Tuesday Morning Walk

17 MAY UPDATE — Yesterday afternoon I finished writing the first draft of the book.

*****

Almost as soon as I began walking I realized that yesterday I’d gone too fast. I’d been rushing into the Apocalypse, fourteen catastrophes strung end to end: global warming, a massive meteor strike event, zones of zero gravity, the Yankees winning their sixteenth consecutive World Series… There is nothing left to be done: that was the last bead on the string. But I was going too fast, trying to finish by Thursday, behind a bit now because last Friday’s task had extended through the weekend all the way till noon yesterday. Afterward I’d had lunch, dawdled awhile trying to clear my head, gone for a run along the trail, watching the prairie dogs watching me, weaving through the cattle to the creek and back again. Then I had tried to do a whole day’s work starting at three in the afternoon. I didn’t give myself time to sink into it, just hurtled into the Apocalypse like there was no tomorrow. Or actually, like tomorrow I had to do tomorrow’s work, not the rest of today’s, if I was going to finish the whole project by Thursday.

I woke up at two this morning, something that doesn’t happen very often any more. Maybe it was the heat, the first really warm night of the spring. Maybe the afternoon’s rushed Apocalypse was coming back at me, letting me know that I’d cheated it. In that day, the prophet would warn, craggy finger pointing toward the end. And who are you, O son of man, to give it a scant three hours, just because you had to drink your glass of beer, had to fry the porterhouse and the potatoes and make the salad, just because you were fully booked for each of the three post-Apocalyptic days?

What did I read when I got up at two? The chapter in the brain science book just didn’t register. A chapter of DeLillo: I felt like I’d been there too recently, or no: that I was there most of the day every day. In Pynchon the brigadier was subjecting himself to the dominatrix: that proved best for a hot mid-May four in the morning; I could go back to sleep after that. I wrote something too, between the brain science and the DeLillo. As an ordinary Joe I don’t harbor ambitions to become something other than human — not posthuman, or transhuman, or post-traumatic zombie, or non-conscious swarm drive, or schizophrenic rhizome, or theotic transcender. I think that ordinary language does describe real things in the world rather than separating humans from the Real. I don’t see any point in accelerating into sociopathy as the expression of a protean will to power. I don’t believe that bioengineering merged with AI will spawn a new hybrid post-human species. That’s what I wrote at three a.m.

At seven I woke up for real, the Tuesday before the Thursday. While drinking my first coffee and eating a donut I came across a video of a debate between Foucault and Chomsky. This must have been in the seventies: Chomsky looked like a prototypical seventies MIT prof, a slightly nerdy corporate engineer type, while Foucault, with his shaved head and stern disposition, appeared menacing and severe. This was no debate: the headliners were talking past each other, addressing the audience in different languages about different topics, barely grazing each other. I wondered, not for the first time, if Foucault’s and Deleuze’s and Lacan’s paranoia about being boxed in by language was an artifact of being French, having been taught to write French by French teachers in French schools. In her early American years our daughter had attended what might be deemed a Chomskyan school: express yourself creatively, and the rules of grammar and spelling will take care of themselves. In France we immersed her in structure: formal instruction in parts of speech and conjugations, recitation of poems par cœur, get creative once you’ve grown accustomed to the apparatus. Some of the American parents couldn’t stand it: they had to take their kids back home, or enroll them in American international schools. Happily for our daughter the French primaire proved to be good cross-training. Now she writes Paradise Lost fan fiction.

That’s one reason why I want to be finished by Thursday: we leave on Friday to pick her up from school for the summer. Last week my wife found a poem called “Iowa City to Boulder,” by William Matthews. With that poem Matthews marked off the route, 80 to 76, as a pilgrimage trail for his readers to follow. But of course Kerouac had already made that run years before. I take most of the drive by night, Matthews wrote: I wonder if it’s true, or if the poem is a kind of short story, a flash fiction they might call it these days, semi-constrained in the poetic structure. Maybe he drove it in the daytime but decided that night driving would be more poetic. It’s free verse as far as I can tell, no predefined rhyme or meter or line length to constrain the drive. A Chomskyan poem.

But now it’s eight o’clock Tuesday morning and I’m walking past the upper pasture, watching the bull as he begins his workday, paying his morning visits to the ladies, and I’m thinking post-Apocalyptically. If I go back in time can I stage it differently? The Book of Revelation is a kind of linguistic apocalypse, a description of something that’s beyond description, signifiers flying off the signifieds, the whole structure of the language being pulled apart in the cosmic upheaval. In his ecstasy John points his craggy finger beyond that day, past the end to the new heavens and new earth. He’s left his body, left the earth, surging beyond structural constraints, embarking upon a visitation to a Deleuzian linguistic afterlife, one among perhaps a multitude of afterlives, where language is free to do whatever on earth or in heaven it desires.

So I’m thinking about going back to yesterday and sketching out an alternative end of the world. a linguistic Apocalypse that does not point beyond itself to the linguistic Millennium. A report comes in from one of the time-traveling reconnaissance agents: there’s been a catastrophic and widespread rupture between signifiers and signifieds. Now – that is in the Apocalyptic future – whenever anyone tells you anything, you have no idea what the speaker intends to convey. You can no longer assume that what people are saying corresponds in any way to events in the world, or even in the imagination – events that they’re purporting to describe in language. Plus you, the listener – you too have lost the connections. You hear the words and you understand them, but you can’t find the correspondences anymore between the nouns and the things to which they point with their craggy fingers, between the verbs and the actions. And of course in that day the recon report too becomes suspect.

But now it’s Tuesday and I’m on the clock. Yesterday was the Apocalypse, and the Friday drive to Iowa is only three days off. No looking back; let today take care of itself. I can smell the barn and I’m heading straight for it, no more distractions.

I’ve made the turn, crossing the little bridge over the drainage ditch. The electrical control box beside the bridge has been encased inside a hollow plastic boulder: is it for aesthetic purposes, or to thwart terrorists using satellite surveillance to identify targets for knocking us off the grid? There’s water flowing in the ditch for a change: snowmelt, followed by two days of rain. The grass is green and dandelions are everywhere. In a month all of this would be brown and crisp if the terrorists blew up the electrical and the sprinkler system wouldn’t run.

