THE JO-TEL is going to drink its way to Dover

I had my last day of Spanish class last night, and after an hour, saying “lo siento pero tengo que irme,” I left and went to Trader Sam’s to meet up w/ Patsy and her teacher school friends. I had a couple margaritas, a couple shots, and a beer or two, and consequently I am a little hungover this good friday. Soy un hungoverito.

This kind of hangover for me is often kind of fun, because it mildy approximates some of the interesting effects of psychadelic mushrooms on the mind. My attention span shrinks, my capacity to concentrate on the task at hand evaporates, and ideas become tendrilous cartoon fingers of the jungle, rapidly reclaiming my brain from civilization.

So I thought I’d write down a few of the things I’ve churned through so far. [More… after the jump!]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Suchagreatpoem. I think I was listening to a song or something that said something about coffee spoons, so I looked it up. First read this poem in High School. I love that they teach this stuff in High School. Not only have most High Schoolers not read any of the stuff that he alludes to, even the hardcore Poetry professor types who have read that stuff really don’t know what he is talking about. Still, I enjoyed the poem back then and I still really enjoy it now.

Rereading it, I realized that one of my favorite literary images, that of a person being “fixed” with a pin like an insect on display almost certainly came from line 57, when I was about 16. I remember the shocker when our Teacher’s Aide, Mr. Andrew something, who was probably about 24 at the time

[an aside: I just got this email, just now:
From: Bindra, Jeet
To: Global Manufacturing Employees
Subject: President’s Monthly Message:
Global Lubricants]

asked us what we thought the “voices dying with a dying fall” were. I think I pictured people riding up an escalator to nowhere and, getting to the top, plummeting to their deaths. Different people had different theories, and finally, with exasperation probably tinged with guilt-ridden lust for some high-school girl, he explained that it was people having sex.

There’s something scarily primordeal about the sudden image of a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

“To have squeezed the universe into a ball” - I’ll know I can speak spanish when I can translate this stuff pithily.

Lines 111-119 remind me a lot of the style of The Wild Party, another great poem that rhymes:

So from the front. People in the wings
Saw him and thought of other things.
Coldly -
Most coldly:
Many would say them boldly,
Adding in language without much lace
They’d like to break his god-damned face.
Ask why?
They might be stuck:
They would like to, just for luck.

The Wild Party came out in 1928, about a decade after Prufrock.

The finale sounds like it was lifted directly out of Jim Morrison’s The Celebration of The Lizard:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
_____________________________________

Now night arrives with her purple legion.
Retire now to your tents and to your dreams.
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth;
I want to be ready.

Eliot just wanted to have his kicks before the whole shithouse went up in flames. Alright!

Wikipedia has a nice little list of allusions from the poem:

Dante (someday, I guess), the early Greek poet Hesiod (not likely), Twelfth Night (for sure)

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more;
‘T is not so sweet now as it was before.

(this reminds me of Proust’s Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’)

… He would rap on the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer, before going to meet him at the front door. He would find, lying open on the piano, some of her favourite music, the Valses des Roses, the Pauvre Fou of Tagliafico (which, according to the instructions embodied in her will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead, to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilled fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase continued to be associated in Swann’s mind with his love for Odette. …

Proust scholars have speculated endlessly on what is the “real life” equivalent of the little phrase, and have generally agreed that it is one of three pieces. Either it is the opening ninth chord of Franck’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in A major, the rising phrases which begin the adagio of Saint-Saen’s Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 1 in D minor, op. 75, or Faure’s ballad in F sharp major op. 19.

But to get back to John the Baptist, precurser to Jesus, whose head was said to have been delivered to Salome by Herod. This is recounted in Matthew 14:1-11, which comes pretty soon after Matthew 13:49-51, where we join Jesus mid-rapture:

49 So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just,
50 And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
51 Jesus saith unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They say unto him, Yea, Lord.

Man, that guy just had so much love in his heart!

But I actually just found out that, at least in the Matthew version of the story, after they brought John’s head to Salome, Jesus’s desciples got it and brought it back to Jesus. This made him sad and he departed by ship to a desert. People heard about this and followed him on foot. (Is it faster to travel by foot or by ship in the desert? Maybe they meant camel, the ship of the desert. Wednesday Night Fever. Enough.) Jesus saw the multitude and felt sorry for them, so he healed their sick. It got dark and his desciples said “Jesus Christ! Send these people away to the villages so they can get some food. God!” And he said, “Watch this! Do I have anything up my sleeves? No. OK, take those five loaves and two fishes, and feed everybody.” And they did! Five thousand men, PLUS women and children. And then Chris Angel was all, “MIIIIIIIINNNDFREEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAKKKK!!!!”

Earlier today I watched this clip from Waking Life:

To which I replied:

The artwork in that scene is amazing. The general thrust of what that guy is talking about is also really cool, but I have two main quibbles.

