re gone you’ll just dump all the chopped vegetables into the garbage and go out for a slice of greasy pizza, you know? In their eyes, for that moment, you’re an on-top-of-things person who eats really healthy and doesn’t waste your money on a dissolute diet…and who knows, maybe one day you’ll figure “I chopped all these vegetables, I guess I might as well make the damn soup.” Similarly, although you should only do this if you’re feeling really bad, you can walk around your shopping district with a couple of carefully-prepared bags — stop to chat with people you know for a moment, and then gaily declare “well, I’ve gotta get these things home and in the fridge!” And they don’t need to know it’s just a couple of old sweaters with some carrots and a quart of milk sitting on top. And yet you may get some shopping done after all, but the important thing to remember here is that many people use the looking-glass self to make themselves feel better by making you feel worse…and there’s no reason to put up with that. Smoke your one or two cigarettes a day happily; smoke ‘em joyfully. Heck, if you’re a guy like me you can smoke ten joyfully, you know? Because what you do for yourself that’s good, is good; though the bullshitter at the bar may claim you’re half-assing it, if he’s whole-assing it you’ve still cut your consumption of toxic sludge by 50%. If the bar for “what’s good” is set so high that 50% harm reductions can’t get over it, might as well be 0% reductions, then what this standard is really trying to enforce is you never quitting, to make someone else look good. And finally, because it seems to be a convention that all such lists as this one need seven things on them…

7. INVESTIGATE HOLISTIC CAUSES. You’ll notice I did not say to investigate holistic treatments, I hope? I have very little faith in treatments, as I hope is obvious by this point: the reductionist ones are all muddled, and the holistic ones probably aren’t even muddled. But the causes of smoking, that’s another thing entirely. Are there such things as “reductionist causes” and “holistic causes”? Well, actually there are…

…They’re just on the other side of the looking-glass!

One level further up the Universe, from where we are now.

Just let me put this out first…

Universe Part Three: How Canada Works

Well, as long as we’re talking about confusions, whether they’re of one variety or another, we might as well talk about Canada…about a post-colonial country that never had a revolution, located in the most northily north part of old North America, pieces of a couple dozen cultures stitched together by a railroad and a handful of boats and planes, and not mixing all that much: a mosaic instead of a melting pot, as they used to teach us to say in school. Or maybe, not quite so much a mosaic as a big and complicated laminate: the neighbours, the village?

It isn’t quite as neat and tidy as that. It’s a pretty good national mythology to have on board, if we must have one, but it’s no more true than anyone else’s, and the knowledge of its falsity permeates even the classes where they teach its undeniable virtue. Canada is a land in which everyone has oppressed someone, and not only that but successfully; a land of ranges and wars and lost or shifting identities, riches up for grabs not only along with names, but because of them too. They say it in school this way: “Canada is a place full of people who’ve traded their history for geography”, and it isn’t just guys like me, the white and well-off guys who represent the current top lamina on this table — no, it applies to everyone here, all the way back past glaciation itself. Anyway, not like the European-derived among us are special enough to be able to expect to hold onto their “specialness”, no matter what we say, so hate us today but don’t bother about tomorrow: we’ll sink into the layers as well, and we’re already doing so. We could never stick around as the “top” for too long — not here. And we don’t deserve to, moreover have nothing about us with which we could make it so even if we did deserve it…so we can try to change our names, and that’s about as much of a move as we can make. Meanwhile over in the UK some numbskull is talking about the “failure of state multiculturalism”…

But in this country, we know: we’ll all fail, before it does. If we aren’t multicultural, we aren’t anything at all; the word is just the fact’s reflection. “The Neighbours“? “The Village“? It isn’t really true; but it could be true. The raw materials are certainly there, to make it true…

…Should we be lucky enough, to wish and work hard enough, to make it so. Like any other country, Canada runs on a few different mechanisms: a body of law backed by a constitution, a praxis backed by precedent, a representative democracy backed by a civil service. But, Canada also runs on something else, too:

A convenient fiction.

Or rather, a bunch of convenient fictions. Start with the Monarch, from whose authority all our law descends — except not really, though we’ve got Elizabeth’s face on our money. Hey, you could be forgiven for being fooled! We’re fooled ourselves, half the time. But since Canada has been its own country for a much, much longer period than is written down anywhere, to reform ourselves as a Republic would be to immerse ourselves in a massive constitutional crisis only capable of being overcome by the minting of an invaluable but unnecessary lie: because we are post-colonial, but not post-revolutionary. We’re independent, but we don’t want the trouble of having to whip up a burning bush or a pillar of fire, to prove it when it’s already true anyway. Not long ago we talked about the possibilities of a revamped constitution, only to realize that if we were to get one it would probably just be a series of bullet-points on a PowerPoint presentation: no stirring document, no high-minded philosophical language. After all, what kind of UDI would let us secede from ourselves? It’s farcical, really. All it would mean was jettisoning one false face, one false origin, for another. The law would be unsupported, but we would still have to use it; heck, it’s unsupported now, and we use it. Because beneath the constitution and the legislation and the precedent and the parliament and the promotions to permanent secretary, is something harder to change because it was never real to begin with.

