Oppenheim Arts & Letters

ad hoc

Possibly, probably, there's a scholar Out There who might suggest that new technologies inevitably create or motivate new wars.  In that light, the Internet might be seen as a mighty weapon.  It's certainly getting some tests.

For Burma, it's turning up a big, "We don't really like you" for the ruling junta, but it's also eliciting an equally large, "So what are you going to do about it?"

Hmmm.

The Old Press, whatever the cost in lost newspaper sales, has never had so much fun: ever skeptical, ever pointing the finger, ever eager to capture attention with someone else's spilled blood, it knows no shortage either of targets or materials.

I once said here of Somalia, there are no slow news days.

With the proliferation of English language blogs and translated media, for English speakers and no doubt the same and other solutions for other language cultures, the world itself has no "slow days"--and the whole spinning thing is here on our desks every day.

What we're missing would seem to be new frameworks and solutions through which to filter old problems, and nowhere may that be especially so than in each of the conflict zones, some loosely tied together, others swimming around in their own murky pools of percieved or quite real injustice.

We're going to need a much better tool kit by way of language and other cultural technologies to re-frame differences in such a way as to make so many issues generated solveable and then free that much more energy for common cause.

That's my prayer for the day.

About Those Higher Powers (Whom We Revere)

About the word play in the title: I'll have to rely on memory, which is dangerous for me, and ascribe the fictional account of an engineer whose radio station has ordered him to replace the term "God" as used in a sermon by a well regarded philosopher with the less aggressive, more easily swallowed, "That higher being whom we revere" to Heinrich Boll's short story "Murke's Collected Silences," [1] in which said Murke makes the switch (this is from back in the analog tape days) and then collects and splices together the bits of tape containing the "dead air" excised while crafting the new tapes.

Lately, people have been producing "higher beings" in numbers--governments, presidents, oddballs--but not to revere them.

Most dismissible: the conspiracy theorists who have granted to the United States of America the awesome power to attack itself by engineering the September 11, 2001 catastrophe and effecitvely maintaining a cover-up for lo these half a dozen years.

The United States government can't keep a blow job a secret.

Who are they kidding?

Then, elsewhere in the world, wherever something goes wrong, blame America or The Jews.

The latest lunacy: America needs Iraq, Al Qaeda needs America, and together, secretly or by divine, possibly predestinated madness, we're just helping one another along.

"Jihadists need their American boogeyman as much as Bush needs his Islamist boogeyman. By fighting them in the wrong way and on the wrong terrain, we have inadvertently allowed them to claim the heroic mantle of nationalism and anti-Americanism. When the U.S. occupiers leave, Osama bin Laden and his ilk will groan in despair." [2]

Gary Kamiya's summertime (or should it be simmertime?) op-ed at Salon opens with invective ("It is long past time for America to grasp that Bush's decision to pound the Muslim world into submission -- not just in Iraq, but in Lebanon and in Palestine -- is not the solution, it is the problem") and dismissible for its heavy-handed cant alone, but there it is: not a U.S. warplane at war in sight over either Lebanon, Gaza, or the West Bank, but we are mysteriously pounding Muslims living in each into some sort of submission (to what: the Internet? automobiles? clean air? safe water? health care?) and never you mind those stubborn old Christians in Lebanon either.

The proper rhetorical lead for ascribing super duper powers to those who don't have them may be, "If the bogeyman wanted to":

• If Hezbollah wanted to (massacre French peace keeping forces in southern Lebanon");
• If the United States really wanted to (make Somalia its 51st state--sorry, Puerto Rico);
• if Al Qaeda want to (get the bomb from Pakistan's military, or, better, control Pakistan's defense force) . . .

Why, hell, they all could.

Except they don't, an observation that may rank as one indicator among many that they can't and are perhaps not as "big and powerful" as the impressionable (and irresponsible) would have them--or, just possibly (we know, don't we) they're just holding off because they have something even more evil and insidious in mind.

?

In one hushed, conspiratorial whisper, all together now: Whoa . . . .

?

Please, really, world: stop it!

----

My mind may be looking for a new home.

I've been hanging out at modelmayhem.com, a fun bunch out of "model-photographer culture" for sure with some reasonably representative and suitably polarized Americans on board who joust in the "off-topic" section of the community. I get into conversations like this one:

Writer "A" notes: "National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell told a House committee today that 9/11 was avoidable, the intelligence was available but the Bush administration failed to connect the dots to stop it." For reference he provides a link: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3621517&page=1.

Writer "B" responds: "the worse thing is how we are still vulnarable after all this time, open borders, poor relations with potential terrorist and just plain bummbling where this matter is concerned has been the hallmark of this administration."

I respond:

"It's not like "the terrorists", warlords, governments, and militaries have their gear wired tight. Most don't (no matter what they tell you).

"It's a miracle things are not worse than they are worldwide (although for too many surviving or seeking refuge from conflict, things really could not get worse).

"If you look for underlying cause, often you'll find deeply wounded people coupled with prejudice and armed as never before possible with magical thinking and decent weaponry.