Next to the fake boulder a block of glass about two feet square is embedded in the ground. I don’t remember seeing it before: probably it’s part of the electrical system. There seems to be a yellowish-orange light flickering down there below the glass. I can’t make it out though, because the glass is thick, uneven in consistency, and partially opaque. Maybe it’s just a reflection from the morning sun. Walking on, I greet the old Central European man who walks his Chow Chow along this path every morning around this time, a dog that, cliché be damned, does in fact bear a striking facial resemblance to the man holding the leash.

*****

Here’s the poem:

Iowa City to Boulder, by William Matthews

I take most of the drive by night.
It’s cool and in the dark my lapsed
inspection can’t be seen.
I sing and make myself promises.

By dawn on the high plains
I’m driving tired and cagey.
Red-winged blackbirds
on the mileposts, like candle flames,
flare their wings for balance
in the blasts of truck wakes.

The dust of not sleeping
drifts in my mouth, and five or six
miles slur by uncounted.
I say I hate long-distance

drives but I love them.
The flat light stains the foothills
pale and I speed up the canyon
to sleep until the little lull
the insects take at dusk before
they say their names all night in the loud field.

And here’s the Deleuze-Chomsky debate, trilingual with English subtitles, courtesy of dmfant in a comment on the most recent Noir Realism thread:

Here’s One

[I mentioned in a comment on the prior thread that, approaching the end of the novel I'm just finishing up, I've been writing a chapter consisting of monologues from 14 significant characters in the series. Each of the 14 monologues is 14 lines long, with 14 syllables per line. Prose poems, I suppose is what they are. I just wrote this one, which elaborates on a minor narrative detail in an incident from a prior book that reads like this: “Why am I here?” the Dancer responded to the Ceramicist’s inquisitive look. She scooped up a smooth milky stone from the edge of the road and juggled it in her left hand as she spoke...]

*****

Jessa

Walking to the Cantina that time, past the two mile mark,
my glance landed on a small stone at the edge of the road.
We had opened the vault of photos, the gallery of
the dead at the two mile shrine. Red rocks edging a red road,
the border of the shrine marked off a world of memory
and loss. Recognizing none, I remembered every one.
Though small, the stone beside the road kept a hidden meaning:
milky white and smooth, it was alien to the redness,
left perhaps by another Pilgrim from another place.
A name was written on that stone, a name I did not know.
I wanted to return to that place; I wanted to bring
my own stone, a name written on it that no one would know
but the one who had received it. Then I would add my stone
to the one I’d found beside the road, a two stone barrow.

*****

[The bit about the name written on the stone is an allusion to Revelation 2:17. One more monologue to write, then four more chapters to go after this one and the first draft is done, hopefully on Thursday.]

Nobel-Level Self-Assurance

“This is not the place to go into detail about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. I have done that in several books, which may be consulted.”

- Gerald Edelman, Second Nature (2006)

Fictional Fiction Writers at Work

[Yesterday the new fiction surpassed 80,000 words, and now I can smell the barn, as they say in horse country. If I keep up the pace I should have a first draft finished in two weeks. Here's a short chapter I drafted last Tuesday. In this interlude, two unidentified writers are inventing a story together, a story about a character -- the bathrobed man -- who has an ongoing role in the larger story. I've written dialogue for these two storytellers before, in earlier episodes. Every time it's been fun, fast, freeing to distance myself from my own fiction by handing my job off to these two guys.]

*****

The bathrobed man bundles up his twenty-one birthday installments, plus maybe whatever’s left of his money as part of his legacy. He sends the parcel to his designated under-the-radar courier, along with instructions and mailing address. Obviously the unborn child has no name yet, so the bathrobed man can’t write Dear Jimmy or Dear Susie at the top. But he can still sign as Dad at the bottom.

Perhaps the instructions include sending each year’s installment from a different location, again protecting against the possibility of discovery by the enemies.

Good idea, but that’s going to set the courier back financially.

Perhaps the bathrobed man includes in the parcel…

…Includes in the parcel some money to defray his courier’s expenses over the next twenty-one years.

Yes. And we presume also that the courier is a loyal and trusted person. He will feel duty-bound to honor what may be the last wishes of his doomed friend, even after all of the money has been spent.

Great, that’s it then.

Excuse me, but I have a question. We are presuming that the bathrobed man is about to be killed by his enemies. Imagine that, through his resourcefulness, he manages to survive this seemingly fatal ordeal. Would he then retrieve the first parcel from the lawyer, as well as the second one from the courier?

Or would he lay low?

Remaining undercover for a month, a year, twenty-one years, until at last he emerges from seclusion. What changes would have been wrought in him? From some underground control center would he have masterminded the implementation of his hermetic scheme? Would he have teetered over the edge into paranoia, into madness, remaining forever in seclusion, perhaps taking his own life?

But how could he have escaped? The thugs have him cornered, his house is surrounded. They’re professionals, and in their profession the consequences of failure are dire. The bathrobed man isn’t the sort of guy to break out the windows and start shooting.

And he is alone, our bathrobed hero. An amateur, alone, pits himself against several hired guns? Even in a B Hollywood gangster film this one-man stand cannot succeed. One thug keeps him occupied by returning fire through the front window, while two of his associates calmly walk around to the back door. A locked door? These are hired killers. The bathrobed man is a duck in a shooting gallery.

Booby traps?

Are you suggesting perhaps the noose around the ankle ploy, hoisting the thug into the air, suspended from the stout branch of a nearby tree? Or perhaps the patch of leaves disguising a pit into which the gangsters who tread upon it will drop? Or do you recommend something more lethal, in which explosives are involved?

Do I hear sarcasm?

Indeed. Simply put, our bathrobed man is not the sort of fellow who goes in for violence. He is an engineer; his genius is conceptual, systemic.

So couldn’t he engineer devices to ward off the thugs? He is at his own house after all, plenty of time to set things up, work out the bugs. And he is motivated, wanting to protect his mysterious invention, his Icon, even if it turns out to be just a crackpot scheme after all. And he is paranoid, maintaining constant vigilance against those who would steal it for nefarious purposes or financial gain. Why wouldn’t he booby-trap his house?

Yes, I concede that these are valid points which you are making now.

Okay then.

But.

But?

Even without the booby traps, the boobies will make a great deal of commotion, no? They will fire their guns at the bathrobed man. If he is prepared to take violent means into his hands, he will return their fire. The neighbors will hear, they will telephone the police, the squad cars will soon surround the house. Our bathrobed man will be taken into custody. He will be required to reveal information about his Icon. No, none of this is permissible for him.