A game.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms winds its way through the body of Canadian law, changing what it touches…but only what it touches, in the same manner that the U.S. Constitution gradually took over the legal bailiwick of its adherent States through one Amendment’s case-by-case testing…and solving. Oh, you mean like Centipede? Yes, I mean like Centipede. But also like something else, “negative Centipede” we could perhaps call it, as each old privilege of the government’s descended power can be used just once more, before becoming non-viable in the new context. Loopholes in independence, you see: they can be useful in the game, if you’re trying to win. As the head of government of a colonial state, the Prime Minister was given the right of political appeal to powers that were more than merely constitutional — powers based in an identity that came from outwith the body of the national entity. And several expressions of that right are still on the books, you see…have not explicitly been rescinded, and so on paper are still available to be used. In theory they are in force until removed. But in practice they are only vestigial provisions, as all loopholes are — one-time power-ups that, once accessed, become excluded. “Okay, we missed that one, fair enough…but no more of that, please.” Well, to say otherwise would shatter the fiction. But on the other hand to use such a provision again would threaten to make the fiction too real, and then we really would have to have a constitutional crisis, so don’t try this kind of shit on too much. In fact don’t go to the power-up well too often in general, or pretty soon you might wind up with de Seze as your lawyer, you know…?

Christ, I really should not be telling you folks this, actually…

So, let’s change the subject! It’s Centipede and Anti-Centipede, that’s all you need to know, all right? Fiction lies at the heart of Canadian politics, because we are post-colonial but not post-revolutionary, and we have a secret project on the go here, our work is at a delicate stage and cannot be disturbed. You see, this is how it all went down:

So you have this great big country, with all these resources: Rhodesia without the diamonds. What you do, then, as a new and tiny little government, is that you give gigantic monopolistic grants to some resource-extraction companies, and you say “get out there and build us some roads and towns, populate the place, in return here’s a couple trillion hectares to do pretty much what you like with, as long as you also send money back to us.” Add a slightly-understaffed and slightly-underequipped government-run police force to the mixture, and there you have it: the classic colonial infrastructure. Let it run for a couple hundred years until your government grows big enough to stand on its own two feet: in other words, ’til the population swells and the general incomes go up. Then you take back the land, and pay out the bonuses to the top men. Start over as something else.

That’s the tricky part, of course.

And it can go an awful lot of different ways, some familiar ways and some less-familiar ways, but in Canada it’s gotten us to a rather weird place even by those standards. A slippery place, where the narratives are all both nebulous, and basically unfinished. History is viral, here; little snippets of genetic code floating around the chemical space of abstract national identity, grabbing on to some things, being grabbed onto by others. So it isn’t precedent, it just looks like precedent: it appears to operate according to the rules of precedent, but it’s actually recombinative at best, and wholly imaginative at worst. “History”, that’s the name of a resource in Canada, if you’re inclined to abstractions of identity: in a sense, the whole thing is simply made-up. Based on geography, as culture here always has been. Here we have the largest footprint-per-person of any country on Earth, but all the “empty” land is still politically divvied-up in grants to large companies — you can, as I’ve said many times before, go north fifty miles from practically any location and hide behind a tree, leaving your John Locke behind you and enjoying all the freedom you could possibly wish for or hope to handle, but if you want an address then you must purchase a properly-serviced quarter-acre lot, and if you want it to be out in the woods somewhere you should be prepared to pay top dollar for it. OR! Incorporate as a mining company, and get it pretty much for the asking. You see? A resource economy is a colonial economy, even if the only thing one is a colony of, is oneself: still Rhodesia without the diamonds, unless one is Rhodes and then it’s Jerusalem without all the pesky Levantines. So English Canada and French Canada aren’t the only two solitudes around here, in fact Canada is shot through with weird geography-based dualisms wherever you look, at every scale…from whose clash every narrative of history emerges, as light emerges from the meeting of particle and anti-particle. And the law’s no different: a set of hierarchical rules duly inscribed and recorded in logical order, fine and straightforward enough, but also they’re floating within a rather more capricious-seeming set of unwritten and unconscious rules that beam down influence onto the legal logic in a manner close to the astrological — just as the planets moving through the zodiac, their glimmering fingers reaching down to push us around. And it actually isn’t at all an unusual arrangement if you think about it, except only that in Canada we generally don’t look up…at least, not while anybody’s watching.