"In childspeak, reducing the violence is like trying to calm a nest of upset wasps with really big stingers."

Jewish American infidel that I am, I'll side with Einstein on the nature of God, lean toward my agnosticism, and add one additional observation: the organization of the universe is a wonder with or without conscience, and most certainly the chaos and organization of both war and peace may well contain patterns and structures working out through the minds of mankind that in every way fit with the physics of existence.

There. I've said it: when it comes to war, quite possibly design, infernal as it may be, trumps substance.

Today, there's little in the way of political or social accommodation to be found among the various and small parties creating war in Iraq--their numbers are dwarfed by the civilian casualties and plus-four million internally displaced and refugee citizens who have had the misfortune to have shared a little bit of real estate with them--even as their methods and rants become familiar, predictable, tired, and old.

The Terrible Cause, whatever it was--oil, democracy, Sharia law, women's liberation, women's suppression, phallic pride and vanity, perceived insult and honorable retribution, etc.--may remain as clouded as ever while the behavior of war itself, that compulsive want of violence and drive toward authority and dominion may become ever more clear.

So one hopes.

# # #

1. Boll, Heinrich. "Murke's Collected Silences."

2. Kamiya, Gary. "Leave the Muslim world alone." Salon, July 17, 2007.

---

Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

---

Language--A "Cultural Technology"

Edited from conversation elsewhere--

The more one looks at language behavior, the more slippery it becomes, especially so as regards abstraction and idealization.

One knows, for example, what a chair is by design by function, but what is that in the mind that suffices for "chair" and then how does that makes its way into "chair a meeting" or "chair person" or "chairman"?

When I was teaching, I introduced students to metonymy and how clusters of sounds and associations between words produced probable but not necessarily locked meanings (so that "fireplace" means "fireplace" and "stockings" mean "stockings" until the two in proximity in a Christianized culture--"fireplace" + "stockings"--come to suggest, symbolically, Christmas).

Interest and arguments involving "deconstruction" in literary terms have a religious character all their own, but it may be worth noting here that language behavior is natural (virtually every human acquires a language); that observation of it lends itself to the construction of grammatical rules that catch its patterns but do not create them; and that everything that exists in language refers to something that exists at minimum in the mind.

I regard language as a "cultural technology", and perhaps that is most visible in the reconsideration of religious texts and their relationship to culture.

# # #

---

Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

---

Einstein's God

Edited response to conversation elsewhere--

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/albert-einstein-god-religion-theology.htm

God exists

in our minds

at least a billion-plus of them across cultures

and we invoke the idea, the name, the precept,

but the multiplication of expression,

the variety in the discourse itself,

suggests the ideation may be more important

in human affairs

then the unknowable entity itself.

---

Einstein's formal belief in God seems to have had to do with the sense of design, force, and will in nature, and, of course, that's how I would agree and express this ineffable thing. It is certain he did not believe in the patriarchal and social voice from on high whose magnificent and fearsome presence guided or meddled and dabbled in human affairs.

Whether he addressed God on occasion (as do I and others) informally, intuitively, as a matter of expression of curiosity, delight, or distress one may never know. I sure don't know, and if anyone has better data on Einstein's beliefs about God, let's read it.

There is a nature to our nature, but we need not mistake what comes and goes in our heads as put there specifically, personally, deliberately by God, nor may we ascribe to God responsibility for our own nefarious acts, nor may we assume that what one believes, including Einstein's vision of the vast and infinite Soul of the Universe, must be embedded, much less forced, into in the minds of all.

# # #

---

1. Haselhurst, Geoff and Howie, Karene.  Albert Einstein: God, Religion & Theology. n.d.

---

Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

---

Spiritual Sentiment and Psychology

Edited response to conversation elsewhere--

The best approach where the facts do not exist may start with examination of the phenomenon itself.

I don't think I'm wishy-washy as an agnostic: I'm merely humble as I can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.

What interests me as a poet--writer, photographer, musician--is how the idea of God, a triplet in music, or solarization got there in the first place and then sensibly woven into someone's cultural fabric.

If you want to say that language invention resides in the nature of the mind, I may go with that: humans are not the only intelligent and playful species on the planet. But then I'd want to move on to the relationship between language (any art) and the experience of ecstasy individually and en masse as approaching some ultimate experience afforded by nature or . . . the divine.

The Star Trek character "Data" had quite a few things to say about sensuality and love over the years as he was made to make logical sense of emotion (he was after all "fully functional" and his "neural nets seemed to miss the presence of many persons when they weren't around") but I don't think the writers had him comment much on the nature of God: what if they had? Would he have been made to demur from comment for being too limited a machine to contemplate or assess the "all" or the "infinite"? Or may he have noted patterns of thought in "sentient beings" across the galaxies so similar in construction but arrived at independently or in isolation as to comprise a real enough, even predictable enough, "space" of their own.

There is no literal space in anyone's heart for the expression, "a place in the heart", but it's just that place the moves us--really, compels us--to love, to make war, to make sense of our nature, and to have the audacity to act with certainty on what we "believe" or "feel" rather than what we know.

I think that form of space real and worth investigation.

# # #

---

Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

---