chaos, mystery & faith

Stacking books on tables eight hours a day makes me thing several things. First is that if you had asked me as a kid, this would have been the most ideal beyond ideal of jobs. As a kid I would go through stacks of used books or library sales or flea markets, searching under piles, trying to find those few diamonds in the slough that I knew were there. Always with the nagging notion that there was a good chance all the diamonds had been scooped up by those earlier or more diligent. Or the person who had put the books out had taken the good ones for him/herself! It was a sort of faith in the mysteries of the universe, that a chaotic set like a pile of leftover/bargain books must certainly exist to reward those patient and determined enough to delve through it. In my late teens I did the same with the used/promo cd bins at the local flea market, there was always something excellent and rare hidden in the endless bins, always for $2. But now that I'm the one setting the tables up the opposite is true: I put the ones I think of as exciting or rare ones up front, so they will be found. (After stashing the choicest bits for myself of course) But a pile which is all rare and exciting has no mystery to it. The choice ones are there up front to convince you that these stacks are exciting and rare, and the searchers of the world will use that as evidence that there must be even more exciting and rare hidden underneath. But no, that's it. The good ones are up front because they are the only good ones.

Second is I get to listen to podcasts all day. Notable: nightspore's Shakespeare lectures (amimetobiosis), Anne Carson's 92nd Street Y reading of Cassandra Floatcan & Plush Pony sonnet series, the planetary society lectures (Neil deGrasse Tyson is a silly man but quite entertaining sometimes). The Stanford fiction series up at iTunesU (I hate iTunes, have I mentioned that?) are interesting but the book circle discussions are way longer than the interviews/analysis. And the sound of people explaining at length why they don't like things that are worth liking is like nails on a blackboard to me. Probably why I dropped so many classes in college (then dropped college). The worst part of education is the students.

Third is there is a metaphor in the manic, Tetris-like stacking of things. There is the content, and there is the form, and the content must fit in the form. At first glance there seems no way the content can fit in the form, given the form's logic, given the nature of content. There is too much content, it is overfull, it is disorganized, it is unwieldy and of different sizes and never quite fits together. But there is a way the logic of the content and the logic of the form will fit, and they will snap together like puzzle pieces and from that point on it will be as if they always were. But there are no interim steps from chaos to harmony. It either all works or it doesn't. Finding it requires faith (faith!) that it can be found.

Too much order and there's no room for mystery. But both the creation of order and the search through chaos come from the same impulse.

(no subject)

I've been thinking a lot about an emergent leisure society. There are more people alive than is necessary to provide for the basic health and well-being of every person alive. The fact that there are still people not cared for is a gross and unforgivable sin on the face of our global culture; however, it's not a great stretch to imagine a world where this is achieved. Which brings up a second point: the better the system works, the less people themselves will have to work. Culture and society are what humans do in their spare time, progress increases the cumulative amount of that spare time, so is it unfeasible to imagine a world where there are so many workers and so little work that work itself becomes voluntary? So much human history has been about need and not choice, people do things because they must and not because they choose to, one must carry this stone to this pyramid otherwise one must be whipped, one must dig this canal otherwise one must starve. In a leisure society no pyramids will be built. However, novels are frequently written without monetary necessity. Space exploration is of itself unprofitable (so far) yet it has been pursued. Politicians make less money than equivalent businessmen. These are things, great things, done not for individual (ie survival) reasons. These are things done for social reasons. Is it so hard to imagine a society where survival isn't a factor at all in human decisions? One wouldn't even have to eliminate war or jealousy or crime or hate from such a society, it's compatible (mostly) with capitalism, it's purely and 100% human. A feasible utopia. All it requires is infrastructure.