So nothing you see, is what you think you see…

…But there’s an unacknowledged synthesis constantly going on, instead, from which a certain number of cues are always silently being taken. Take our Upper House for example, the mighty Senate of Canada, the Red Chamber of Sober-Second-Thought…in other countries, such a body wields both enormous and practically-necessary power: the business of government cannot get done without it. But in my country the Upper House’s necessity is mainly constitutional, and its efficacy not really “practical” in the ordinary sense. Not that things don’t happen, in the Senate of Canada — they most certainly do! — but they’re probably mostly either not the things you think, or not happening in the way one would assume they ought to. It’ll never be a body so legislation-oriented as the U.S. version, for example, or even the UK’s House of Lords: why, I was being informed just the other day that reform was coming to the House of Lords, and laughed a little to think that they could actually get it, where we can’t! I mean, we talk about it a lot. The famous “Triple-E” Senate, equal elected and effective…but when it comes down to it that’s a little bit like Americans talking about breaking out of the two-party system, it’s a wonderful idea but it belongs to someone else’s country, someone else’s structural requirements. If the United States ever had a viable third party, the relative power of the President would probably triple (I haven’t run the numbers, but that’s my best off-the-cuff guess), and all the checks would become terribly unbalanced; if Canada ever had a Triple-E Senate, every government would behave like a coalition, and non-confidence votes would fill the skies like the passenger pigeon. A Double-E Senate, that’s probably possible…hmm, might even be good…

At least, fun to watch…

…But it probably wouldn’t change the fact, alas, that Canadian Senators often have tasks they could be more fruitfully engaged in, than the standard duties of a conventional Upper House member. I say all this, by the way, knowing that I not only speak of what I probably shouldn’t, but speak at the very least a little bit beyond my knowledge…any fellow Canadians reading this will find much in my analysis to disagree with, and I’m certainly no Donald Savoie. So in my view a Senator’s role is primarily that of a Provincial Advocate, an informal applier of policy-lubricant on Parliament Hill, a sort of postmodern Tribune…but so what, if that’s how it seems to me? In Canada there is always plenty to disagree about, since nothing is ever really as it seems, so who knows who’s got the truth of any of it? When the fact is still that all light looks the same, even if it comes out of different collisions. To me, the Governor-General is uniquely interesting for being simultaneously more and less of a figurehead than the Monarch he or she “merely” represents…gathering power by refraining from exercising it, precisely because he or she is not the Queen, but instead stands between us and the Queen. But for other people there is no reason to think the Governor-General a figure of any potency at all, while for others still the Governor-General’s power is not only considerable (and considerably attractive) but actually crying out to be used. Well, we differ on this stuff. We differ on it a lot. History here is like Bertrand Russell’s idea of memory, not the recollection of the past but the construction of the present, and even the Queen herself can’t know what Canada might do if she were not the actual Monarch, but instead some other person was…because the BNA Act says what it says, but these are different times now, and we don’t really know what rules we’ve changed, because just as with Nomic the rules change according to what’s around them. The primary rule-set is made to be as immutable as the secondary set is made to be mutable, but somewhere in the interplay between them is the faint promise that anything can be destabilized and undermined, so long as it rests on definitions. Andrew is already planning to talk about Turing and Godel (and Wittgenstein, maybe, one hopes?), and for that matter Bayes, and he’ll do it all so much better than I would that I don’t feel like I need to bore you by ineptly stealing his thunder here…but, just to say that we can’t always trust our categories, that I will do. Because, you know…we can’t.

We can’t trust our categories. Because names aren’t realities, they’re just reflections of the state of current knowledge: all provisional, all approximate, all transient. Beautiful in the headlights, ugly in the rear-view mirror. Do we have five senses? Is there a disease called alcoholism? How should we measure intelligence? Can computers think? Does a dog have Buddha-nature?

Does Canada work?

We’ll get back to that. But first…

Who wants to hear the Stop Smoking method I invented last week?

It’s a little bit long. And a bit counterintuitive. And LONG. But perhaps you were expecting that; as in this little sketch of my country’s weird unspoken dynamics I was expecting to either not be able to say all that I should for accuracy and realism’s sake, or to dramatically contradict myself through speaking more authoritatively. Canada: we’re a bit of a myth, if you want to know what I think about it. Reports of our existence may have been greatly exaggerated. A few years ago, I was interviewed for a short documentary on what other countries think of the United States, George W. Bush, and Iraq…and was surprised to be confronted with the filmmakers’ questions about my belief in God. Baffled at first, I then realized:

“Oh, right, I forgot! You guys are American!“

And so delivered the only comment I could, to the effect that my belief in God is a lot like my belief in a Canadian Identity — either there is one, in which case I’ve got it; or there isn’t, in which case I don’t. And so either way there’s not much to talk about, there. Any proposition may be true or false, but we are not guaranteed the specification of this, and in any case there’s always the chance we’ve simply got hold of the wrong question, for the kind of answer we want. Or there may indeed not be a right question; there may not be any right question. We might easily take things to be other than they are; or then again there may not be any particular way like that in the first place, that they can be. So it’s really all a matter of finding out what you can and can’t get wrong, more than anything else…and the truth is it’s a two-edged sword: in that the number one thing that you can get wrong is the number one thing that you can also get right…

Which is: names, of course.

But fortunately for us, names aren’t things.

And sometimes — improbably, perhaps, but it’s true! — that’s a relief.

