Never in this world will a man live well in his body save dying...

[kleenexwoman]

I've just come from Modern Poetry class, and boy are my frontal lobes chafed. Partially because of the objections of the Fugitive Stars and partially because I've seen a lot of cheap coffee mugs with the legend "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" written in whimsical fonts on them (you'd think that the creators of the mugs, knowing the quote, might know where it came from and what its implications are--then again, maybe it's deliberate, a sort of memento mori), I expected to dislike T.S. Eliot. But I was wrong, oh so wrong. I dug The Wasteland, and I dug it even more after Apter kindly explained all the references that T.S. had just sort of expected his readers to get. (Maybe through the collective unconscious he likes so much? Like by poem magic?)
William Carlos Williams, my god. I always thought of him as "that wacky guy who wrote about chickens and red wheelbarrows," but so many of his poems are naughty. Plants are women--a shameless fallen leaf crushed dry under the wheel of a slicksmooth car, a blossom of Queen Anne's lace invading a meadow in interconnected orgasm, a field of silvergreen asphodel waiting to be plucked.
Also, Wisława Szymborska. Experiment is excellent. The problem is that I can't find all her poems that I wanted to share on the 'Net, and I don't really want to take the time to type them *all* out. They're...long, some of them. The Wallace Stevens one I posted a while back tested my endurance as far as transcribing goes. Wish I had the patience to sit down and type 'em all, I really do--they're genuinely funny and subtle. (They had to be subtle if they were going to be funny--she was working under the Communist regime in Poland and couldn't actually come out and say things. Consider "Experiment"--this was when the Russian government was doing experiments much like the ones described in the poem. At least if your entire head is in a jar, you know you're in a jar.)

So I turned four poems in to the Central Review, and three of them got in. I'm pretty happy with that, but the three that got in were the three that I honestly thought kinda sucked. The ones that got in: A pair of overly ornate poems about dead girls (for those of you who aren't familiar with my poetry oeuvre, you can check it out at kindredhellion--the stuff I'm satisfied or frustrated enough with to have stopped editing it is put up there), an unedited "mini-sestina" I wrote for an exercise in Creative Poetry. The one that didn't get in was "Jubliate in Felibus," the one I sweated over and fiddled with and had to ask people about obscure parts of Latin grammar for, and the one that pretty much everybody seemed to like.
Eh. It's all a matter of taste. The poems were picked pretty quickly, though; submission date was Friday, and the winners were announced that Sunday. ('Stin, who's on the editorial board, says that not as many people submitted poems, and that she thought the senior editors did a crap job of picking a lot of them. Maybe I'll apply to edit the next one. They need a hell of a lot more fiction.)

*

Have been talking to Char and her boyfriend Robert (who's also in my Creative Poetry class, and always has highly unusual story recommendations) almost as much as I would like to. (Char is fun and full of thoughts.) We discussed the possibility of sex on Mars (and sex with Mars, for people who are just that turned on by extraterrestial geology, and came up with the idea of quantum reincarnation--
Reincarnation is, of course, the idea that one's soul goes through various incarnations in order to experience every basic experience and emotion that can be experienced. (For the purposes of this model, it has nothing to do with a system of reward or punishment. Example: I'd like to be a cat in my next life, and sort of hope to be one if I'm good, but that incarnation might not let me go through an experience that I still haven't, like the death of a spouse or, I don't know, the feeling of being cut down for paper.) Once you have experienced the entire range of emotion, you're complete and can be joined with the Cosmic Mind or go to Heaven or what have you.
Quantum immortality works off the idea that there are infinite (almost infinite) parallel universes that differ, each in turn, by infinitesimal amounts. The morbid or slightly paranoid will note that every second of your life, you have a chance to die, and there are enough universes to cover death every second of your life. Quantum immortality is the idea that upon each death, your consciousness is transferred to a universe in which you did not die. Thus, upon being poisoned by the toxic mix of powdered iced tea and milk that I'm now drinking, I will suddenly snap into another universe where the mix of powdered iced tea and milk is completely harmless. Upon being choked by the sardine I'm going to eat as soon as I get home, I will snap into a universe where I safely expelled the sardine from my throat and onto the floor where the cats can eat it, or possibly a universe where I never choked on the sardine at all.
Char brought up the possibility that because of this possibility, reincarnation in the classical sense is unnecessary. If you can transfer your consciousness to other, slightly different yous in other universes, why bother to live so many lives in sequence when you can live millions of the same one? Thus, quantum reincarnation is one single soul spread out among millions of universes, with each fragment of the soul going through a different life at the same time. Because every possibility is inherent in the universe and every possibility exists in a different universe, by the time you can't avoid dying, your soul will have gone through every single thing and experienced every single emotion it possibly can.
Question is, how much will you be able to differ before you become a completely different person with a different soul? Well, you can quantify differences as variables, and each person's life can be considered an equation. Soul A differs from Soul B because Soul A's birth-country variable is [Poland], whereas Soul B's birth-country variable is [Canada], and so on. Very broad, of course, and each variable has multiple variables attached to it (which part of Poland? Who was the midwife? Was the mother in pain? Was it raining outside?), but you get the idea. Comparing two equations would have to stop at points of difference rather than going on to compare increasingly varying variables that go along with each point of difference. From there, the question of how much difference makes two discrete souls rather than two fragments of the same soul is merely a technicality.
(Also, to take care of something that one of anivad's posts made me ponder, free will would be a matter of chance. In this universe, you just *happen* to choose to go to college instead of working at the dry-cleaning place down the street from your parents' house, to have tacos rather than burgers, to marry or not, to eat a peach. In another universe, you do not out of necessity, because you have made that choice here. Not that you are aware of this. The mind can fool itself pretty easily.)