So he needs to escape. Now we’re back to where we started. He’s surrounded so he can’t escape, and he’s not prepared to call attention to his grand scheme through gunplay and explosives. He’s dispatched the parcels, one to his childhood lawyer friend, the others to his trusted courier friend. And so now he dies to protect his secret schemes.

Perhaps taking his own life to avoid being the subject of so-called extreme interrogation tactics, by means of which the thugs would attempt to extract the truth from him.

So why aren’t we satisfied to leave it at that? It’s a good story the way it is. It’s as if we’ve gotten too attached to the bathrobed man, like he’s calling on us to save him from his fate.

And it is a fate that was sealed twenty-one years ago when the bathrobed man sealed the secret parcels. Now we have moved on in the story, far into the future. The thugs have perhaps discovered the lawyer friend, the son or daughter has gone in search of the father. The future becomes the present. This is where we must concentrate our attention.

Wait a minute…

Of course. After twenty-one years of waiting, what is another minute?

No, listen. The Icon. Bathrobed man designed the Icon, this awesome system linking everyone and everything together across vast distances. Okay great. So listen. Bathrobed man sent off his drawings and documentations. But didn’t he also start building this thing, this Icon? We’ve already said that he has associates, that he had financiers backing his work. The written documentation is a backup, we said. There’s also an oral tradition, a means of communication propagated among a cadre of operatives, associates of the bathrobed man who are secretly building the Icon according to his prior verbal instructions.

Yes…

Maybe the Icon has bootstrapping potentials that help with the implementation. For example, maybe some module of the system enables an unspoken means of communication, letting the Icon-builders communicate with each other without leaving a paper trail, or an electronic one.

Yes, and perhaps the Icon, as gradually it is taking form and substance, enables the secret cadre to identify others who could join them, others whom the bathrobed man never met, others whose behavior patterns or brain waves conform to a certain profile that identifies them as promising co-conspirators.

Fine. Now, the Icon links people and things together across vast distances.What about across time? Across long spans of time? Does the Icon make temporal linkages?

Yes, perhaps also the dimensionality of time is built into his grandiose schematics. The likelihood is high, I think now. So the bathrobed man anticipates that the Icon will gradually be assembled over the years after his demise at the hands of the gangsters.

And he set it in motion across time, this gradual assembly. Built by his associates, by new co-conspirators…

Eventually achieving the ability to assemble itself.

Yes, that’s great.

Even if the bathrobed man did not know how to design this autopoietic capability of his Icon, he set it on the course toward its eventual emergence as a self-generating device.

And perhaps also self-regenerating, the ability to diagnose and repair its own breakdowns.

And self-replicating.

Yes. So the bathrobed man envisions the gradual self-creation of the Icon as something like an organism, or even a new species of organisms capable of reproduction. It extends across vast tracts of space, across multitudes of people, across long spans of time. Now, does the Icon also extend itself backward in time?

Oh God. You wish now for the Icon to turn itself into a time machine?

Why not? It does everything else.

What does it do precisely?

Hell, I don’t know. It does everything. And if it does everything, then surely it ought to be able to manage time travel.

But have you not yet seen enough such stories of time travel? Must we be doomed to repeating the time travel trope, as though stuck in a time loop that repeats itself again and again, never to be surpassed?

You mean like Groundhog Day?

I’m sorry – like what now?

Never mind. But look, this is how we rescue the bathrobed man from his imminent and inevitable demise.

The Icon returns from the future to save its master, its creator, its father?

Exactly.

 Oh my God. The tears will be flowing down the aisles. Or perhaps they already flowed. Have flowed? Have been flowing? These verb tenses…

But yes, suppose we do that. We have the what, now we need the how. How will the Icon save the bathrobed man, twenty-one years in the past?

I don’t know. No, yes I do. It is already happening. We are the instruments, the vessels of the Icon as it performs its heroic time-traveling mission into the past. This is what the Icon will do. It will invade our minds so that we will write a scenario that saves its father, twenty-one years in the past. But of course it is the past only in diagetic time. In narrative time the rescue remains, happily, poised as a future unfolding of the story. Is invading our minds? Has been invading?

Zizek’s Post-Traumatic Speculative Fiction

The past two days I’ve participated in a lively thread about post-traumatic subjectivity at the Attempts at Living blog. In the course of the discussion I became aware of an essay by Slavoj Zizek entitled “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” [The Abstract and a link to the PDF of the paper  can be found here.] Having read Zizek’s essay, I’m not sure what value there is in writing a post about it. I once did a lot of PTSD counseling and might do so again in the future. Does Zizek offer practical therapeutic advice? No. Does he reframe post-trauma in a way that has psychoanalytic value? That question might be worth considering, although I regard Zizek’s frame as a constraint to break rather than a context to step into. Does he reposition post-trauma politically? He does, and that’s what I find most objectionable about the essay. Is Zizek claiming that what he writes is true? If so, I don’t see any evidence supporting his truth claims. Alternatively, is Zizek telling a story, writing a kind of fiction, an alternative reality in which characters can act and events can be staged? Previously I’ve concluded that I get the most personal value out of metaphysical speculation if I regard it as a fictional genre. Do I find value in Zizek’s speculative “short story” about the post-traumatic subject? I do. In fact, I think I can adapt it for a chapter in my own fiction that I expect to write next week. So I’ll write this post about Zizek not as a critique but as a kind of summary description of a fictional world, an oppressive apocalyptic vision.

In some realities, what the subject fears is the inability to attain desires. In that sort of reality, trauma is the definitive obstacle to the fulfillment of desire. Trauma maims or kills you so that you cannot pursue your desire. Trauma removes that which you desire from the field of possibility, making further pursuit pointless — learned helplessness. The post-traumatic subject becomes passive, psychically numb, alienated, zombified, reduced to brain and body without a heart and soul. Trauma permanently severs the link between desire and fulfillment. Post-trauma, desire dies because it cannot possibly be fulfilled.

But that’s not how Zizek’s alternate reality works. Zizek begins his story by rehearsing (his version of) the Freudian-Lacanian fiction about trauma: that the victim actually wants to be traumatized.

For Freud (and Lacan), every external trauma is “sublated,” internalized, owing its impact to the way a pre-existing Real of the “psychic reality” is aroused through it. Even the most violent intrusions of the external real — say, the shocking effect on the victims of bomb-explosions of war — owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, the death-drive, in unconscious guilt-feeling, etc.