Interlude: Appearing Without Explanation

Just give me a minute, Bloggers, and we’ll be getting right back to the main programme…

However in the meantime, you may wish to scroll down to the latest entry on the Seven Soldiers Of Steve part of the sidebar, or just go here, to see what our pal the Disharoonian one has brought to the Valentine’s Day party…

(My God, we’re up to twenty-one of these!)

(It’s very gratifying…)

And as long as you’re going where I tell you, how about you check out a thoroughly unexpected interview with Gerhard (!) (WOW!), some Twin Peaks art, or even maybe read a book.  Thanks to Twitter I’ve been a terrible Linker Of Things lately, and I’m not promising I’ll correct it anytime soon (especially since the Mindless are linking so fast and furious these days), but as long as we’re both here we might as well go somewhere else, eh?

And then get back quick and take our seats:  the Universe should be starting up again in a minute or two…

Universe Part Two: Flashback! To “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World…!”

I got this for Christmas, Bloggers!

Every once in a while, my family pulls a rabbit out of a hat.  How did they know?

I loved it, of course.  Cannot explain how much I loved it.  As I asked Ed, who’d come over to watch it because he hadn’t seen it either:  “Christ, it’s really good isn’t it?”  He spread his hands:  “oh yeah,” quoth he.

“Suddenly I feel like a real asshole for never getting around to reading the comic, you know?”

“Oh yeah.”

And so it was decided.  Although…

…Once I figured out that Ed had read the last volume at the library, I started peppering him with questions about the final big battle.  Did he think that somewhere in here was where the film script finally parted from comics-logic, in the name of conventional closure?  Or — or was I reading this wrong — was it simply the fidelity to the comic’s presentation, transposed directly to the big screen, that made the filmic part of its web of influence more apparent, made it seem like something more assiduously conventional than it was, because once you put something influenced by film back into film it just looks like…well…film? I couldn’t tell, you see:  because ever since David Golding laid it on me that all the most impressive film-influenced accomplishments of Watchmen would look trite when actually put into a film (“oh my God I think that guy’s having a flashback about something FOR CHRIST’S SAKE SOMEBODY GET ME SOME B-12…!“) I try to be alert to how overly-faithful replications can amount to horrendous plot-losing…

Or am I overthinking it, Ed?  Or what?

“Oh yeah.”

I think he might’ve meant:  “well, kinda…but not really. Except a little.  In a way.  Maybe.  Shut up.” But then again I suppose I can’t be sure that’s what he meant, because I sort of forgot what the question, uh…?

But anyway, right or wrong, true or false, north or south…it sort of got me thinking.

I really liked this movie…I mean, I really liked it.  I felt, in a way, like it was made for me.  But…

…That couldn’t be right, right?

So, since it couldn’t be right, and since therefore I could probably not really trust my own impressions about it to be those of who it was made for, I decided to phone a friend.  Now over in snowy Toronto, best beloved, lives a good friend of mine who could probably win a Hallowe’en costume contest if he went dressed as Michael Cera…a bright young fellow, he reminds me of me at that age if I’d only been cooler and more talented and more tuned-in.  Where I am lead, he is palladium;  where I dully vibrate, he sings, and after a while his song begins to chain.  So since it’s all aimed at him anyway, I thought, maybe I just better ask him.

“What’d you think about Scott Pilgrim?” I asked him.

Quoth he:

“I sort of felt like it was fucking with me, on a personal level.”

Now this came as something of a shock to me, Bloggers;  because I’d really been expecting him to say “yeah, that part’s a condensation” or “no, that part’s just like how it is in the comic” or even “you have no idea how much sense that bit makes in terms of the gaming thing, and that’s what you’re missing”, but one thing I most definitely did not expect to hear him say was that, if you know what I mean…

…He hated The Breakfast Club.

There, I said it.

I said it, and I’m glad.

Except…

Not really.

***

Is Edgar Wright his generation’s John Hughes?  Well, that’s obviously a terribly unfair and ludicrously high-concept sort of comparison, and not just because it appears to try to slot Edgar into some stupid “moral” comparison he obviously doesn’t deserve, but also because it takes as read that John Hughes is someone we don’t have to consider as a person or an artist — I mean, just take a look at his biography and filmography to see that he goes deeper than some self-serving “generational” prejudice, or better yet take a look at THIS, for God’s sake — I mean do we just judge people now, we modern media trackers, in order to shore up some self-concept of our own?  Is that what we do, just obsessively “rate” every possible person in order to construct a constellation of taste we can belong to, that we feel is immune from exterior assault?  Well, some people do, obviously:  you can’t really even go online at all without seeing this horrible objectification taking place, these vile motives so cleverly and self-servingly exposed.  And it is perhaps something very like a confusion of politics and ethics that we can observe there:  in this case, though, as a deliberate tactic in the juvenile mind’s favourite argument, an odiously scornful zero-sum equation that reflects a paranoiac need to be better than somebody by setting up a rigged game.  Politics and ethics, ethics and politics, which card is the Lady’s, ha-ha YOU FAIL AT BOTH.  EPIC FAIL.  It’s the morality of a game of marbles:  the attempt to make nothing important if you can just knock it out.  So…“is Edgar Wright his generation’s John Hughes”, that’s a question that decomposes rather easily in an alert reader’s mind to the statement “I am a venal and self-interested hipster whose only interest is in having a bigger slice of a smaller pie made of nothing”, but that is not why I bring up the idea of such a comparison Bloggers, I swear.  But rather I’m just interested in the effect Scott Pilgrim had on my young Torontonian friend…