You'll be tested on all this later.

Comments

[inkhornsybarite.livejournal.com]

is this rachel weisserman?

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Yes.
I happened to see you in the library. Do I in fact know you and have somehow forgotten on a conscious level?

[inkhornsybarite.livejournal.com]

i only really know of you from The Central Review reading last fall (i looked up your name just now through that), but it seems like i see you everywhere. but reading your entries in here makes me wonder how on earth it is that we have not already been friends for some time (although i'm not sure you would be able to tell this from the smattering of entries in this, my newest lj...sadly, many previous, more revealing attempts, including myspace blogs, have undergone deletion or privatization at some point or another due to a number of extenuating circumstances.)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Socially dysfunctional people are always the really interesting ones. We should start a club. (I see the flaw in this immediately, but that never stopped a good idea.)

Ah! You had "Z." in that issue. I got the same feeling when I read it, although I only recall seeing you then, and today...
I'm always coming across people I should have been friends with for years in ways I would not have expected. Online communities seem to facilitate that.

[smudge-pot.livejournal.com]

Didn't T. S. Eliot write the 'Possum's Book of Cats'? Well, I think it's called something like that, anyway. I saw the musical of it once, it was amazing.

Interesting take on reincarnation. I once thought something like that when I was younger, but it wasn't to do with death, it was to do with grief; others will suffer around you, but the second anything bad happens to you, you'll be swapped over into an alternate universe. Therefore, each of us are protected from grief by living in our own protective universe.

All of which was BS, of course; I only came up with that theory because I hadn't experienced personal grief yet (still really haven't, but I've come to my senses). This all kind of stemmed from yet another theory that I'm the only real person in the world and that God has created the universe around me, because how do I know if people are actually people? Etc.

Sorry for bringing general vague craziness in here.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

"Cats," yes...I used to love the musical, but I've never actually picked up the book. It's weird, though...sort of like the way I used to love Ursula K. LeGuin's "Catwings" series far before I discovered her as an adult SF author. (I still like "Catwings" better than most of the other things I've read by her.)

yet another theory that I'm the only real person in the world and that God has created the universe around me, because how do I know if people are actually people?
I had that idea as a kid. I think a lot of kids do; they haven't really learned empathy yet. Solipsism for the win, I guess. (I still wonder about that sometimes, but ever since I've started to really like people, the idea makes me too upset to think about dispassionately.)

[inkhornsybarite.livejournal.com]

I'm terribly fond of The Wasteland; wrote a paper for Harding's Brit Lit class, once, comparing it with visual expressions of desolation and alienation in Dali's works, and it was a fun one to write.

Interesting discussion of Quantum Immortality. Reminds me a little bit of the idea of eternal return, as presented in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At least, I pick up on the same sense of longing for something to lend weight or permanence to our lives in the face of futility.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I can definitely see how that'd work with Dali. I have a few of his prints tacked up on the wall right across from me, and the resemblance is striking...

I haven't seen The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I think I know the concept. The idea that the universe repeats itself, right? It's very much a comforting idea. The only problem is that even quantum immortality really has to end sometime, considering the natural lifespans of human beings. (Unless you find a universe in which humans are, in fact, immortal.)

[benprime.livejournal.com]

If (the illusion of) time is circular (as has been proposed) reincarnations could be both simultaneous (in the sense of taking place at the same 'time' in different places) and consecutive (in the sense of going from the end of one to the beginning of another).

