What Makes a Caress?

A caress?  As opposed, that is, to a touch that is merely therapeutic?  The question can be an awkward one if you find yourself engaged with a massage therapist.  You, with your eyes closed and facing down, may feel that you are being caressed, while the masseuse may feel rather that she is kneading a loaf of pizza dough before putting it in the oven.

Intent and context certainly matter.  But Wittgenstein would remind us that the intent cannot be pulled out and abstracted from the context; we infer the intent in large part from the context.  

In the current New Age, it cannot be denied that a robot/android can be made whose caresses are indistinguishable from the real thing.  Another genius whose path crossed with Wittgenstein's, Alan Turing, would say that if you can't tell the difference, then there is no difference.

But I don't buy this particular and secondary Turing Test.  Must we really remember this, that a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh?  More fundamental things must apply.

 

Who Is the Conjurer?

Who is the conjurer of my dreamscape?  The tales are too complex and too creative to be my own. 

All in one night:

1.  A girlfriend from my youth materializes in my bed.  In the darkness she embraces me from behind.  This brings me peace and comfort.  Only later do I realize that she has taken six long, thin vials of blood from my back as part of a prank or worse, as part of a sinister experiment.  The next day I search for clues to her whereabouts.  I find an empty pack of Parliament filters, her favorite brand, on my table.

2.  I am waiting for an elevator on a high floor of my office, with a friend.  Suddenly a very petite young Asian girl joins us.  She is beyond distraught, stricken.  When she approaches me, I ask her if her distress is "personal," as opposed to, say, a colleague having had a heart attack at his desk.  But it immediately occurs to me that any such level of distress is personal.

We are in the elevator now.  Her eyes roll into her head and she collapses into me, still alive but unconscious.

3.  I am running my very first marathon.  But a half mile in, I decide to lie down in the fetal position in the middle of the course.  I am just resting to build my strength for the remainder, if I can do it.  I try not to call too much attention to myself.

4.  A man calls out to me -- "Have you seen these modern sailboats, with their flimsy construction?"  He is at the center of a cavernous wheelhouse in what appears to be an enormous Spanish galleon.  I climb towards him on a staircase within it that, like everything else around, is made of heavy, dark, ornate wood.  I then notice that, radiating out from the center, there are what he calls "belaying pins," but they are not of the usual sort.  Each is bigger than I am, and in the shape of a woman's arm.  Each ends in a delicate looking hand whose fingers are poised to grab something.  I surmise that these "pins" can be used somehow in the handling of the cordage of the massive vessel.

Night Two Addendum

We have a spectacular nighttime view of the city of Boston as we roll in by train from the west.  We can see the glow of Fenway Park far off in the distance.  When we get to Fenway, we hop off.  We find a bar within the park itself.  It is very crowded; my friend and I are well and truly belly up to the bar.

We order a round of pinot grigios.  When the barista returns with them, my friend asks her if she has something "special."  She comes back a minute later with a small tray of chocolate cupcakes, Hostess-like but without the squiggle.  She tells us that they are laced with a heavy dose of aphrodisiac and advises us not to drive after eating them.  I wrap mine in a paper napkin and stuff it in a pocket, never to be seen again.  I have a certain contempt, in the dream, for people who rely on such things.  (I do literally bump into a woman at the bar, by the way, but after tossing off a little half insult/half tease in my direction, she disappears as well.)

When I take out my wallet to settle up, I am more than a little annoyed at myself because it is stuffed to overflowing with random bills.  I must be carrying at least $1000 in cash for no good reason.

 

It's Not for Me

It's not for me to try to lead you on your own personal path to Enlightenment.  My own path suffers from a dark cast of mind and a lifelong lack of spiritual discipline.

But the Greatest Avatar Ever to Have Emerged from the State of New Jersey, Whose Multiplicity of Names Shall Remain Nameless, insisted in his lifetime on two things -- (1) that we empty our minds; and (2) that we unclench our minds.

The first is well understood, if extremely difficult in the execution.  It is the shutting down of the internal monologue, via meditation or tai chi, for example.