…Which is to say, I am kinda interested in myself, but mostly I’m interested in seeing how this guy copes with a cultural context he inherited from me and his mother and all our friends.  Because I didn’t expect him, of all things I did not expect him, to resent the Scott Pilgrim movie, and feel like it was “fucking with him”.  I thought he’d just naturally love it, as I did and do.  But…

Can I just get back to that, in a minute?

(Some of you may want to get a cup of coffee, for this part.)

So there are a couple of things about this younger generation (although GOD but I detest loose-witted “younger-generational” excuses for “older-generational” self-dissatisfactions, but just for a moment please!) that have been made popular in the general mass media but that turn out not to be true…that very plainly to us, Bloggers, have no substance to them whatsoever.  For example, how bankrupt is the idea that there was a generation of people (ugh) whose special province was the exploration of influence, the charting of artistic continuity, and that the ones that came before them made little insular kingdoms of taste, and the ones that came after were just ahistorical remixers who did excessively brilliant cut-up art but never saw a linking thread that wasn’t magical in its character:  working by the ancient laws of sympathy, proximity, or similarity, and tossing aside the secret logical connections of Kingdom for the inspired collisions of Plasma?  Answer: very very fucking bankrupt, is how bankrupt that idea is.  Were the young people of today not supposed to care about history?  Was history just supposed to fold around them and dissipate when it met its own outer edges, in some sick Childhood’s End fantasy of the last generation’s poignant Living Will?  It’s not an expression I like to use, Jeeves, but:  tchah.  The “younger generation” types (like that even means anything!) have turned out to be far better and far more responsibly literate historians than many of their “older generation” predecessors, and the myth of their short attention span is like a misery-loves-company wish-dream;  the loss of what they now call “cursive script” in schools is not on the kids but on the (bad) teachers, who want the kids to not have the Good Tools because (just like the principal dude in The Breakfast Club!) they’re more interested in their own past disasters than they are in the future…

Sorry;  rant! But listen, I tutored a lot of these teacher-type clowns when they were undergraduates…and I can tell you pretty authoritatively, there are a lot of them that prefer cracked mirrors to open windows…

(And, don’t come back from your coffee just yet…you may want to put an extra sugar or two in there, or something…I mean what I’m saying here, in plain English, is stall…)

…So, but what I meant to say before I got started on that rant, is that when The Breakfast Club came out it was not seen then as it is now:  through the two-foot airport glass of nostagia.  Instead, it was loathed as much as it was loved.  Yeah, check it out:  it was loathed, as much as it was loved.  And there’s a reason for that, and the reason’s called “realism”.  Some people saw themselves in that movie, and admired its fidelity to their experience.  Others saw it as a colossally over-romantic slap in the face to life as it’s really lived.  And these differences didn’t exactly cook down according to party lines…at least, not the very obvious party lines that were drawn-out by the movie itself…but even so, more of the “outsiders” probably were annoyed with the thing than any of the “insiders” were, because there was a feeling afoot at the time that this movie was more for the “insiders” than their outer-dark brothers and sisters…and this really polarized the general “generational” view of John Hughes as time went on.  Sappy “feel good about yourself” crap, is how black-painted people in their mid-twenties tended to characterize the movie “Home Alone”, as though anyone even asked them to see it…maudlin faux-nihilists beyond the very most excessive dreams of even Michael Moorcock, these proto-hipsters seized on the dehumanization of unlikely, lucky, intelligent, funny, and humane filmmaker John Hughes as a weird point of pride:  I am against this…!

All because, probably, just a few years earlier they had been seduced by the comforting lesson of The Breakfast Club…because they were, in fact, the ones much closer to “inside” than “outside”.  So in a way the canard was true, but then again that it pretty much had to be true is not really the fault of John Hughes:  since how could the “real” outsiders in my town think either this or that of The Breakfast Club when like Napoleon Dynamite they just stayed in their rooms drawing ligers, and were never invited to Movie Thursdays in the first place.  Eh?  They didn’t even know this polarization was something to be a part of.  It was only the people who might find something in it, who did find something in it, and then began the campaign of coolness against John Hughes long long long after they should’ve cared…

…Because it had claimed to be realistic?

Well, it never did claim that, actually…but those who are flattered by a thing always see realism in it, you know.  Some cops used to say Hill Street Blues was realistic;  some doctors used to say that ER was realistic.  Absurd, of course…I mean it’s like saying Battlestar Galactica is realistic, or something…

(Maybe stir a little cream into that coffee?)

