More Susurrations from the Earth

Sometimes it seems I can only write when I’m otherwise incapacitated: at lab meetings, on trains, in waiting rooms. The following bit was forced out of me (by me) on the LIRR the weekend after moving to Asgard.

2 parts of me (3?), the piece which is the purely human bit, the abomination of nature, which like puzzles and reading and zoning out and into itself.

& the piece which is a part of everything, a borrowed bit of consciousness, trapped in the bioelectrochemical labyrinth of the brain. It feels EVERYTHING and it very different from the emotions of the social creature I am (carrotted in at the top of the page, my handwriting seems to whisper as the street trees did on Friday, “There is never any end to the pain it channels because the planet is dying,” the trees respond knowingly without emotion “We know.”) When & how & why did other people shut this voice out? I can shut it out by ploying, plying, and playing with the human bit, but when it fails, I fall. I fall into it. I go deep down into that place in the earth where it weeps.

(An aside) Is there a piece of it which is me? Lauren Thompson? No. I don’t think so.

**

I have spent a lot of time & energy trying to become functional. I have equated functionality with sanity. This turns out to be a fallacy. Just because I do more with my day doesn’t mean it’s imbued with more meaning.

I do lots of things people do, but I do not feel like a person. I am still playing pretend. I am more thought & body than human. Thought & body alone do not make a person. It is this socializing, this bargaining, this compromising with the group consciousness piece, the empathy piece, empathy with the great thing, not face. Faces & and bodies are terrible things. At one moment calling that strictly human piece, the strictly human pieces, the pieces which reward themselves, the masturbatory regions which like to light up with their own cleverness.

Art. Faces & bodies appear art to us.

And then, at the wrong angle wrong moment (most angles, most moments) they reveal themselves as naked masks of muscle and fat, repulsive tubes of flesh, nothing more than limbs and torsos with very little power at all, doing nothing more than what organisms do (a horror for us to see!, for we take so much more than other organisms & to be reminded of our crimes is unthinkable).

Stop imposing. Stop imposing.

Stop dressing. Stop dressing.

We are less than animals.

We are less than nature.

With nothing left to listen to except the soaring progress of our own destruction…(there is nowhere in nature left where man’s crowning “achievements” go unheard with their grinding for more than a few minutes at a time. And even these places are rare.)

How has man’s internal dialogue changed? From the raucous sound of his own living?

I am wearing human skin, but I am an alien in th

I feel as though I am a bit of nature dressed up as human. I want to go home, but there’s no home to go to. This battle is so uphill.

It will not be the same.

**

From later that day:

It’s really important that You make media to infect people’s thinking, to come around to where You are.

Man takes all the e sucks everything from the earth, resources & energy, & gives back nothing but waste & suffering.

He needs to learn this dark truth about himself.

Instead of standing outside of nature, he needs to a fuckin’ vortex of misery, he must rejoin the planet’s ecosystem, a nomad no more.

There is no place to wander to next & You have nearly used up everything here.

Change. And know, death is not the worst thing.

**

I originally intended for this place to be a realm where I put flesh on ideas whose skeletons have formed in conversation, but this restriction seems to limiting now and strains against the intention of growth. That said, this passage presents fetal ideas, unfinished, and defenseless. They are not rules by which I live and their stark deviation from generally accepted sanity is acknowledged…but the, as yet indescribable, resonance of their truth leads me to believe their pursuit will prove fruitful regardless of their veracity: they speak of something worth examining.

Job Anxiety

I'm still having nightmares about working for the government. I'm still having nightmares about being fired. It was humbling and unifying and terrifying. And all sorts of things I think I still need to work through.

This is the quiet trauma of America today. We live to work. We work to live. And this cycle is broken all the time.

Jobs hold a little something over our heads in cruel way. Purpose. Fulfillment. Security. I feel as though the government is still holding this little something over me, but unlike the (albeit uneven) give-and-take that came with the salary and benefits, they have my little something and I can't get it back. I feel like I made a deal with the devil. No really. My aversion to melodrama wants me to delete that sentence, but the deep dread in me months later only festers and I know it's true. I wanted to change the big bad but the big bad changed me. I need to purge this thing.

This is a piece from a sparse journal which in less than 75 pages, interspersed with (far too many) practical matters, pointless lists, and unexplained empty or nearly empty pages saw me through my last semester at college, my first post-college job, and the initial stages of rejection and job-hunting. The hand-writing varies unsettlingly and often ignores the lines. Cross-outs are scribbling messes, sometimes completely obscuring the first attempt at composition. The spelling is apathetic even for me, and the condensation of letters is rampant despite the sprawling script.

"When You have a routine, it's very easy to regurgitate the status quo. Little repetitions lead You through the larger repetition. 'I am doing A because of B because of C...because of x, y, and z." But when there's a disruption in this pattern, You begin to question why You're doing anything at all.

You wonder what the point is. The end-goal. You wonder about its sustainability. It seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket...again...except this time we have numbers and charts.

Science has made the end look so sure."

Just an FYI

You may have noticed, (maybe?), that the previous post keeps changing every few minutes. I think this is how I will update posts from now on. As I can never see my own thoughts as fully finished, I think it's best that I publish them as they organically occur. Otherwise, it seems I will never publish anything.

So check again at the end of the day if You see a post You like. There may be even more to it than the first time You viewed it.

More on Nootropics

It may frustrate You to know my hiatus has nothing to do with my absence from writing. There are many little snippets sitting unpublished on this very blog as well as some chewy nuggets idling in my green notebook. However, the topic at hand pulls me out of my shyness.