1) I think he uses the word “evolution” really loosely here, which can be fine, but pretty troublesome coming from a Chemistry Professor. The development of tools, societies, agriculture, industry, computers, etc. are “evolutionary” in the sense that all life and all the products of life on earth are the results of evolution through natural selection. But there’s a fundamental difference between, say, eyes or wings - features that are passed on from generation to generation in the form of genes for making them, and computer systems or democratic government - things that are continued and passed down through human intellectual effort. Dawkins calls these things memes and thinks that they probably are subject to a similar set of evolutionary rules as genetic evolution, but while these things live, mutate, and reproduce in the arena of human minds, genetic evolution operates at the molecular and cellular level of genes and proteins and embryos. So it’s a little incorrect to say that evolution is accelerating. Evolution as it has been operating since the advent of life continues apace.

2) He talks about evolution as if it was a long linear string of events all inexorably leading up to the development of humans, the crown jewel of life. It’s good to always remember that humans represent just one of many different ways of successfully making a living. There are somewhere between 10 and 50 million separate SPECIES of insects, all of which have been evolving just as long as humans have (and are continuing to evolve, just as humans are, only probably faster in most cases). To a very good approximation, all species of organisms on earth are insects. That said, obviously there is something different and special about humans (big brains, language, technology, glitchy post-twee-pop). But it didn’t have to be that way. We lucked out. About 70,000 years ago, the entire population of
humans had dwindled to between 2,000 and 15,000 individuals in North Africa, sitting around their campfires, frantically trying to come up with a god powerful enough to deflect any proto-myanmarian cyclones that may have been thinking about blowing their way.

3) Finally, his conclusion is, as he says, completely counterintuitive and I think completely baseless. Why, when computer intelligence finally surpasses human intelligence, and silicon-based evolution explodes off the launch pad, would these new neo-humans or robot overlords tend to evolve in a warm, fertile, inefficient way whose manifestations will be of truth, loyalty, justice and freedom? I agree it would be nice, but it would also be nice to have an omnipresent, omnipotent buddy in the sky who could be counted on to do favors for you and temporarily suspend the physical laws of the universe in exchange for loyalty and obedience and an offering of animal sacrifice here and there. But hey, if wishes were horses….

BMK12000 said,

sure, i mean, i don’t think you can take too much of that movie too seriously—you get presented with three-to-seven minute snippets of extremely complex philosophies and they are bound to be inconsistent and incomplete. i think of the movie more as a thought exercise to tickle your brain with, not really anything to settle your world view.

two things in response: one, he does distinguish biological, anthropological, and cultural evolution in the beginning of the rant. and two, he bases the conclusion off his view that societal pressures are what have contributed to social evils, and that the point of evolutionary singularity will result in a sort of “new” evolution of individuals rather than populations, an internal neo-human evolution that is unspoiled by those external pressures. plus the whole thing is also based on a theory of concurrent evolution between digital information (machines) and analog information (cloning) tied together by neurobiology. might not be convincing but he at least has some reasons. (maybe ann can weigh in here, because past what i just wrote i’m on very shaky ground on this stuff.)

regardless of the merits of that scene (interesting fact for austinites, that guy is a prof at st. ed’s), the point for me is not the words but the whole package—the animation, which is surreal and amazing with his face bubbling and melting as he speaks and with the aquarium behind him, his tone, the way he says “telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm,” the way he doesn’t stop for more than a second the entire time, the way he scratches the surface of blowing your mind, and of course the way he ends the whole rant with “that would be nice.” it’s pretty satisfying.

brett.

And finally, I say

I agree, the total package is awesome.

But to suggest that “parasitism, dominance, morality, war, and predation” were not biologically evolved long before the first human society is pretty crazy. OK, so maybe not Morality, but I’m going to go ahead and say that Morality is, on the whole, a good thing. But parasitism and predation have been around for billions of years and I’m just not clear what magic exists in the combination of computers, cloning, and neurobiology that would render those ways of making a living obsolete.

Also it sounds like he’s saying that each individual will get to consciously direct her own internal neo-evolution. But I’m having a hard time imagining this leading to a global flowering of Justice because I’m having a Really hard time imagining little Joe Schmoe Jr., 11-year-old kid in Tanzania, getting access to this technology anytime soon considering that millions of people are dying from medieval water- borne diseases that could be stopped by 50-year-old vaccines and $2 water filters.

BUT! I’m sounding like some kind of curmudgeon! It’s a great clip and a great idea; makes me really want to see that movie again. After the first time I watched it I walked around my neighborhood for an hour muttering into a mini tape recorder. My neurobiology is a little tweaked right now, too, from the tequila I drank last night, which is why I’ve been typing constantly for the last two hours. (look for my ravings at jo-tel.com)

Good day to you!

-Hip E.