So the fun thing here is that Scott Pilgrim is completely not realistic, and cannot even be mistaken for being so in the smallish ways that John Hughes’ movies somehow mistakenly were…and yet it’s all of a piece here anyway, because we never were expecting Mike Leigh or Ken Loach or anything from most of our filmic or televisual entertainments, were we?  And “real” realism is not really a real thing, that we talk about in this way in the first place;  we know perfectly well that this word stands more for some sort of topical consanguinity than it does for any actual representational truth, so “fidelity to experience” or the reading of realism in flattery…well, that’s just playing with our descriptors the same way the movie plays with our images.  Sixteen Candles, as a matter of fact, is a lot like Scott Pilgrim in its creation of a convincing analogic world where impossible, forbidden, and deeply longed-for transactions can occur in just this way…and the internal trivia, the trivial logic, of world-building takes hold very firmly to make it so.  The themes, the arcs, the conclusions are all simple as can be, purest boilerplate really, and obviously pure fantasy…but each makes a special aesthetic feast of those generic frozen-chicken-finger ingredients, that is the viewer’s aesthetic:  flattering, funny, forgiving…hopeful.  Well, but The Breakfast Club actually is “realistic”, by those lights…!

Except that it ended up being vexed in a way that Sixteen Candles was not, and so the word was harder to apply in a casual, dare I say apolitical way.  Which is naturally down to the movie’s very ambition:  seeming to give an easy answer, but all too conscious that the answer in reality is not so easy, it shows it and then it takes it away, in a movement most profound to the mind of its intended audience-member.  And you can’t not see the drawing hand behind that sort of thing:  it has a point, but the point’s much more like the point in a play than the point in a movie, and so in a way it’s garbage.  It’s thoroughly artificial, and so is deemed to be a cheat.  Although it really is not…

But then…in a way…

…It sort of still is.

And that’s in the play, too.

***

(Okay, you can come back from your cup of coffee now.)

Let me just say that there was always something in me that resented the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…I mean, resented it like hell.  And maybe that’s why I kept on seeing it over and over.  I saw The Breakfast Club over and over too…because I was one of those people who had just graduated high school, had not yet found their own new thing to do.  For guys like me, dating girls still in school, feeling viscerally tied to that weird conceptual environment…it was hard to break free.  I mean:  I wanted to break free, but it was hard.  And so to me it all had something of a secret message, a subtextual trivia-reality that I could locate my misgivings in…and yet still not have to do anything about them…and so it was very forgiving indeed, and even better than that it was useful…

But enough about that, as we get back to Edgar Wright, whose Hot Fuzz (and to a slightly lesser, or possibly just more cryptographic degree Shaun Of The Dead) is a movie I can’t believe American audiences even liked…! Because it’s built on influence so very strongly.  Beyond the callback to The Avengers in the final battle in the model village, which any normally-hip person is sure to pick up on, its televisual anglophilia runs so deep and spreads out so wide that myself I expected to see Penelope Keith in the thing and maybe I even did…! Expected to see Robbie Coltrane wandering around in it and maybe that even happened…! Why it shocked me to my core that there was not a portrait of Helen Mirren on a wall somewhere in this movie, I expected to see Saffy as a vampire, Felicity Kendall viciously slam Simon Pegg in the gut with an organic artichoke, this was JLA/Avengers stuff here, and it was no less pretty and no less ugly, and wasn’t Timothy Dalton just fantastic in that episode of Midsomer Murders? He really was, wasn’t he.  And so this is the Northrop Frye thing, really:  if you’re trying to read John Donne and you don’t know your King James, you’re not going to get more than 40% of the logical density.  Well, I said the “younger generation” aren’t exclusively ahistorical remixers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do any remixing, you know…!  And yet still, Edgar Wright is no more of the generation he appeals to, than John Hughes was of the generation he appealed to.  Born in 1974 (according to Wikipedia, anyway), the director of a couple movies I like a great deal and one that I LOVE UNREASONABLY (if I may just remind you) is not quite as much older than my Torontonian friend, as John Hughes was older than me…but he is close, and that puts him in about the same ballpark as the Old Master, and arguably doing the same sort of difficult things excellently:  i.e. setting a beat that others can drum along to, recognizing as their own.  But more than that, absolutely Edgar Wright at…what, 36 or something?… is most definitely old enough to have absorbed some of the flavour of the young-adult Nineties (as Brian Lee O’Malley is just a bit too young to really have done) where I made what you might call my second adolescence.

Every generation is encumbered by the “coolnesses” of the previous one, you see;  it takes time for that stuff to work itself through the cultural alimentary passage.  And so here are the T-shirts, here are the shoes, why no wonder I liked this movie so much here is even my generation’s riff on Audrey Hepburn, the Unobtainable Girl with the ever-changing hair colour.  My shit’s still not over, it seems:  it keeps gaining vitality.  Skateboarding with the good trucks?  Invented it. Video game logic/music?  In at the start. Basement-suite living?  Jesus, no wonder Ben was driven crazy by this.  The shoes, the quokes, the party scenes…that’s all me, isn’t it?  Me and mine.  I me mine.