A recent articles, brought to my attention by the lovely io9 (http://io9.com/5617273/two-new-scientific-studies-reveal-hallucinogens-are-good-for-your-mental-health), discussing the psychiatric applications of ketamine and LSD bring me back to my earlier post on nootropics, which I had promised to expand.

It amuses me to see in retrospect how the tone of the entries surrounding the entry on nootropics directly correlates to the types of sensations which are discussed in the review article in Nature (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v11/n9/abs/nrn2884.html).

Skeptics of artificially changing our brain chemistry would be quick to invalidate any these musings incurred "under the influence." However, since when has evolution always been right? In other words, why should we trust that our natural brain chemistry is optimal?

Prior to recent years, our intellect's heavy focus on the ego served us very well. It ensured that we and our offspring prospered. But now that we are more or less safe from the cut-throat existence of our ancestors, the predilections of this selfish character are literally killing us as a species. Homo sapiens' inflated ego has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Indeed, many of our other given attributes have proven less than sufficient (a fact we are generally willing to admit and medicate), why should we not try to fine tune our heads? As creatures who have gained the evolutionary edge from our brain-power, perhaps it is our hubris which stands in our way, a psychology of previous investment. After all, we have spent eons working out our neurophysiology to this point. But this mindset is a general delusion pervading too many of our institutions, masquerading as a love of progress.

We forget that progress is not linear. Sometimes we take a wrong turn, technologically, sociologically, agriculturally, etc. Like us, evolution is not entirely rational, and what works in the short term will not always work out in the long term. (I speak here of our dependence on fossil fuels, personalized transportation habits, urban planning, and agricultural...well, disaster.) We should be probing out in all directions, not hurtling out towards the first one which yields promising results, keeping our eyes closed and fingers crossed that things continue on the way they have.

Perhaps, our lives are still too short, and our experiences too telescopic, for us to fathom on a daily basis how long a species lives and the permutations on such a life which are possible. Which is why I am so pleased (!) that the aforementioned research results (which have really been known for decades) are finally coming in fruition in literally, THE most well-renowned scientific journals.

The review article in Nature provides a chart for assessing "altered states of consciousness." However, like Stanislav Grof (read this interview http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/404/across_the_universe), I clench at the term "altered" to describe these states, which are entirely achievable without drugs, as well as with their aid. States which would benefit all people such as insightfulness, experience of unity, and blissful states, and other states which many others have an innate curiosity towards experiencing like elementary visual alterations, audio-visual synesthaesia, vivid imagery, and changed meaning of percepts.

In addition to the obvious benefits of insightfulness, experience of unity, and blissful states, which have the potential for creating more peaceable human beings, I believe that there are real advantages to experiencing the "secondary" perceptual effects of these "non-ordinary" states.

The human mind longs to feel different, and experience things differently. Altering input and processing is like exercise for the brain. Who doesn't want a limber brain?

Low Days

I had been low. I am better now. This is something I wrote during my mental hiatus (though part of me swears I already posted this...hesitation runs deep during the down days.)

:You think it's the abstract thoughts of depression that get You, but it's not. It's the mundane ones. It's be fine if it were just the philosophical nothings that end in nihilism. "What is the point of it all?" is really a fine question all by itself: more inspiring that discouraging, but when this question holds hostage the paper-cut sufferings of daily life with its unfathomable answer, that when the paralysis sets in.

The real question a depressed person asks is not "What is the point of all this?" but "What is the point of all this if I feel pain?"

Subway Graffiti

My tiny green notebook is nearing capacity and I've begun to transcribe some of its tib-bits. I thought I'd share this one with You:

I wonder about the graffiti on the subway tracks, well not on the tracks, on the tunnels I guess, the metal posts that keep the streets above from falling on the streets below.Do the graffiti-ists do it just to know it's there? Or to some other end? Like harnessing the unconscious night-vision of straphangers reading off and therefore feeding their spray-painted sygil? Or is it just to have a piece of this city, to occupy it indefinitely publicly yet privately with a piece of their art, of their mind? Or is it simply to tell another person "I did this thing!" and to have that person think every time they pass on the subway line "The did this thing for me."?

Biologist's Gripe

So I posted this in response to what my awesome friend wrote here:

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/blog/how_scifi_scientist

And I am preserving it here, because I am a narcissistic nerd.

Me:

I agree completely!

But, why do You think it is that biologists always seem to get such a bad wrap in science fiction?

The advancements that physicists make in sci fi always inspire "wonder and excitement." Yet, advancements in biology, with a few exceptions for "practical medicine," seem confined forever to the horror and dystopian genres. We are unhesitant to explore new territory, manipulate our environments, and create new tools. Yet when we direct that same sense of adventure inward, instead of out, somehow we cross a line and become the stuff of monsters...But why should we not try to guide our evolution?

Kennelly:

I don't know. I wrote this when I was drunk.

But The Fantastic Voyage isn't like that, that's biologists doing good and going on adventures and stuff. It's mostly horror, not sci fi that badly characterises biologists. I've got more comments, but I've forgotten them.

Me:

I don't know. Sci fi seems to put biologists in a "dubious at best" category, unless they're doctors or ecologists, just maintaining and preserving the status quo, but physicists get to be saints of the stars for throwing together interstellar space travel. "Good biologists" in fiction just don't CHANGE anything. It seems unfair. Or maybe it's just because the humans in those sort of tales (with badass forward thinking biologists) would be too foreign for us to relate to.