Postscript to a Passing.

Twelve years ago this past May, the friend of my youth died. Nothing spectacular, not even a definable cause- the cause of death was listed as "congestive heart failure" after his body was found on his kitchen floor after an indeterminate amount of time by a relative who  came by to check on him.
For at least half of his fifty-seven years, he had tried to be a writer, a writer of serious fiction....although what he had in mind was a fiction that already belonged to the past. He tried to write novels, because people who could, or who wrote about people who did, told him that's what he needed to do. So he was determined, and to the end of his days, to do that very thing. Not just a novel, but The Great American Novel.
Unfortunately, this desire matured in a time when virtually all currently written novels had devolved into two categories: novels to pass the time, and novels that must pass peer review.
The first constituted entertainment for a mass market, and 500 pages or more was de rigeur. Better was a series of such novels, based upon a character or characters and in situations which could be cranked out at the rate of at least one a year, to keep the gravy train rolling. The final criterion, of course, were novels written in such a way that they were readily adaptable to the movies or television, thereby greatly widening their audience (not to mention the stream of cash). If figurines and other toys, along with video games were possible, so much the better.
The second variety of novel he was closer to, and he saw a published early mentor at university as just such a model. One wrote "stories" that were accepted with minimal academic pedigree into what were called the "small presses." The small presses had the virtue (at least soi-disant) that they were read by Those Who Matter when it came time to have one's serious effort put to print. Not so very different, all in all, than passing one's thesis committee within the Ivy-Covered Halls....which is where it all originated. The days of "serious" fiction being between author and publisher being over, it was necessary that literature pass through the halls of academia, the better to be vetted for purity of thought and ideology by late 20th Century druids.
Neither would avail, no matter how he tried. At one point, he managed to crank out around fifty pages of something that Accomplished Authors told him could indeed be a Great American Novel, if he could just turn out five or six hundred more pages of it. Alas, he could not.
And so he waxed epistolary, as he had always done, well and in huge volume, and to a number of people...myself being one of those.
Over the years I accumulated his writings, and disposed of several rather large boxes not long after his death. Letters short and long, on bond, onionskin, cheap legal pads, postcards. Letters wrapped in crumbling rubber bands and stuffed in manila envelopes and folders. Most with U.S postage, some from Mexico and Guatemala.
Came a day in early Fall, his favorite time of year, so I decided it was time to consign what was left of his scribblings to the ages. I made a nice fire and began to feed it. About halfway through the box, I came upon something I didn't remember, a really large manila envelope, not only clasped but sealed.
Upon opening it I came upon a huge manuscript, the sheets all uniform with word processor line numbering. I read a few pages, and it was The Book. He had written it after all, unknown to me or presumably anyone else. I looked back at the envelope, but it had no address or other marks on it, and the manuscript itself was free of any corrections or clue as to his intention...but clearly a final draft.

I thought about it, not for very long, and threw it into the fire.

Alpha Dog Syndrome by Proxy

Some theorize that in the sexual hunt for mates, men who move in groups may fall into the habit of admiring the moves of the dominant male in their group, rather than strike out on their own, thus the term "Alpha Dog Syndrome."
Something similar happens on a social scale, and to both men and women, under the broad rubric of "celebrity worship," which has a pedigree with enough cobwebs on it that it tends to be ignored. When someone is experiencing the sort of success or recognition (etc.) that we'd like to have, there is a tendency in some people to identify so strongly with this "alpha" person that their identity may become subsumed by it.
Listening interminably to the ideal's music, dressing like them, adorning one's living quarters with multiple images of them- these are all well known traits of adolescence, and are dismissed by the adult world as passing fancies. But if we ask the question "What if these passing fancies aren't so passing, and persist in some people into adulthood, pray, what forms would it take?" we may easily view a number of adult behaviors that aren't so easily brushed aside.
The most obvious is when McLuhan's "fifteen minutes of fame" becomes an obsession leading to escalating antisocial behaviors such as unwanted attention, "peeping tom" behaviors, up through stalking to the form of much more serious acting out of these desires. At the end of this, unchecked, one may suppose something like a "John Hinckley Syndrome," where the unrequited desire for a celebrity can only be realized by becoming a celebrity oneself, in this case through the shortcut of committing and act that will without fail result in notoriety.

The Newest Jerusalem

In my salad days, I used several episodes of the original series COSMOS (hereinafter all caps to distinguish it from the New, Improved Cosmos) in Biology class to help orient 9th graders to the basics of Evolution. Over time, I became uncomfortable with the tone of the series, which moved far beyond Science as a methodology  or a collection of techniques, and devolved into to pronouncements, always beginning with the capitalized "Science Says." Carl Sagan came to seem to me more and more as the high priest of a new dispensation that went far beyond the acquisition and application of knowledge about measurable reality. My view of this was confirmed when I came across a book by Sagan, something about a "demon-haunted world," that fundamentally identifies mental illness as all that is not Science. COSMOS came to assert -as does all materialism- that the reality of Science -what is defined as and duly refereed by Scientists- is the only reality there is, and everything else, far from being merely beyond the purview of scientific investigation, was and is irrelevant superstition,  representative only of ignorance, reaction, oppression, and darkness. And how is this different from the role of the priests of the temple in Ancient Egypt, or the Inquisition of the Catholic Church, which is so roundly condemned by COSMOS? In essence, not at all, and there's a lot of truth in the classic line "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition," because it can take many forms.