But all through that beautifully-rosy two inches of nostalgic airport glass.  “Fuck you, Twenties, you can’t hurt me anymore!” I think that’s what I felt.  “Fuck you, Bueller!” It really was a wonderful moment, because where Ben saw it and thought, “oh movie, why you gotta rub my nose in it like that?” I saw it and and thought “why what wonderful virginal blood you have, movie, all the better for me to bathe in and now I shall NEVER GROW OLD, NEVER NEVER…!” Honestly, the Unobtanium Girl, the fantasy of how she is nevertheless-obtained is my own personal cry-yourself-to-sleep-at-night Alvy-Singer-play that’s-how-it-would’ve-gone-if-she-wasn’t-a-person distortion…and I would almost feel like I need a royalty from its use, except oh movie, oh movie, you did give it to me just the way I always wanted it, didn’t you?

Well…

It did, actually.

Because when I entered the early Nineties, where just about all this hip shit came from (what, you thought hipness was reinvented every seven years? nope, that’s Disney audiences), I had a very odd experience indeed.

“It’s called paedogenesis, Ben,” I said to him.  “The amount of time an organism spends as a juvenile, it’s changing in front of our eyes.”  And this much anyway, Bloggers, is true.  Fifteen years ago, the Canadian government defined a “young adult” as anyone up to the age of thirty-four…and this year it’s actually crossed forty.  The cause of this is schooling, one of the most powerful technologies ever invented by the human mind, macro-circuits like in Neil Gaiman’s version of Jack Kirby’s “Eternals”…big factory/prison style buildings, with input and output and throughput, Plato’s Academy only with the changes of efficiency and equality wreaked on it.  Biologically, we’re adults as soon as we hit puberty — “shaddup and drink yer gin!” — and it takes us the longest to get there, even in the pure bio-state, of any other land-walking animal on the planet! — but school changes us, my dears.  In that, as a certain two-time winner of the George Orwell Award For Clarity In Language might assert, it erodes the distinction between childhood and adulthood, erodes its marks and erodes its privileges on both sides, and puts the young into a peculiar position indeed…as now unlike any other creature on the whole Earth, being of reproductive age and achieving maturity don’t mean the same thing anymore, for us.  I mean…

…Heck, it isn’t even close, really.

But we’ll get back to that my dears, back to it…back to it…I mean we obviously can’t get to it now, can we?  Not, at least, when it seems the topic of how childhood and adulthood are constituted is itself such an alarmingly vexed one…so constructed, so fluidly-changing, so interpenetrated with all the other practical (read: social) issues of “how to be in the world” and indeed what that world even is…in the London streets of Dickens one sees it very clearly as the interference produced by several overlapping worldviews that the individual must find a way to transit, and for the poor at any rate the necessity is absolutely urgent, so the boundaries between interpretations are correspondingly more permeable.  After all, if “childhood” is in some way the creation of the state of being wealthy, it only seems to stand to reason that as one’s environment gets wealthier one’s guiding definitions about childhood get harder to perturb…but on the streets, where being alone and unsupported is the most dangerous thing in the world, the notion of childhood/adulthood itself becomes fungible, and the cultural dialogue that surrounds it becomes correspondingly more interreactive.  One “is” not one thing or the other, but one is a much more active identity-seeker than any “is”-type category would allow.

Which is the whole problem/burden/unexpected joy of adolescence…not being one thing or the other, but instead being an active seeker after identity no matter what one’s socioeconomic class happens to be.  Because paedogenesis puts a strain on all of us…

As it put a strain on me too, of course…but then off I went to university, into a comfortable paedogenetic limbo of sorts, where those forces were balanced in a new activity.  Aha, except that then I bombed right out of university, and the superposition of states failed:  and back into my own hands fell the liquidity of a “youthful” identity, which really amazed me because I totally thought I was too old to have it.  However, starting work, starting roommate living, out from under any sort of umbrella of purpose…I’m not saying it isn’t something we all do, I’m saying that it is something we all do, but what’s interesting to me, about my story, is that the second adolescence had two components.  One being that it came right on the heels of an abject social failure…

…And the other being, that it was a wonderfully freeing time, a time between, an untethered time that felt a lot like adolescence, except that this time it was without the paedogenetic frustrations that run through teenagehood like Judd Nelsons through hallways.  And once having tasted that absence of frustration, who would ever go back to it, eh?  Con-sider yerself…!

But we’ll get to all that later, because now we finally are on to the business of Scott Pilgrim.