In ZizekWorld, what one fears is what one desires. And what one desires is to be hurt, to be victimized by the sadist, to be punished, to be dead. I desire what I fear: some might regard this construction as a delusional phantasm, a subjective fiction. Trauma, when it comes, could be regarded as the irruption of the Real, destroying the fantasy, clearing the way for the individual who was previously immersed in a fictional delusion to get a little more real, to start becoming a real subject. But that’s not Zizek’s story. In ZizekWorld, not only does the subjectively Real incorporate the phantasm of imagined trauma: the image of the trauma is central to the subject’s reality.

Why? In Zizek’s fictional universe, as in many other parallel universes, the human subject is activated by desire. But here’s the twist in ZizekWorld: if the subject’s desire is ever fulfilled, then the subject loses the prime motivation to do anything. The object that someone desires is never really the cause of desire; if the object is attained, then desire must shift to some other object, some other potential source of fulfillment that must be pursued. At some unconscious level the person occupying Zizek’s fictional world understands this to be the case: if ever my desire is truly fulfilled, then I have nothing left to motivate me, no emotional engagement in the world.

In ZizekWorld, then, it’s not the permanent impossibility of fulfillment that kills desire. What kills desire is the fulfillment of desire. And so in effect the subject desires that which would kill desire, which would in effect kill the subject. The subjects in ZizekWorld are animated not by libido versus death drive, but by libido intertwined with death drive. And it is trauma that, catastrophically, fulfills the subject’s desire. In trauma, the phantasmatic image of desire held at a distance by the subject suddenly and uncontrollably closes the gap — between subject and object, between desire and fulfillment, between libido and death. Trauma destroys the object of desire because the object was always just a stand-in for death. And now death has come upon the subject, killing the object of desire. And trauma kills the subject of desire too, because the subject is intrinsically organized around desire.

But in ZizekWorld, killing the subject of desire doesn’t kill the subject altogether.

All different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbolic…), lead to the same result — a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity: after the shock, literally, a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment — it is a subject who is no longer “in-the-world” in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a new form of life — his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims.

The resurrected undead zombie subject is born again, its desire fulfilled. Should we feel sorry for the post-traumatic subject, and angry at the perpetrator of the trauma? Not in ZizekWorld.

What if we surmise that the cold indifferent disengaged subjects are NOT suffering at all, that, once their old persona is erased, they enter a blessed state of indifference, that they only appear to us caught in unbearable suffering?

The post-traumatic subject feels no pain because pain, like all feeling, is a product of a subjectivity fueled by desire, and the desiring-subject is dead. What then do trauma and its consequences mean in ZizekWorld? They mean nothing, since meaning is another product of the desiring-subject, a story that the subject tells itself about what it desires and why, how it goes about pursing its desires, why it is thwarted, etc.

In ZizekWorld the post-traumatic subject lives on, without desire, continually repeating the same meaningless sequences of actions again and again, the death drive decoupled from libidinal investment. And who are these “degree zero” subjects, these shells without substance, these “autistic monsters” that populate ZizekWorld? They are the “new proletariat”:

the exploited worker whose product is taken away from him, so that he is reduced to subjectivity without substance, to the void of pure subjective potentiality whose actualization in work process equals its de-realization.

Presumably in ZizekWorld the new proletarian masochistically wants to be exploited, feels he deserves it as punishment for his guilt, wants to be reduced to performing repetitive meaningless tasks. Who else are the post-traumatic subjects occupying ZizekWorld? Those cold-blooded killers, terrorists, and suicide bombers, those mindless followers of orders dictated by their authoritarian leaders, the Muslims:

When one looks an autistic subject (or a “Muslim”) into the eye, one also has the feeling that “there is nobody home.”

I could go on to discuss Zizek’s negate-the-negation shtick, whereby trauma ironically doubles the original primal trauma of symbolic castration from the Mother by the Father, a trauma that creates the subject in the first place. But this is enough I think: I’ve got my own fiction to write. We can certainly envision a Leader in ZizekWorld who organizes the zombified new proletariat in order to accomplish a violent revolution. Even if they’re killed or maimed in the battle it doesn’t mean anything, because they’re already dead, beyond meaning, beyond suffering. Or the ruling class can simply continue to exploit their undead workers, who don’t feel it anymore, who don’t care about anything anymore. Or the Muslims can be bombed into oblivion, since they’re already undead zombies. I can use these fantastic totalitarian speculations of Zizek’s for my own sinister fictional insurgencies…

I Like My Similes Like I Like My Metaphors

[I'm about two-thirds of the way through the current book. This excerpt comes from the immediately preceding one.]

“Hey Lois,” he shouted out the open office door as he veered toward the flipchart. “Go get us a round of beers if you would.” He studied the top sheet for a few seconds before ripping it from the pad and tossing it to the floor. Uncapping the black marker he began writing something at the top of the page. The marker was nearly out of ink and Karas flung it across the room, its tip making a short grey smudge on the wall between two of the taped-up sheets before caroming onto the hardwood. He snatched up the red marker and began again:

MAN  –> NEPHILIM –> ELOHIM

“This is the progression, yes?” But Karas wasn’t waiting for the Courier to keep up with him now. “We’ve always thought – I’ve always thought about the progression in individual terms. A man becomes a mighty man becomes a god. Pilgrimage as decisive and extreme movement away from the norm, from the collective. The outlier becomes a double outlier, and maybe finally a triple outlier. Instead of waiting for the one in a million to come along we would accelerate the difference engines, turbocharge the thrusters, propel more of the exceptional people out of orbit. Some of them might shoot out of sight altogether, never to be heard from again. But others – well, instead of launching one revolution at a time they might catalyze simultaneous cascades, multiple singularities in art, science, economics, warfare…

“Still, there has always been the statistical underpinning. Difference relative to the norm, stretch out the axes of deviation. We’ve always speculated that a society of outliers might emerge, reticulated through the Portals via some unknown and perhaps unprecedented mechanisms exceeding mere empathy and cooperation. We didn’t want the Stations to be seen as anything more than termini linking the Trails, transient nexuses for Pilgrims passing through as each by each they pursued their separate trajectories into exceptionalism.