The current 2014 Cosmos series, far from being an improvement on COSMOS (except, presumably in special effects) immediately jumps on this bandwagon with the overarching statement, and within the first ten minutes, that "the Cosmos is everything that there is." I would reply with the Tagalog  "akka," or  for you only. Cosmos 2014, to an even greater extent than the original COSMOS, is Science become completely didactic.

There is more in heaven and on earth that can be reached with either the electron microscopes or the telescopes of Science, but that's on their agenda to become "politically incorrect." Taking a very important page from Stalin's takeover of Russia as Party Secretary, the insidious practice that's been readopted is that if it's not on the public agenda, it never gets discussed. And the mass media have been proven compliant with this goal. Science has become the dutiful servant of those who see control as the main goal of human society, pursued to the n-th degree. What previous attempts at totalitarianism got wrong was their ethnocentrism, violence, and brutality. The new totalitarianism will not discriminate on ethnic, racial, sexual, or any of the historic grounds, it instead will be directed with a suffocating benevolence directly at the individual, all individuals, in a totally non-discriminatory manner.

The New Cosmos will of course proceed to the Cosmos' self-invention in the Big Bang from an immeasurably small point (which no one can explain, but they're not going there). While stating that Science banishes us from the tyranny of mere imagination, the producer of the show, through Dr. Tyson, will relentlessly go there whenever they've reached some point that Science cannot address.
Science has begun to wax fundamentally mendacious. Current Science, for example, speaks of "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" with complete assurance, as though these things have already been measured and are known. In fact, they are only placeholders marking the inability of contemporary Science to reconcile its own metrics, exactly as the concept of "Ether" was employed in the 19th Century. The High Priests of what has become an institutionally captive Science must always act as though they know, lest the Great Green River of Grants dry up.

Modern science started with people who were very limited in many respects compare to present-day researchers, but in one thing they were immeasurably richer: independence. The advantage of the earlier system of patronage lay in the patron's ignorance of and consequent indifference toward their clients. As long as the client could be presumed to glorify or enrich the patron at some point, the client was free to pursue their goals with a complete lack of interference. Do contemporary scientists enjoy the same freedom? I would submit that many have lost it, and those who have not are in the process of losing it. The actual researcher is now being driven by forces that have nothing whatever to do with the actual practice of Science. More scientists labor at the equivalent of devising a better remote control for televisions than are exploring any Brave New Worlds.

A far too lengthy segment in the initial episode of Cosmos concerns the fate of Giordano Bruno. This segment is portrayed in a strangely crude, not even animated set of pictures, in stark contrast to the slick graphics of the galaxy shown earlier. One presumes this is somehow meant to convey the crudeness and brutality of those times....although, I suspect, all it did was put a contemporary viewing audience off. It's rather like getting kids nowadays to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle. The message of the fate of Giordano Bruno was in line with the rest of the message of Cosmos: that which is not Science is now very likely (soon = almost certainly) Bad. There is neither freedom of belief or opinion outside of the pronouncements of Science in Cosmos, only being Wrong.

Next on the agenda is the ongoing attack on free will. Once it can be firmly established (probably by the Center for Disease Control) that free will is just another superstition, all human liberties become irrelevant. I look forward to seeing this in future episodes....which, as of this date, I have no plan to watch. The litmus test for those who do choose to watch
COSMOS is to keep track of how much actual discussion of scientific method there is, as opposed to scientific pronouncements.....because method, and not statements of Truth, is all science really is.

A Meditation Upon the Sphingidæ

To get it out of the way, the Sphingidæ are the sphinx moths, aka hawk moths, hummingbird moths, etc. When I recently encountered my first one, it was of the genus Macroglossum, the "hummingbird" variety, doing what hummingbirds do, dipping its proboscis into clumps of pink flowers. It moved about in a way at first indistinguishable from hummingbirds: rapid wing beats, quick, darting flight, capable of backward movement. Since I was in unfamiliar territory (Colorado), I assumed that what I was looking at was, in fact, a hummingbird. Then, after a minute or so of observation, I noticed the antennæ, which of course no bird possesses. On reflection, what is amazing is my mental tendency to assume that because I thought it was a different species of hummingbird that "-well, perhaps it has some kind of structures that resemble antennae."
It was only later, after looking up "hummingbirds of Colorado," that an associated item delivered information about the sphinx moth. Then, after being corrected about the identity of the insect I had been observing, I began to think about our tendency to push individual entities we encounter into some pre-existing mold that is already in our heads. As much as I value the notion, e.g., of considering human beings on their own terms, as individuals apart from any sort of classifying characteristic - wearing jeans, blond hair, brown eyes, green skin, etc., it was somewhat disturbing to me in retrospect how automatically I had categorized an insect as a bird. Closer examination, of course, reveals many characteristics that differentiate hummingbirds from sphinx moths, but somehow my brain preferred to place the insect in a known, familiar category, rather than consider it as something new and unique.
What we value, or claim to value, is always working upstream against whatever mechanism in our heads relentlessly works to generalize. While generalizing (or stereotyping, to use the dirtier word) is and always will be valuable mental shorthand, it requires situational awareness, an actual mental effort and acuity to reject it when that is needful.