After the Tyger

In my new lexicon, "ET" does not stand for "extraterrestrial;" it stands for "extreme terror."  

Before we turn to the terror that may be induced by coming encounters with the perceived inhabitants of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAP, perhaps we should think about the variables that contribute to a feeling of extreme terror in less exotic circumstances, so that we can measure the visceral fear that is to come, as a consequence of the Big Disclosure, against ET whose sources are, in a literal sense, mundane.

Malevolence.  

Intelligence, perhaps in part as a proxy for power to do us harm, if harm is intended.  

Sheer Size.  

And Strangeness (the experts speak of "high strangeness" when referring to certain reptilian and insect-like creatures, for example).

And so, playing at being scientific, we might adopt a formula:

ET = MISS

What does it mean?  The level of extreme terror is proportional to perceived malevolence times perceived intelligence times size times strangeness.

The Tyger himself.  The terror can be quite extreme because the only thing missing from the equation is strangeness.  The creature is quite beautiful.

Compare coming into a clearing to see an elephant in the wild.  She is more intelligent than the tyger, she is huge, she is quite strange in her composition.  But the jury is out on malevolence.  She will probably live and let live if you don't come too close or threaten her offspring.

Compare the pretend creature seen in a viral video that some wit with time on his hands was able to construct.  He built a very realistic spider costume to be worn by his friendly and lovable dog.  When the dog runs, the legs of the spider bounce up and down in such a way that they appear to be propelling the spider.  Two young girls push the button to call for an elevator.  When the doors open up, what appears to be a two-foot-wide tarantula runs after them!  The terror is extreme.  It's only wildly funny because the malevolence is a mirage.

When people experiment with the powerful hallucinogenic drug DMT (which is said to be released routinely by the brain as death approaches), it is common for them to see "elves" or court jesters.  These creatures seem "more real than reality."  They also seem to know everything about the experiencer.  They often mock him or her, as if giving life instruction in the form of "calling out one's bullshit."  Having high strangeness and high intelligence, if only modest relative size, they will induce ET, or not, based largely on their perceived level of malevolence.

What about God Himself?  Well, one might want to ask "Which One?"  The Gnostics believed that the god who built all of creation, including us -- "Yaldabaoth" -- who is the same as the god of the Old Testament, was a petty tyrant -- jealous and downright evil.  It might well induce ET to find oneself face to face with him, in a way not much different than when Dorothy and her friends first encountered the Wizard of Oz.  (His malevolence, size and strangeness, and yes even his intelligence, are fabricated of course, and it takes less than a minute for the terror to evaporate once he is revealed to be the celebrated "man behind the curtain.")

On the conventional earthly plane, I might Eye Dee the giant squid as the creature who best proves out my theorem.  In a little storefront on the street in Manhattan outside the Museum of Modern Art this past summer, a fascinating video played out in a continuous loop.  In the video, a normal-sized squid investigated, then devoured, a chambered nautilus in his chamber, which was somehow shown in cutaway view.  (The film was not animated.)  The squid inserted one tentacle into the nautilus's shell all the way in a conventional spiral into its deepest interior.  There it found its prey.  The squid then compressed itself in such a way that its body could make its way halfway along the spiral path.  Then it tore apart at its leisure the poor animal hiding in the center, using its suckers to move little pieces to its mouth.

If we place ourselves in the posture of the nautilus, it is hard to imagine anything that could be more terrifying.  And if we place ourselves in scuba gear in an underwater cavern, with a hungry 30-foot giant squid coming upon us, well, there we are in solidarity with the nautilus.  Our terror is only rendered more extreme if we look upon the eyes of the Creature and remember, from our science books, that it is more intelligent than your average chocolate Lab.

By all accounts, the perceived inhabitants of UAP come in various sub-species, or perhaps in various put-upon guises.  Some, such as the crash victims of Roswell, are too helpless to pose a threat, so they can't be said to be malevolent in the moment.  They may induce wonder and bewilderment in us, but not terror, at least not directly.