“But now we face the empirical facts: most of the Pilgrims are going nowhere fast. Money, power, sex, prestige – the vectors and endpoints are all so fucking predictable. Sure there are exceptions, and exceptions are what we prize above all. Maybe our project is doomed from the start, but we wanted to establish the preconditions and the apparatus and the impetus for cultivating a whole host of exceptions. Hey, we should make that our new motto.” Karas turned back to the flipchart and printed in large block letters, filling the sheet:

EXCEPTION IS THE RULE

Lois brought in two tall tapered glasses of cloudy beer with a skim at the top. “Belgian blond lambic,” she announced as she placed one of the glasses on the conference table in front of the Courier.

“I like my beer like I like my women,” Karas insinuated archly as Lois handed him the other glass.

“Cold and flat and murky?”

Karas watched Lois walk back out to the antechamber.

I’m Shocked, Shocked

…to find that US hospitals make more money by fucking up than by doing it right. From this NYTimes article:

Hospitals make money from their own mistakes because insurers pay them for the longer stays and extra care that patients need to treat surgical complications that could have been prevented, a new study finds. Changing the payment system, to stop rewarding poor care, may help to bring down surgical complication rates, the researchers say. If the system does not change, hospitals have little incentive to improve: in fact, some will wind up losing money if they take better care of patients…

The study is based on a detailed analysis of the records of 34,256 people who had surgery in 2010 at one of 12 hospitals run by Texas Health Resources. Of those patients, 1,820 had one or more complications that could have been prevented, like blood clots, pneumonia or infected incisions. The median length of stay for those patients quadrupled to 14 days, and hospital revenue averaged $30,500 more than for patients without complications ($49,400 versus $18,900). Private insurers paid far more for complications than did Medicare or Medicaid, or patients who paid out of pocket.

The authors said in an interview that they were not suggesting that hospitals were trying to make money by deliberately causing complications or refusing to address the problem. “Absolutely not,” said David Sadoff, a managing director of the Boston Consulting Group. “We don’t believe that is happening at all.” But, he said, the current payment system makes it difficult for hospitals to perform better because improvements can wind up costing them money.

Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for American Health Insurance Plans, a trade group for insurance companies, said in an interview that the study illustrated that the entire health care system needed to move away from what she called “the perverse incentives of the old fee-for-service system that emphasized quantity over quality, and toward methods of payment that reward better care.”

…Dr. Barry Rosenberg, an author and a managing director of Boston Consulting, said the study came about because his firm was working with Texas Health Resources to find ways to reduce its hospitals’ surgical complication rates, which, at 5.3 percent, were in line with those reported by similar hospitals. Part of that work involved analyzing the costs, and he said the team was stunned to realize that lowering the complication rates would actually cost the hospital money. “We said, ‘Whoa, we’re working our tails off trying to lower complications, and the prize we’re going to get is a reduction in profits,’ ” Dr. Rosenberg said in an interview…

In an editorial, Uwe E. Reinhardt, an expert on medical economics from Princeton University, called the study’s findings “troublesome but not surprising.” He called the current payment system “untoward,” adding that it “can tempt otherwise admirable people into dubious conduct.”

Springtime for the Homeless

UPDATE: The Shelter just announced that it’s going to stay open tonight and tomorrow night before closing for the season. Maybe my post helped in shaming management into it.

Winter Sheltering services are available from October 15 through April 15 for any adult in need.

That’s what it says on the website of the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless. It’s not true: any “adult in need” who has already spent 90 nights at the Shelter during the current “warming season” cannot spend another night there. And capacity isn’t nearly adequate: while the Shelter sleeps 160,  another 100 people spend their nights sleeping on the floors of churches and synagogues that have agreed to provide “overflow” shelter during bad weather.

But today is April 16 and according to the Shelter’s calendar the season is now over: the Shelter is closed tonight and every other night until October 15. Presumably in the warm weather homeless people are not “in need” of an indoor place to sleep, even though it is illegal to sleep outdoors in Boulder. Here’s what Boulder looks like today, April 16, out my back window:

Today’s local forecast: Moderating temperatures will change morning scattered snow showers to rain showers by late day. Patchy freezing drizzle possible. High around 45F, low of 31F. Winds SE at 15 to 25 mph. [Currently it's 25F, so the meteorologists were being a bit optimistic about the low.]

Tomorrow: Cloudy with snow showers becoming a steady accumulating snow later on. Cold. High 36F, low 19F. Winds N at 15 to 25 mph. 1 to 3 inches of snow expected.

Undead Text

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

That’s the first line of The Shadow of the Wind, a 2004 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón that I’ve been reading. Yesterday I was searching my document files — my private cemetery of forgotten texts — for a fragment I remember having written, thinking that I might be able to splice it into the fiction I’m presently writing. I never did find what I was looking for, but I did come across a document from 2004 that read like a Ktismatics blog post before Ktismatics even existed. Better late than never, I figured, so I reformatted the document as a post. I titled it “Wallace Stevens, Bond Man.” While proofing it I was remembering a couple of other posts I’d previously written about Wallace Stevens. So I googled myself: it turns out that I had already turned this same text into a Ktismatics post. It’s called On Keeping Your Day Job, posted in August 2007. So it was three years after having written the text that I turned it into a blog post, but that post is nearly six years old now and I’d forgotten all about it. Sometimes even the resurrected texts find their way back into the crypt.

Wherein I Recall My Prior Life as a Mad Scientist

If the glass is half full, that means it’s also half empty.

After finishing my doctorate I did a postdoc in an AI lab. These were the early, heady days of expert systems, a technology predicated on making explicit the tacit knowledge of human experts, converting the heuristics of human decision-making into conceptual objects and rules for manipulating them that could be run on computers. Our core group consisted of cognitive psychologists and computer scientists, and in building systems we would collaborate with “domain experts” in medicine, business, law, engineering, and other practical disciplines. A standard division of labor was established: the domain experts provided the expertise; the psychologists did the “knowledge engineering,” which consisted of making explicit what the experts knew and how they used that knowledge; the computer scientists designed and built the computer systems encoding the engineered expert knowledge.

Early on I came to a sobering realization: human experts aren’t nearly as good as computers at using knowledge. Humans have limited processing capacity, and so they can’t remember very many things at once, can’t pay attention to very many features of the task in front of them, can’t deal with very many variables at the same time. To compensate for their limitations, humans take various short-cuts and work-arounds in solving complex problems. Computers have limitations too, especially in their ability to acquire new knowledge, but in their ability to process lots of information they vastly outperform humans. Equipped with knowledge already learned by human experts, computers can manipulate this knowledge more efficiently, and more accurately, than can the human experts.