However, I think at the moment of death that fragment of soul would re-enter a state of eternity and be reconnected with every other fragment of soul from all of your other lives. Being outside time makes temporal concepts (and tenses) awkward but essentially the soul would 'always already' have lived all those lives, as well as being perpetually in the state of anticipating being reincarnated into this funfair, and returning from having been reincarnated. Also.. i think we may all be the same soul. You ask: how much change can there be before it's a different soul? For me, the possible answers are either that every single soul-incarnation is different, like every print of a painting or every $5 note, or that all souls are the same.

btw, it may be a coinkydink but I saw a quote from The Wasteland the other day in a book on anarchism. I loved (and was disturbed by) The Experiment. I live to be disturbed though. Please do keep pointing these things out.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to take a while to think about this--I'm not sure whether you mean the concept of circular time in the same way that the universe is curved (i.e., there is no percievable end or beginning, things just happen in a cycle), or whether the universe begins again after it ends. The first way, you'd eventually either have to recycle souls or have a universe empty of souls...the second way, the universe might actually come to an end as a result of each soul (assuming there are a finite number in each discrete universe) attaining complete enlightenment, as everything would simply become one; the veil of Maya would be permanently stripped away.
either that every single soul-incarnation is different, like every print of a painting or every $5 note, or that all souls are the same.
That's the most logical answer I could think of. Introducing a conscious divine element into it would add another variable, though, and I'm never sure whether to assume an ineffable God as a presence when I'm talking about the idea of a soul or not. The one's existence would seem to depend on the other's, no?

Do try to find a Szymborska collection! Not all of her poems are online, and they're very much worth a read if you liked Experiment.

[benprime.livejournal.com]

The curved spacetime thing, I think. I don't have a firm view of what happens when this universe 'ends'...whether it leads back to the beginning of itself, or to the start of a 'new' universe. I think that both of those ideas are confused by a flawed conception of time though. If time ends at the end of the universe (or curves back to join up with its beginning), there isn't really any 'after' in the conventional sense. There seems to be no _continuity_ of time from one universe to the next so it may make as much sense to say that the next universe is before this one, after this one, and coexistent with this one. I like your picture of the universe ending when the last soul attains enlightenment though... it has a nice symmetry.

[drworm.livejournal.com]

T.S. Eliot is the shit and now I sort of want that coffee mug. I would totally use it for hot chocolate, why not.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I shall totally pick one up for you should I ever see another one. (I myself want one with the lyrics from Mississippi John Hurt's "Coffee Blues," in which he lists the increasingly extreme and bizarre things he'd do for just one cup of coffee. Sometimes, I can just about relate.)

[drworm.livejournal.com]

:) Never heard the song, but it sounds like a good sentiment/coffee cup. (Personally, I'm still totally cool drinking Swiss Miss from a memento mori.)

Will you be online soon/later?

(frozen) (no subject)

[he-dreams-awake.livejournal.com]

You just re-wrote, in almost exact words, my specific belief structure that I've been raving about for five years-plus, now.

Not a new concept. I wonder, ponderingly, why believing me was so difficult when the idea "in theory" makes you feel terribly enlightened. Ah, it's not true, I do know; it's easier not to have to think.

(frozen) (no subject)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Probably because I pieced it together with a friend instead of hearing it whole from someone else (who I didn't feel I could question). Ideas make more sense when you're able to work them out from the start yourself. It's easier to think than to believe, and I still don't actually believe it. I've written about plenty of stupid ideas on this journal, and few of them are more than idle speculation. This one is no different.

(frozen) (no subject)

[he-dreams-awake.livejournal.com]

Technically, as you've proven quite easily - it's easier not to think at all.

(frozen) (no subject)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Yep. That is true. It's much easier to go along with what someone else says, even when you're absolutely certain (deep down inside, but you wouldn't want to articulate it) that it's not going to work and that they're delusional. That has been a major problem throughout all of human history and it's not ending today.

(frozen) The nature of reality

[allegradestina.livejournal.com]

Really, Rachel. Who are you to define the reality of others? You come off sounding so high and mighty now, but you were once the most avid of the group. You were always the first person we shared our plans with. If you want to think that we personally are assholes for borrowing money from you when we were in a desperate crisis (and only because you were our FRIEND) then go ahead and think that. But you cannot speak for what is and what isn't as far as everyone else is concerned because we had a falling out as friends.

Let us leave it at this, shall we? We loved you dearly and Neo was hoping to be able to talk to you again, but it looks like you've chosen the snooty end of things. I had no hope that you would ever be as you were. I'm only doing this for him because he gets very upset over stuff like this.

