From outlets to primate

Dear diary,

This morn we had an electrician pay us a visit. We called him over. We had two outlets that we wanted him to look at, behind the wall that we tore out. He fixed some broken screws; then he secured a loose outlet box; last of all, he installed a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter in our garage. He was a good guy; I recommend him.

I’m writing this absentminded entry not because I really want to but only in hopes of mitigating the stress that I feel right now; for I talked to our favorite neighbor yesterday and he said he’s planning on moving away this summer; so this puts pressure on ME to try to leave my apartment too. Ya gotta keep up with the Joneses.

Despite that last jokey remark, I am serious: I really want to escape from L.A.; escape from New York; escape from Alcatraz.

People shut their doors really loud in my neighborhood, I’ve noticed that. House doors and car doors. And they start their cars loudly and let their cars idle loudly. And they stomp down hard when they walk.

I’ve been saving last week’s free local newspaper, with the intention of quoting it here in this public-private journal. So here let me get rid of a couple quotes.

Members of the 1776 Motorcycle Riders served in conflicts dating back to the Korean War. Many of the riders served in Vietnam, but members of the group served all over the world.
     “We all believe in country and God,” said the leader of the pack. “We all share that same belief that country is number one and we stand up for the U.S. Constitution. Every one of us swore to defend that.”

This won my attention. All these things: riding motorcycles, serving in foreign wars, swearing to defend the Constitution—they’re so adventurous, compared to my own quiet life as a bookworm. And the quote from their leader makes me think of those notions “God and country” from a different perspective.

Now here’s the other part of the same local paper that I wanted to share – quote 2 out of 2 – it’s from a letter to the editor:

The real problem with school shootings is not the firearms, it’s the culture that has taught our youth that there is no sanctity of life. . . . We can remove politicians and pass laws, but that’s not going to work. We have to change hearts. It won’t happen overnight. We should start working immediately.
     Here’s one suggestion. Let’s put a sign in the school halls that says “You shall not murder.”

I had to read this over a couple times before I understood the writer’s point. Or maybe I still don’t truly understand the point, but at least I think I understand it. The opening sentence about the “sanctity of life” refers to the practice of abortion: I assume the writer is saying that if we teach our children that aborting a fetus is permissible, then those children will deduce that gunning down their classmates is equally permissible. And the quoted line “You shall not murder” is from the biblical decalogue, also known as the Ten Commandments. The relevant passage (Exodus 20:1-19) starts out with the phrase “And God spake all these words, saying…”—here, now I’ll copy just a few, starting with the above-mentioned one, in the King James translation:

• Thou shalt not kill.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery.
• Thou shalt not steal.

Then, after the list ends, there is this narration, which I really like:

And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

As I said, I love this; but this also amuses me, because I see in it the same attitude that my earthly mother has always shown toward the sacred and the divine. The ancient Israelites would rather have their human leader address them, as opposed to God himself; because God is too intense. Likewise, my mother would rather read a priestly critic’s interpretation of the Holy scriptures, as opposed to the Bible itself, because the Bible is too intense. (I myself prefer the raw Bible, and I supplement it with Walt Whitman and William Blake, because they equal the best of the biblical books in their intensity. Plus Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, etc…)

If I hadn’t already confessed as much above, could you have been able to tell that I’m writing merely to escape time-angst, rather than out of pure joy and because I really want to? Knowing that I must sell my apartment and move somewhere else… it’s not very fun.

What kept him and Elsie going would have to be a dream of what was possible rather than the hard reality of things as they were.

That’s a sentence from Paul Mariani’s biography of Wallace Stevens, which I recounted my purchasing of in the previous entry. Elsie is Stevens’ wife – she’s also “her” (and he’s “he” and “him”; and “the poems” are his earliest poetic efforts) in this next passage that moved me:

. . . he was as yet finding it difficult to get back into the rhythm of writing. Still, the exercise elated and satisfied him. The poems were to be their secret, he told her, since most people found it absurd that a man should write verse. His habits, in fact, were becoming, as he noted yet again, more and more ladylike.