I remember giving a talk in DC to a gathering of all the AI postdocs funded under the same national grant program, working in labs at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, U. of Minnesota, UC San Diego, maybe others (my memory has degraded since then). Most of the talks were about AI work in progress. I talked about the differences between human and computer decision-making. Instead of fancy slides I drew overheads by hand with a black marker. I drew out a simple binary decision tree that went maybe 7 layers deep, pointing out ways in which knowledge and logic interact in actual decision-making tasks, describing how computers are not vulnerable to the same sorts of biases as humans in working through even a fairly simple decision. I remember one of the colleagues at my university telling me afterward that he thought my talk sucked. But I also remember discussing the implications of my presentation with the overall head of the grant program nationwide and one of the pioneering figures in expert systems. It turned out that his group was moving away from having computers imitate human heuristic knowledge toward more reliance on what computers are best at: manipulating numerical information via quantitative algorithms.

While I did some work on a pediatric cardiology expert system, I spent most of my time as a postdoc doing knowledge engineering on two other projects. One was a system for designing so-called fractional factorial experiments, where the domain expert was a statistics professor in the business school. The other was a system for making credit decisions, the domain expert being a professional credit analyst in the insurance industry. In both cases, through conversation and observation, I was gradually able to identify the information the experts looked for in the “task domain” and the ways in which they used this information to render decisions. As had been the case in other domains, these experts used short-cuts and rules of thumb to compensate for human processing limitations. I put together alternative “inference engines” for both of these task domains, with decision-making processes predicated on the heavy number-crunching capacity of computers. I also went ahead and did the programming on both of these systems.

The results should have been predictable. Both the experimental design system and the credit rating system were excellent at performing their respective tasks. Where it was possible to evaluate their decisions in comparison with the “right” answers, the computer systems outperformed the human experts. The human experts acknowledged their machinic doubles’ excellence, even at times conceding their superiority. But they didn’t trust these hybrid expert systems, using their own human knowledge but processing it algorithmically rather than heuristically. They couldn’t understand how these systems thought, how they arrived at their decisions. The systems’ reasoning procedures, more efficient, more consistent, and arguably more accurate than their own, were too opaque, too alien for the human experts to grasp. I concluded that the only way systems like the ones I built would ever be used in real-world decision-making would be if the human experts weren’t sitting around looking over the expert systems’ shoulders second-guessing their decisions. You would need lower-level human technicians to feed the computer systems with data, to read the output, and to enact the systems’ decisions without constantly grousing about robots ruling the world and all the rest of the tedious all-too-human resentment my systems seemed to provoke.

The Brain’s Glass is Half Full

My brain doesn’t have to understand its own workings in order to work. Even a frog can see a fly, hop toward it, and catch it mid-flight with its tongue, all without knowing how its neuromuscular apparatus accomplishes these feats. I don’t know through introspection how I see and run and catch a ball, how I feel warmth or hunger or sexual arousal, how I understand spoken language or remember the name of my elementary school. Why should I expect my ability to decide and to take intentional action to be any more accessible to introspection than any of these other neurological functions?

Humans are at least partially aware of their own limitations. I don’t have much body fur, but if I turn on the heat inside and put on a coat when I go out I can survive in a cold climate. I can’t outrun a zebra, but if I get in my Jeep and drive after it I can overtake the zebra. I have a hard time remembering a 9-digit number, and even then my memory degrades rapidly, but if I write the 9 digits down I can retrieve them when I need them. Humans build and use tools largely to compensate for their mental and physical limitations: this ability is paradigmatic of human intentionality.

Cognitive psychology as an empirical subdiscipline emerged in the late 60s not from philosophical idealism but from behaviorism, which regarded all behavior as an automatic stimulus-response mechanism unmediated by thought. Cognitive psychology presented empirical evidence supporting the alternative contention that there is a black box intervening between S and R, processing inputs and preparing outputs. Neurologists are exploring more directly how the black box works. But explanation won’t change functionality. When Copernicus figured out that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun, and when Galileo confirmed the heliocentric system observationally, people didn’t suddenly spin off the surface of the world and float into space, nor did they suddenly stop seeing the sun rise in the east and set in the west. If a satisfactory empirical explanation of intentionality is achieved, that won’t mean that people will suddenly stop intending or realize that they’d never in their lives actually intended anything.

Intentionality as Adaptive Mutation

[This post follows my prior posts on Terrence Deacon's 2012 Incomplete Nature entitled Why Life? and Reducing the Intentionality Problem.]

I don’t know why or how life evolved from nonlife. Other self-organizing systems, like heat convection or atmospheric currents, are dissipative structures that accelerate the production of entropy in far-from-equilibrium conditions. Organisms do it too, maintaining their negentropic functions by using free energy from their environment, thereby accelerating overall entropy. Maybe that’s what organisms are for: to accelerate the inevitable heat death of the universe. Certainly humans are highly efficient entropy production systems, using not just their own bodily metabolisms but the artifacts they create to suck free energy out of the universe, replacing it with waste, exhaust, and other entropic byproducts.

Regardless of how and why they came into existence, organisms do maintain and reproduce themselves. Organisms that through random mutations achieve incrementally better abilities to obtain access to free energy and to metabolize that energy are more likely to survive and to reproduce. A bacterium doesn’t have to have intentions motivating it to waggle its flagella in search of sunlight and nourishment. A bacterium is a self-organizing system: it spontaneously perpetuates its own equilibrium by means of genetically encoded drives that are sensitive to indicators of environmental energy sources. Presumably it’s cause-effect all the way down.

Suppose the environmental sources of metabolic energy — food — available to an organism are uncertain, quantities are limited, and access is difficult. If following its genetic program the organism pursues an unfruitful path toward food, it will die. Suppose this organism carries a set of mutations that permits it to evaluate the relative likelihood of finding food by pursuing different uncertain trajectories. Suppose the organism is further mutated such that it is able to identify and work around obstacles standing between itself and the food source. These mutations would be adaptive, enhancing the organism’s survival odds, if the extra energy expended in the exercise of its mutated food-finding abilities are more than offset by increased access to sources of energy replenishment.

This whole mutated apparatus is still following straight cause-effect, motivated by genetic instincts attuned to environmental affordances. There is still no need to invoke intentionality. Even if through more mutations this organism became aware of its own enhanced food-finding capabilities, the self-awareness does not imply or require intentionality. I’m aware that I’m presently digesting my supper, but that doesn’t imply that digestion is the result of my intentions.

