Kaleidoscope Notes - A Preface

Remembrances of Things to Come

We had come to the UK on our our first tourist trip in twenty years. My wife wanted to see a land of castles along with the venerable sights in London, while I only wanted to see the Roman Baths in Bath. We’d agreed that after landed in London we’d go see the Baths, then the castles in Wales, after which we’d return to London and take in “all” the venerable sights… the changing of the guard, the Tower of London, Westminster Cathedral, etcetera.

We had just arrived and I trying to think of a new way to look at things on the trip. As far as I was concerned, anything we stumbled on would be interesting, but I wanted some way to hold it all together so as not to be overwhelmed. I wondered about Roman days when London was just a little outpost by a bridge that their venerable engineers had built over the Thames, and then I thought about the far-off future. People had been coming here now for two millennia, would it really seem much different? What about when the pretensions of civilization have been restored to their proper size, would our concept of a great hub and crossroads change? And thus I thought about our pretensions of civilization, and what we think we are about, which was an interesting lens to look at things during the trip.

Thus it came about that this book was begun on the loo in London Town. I have described elsewhere a ‘riddle of existential truth’ that never fails to place you firmly in the present, a riddle that participates fully in the distant past and far-off future while they become entirely irrelevant. Perhaps it is why I had the inclination to write this book while sitting on the loo. The riddle is “what has no shape and all shapes and none can bear to live with?” The riddle’s name is “the Riddle of the Sphincter,” and appears in my Lemonade Lessons, and “The Tales of a Cameo-Merchant,” both of which have serialized in the Weekly Waffle on Substack.com. You may draw your own conclusions. And this is how I have squeezed out ten essays twisted around the tourist’s concept of history —-the why, who, what, when and how of it all.

You must understand. I am an obsessive thinker, muddling over just about anything.¹ I need an existential lens or two to get out of bed every day and put my feet on the ground. Subjecting oneself to the travails of out-and-out tourism could reduce me to catatony. I knew we’d be mucking about several sites each day, hearing about dozens of folks each hour who we’d hardly heard of —the Duke of Whatsisface and Lady Marlhammer and King Pardhonmme of Butting— to find out what they did and when they did it (oh, so many dates to straighten!) and how they did it which the damnable guide would be rapturously extolling. I know. I am one of those guides in my own oh-so-historic-church in Trenton, New Jersey!²

Now this why, who, what, when, and how can be properly called ‘existential,’ with WHY? coming first and last. And so I am writing this Preface, which shall be mirrored in a Summary of Sorts, between which we shall sandwich a number of prophesies concerning the why, who, what, when, and how of my pretensions for civilization. For given my news-feed every day, we are definitely in the shit-house, on the loo.

What is happening to us? and Why? It seems that all our more recent pretensions for civilization, of making the world a better place for all have already been shed, and we are back to Rome and the Caesars, baby Caligula et al. And the how of it is through multiple thin-film envelopes, a spherical umbrella of privatized satellites that now constitute the crossroads of commerce and personal communications. Through an efficient preference for digital digestion our future is already here. How is it we cling to old pretensions? The hubs and the bodies of our towns, the skeletons of cultural artifacts we believe still cloth us?

We are condemned to a physical presence, yet we are now entirely projected through the clouds, and we allow our digital surrogates do the work. It is the new Artificial Intelligentsia who are the latest class of aristocrats in charge, keeping counsel through what we happily and helplessly admit is “artificial.”

Unfortunately it is very real. Its purveyors believe that its intelligence, the distillation and consummation of all human intelligences, is the keystone for the arch through which our children shall pass into our future home, built on the foundation of even greater intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is distilled like alcohol. I shall refer to it as AINTelligent, only missing the apostrophe. It is mostly good to give us confidence to glance over all holes in other logics that may be brought into play, drunk with the power and appearances of it all. Too flimsy for the solid rock of our foundation or the keystone of our arch, it can prove quite strong as an arbor, a carefully pruned arch of grapevines or Wisteria that shall grow thicker and stronger by the year and keep the New Eden fragrant and well-supplied with wine. Our A.I. is natural, a truly natural outgrowth of us and who we have been — but it is not any answer to who we are. And that shall take us quite a long time, through quite a lot more suffering. This is the essence of Prophesy #1, which hardly takes much of a prophet to see.

Which brings me to the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.

Prophesy #2 is that we shall come to think of ourselves as kaleidoscopic, which shall open new vistas and counteract our trust in AINTelligence.