But what does it mean to unclench our minds?  

In that ancient and much-beloved documentary series, "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," Jacques and his minions would often find sea anemones on the ocean floor.  Their many tentacles waved in lovely patterns as they hunted for plankton or other little things to eat.  But if an intruder such as Jacques touched them even with a light finger, they would withdraw instantly into a tight, protective ball.

The New Jersey Avatar admonishes us to open up to the world, whatever it may bring.

 

At the Risk of Blasphemy

Could the intensity of the devotion to Jesus Christ as personal Savior that we have seen lately, and the sheer numbers of people who feel such devotion, conjure Him out of thin air, making Him real after all, for believer and non-believer alike?

 

Un Cheval Andalou

I will start this one with an acknowledgement that it is all from memory, and that the memory is not always reliable.  But I will also argue that in this particular context it does not matter.  A Jungian therapist once said to me that it makes no sense to ask whether the dream has been remembered correctly, because there is no dream other than the recollected one.

"Un Chien Andalou" -- "An Andalusian Dog" -- is a justly famous, hallucinatory little film that Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali conspired to produce in the 1930s.  It shows us a succession of nightmarish vignettes.  In the one that stands out to me today, a young gentleman in fine clothes stands in a large and equally fine drawing room.  He is chained to a grand piano.  A dead horse, flayed, lies atop the instrument.  The man is struggling to drag himself and his burden in small steps towards an attractive woman who stands across the room.  (She could cross the room to him unburdened, but it seems that she is indifferent.)

A not-so-subtle message of the vignette is Sisyphean; that is, a tremendous exertion is being made in a hopeless cause.  But beyond that, it is a reminder that our cultural and social affectations are but expressions of vanity in a world that is governed at a deeper level only by blind and base animal instincts.  

I think of the scene now because it seems to mock my late fixations upon two things that are linked in my mind -- the possibility of transcendence and the imminence of right and proper judgment.

And yet, all can be reconciled if we see the entirety of "Un Chien Andalou" as a playing out of one man's descent into Carl Jung's netherworld, his shadow world.  On this view, the netherworld is a real, subconscious world that is shared by us all, and only by immersion into it can we reach the form of transcendence that Jung himself achieved, and that he referred to as personal integration.  

Jung would call this "science."  Without disparaging it, others might call it "mysticism."  With a little tweak to Arthur C. Clarke's oft-quoted aphorism, we may say after all that "any sufficiently comprehensive and advanced science is indistinguishable from magic."

 

We Need a New Theory of Memory

When we take into account that everything we know, we know because we remember it, how can it be challenged that there are simply too many memories to fit inside even the largest individual cranium?

• "Daddy, how do you spell 'clapboard'?"
• The fact that Susie Wiles is the daughter of Pat Summerall.
• The color of your first pencil box.
• How much salt to put on the skin side of a duck breast before pan frying it.
• The cylinder configuration of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that powered the P-51 Mustang in WWII.
• The difference between magnetic and true north at Boston in 2025.
• The section of the Internal Revenue Code that governs intercompany pricing within multinational corporate structures.
• How to close a window in the Windows operating system.
• The purpose of the indentation in one button only among the many buttons of a Crucianelli accordion.
• The taste of a blade of grass.

And so on and so on.

"The idea that the brain is a computer is simply a metaphor."

But if all of our memories, broadly understood, are stored elsewhere, the implications of that are profound indeed.

When we each reach our point of personal extremity, do we release the memories in a structured way?  Are they organized in "arrondissements" around a core?  Or are they all held, democratically if you will, for the life review, the review in which you will experience vividly the impact that your pilfering of that yellow pencil box from the lost and found had on its true owner?

 

Slip Sliding Away

Any personal feeling of:

• Transcendence
• Vindication
• Absolution
• Communion
• Completion; or
• What the Russians call "byez-a-pas-nust."  It often means "security," as in "KGB" -- the Committee of Governmental Security -- but more literally and more commonly "the condition of being without danger."

All slipping or slipped away.