But then on the other end of the scale there are the reported reptilians with anal probes, who may or may not telepathically communicate to us that "this won't hurt a bit."  There are also the perpetrators of cattle mutilations proximate to UAP sightings, fantastically strange and merciless operations that are too ubiquitous to be dismissed as nonsense.

How do these various species or guises relate to each other, and who is in charge?  Is anyone in charge?

Humankind in a collective state of ET for the first time in the history of the world, that's what I am thinking about.

 

Is My Question the Same as Blake's?

The question embedded in the poem that is --

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

We are asked to stand in awe of God's magnificent yet terrifying handiwork.  But beyond that we are asked what kind of God could leave us defenseless on this landscape with the tiger, who is wont to lie in wait when our wives and daughters take the trail down to the river, out of necessity, "in the forests of the night."

And how much more terrible, now, to look into the eye of the shape-shifting tiger and to see, in addition to cold malevolence, an intelligence that has evolved for millions of years beyond our own.  "This is not a beast but a demi-god!"  Do we really think that there is a benevolent Higher God who stands behind him?  What is the narrative that might explain this in a way that gives comfort?

 

C. G. Jung in His own Words

We have now discovered that it was intellectually unjustified presumption on our forefathers' part to assume that man has a soul; that that soul has substance, is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent in it which builds up the body, supports its life, heals its ills and enables the soul to live independently of the body; that there are incorporeal spirits with which the soul associates; and that beyond our empirical present there is a spiritual world from which the soul receives knowledge of spiritual things whose origins cannot be discovered in this visible world.  But people who are not above the general level of consciousness have not yet discovered that it is just as presumptuous and fantastic for us to assume that matter produces spirit; that apes give rise to human beings; that from the harmonious interplay of the drives of hunger, love, and power Kant's Critique of Pure Reason should have arisen; that the brain-cells manufacture thoughts, and that all this could not possibly be other than it is.

 

It is Right to Give Him Thanks and Praise

It is fitting indeed and just, right and proper for salvation, for us always and everywhere to give thanks to You oh Lord!

 

In What Imagined World?...

... Will I achieve a final triumph of the spirit, and not sustain a final annihilation? (Metaphorical victories -- "You will live on through your children" -- don't count.)

Carl Jung treated his "primitives" with reverence and respect.  And yet, he said, they could not even process the question that he put to them -- "What will happen to you when you die?"  They told him that the bodies are always dragged into the bush, for the hyenas to eat.  (The Tibetans use birds instead, and the ritual is more elaborate.)

At dawn, the men of the tribe spit into their hands and turn their palms towards the Risen Sun.  The spittle is equivalent to their breath, the Breath of Life.  How is this different, Jung asked, from our own acknowledgement of powerlessness, taken from the Passion of Christ -- "Lord into Thy hands I commend my spirit"?

 

Letting Go

Certain physical things help to anchor us in the world, to bring us special comfort.  For my dear friend Sam, they included his books about (or written by) the Founding Fathers, as well as his Hebrew bible.  

As we prepare to check out, these things can become to us like the binkie and the blankee of a babbling baby.  The hospice worker will whisper in our ears, encouraging us to let them go as earnestly as she says that we must let go our very loved ones.

Thus such things become a principal artifice, and take on an outsized role, in literature, in the theatre and even in the visual arts.  The writer/artist may seem to choose them casually from a long list of fungibles, but if chosen well they will resonate.  (Peter Falk fussing about which hat his character should wear in "Wings of Desire.")

Say good-bye, Professor Nabokov, to your desiccated butterflies, good-bye, Monsieur Proust, to every madeleine, good-bye Mr. Williams to your menagerie that is made of glass.

 Zuckerberg:  At the End of His Tether

In the olden days in America, especially before the railroads, there were private highways, often called "turnpikes," under private control, and tolls were collected for the privilege of using them.  It was good to be Johnson when the Johnson Pike was the only practical route between, say, Culpepper and Paytonsville.  Thus there were natural monopolies on the movement of things from Point A to Point B.

There were no natural monopolies on the movement of information from place to place.  A city such as Boston, at its journalistic peak, might have been home to five or six daily newspapers, all vying for what we now call the "eyeballs" of the people.