You know, the whole friends stabbing him in the back thing.

Love to you,
Trinity

(frozen) Re: The nature of reality

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're assholes for borrowing money from me in a time of crisis, and that's not what this is about. I'm sorry if you thought it was; I know I was unclear on the reason I left. I never asked for it back and I don't expect it back, and I'd do that for any of my close friends if I had the funds.

I'm not trying to define the reality of others. I'm trying to define my own reality, and I came to feel that I couldn't do that while I was still in the group. I didn't try to convince you or anyone else that you or they were crazy before I did, I just left and tried not to make a fuss about it.

And no, I don't think I will be able to talk to you guys again. My relationship to you was based mostly on the group, and I don't want to be a part of it again.

Wish you the best of luck, though.

(frozen) Oh, please.

[drworm.livejournal.com]

This isn't about the nature of reality at all. Your sense of melodrama is quite adequate, however. Good show, good show.

I would be more impressed if you really could leave it at this. I'm sorry if you feel hurt or if one of you thought there would be opportunity for reconciliation. But this has ended, and it's going to stay ended.

[anivad.livejournal.com]

The quantum immortality thing is interesting. But eventually you're going to end up in similar universes, namely the ones where people can live to old, old ages.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

And you'd end up with two consciousnesses in one head at the same time, assuming the universe exists prior to your death. Maybe that's what happened to people with headvoices.

[butterduck.livejournal.com]

William Carlos Williams is wonderful. Your modern poetry class sounds really cool.

I think free will is a necessary illusion. We need to believe in choice because otherwise we cannot learn from our experiences or apply our knowledge.

I don't get that whole quantum reincarnation thing. It seems to rely on the idea of alternate realities, a concept which has never made sense to me. Are you saying that you experience many realities, or that somehow all people in the world could be one persona? I suppose if you look at it from a Life Force perspective, we all have the same life force and from that, if you combine all humanity as one, Humanity is collecting all of our experiences.

Interesting. But I don't think that this sort of metaphysical speculation has any real use in life, except as a form of mental exercize. The funny thing about disbeliving in free will is that then you can't make decisions. You choose to be unable to choose... the very act of deciding whether or not you believe it is already decided. Disbelieving in free will is wholly impractical. And then you get into the whole complicated idea of fate...

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Are you saying that you experience many realities, or that somehow all people in the world could be one persona?
A little bit of both, I guess. I'm still unsure as to the specific metaphysics of this little gedanken, since I don't actually believe in the concrete reality of anything that could be called a soul and therefore am not sure how to handle it.

You choose to be unable to choose... the very act of deciding whether or not you believe it is already decided.
But someone's belief or lack of belief in free will doesn't have any impact on whether they actually have it or not. If they do have free will and choose not to believe that they do, it's still their choice to believe that.

[butterduck.livejournal.com]

Yes, belief in free will has complete impact on whether or not they have it. Free will vs. determinism, both are personal truths, personal perceptions of the world. If one person believes in free will, that changes whether or not he chooses his actions, but does not affect others. Free will isn't something that can be proven. If a person chooses (heheh) to believe that they have no choice in their life, then 1) the very act of choosing to believe this will be "decided", 2) they will not ever consciously choose anything again, because in their mind, everything is decided.

[benprime.livejournal.com]

maybe the long-running free-will/determinism debate continues because its terms of reference are flawed. The assertion that we must have one or the other _exclusively_, when clearly determinism destroys the concept of responsibility, but on the other hand much of the physical universe does indeed seem to function deterministically and we seem to be part of that universe. Quantum determinism (that is, that everything is governed by quantum events which are individually random and only statistically determined) seems even less satisfactory than classical determinism, which was at least predictable. My current theory is that free will (soul, consciousness, whatever) interacts with the physical deterministic world at the level of these quantum events. The fact that the raw results of an experiment (see Bell's theorem) seem to depend at a fundamental physical level on the intention of the experimenter, is, I think, some evidence for that.

Which WCW work would you recommend for a novice?

[butterduck.livejournal.com]

Saying that events are random and using that as an explanation for them is completely unsatisfactory to me. Sure, there is chance involved that one thing might occur or not occur, but there is always a reason. I don't think that determinism gives enough credit to the reason things happen. We may not always understand why things happen, but that does not make them random. I can agree with the fact that our consciousness interacts with the physical world, whose events are separate but affected by our actions, but I can't see anything as arbitrary.

Sorry for the delay. As far as WCW goes, "To Elsie" is an excellent one; it really brings out the shift away from Romanticism and toward a 20th-century American identity.