Without knowing what that last word meant to Stevens, I think I myself tend to favor “ladylike” habits. Ultimately, I hope we can all get beyond sex and gender; but, if we must remain here stuck in the muck, then when people say things like “Just let womankind take over the world,” I’m inclined to agree. And yet, I wonder why, in the above passage (which takes place around 1913, when Stevens was in his mid-thirties), writing verse should have been considered a feminine pursuit by “most people”—or, at least, for a man, “absurd”.

(In case I haven’t made my stance plain, I’m all for absurdity.)

CONCLUSION

Finally (I’ll say just one last thing and then I’ll end this), last evening we screened a film called Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978). Here I’ll give the blurb from the distribution company’s site verbatim:

In 1977, acclaimed director Barbet Schroeder and cinematographer Nestor Almendros entered the universe of the world’s most famous primate to create a captivating documentary. The film introduces us to Koko soon after she was brought from the San Francisco Zoo to Stanford University by Dr. Penny Patterson for a controversial experiment—she [the gorilla] would be taught the basics of human communication through American Sign Language. An entertaining, troubling, and still relevant documentary, Koko sheds light on the ongoing ethical and philosophical debates over the individual rights of animals and brings us face-to-face with an amazing gorilla caught in the middle.

First, please note that dire year again: 1977; and compare the many dismal revelations that I recently shared about this datum, which happens to mark my own fall into spacetime, from Berardi’s book titled Heroes: mass murder and suicide. Now here’s my brief reaction to the movie:

I thought it’d be hard to watch; I thought it’d make me cry. I thought I’d feel sentimental about the gorilla, and that her achievements in the realm of human communication would tug at my heartstrings. But instead I spent most of the film puzzledly smirking and flabbergasted at what seemed the obtuseness of the SCIENTIST! My constant interpretation was that Koko the gorilla was bored and mostly interested in food, sex, etc. Life’s basic needs. This living creature seemed to be using Sign Language only the way that a dog might balance on its hind legs at a command from its owner, and for the same vulgar reason: to earn a snack. I also kept thinking about Christian missionaries and their attitude towards the civilizations, foreign to them, that they intend to “civilize”. But I would have liked this gorilla to take to language, to form a liking for language and its infinite potential; as in “Koko the gorilla got on with American Sign Language so passionately that she ended up requesting a book of English Romantic Poetry via interlibrary loan; and now, a mere six months later, Koko has learned to loathe the Internet, although she puts up with her computer as a clunky-but-necessary archiving device.” In other words, I would have liked to see Koko the gorilla take a shine to linguistics, so as to improve conversation; but instead she was reduced to making her requests for foodstuffs more and more poetic, to the chagrin of her myopic researcher. But at least this researcher wore a standard smock almost constantly; I like that cliché; that’s how scientists should always present themselves to their universe.

Remove the smock, prays Koko; let’s roll on the ground.

So now I’m of the opinion that, in a certain way, gorillas are smarter than humans. And I also kept wondering, while watching the movie, what I would do if I had to live with Elohim, that is to say: What if I got captured by the gods? They’d probably try to reward me with televised sports and light beer and hamburgers. So would I make progress in whatever they were trying to teach me? What exactly would they try to teach me? Doesn’t Plato say somewhere in his writings (or make Socrates say) that the gods just recline all day enjoying a state of pristine contemplation? But I’m already an expert at that: all I naturally do is contemplate possibilities all day—everything else is a distraction, especially this Learning Cell in which the gods have trapped me. They keep telling me: You’re not contemplating correctly—correct contemplation is to center upon mathematics exclusively. Your problem is that you keep dreaming of attractive bodies of flesh and harmonious relationships. We solved all that messiness long ago by becoming invisible, nonphysical, and indifferent to life.

P.S.

Here’s another track from my ancient rap demo album whose beats all come from the patterns that I found stored on my brother Paul’s drum machine.

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/173329585706/untitled-mcb-you-rap-so-good-is-an-old-demo