When radio and television came into vogue in the 20th century, the government in the form of the Federal Communications Commission parsed out the bandwidth with the goal of protecting a marketplace of ideas.  The rules were more or less neutral as between Edward R. Murrow and "Mr. Ed," but with a nudging of the industry toward the coverage of "public affairs."   (Why was Eddie Fisher's affair with Elizabeth Taylor not considered "public" for such purposes?)

Then, decades later, came the young visionaries, who might be working out of a garage in Silicon Valley or, more formally, at a place like DARPA or the MIT Media Lab.  They could see beyond horizons both technical and cultural, and with respect to the latter they found their inspiration in Marshall McLuhan and the most imaginative of the Mad Men of the '50s and '60s.

Bill Gates foresaw that well-soldered "pizza boxes" would displace the US Mail as means of interpersonal communication, and challenge radio and TV as means for the distribution of Mass Content.  He knew that algorithms -- logic trees -- would have to be invented not just to perform specific tasks, like the typing of these words, but also to enable the general enabling of the machine.  He and his minions would invent a near-universal language that allowed the machines to wake up from their slumber, challenged only by a small bite at the apple in the form of the language of the Mac.  

Would the government bust up this natural monopoly?  Hell no.  It was in no one's interest that there be a Tower of Babel among the machines, and if someone was going to control their autonomous nervous systems, it might as well be an American company led by an American pioneer.  The money in untold amounts would follow.

More visionary even than Mr. Gates was Steve Jobs.  He could see that everyone in the world is feeling lonely and isolated most of the time.  But if they had the right little machine in their pockets, offering instant communication and instant access to all information, they could be distracted from their loneliness and isolation.  They would quickly become totally dependent on their little machines to fend off anxiety, to fend off death.  To satisfy this craving that he himself created, Jobs' enterprise would have to build a factory town in China (a single giant factory really, with many bunk beds attached), capable of assembling 500,000 such little machines per day.

What of the collateral consequences?  Mr. Jobs perhaps was wise to waste away before they were tallied up.  He must have single-handedly erased billions of hours of contemplation per year, among other things.  Is contemplation a good or a bad thing?

And now the new oligarchs.  Mark Zuckerberg will build out and control, we are told, an infrastructure that will allow us to live in an artificial universe, a ubiquitous 3D Zoom call from which there is no escape.  To others, we will be represented in this space by an idealized form of our own choosing.  The Elephant Man will be treated just like Fabio in this new world, because his "avatar" will be Fabio.  Accordingly he will be able to have virtual sex with Stacey Abrams whose avatar is Whitney Houston.  They will be able to share in the vapidness, the high heat and the flame-out, the ultimate pointlessness, of every Hollywood romance that has ever graced the cover of People magazine.

There will no longer be a need for football stadiums or ballparks; we will share our enthusiasms in the virtual space.

There will be a small underclass of people who are charged with upkeep of the infrastructure and, indeed, upkeep of the real world at large.  We will be able in the main, for example, to administer drugs to ourselves, but the surgeon's assistant will still have to cohabit our actual space if he or she is to timely remove an inflamed appendix.

Our cats and our dogs will miss us.

Zuckerberg will do all of this to enhance our lives, ca va sans dire, but as the creator and keeper of the new virtual world, he will be entitled to charge a small toll of his own.  Part of his challenge will be to measure in tiny increments -- not to say "bytes" -- the extent to which we are availing ourselves of his new world.  Then he can automatically, algorithmically, collect a hundredth of a cent per whatever.  The money will not change his life of course, except insofar as it gives him a mountain of cash to throw at the next cultural revolution, one that not even our nascent young visionaries can see from here.

The most significant thing perhaps -- just as at Fenway Park, just as at Disneyworld, there will be behavioral rules that all of us will have to follow in the virtual landscape.  We can call these rules social or cultural, but as we know there is only a faint smudge that separates the social and the cultural from the political, which is to say the rules by which we govern ourselves.  All of this will happen in baby steps, but Zuckerberg in due course will get to decide how much agency is left to the individual.