What if some further mutation occurred in which the organism does achieve intentionality? This mutant creature plans for its next meal even when it has no immediate need to replenish its energy stores, even when there are no signs of food being present in the organism’s immediate environment. Would this mutation prove adaptive? The same conditions are in effect: if intentionality works, and if the exercise of intentionality more than replaces the calories it burns up, then it should enhance the organism’s survival. Is intentionality a straight-ahead cause-effect mechanism? I think it would be better to regard it as a mechanism that anticipates cause-effect based on prior experience — a temporal feed-forward loop. Intentionality is predicated on the anticipated desirable future effects of causal mechanisms that the organism itself puts into operation: if I cause myself to go to the watering hole, this action will probably result in my finding some food there; if my speed covering the distance to the watering hole causes two hours to elapse, then as a result I will probably be hungry by the time I arrive there.

Another mutation: the organism becomes aware of other organisms’ techniques for finding food, whether those techniques are intentional or not. This organism observes a creature locomoting in some direction and infers that the creature is on the trail of some food source; it then follows the creature in search of its own food. It observes a creature evading complicated obstacles to obtain food; it imitates the other creature’s behaviors and secures its own food. This organism would need the sort of intentionality that enables it to infer that the other creature’s motivated behavior is relevant to its own motivations and therefore worth imitating as a cause that will likely generate a desired effect. Adaptive? Same rules apply. Cause-effect? The feed-forward loop of intentionality is augmented by a feedback loop of observing and imitating others’ behaviors.

In short, intentionality can be built incrementally on unintentional survival mechanisms without transcending cause-effect, and intentionality offers survival benefits if it isn’t too much of an energy drain to operate.

Limitations to the Cleverness of Squirrels

Recently we replaced the old bird feeder, which had been gnawed beyond functionality by the squirrels, with a new supposedly squirrel-proof model. The design is fairly ingenious. Like ordinary feeders, the cylindrical tube containing the seeds has holes drilled into its sides with pegs mounted under the holes, allowing birds to perch while extracting seeds through the holes with their beaks. This feeder has a separate shell surrounding the cylinder, spring-mounted so that when a creature heavier than a bird climbs onto the feeder the shell sags down under the creature’s weight, closing the holes and thus denying access to the seeds within.

But squirrels are nothing if not persistent: if there is a design flaw they will eventually discover it. The base of this feeder is attached not to the outer shell but to the inner cylinder. Consequently, a squirrel standing with its back feet on the base puts no weight on the spring-loaded shell and thus the holes remain open. A squirrel figuring out this trick can stand there as long as it likes gorging on seeds.

Two squirrels live in our back yard. One of them has figured out how to outwit the squirrel-proof feeder; so far the other one has not. It took several days for the successful one to zero in on the invariants of the trick. After a few days of frustration it began to bounce up and down on the feeder, causing the gravity-activated shell to bounce too. When in the low-gravity “up” position the shell would slide up and the holes would re-open momentarily. During this brief interval of low relative gravity the squirrel would stick its paw into one of the holes and try to pull out a seed before the gravity of the downward bounce closed the aperture again. Eventually the squirrel discovered that crawling down onto the feeder, spinning 180 degrees vertically so that its head is facing up, and then resting its weight on the feeder’s base is a successful behavior sequence for keeping the holes open and the food accessible. It isn’t necessary for the successful squirrel to acquire explicit understanding of the cause-effect relationships involved; the squirrel need only recognize that its behavior has achieved the desired result. The other squirrel, the one that hasn’t yet succeeded, seems equally motivated, repeatedly climbing onto the feeder, gnawing at the lid and the wire mesh with which the gravity-activated shell is surrounded. I suspect that eventually the failing squirrel too will succeed.

Squirrels are clever. They’re good at figuring out complicated behavior sequences that give them access to food. Once they figure out the trick they remember it, performing the maneuver more quickly and efficiently over repeated sessions. What squirrels aren’t very good at is learning by imitation. You’d think that the failing squirrel would learn the trick by watching the successful one. But this requires the failing squirrel to realize that: (1) the successful squirrel’s behavior is motivated, even if that motivation is unconscious to the squirrel; (2) the failing squirrel shares the same motivation as the successful squirrel; and so (3) it would be a good idea to imitate the successful squirrel’s motivated behavior.

Squirrels are independent experiential learners. However, squirrels do not occupy joint attentional scenes with their fellow squirrels, and so they’re poor imitative learners. Humans are very good imitators. I can imagine two seed-loving humans living in the back yard. One of them struggles to figure out how to outwit the feeder, the other sits under the tree and waits. Once the experimental innovator succeeds, the observer watches, imitates, and succeeds too, without all the fuss and frustration of learning the trick by trial and error. I once took an MBA course in organizational innovation at the university where I got my doctorate. “Be a quick second,” was the key advice proffered by the professor.

The Tables

Bud and Gerald entered another room in which four people were seated around a wooden table.

“According to Eddington there are two tables,” asserted the physicist. “The first table is the one at which we are seated – a piece of furniture made of hardwood, its patina darkened by the layers of polish that have accumulated over the years. It is oval in shape, with claw feet and intricate swirls carved just here, where the legs meet the tabletop. An antique perhaps, possibly a bit too delicate for the hard labor to which we put it here at the Scriptorium. But there is also a second table, beneath this one so to speak yet invisible to us. It consists primarily of empty space, sparsely populated by elemental particles swirling through charged space at incredible speed, indistinguishable from tiny quanta of electromagnetic energy, moving from one point to another without ever being anywhere in between.”

“Superb,” the politician commended the physicist, “but is there not also a third table? It is a diplomatic table. Your words carry more force than mine, are weightier, have more gravity, because you sit in a position of authority, at one end of the diplomatic table. Whereas I, seated at your left hand along one of the longer sides of the table, am in a subordinate position to you. In comparison to yours my pronouncements ring indistinct and hollow. Now if we were to trade places at this third table…”

“There is a fourth table,” said the painter, seated across from the politician. “It is made not of electrons, nor of power differentials, but of shapes and colors and angles. If I were to describe this table I would use not words but images. My description would depend on whether oils or pastels were made available to me, and whether the surface on which I present my image is canvas or paper or the wall behind me. It would depend too on whether the light fixture above the table could be dimmed just a bit, whether our conversation around the table as I paint is convivial or combative, whether someone proves kind enough to fill my wine glass again.”

