Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort—
along with human love,
dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
I was down at the coffeehouse, connected to their wi-fi, then I drove about two miles to my folks place, and it says I’m still connected. My folks don’t have wi-fi, so I was just going to use Word. There could be a neighbor with it, but I’d have to connect to their signal, wouldn’t I?
I think … uh oh, I’m not sure I can say that just yet. This is a conundrum.
Maybe it’s better to begin by posing the question again: What is consciousness? A dictionary says this:
A sense of one’s personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group.
Ok, so how do we know if something – or someone – has a sense of personal identity? You know I do because I say I do, and I might believe you do, even if you say you don’t. It’s a little like saying, “I always lie.” So you would probably believe that I have consciousness even if I don’t get around to saying I do, right? Therefore, saying I have consciousness cannot be the proof of it. We probably all believe that our pets are sentient, even though they never actually say so.
What about this computer I’m using? I can make it say “I have consciousness,” but that doesn’t make it so. Conversely, my pickup truck has never said it does have consciousness, but that doesn’t prove it doesn’t.; there have probably been millions of humans who’ve lived and died without ever worrying about their consciousness enough to proclaim it either.
Which brings me around to my refrigerator, which, late at night, pretends it has an automatic ice-maker, by imitating the sound of ice cubes dropping into a tray. And my wireless router, which inexplicably loses connectivity when I’m in a rush to tube up to the pipes of the internets.
Maybe we can say that machines aren’t sentient, because they can’t do the things we do, or even the things that dogs do. They don’t love, for example, or hate. But what happens when we make a machine that learns to flinch from fear? How will we know the line when they cross it, and become conscious?
The Federal Aviation Administration has now acknowledged that the third of the four planes seized by the 19 men with box cutters had already hit the Pentagon before the FAA finally called there to say there was a problem. The FAA lied to the 9/11 commission about this, then took two years to ascertain the facts – a 51-minute gap in defense – and released the finding on the Friday before Labor Day, an excellent burial site for bad news.
So America is not the secure fortress we grew up imagining. Perhaps it never was. What protects us is what has protected us for 230 years: our magnificent isolation. After the disasters of the 20th century, Europe put nationalism aside and adopted civilization, but we have oceans on either side, so if the president turns out to be a shallow, jingoistic fool with a small, rigid agenda and little knowledge of the world, we expect to survive it somehow. Life goes on.
Oh, how I wish I’d written that. This is the kind of thing – and by the way the whole essay is great – that comes from sitting and thinking and writing with patience. One of the reasons my blog isn’t better – and my writing in general – is that I rush it. I’m rushing this now. More on that later, when I have time. Suffice it to say, I’m glad we have real writers of focus like Keillor … and Molly Ivins.
My cousin died today. Only 51, only 10 weeks since the first suspicion of the cancer. She lived in Arkansas, and I haven’t been in Arkansas since the year Carter ran his big grin for president. I don’t know her favorite color, or what she may have seen in the clouds that hang over the river, where it escapes Oklahoma and falls away to waste itself in the Mississippi. I rarely feel so small, confessing what I do not know, and having no defense.
It’s hard to say, but let’s imagine blue. Sometime maybe I’ll find out if I’m right. And animals – let’s believe in dogs, evaporated from the lakes I have lost in thirty years of sedimentary forgetting. That explains everything, except why it seems to be so cold tonight.
Well, she’s met up with good company, there beyond the fields. But it’s not for us tonight. Somebody get the gate, and let’s go in.
the blog that stops at nothing will let this speak for itself, lest we forget…
No no, we should have this to caption it:
It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among the western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — were ridiculed and ignored.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention, Salt Lake City, Utah, Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Truer words were never spoken.
The Dark Room (working title)
And I find it kind of funnyI find it kind of sadThe dreams in which I’m dyingAre the best I’ve ever had.[1]The room is full of winter dark, but his mind is full of the feeling of summer. It’s a longing, a kind of love of the way it stays warm all night, so that he can sleep with the fan on; love of that moment when he parks the car in the shade and wants nothing so much as to lay across the seats and sleep in the close air through the afternoon. What does it take, he wonders, to hold on to moments like that? How is it possible for a man to fend off the winter that’s always seeded, sleeping, in his heart?He has a ritual for finding sleep. At midnight, he goes out on the balcony, no matter the weather, and stands there cross-armed. He looks down at the dull glow of the city, the inky void where the river runs, and the outline of the hills in the distance. Those he can see like the edge of a saw if the moon is out. He thinks of nothing but how terrible the day was; long and stinging like a biting fly. Frequently painful but vital, like the lancing and drainage of some torn, infected thing. His life is resistant to
medication.What am I doing out here, in the world, with its hard smells and bad water? Oil and water do not mix. I should be in bed. It’s late, isn’t it? It feels like it must be midnight; I’m getting that ache between my shoulder blades and my eyes are tired. I should rest, pull the covers over my head and breathe slowly in the dark.
Back inside, he goes around to check the locks and put out the lights, and takes a long pull on the bottle of whatever juice is chilling in the fridge.As a child, he would lie awake a while, on his back, and pull the covers over his head. He would die there just a little, in the darkness of his room, arms across his chest. He could hear his parents’ television droning down the hall, and then their laughter. Imagine his pure little face incorrupt in a beautiful casket of rosewood, where he could see himself mourned by classmates and teachers awakened, finally, to the obvious truth of his greatness. They had missed his special gifts, and now they paid the price in pure loss. No hope, no remedy, but now at least they were sorry, and sprinkled his corpse with their tears.
Now at 45, these vestiges of that waking dream persist: He lays on his side and pulls up the sheet, over his head, smelling the essential nearly dead scent of self. He drifts off disillusioned, having seen life stop but then go on, too many times. No lessons learned, no abject repentance; just a few days of cold cuts and hot dish, packaged napkins, and finally the lawn to mow. Someone has to pay the bills, divide the loot. There must be a thousand snapshots in those boxes there, and why would he keep all these receipts?
Sometimes sleep won’t come at first, so he reaches out and feels for the phone beside the bed, keeping his eyes closed, and listens to the dial tone. He lets it moan into his ear, getting louder and louder in the abject silence of his room. This is what he needs to hear, the perfect voice of everyone on Earth. The humming even of the dead.So when the voices come, through the blanket, from the bland wallpaper or the clock that hangs there, they come as just a breath. The voice of his mother sometimes, gathered like the echo of wind in a shell. Or someone else; he never knows. But there is always a voice in his head as he waits for sleep, and he considers it a kind of art. As if he set up a canvas by the muddy river, and watched as the river painted itself.[1] Tears For Fears, “Mad World.”
© 2006 by Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
Muzio Clementi, who had seen (the Razumovsky Quartets) in manuscript, remarked to Beethoven “Surely you don’t consider these works to be music!” To which Beethoven replied: “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age.”
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.-Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
Metaphor 