And you know, one of the great things about this for me was the Canadianness of it…I deeply recognize the locales as wonderful analogues of the places I lived in, the places I went to.  BACK THEN.  Through the airport glass.  But for my good friend over there, they actually are the places he does live, they are actually the places he does go…and there ain’t nothin’ analogic about it, and besides that it isn’t great.  Because they are loving looks at those places, but they are not his loving looks.  Though not a single soul will ever come riding to the rescue of an averagely white guy who feels colonized, still that’s exactly how he feels, and he’s not wrong.  We’re all colonized, some time or another.  But some of us, strangely enough, are supposed to like it.  And not start complaining when you get absorbed by your own stuff.  Because that doesn’t make any sense, right?  How can you colonize you? How can you think you have a leg to stand on, if you want to complain about that?  However, as I always say, the people in the world who complain about the Americanization of their culture — your Nike, your McDonald’s, and so on — really would do well to stop and remember that these things colonized America itself first, and that’s even something that’s still being fought over.  The slang of California, the music of the Rockies, how to broil good beef and boil good bagels…southern-fried poker, with its weird in-between hands like Little Dog and Blaze.  All the myriad folkways of an America that was, that people are trying to hang on to, but having trouble articulating why, what’s so valuable about it, etc. etc.  And as well, the America that may be, the melting-pot of the twenty-first century…all that stuff, too, is threatened by “Americanization”, is it not?  That great modernist steel-and-glass superskyscraper, good to no one for nothing, except it makes money.  Real culture has to go underground, in the sight of that monolith…

…And, just try to make the best excuses it can?  Up in Canada, we see that pretty clearly, and identify with it.  The thing you’re forbidden to complain about it, because it’s you, and other people don’t have a problem it, and it’s you…and other people don’t have a problem with it.  Oh, just because it’s a bit weird up here, you see?  Not to jump any guns, but Canada is strange because although it’s a post-colonial country — like Rhodesia minus the diamonds! — it still isn’t a post-revolutionary one, and so although it loves being part of stable old North-North America, the super-Anglo part, and feels for the most part rather cushioned in its nice-and-wealthy viewpoints (we are talking about the white people here, obviously, and don’t worry I will get back to this in a more complex and cautious way, for now I’m just dashing paint around) it still is true that we’ve got a little bit of what they call in ivory towers the “colonial mentality” — that weird pushme-pullyou perspective in which identity is always contested, and doing the contesting, all at once.  So…

Scott Pilgrim.  No wonder I loved it, but also no wonder my friend felt like it was touching him in a bad place, and couldn’t quite get his head around how to say that without having people jump all over him and tell him he was being insane.  And I confess, I’ve never had anyone make a movie about me before, only featuring someone who’s exactly not like me, acting out my own colonial-mentality second-adolescent drama to himself while I watch and wonder how not to be insulted at being made to take that stance with respect to my own story…

(“It was like you and American Splendor, only I didn’t like mine…!“)

…I wouldn’t know about that, because (you see) the biggest movie anyone’s ever made in my town, that went to my places, is still Rumble In The Bronx.  Not exactly a threat.  The North Shore Mountains leaping and soaring over New Jersey and Manhattan:  hovercrafts beaching near where I was swimming.  “You are all cabbage.” It was like the ultimate triumph of Canadian locations being used for Anytown, U.S.A., Canadian actors being used as Anypeople, U.S.A.  Simply as crazy as it could get, and I loved it.  I felt, in a strange way, almost vindicated by it…

…And American Splendor, that was just a whole other thing, obviously.  But it was vindicating too.

So, those two things were very nicely split up, for me…!

But not for Ben.

And is it not bad enough that he is walking around in all the cultural detritus that me and his mother and our friends left for him?  Because he is, you know:  the T-shirts and the shoes, the little hipnesses and the dream-girl we invented.  My story, perhaps…and so not his.  By the time “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”‘s source material was done, Brian Lee O’Malley was thirty years old.  Dude, that’s old.  As old as the chick who wrote Juno.  It’s like his life is going in reverse, played out onscreen:  things that we are removing from your imaginable possibilities.  Oldies:  gone for good.  And so what’s a guy to do?  They just come for you now, eh? And it’s just movies, other people don’t have a problem with it, how can you possibly pretend to feeling “oppressed” or anything, I mean isn’t that just ridiculous?

I must say, though I’m not feeling what he feels there with movies, there is something that this all reminds me of, and that’s…

…The Olympics, of course.  That one felt like a hovercraft riding up over my head.  And I really, really, really hated that aspect of it.

Seven evil rings.

But of course, I never beat them.

Because I got so in the habit of mistaking one thing for another over my lifetime, that I forgot the big lesson, and fell between the stools.

***

Yes, in case you were wondering:  my new little nephew’s name is Oliver.

But, what were we talking about?

Gee, y’know…that’s the problem with blog-posts that go on too long, isn’t it?  Eventually you stray from the clear focus you had at the beginning, and that’s when you’re bound to make a misstep, say something you didn’t mean, or can’t defend.  Does it all add up to anything?  Is any of it true?

Well…

That’s a good question, isn’t it?

But any question can go more than one way, I guess…

…So anyway there’s that!

And so that’s that.

LOVED. THIS. MOVIE.

But get those links while they’re hot, eh?  Because I think Sony’s taking them away even as we speak.

Okay!