“But none of these is the real table,” the fourth member of the conclave averred. “The spinning particles and energy fields? That’s what the table is made of. So too are the walls of this room, the floor, each one of us. Are we all part of the table? Certainly not. The table is made of wood while we are flesh. But again, we speak only of building materials and not of the finished artifact. The diplomatic table, the painterly table – these aren’t the table either. You” – turning to his left to address the politician – “are describing ways in which people interact around the table, ways in which the table contributes to these interactions, lending and withholding its architectonic power to your rhetorical power. Whereas you” – turning to his right now, where the artist was seated – “would depict the ways in which the table interacts with your senses, your sensibilities, your sensitivities. Presently the table serves all of us as a flat surface on which we can place our drinks without spilling them. It serves as a locus around which the four of us can gather to engage in conversation, while also providing a physical and visual barrier, making it more difficult to engage in a brawl if our disagreements become too heated. Again, these are interactive properties of the table. But what of the real table, the essential table? It cannot be reduced to elements and materials, it cannot be expanded to utilities. What is it, this essence of the table? Even if we could know it, we would not know it, for knowledge too is a utilitarian function, an interaction of our minds with the table. Knowledge of a thing can never be the thing itself. The graven image is not the same as that which it represents. And where is it located, the table’s essence, if it is neither in the materials nor in the interfaces? It must be somewhere that cannot be touched by interactions with other material bodies and forces, or even with minds. It floats in deep space perhaps, or it crouches at the bottom of the sea. Or is Sheol the place where essences reside, each stored in its own vacuum-packed sarcophagus, all essences stacked in the infinite tunnels extending deep beneath the earth awaiting some post-apocryphal resurrection when the essences of all things converge and diverge, creating new heavens and new earths, not just in appearances but in reality? Is it not toward Sheol that we Pilgrims strive in search of the essences of all things, including the essences of ourselves?”

“I bought it for thirty-five dollars.” The four Pilgrims seated around the table, Bud and Gerald standing inside the doorway: all turned toward the figure slumped in a well-worn burgundy sofa on the other side of the room, notebook and pen in hand. “I bought it from a neighbor at a yard sale just after I’d returned from France, maybe five years before I moved here to the Scriptorium. It was her mother’s table, I presume she came into possession of it when her mother died. The table wasn’t even on display out in the driveway. It was wedged against the inside wall of her garage, covered with boxes, not easily accessible because of all the other junk packed in around it. Was she glad for me to get the table out of her way so she could park her car more easily? Had she been feeling guilty in not using her mother’s table, perhaps not liking it as much as the newer table that she had selected herself, according to her own tastes? By giving her mother’s table a new opportunity to serve its function did I help assuage my neighbor’s guilt? Or does she now worry daily about whether I’m taking good care of the table, always her mother’s table of course in her mind, honoring the table as I would her mother herself, even though she may have harbored, as most of us do, ambivalent feelings about her mother? Would my neighbor have suspected that I don’t much like the table because the legs along the sides are positioned so closely together that it’s hard to avoid barking your shins when you pull up to it? Through the walls could she hear my shouts the day my knee bumped one of those legs, toppling over my glass of wine onto the newly-cleaned carpet?”

In Sheol the writer’s essence was seated much like his material self – as above so below – on the mutable and increasingly threadbare essence of the sofa he had bought at some other yard sale, the essence of notebook and of pen in hand. He looked across the room toward the essential table, understanding fully that his visitors had essentially left. Is what I write about the table here and now, he wrote in his essential notebook, different from what I might have written were all of you seated across from me at this table, engaging me in further conversation about tables? Did you leave because you were offended by certain remarks I might have made, because they left you tongue-tied and embarrassed about your inability to respond fluently? Did you wish to encourage my engagement in the sort of one-sided dialogue I had been commending earlier in the week? Or were you just bored? And me: am I still going on and on because my interest in the tables is not yet exhausted, because like so many self-absorbed hosts I am essentially indifferent to my guests’ presence and can’t take a hint that it’s time for me too to put away my pen and notebook and take a walk in the open air? Do I write out of spite, in an effort to force you to return and respond to what I have written? Or is it a simple matter of horror vacui? Tomorrow when I take my customary seat at one end of the fictional table, facing out the back window onto the eruption of dusty greens and pollen-saturated yellows and purples that are the sure result of the rare midsummer rain that even now is coming down up above, will I incorporate into my novel (or is it nonfiction after all?) these speculations about the motivations of people who evaporate as quickly as rain in the desert (or were they mirages after all?), a host talking to the empty chairs of guests who are elsewhere – a text that is likely to remain unread and unremarked, forever positioned at one end of the table speaking silently but insistently into the void, sinking through the floor, through soil and sand and stone, into the profundity of its insular essence?

[...adapted from Sunday's thread on the Agent Swarm blog. I like my original ramblings better -- more spontaneous, nicely contextualized -- but this version works too I hope for the novel.]

Elohimic Systems Engineering

[Just having a little fun now, writing along this afternoon on the current fiction, working title The Scriptorium...]

…There was a software engineer who before setting up residency had built a couple of automatic holy-poem generators that attained immediate popularity among the Pilgrims to whom he had demonstrated them over drinks along the Trails. Once he got settled in at the Scriptorium the engineer quickly got to work on what he termed an old-school elohimic expert system. From interviews with theologians, gurus, cabalists, and prophets he extracted a substantial body of godly insight, which he compiled as textual aphorisms and brief enigmata that he then programmed into the system’s knowledge base. In response to fairly complex Q-and-A sessions with spiritual seekers the elohimic expert system would automatically string together its fragmentary wisdom into multiple paragraphs of polytheistic revelation. It’s like a sophisticated Magic Eight Ball, the engineer scoffed as he scrapped the device, which had immediately attracted a strong following among the Pilgrims who had beta-tested it.

Next the engineer set about building an object-oriented elohimic system, or OOES. Instead of propagating the so-called sensual properties of hierophantic loci with which votaries typically interacted – words of holy texts, pictorial images of icons, architectural and topographic layouts of sacred spaces – the OOES was designed to manipulate the withdrawn essences of these spirit-objects. Almost invariably the user interacting with the OOES would receive in response to queries neither direct answers nor enigmatic ones but silence. Some Pilgrims spent weeks contemplating the system’s apophatic non-pronouncements; most headed on down the hallway after fifteen minutes or so…