A kaleidoscope represents the lens - or properly alternating lenses - through which we can perceive things. A single lens or pair of lenses through which we look might refer to glasses, or a microscope or telescope. By calling this looking-tool a kaleidoscope, I suggest our perception is constantly permuting, like a Kaleidoscope being turned. It is not that we consciously shift from one role or one observer to another, but rather that we’ve already got multiple lenses and a built-in lens-permuting structure to deal with. This could be a constant, and a constant problem to boot, except it is through this that the emergence of our self and spirit comes about, almost magically overpowering the chaotic complexity of our deep-structure.

My existential suggestion, which I shall liken though the analogy in these K-Notes to tourism, is that we are fitted with a mechanism designed for tourists. It is a bit of a toy through which we can regulate chaos more efficiently if we learn how to play it properly. The hypothesis is that we all deal with chaos —quite like a tourist in a strange land, but we’ve grown accustomed to it and no longer notice the chaos of it all. Life as chaos management is all a theater, an artistry we might dub ‘chaosartistry’; but we forget this, and thus constantly forget that we are always tourists in a strange and fabulous place. By NOT recognizing the kaleidoscope of our senses as a well-structured set of shiftable perspectives —which is to say lenses and filters that alter what we see— when these overlap in unaccountable ways they go out of focus and we begin to argue with one another. This happens frequently enough, and if we are not chaos artists, recognizing the kaleidoscopic and rather magical structure built-into-us, we may be condemned to create more chaos in the world we perceive than is necessary. Don’t believe it if the AIntelligentsia insist that they have that kaleidoscopic structure under control already—the possible permutations have already got them perennially and mathematically stumped³. Herein lies our freedom to fashion tomorrow, for it is all a matter of the clothing we put on things.⁴

There is nothing very novel in this. What is novel is the explanation of the modern predilection to multi-tasking. I shall try to prove its importance to us at the end of this Preface, when I describe the use of our internal kaleidoscope as a plaything, as a T.O.Y, or Theory of Yourself. This is most strangely connected to the timelessness that a Zen teacher is trying to impart, in which your mind can encompass the most harmonic reaches of cosmic ‘Aum;’ and the kaleidoscopic T.O.Y. it is quite helpful to the tourist who would like to see what our civilization is supposed to accomplish. Yet somehow the T.O.Y. in the service of multi-tasking can lead us to mindlessness. By the end of these essays, I hope I will have dispelled fears about the mindlessness that our technology is succeeding to impart, as we let ourselves go hither and yon to the flute of the new aristocracy.

Now you will find that most Zen teachers are not generally concerned with ambitions of civilization, for indeed it is all ‘pretension’ and ‘maya’ (an Indian term denoting the world of appearances and impermanence). But most of us are not willing to throw human purpose out the window, and would like to know the Why, How, When (& where), and especially the Who of civilization and its meaning. At least we should like to place ourselves into a story that means more than the cosmic ‘Aum.’

Indeed, this book should be a bridge serving that gap. It is a little book of little prophesies with a subtitle referring to Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past. Marcel Proust is purported to have written his masterpiece laying around in bed. In the case of the K-Notes, I merely had to sit on the loo to dispense a few truths.⁵

Prophetic Tourism.

It is rarely acknowledged that the best training for prophesy is the study of history.⁶ Putting yourself in the place of folks way before your time…in as many different times as you might… you simply try predicting who you are and what you see in front of yourself today. This is what the thoughtful tourist does at the end of the day while enjoying dinner, or in my case, after dinner sitting outside our hotel with my pipe. And of course, this is what brought about this book.

You can be an armchair tourist, practicing the art of prophesy, by diving into a book. It takes a few deep dives and a good swim in another person’s set of lenses, developed over thousands of hours of composition and deep thought. I am an obsessive reader this way, as other peoples’ mindsets offer good exercise and a great method of escaping the present. If, on the other hand, you are reading someone to prove yourself right by cutting them down, you shall not escape anything nor see much that you don’t already know about the future, which doesn’t really help with the prophesy any. Getting your feet wet with a dip into Wikipedia here and there is not adequate. But of course, a trip to another country is quite handy in bringing multiple lenses into play, where Wikipedia is invaluable and can tie oceans together; which can be a very good reason to travel.

Now, as odd as this may seem, these ‘K-Notes” have been conceived as a tentative fly-over a dreamed-of “Millennium” when we have reached the purpose of the species. We assume there is only cloud cover, but in fact folk have been sailing around that time and terrain for centuries, and we only need look for a breach in the clouds.

In our current era of modern ‘Millennials’⁷ who have had children of their own, they are raising them out of the past into a quite uncertain future. But what is certain besides wars and other such nondescriptive stresses such as global warming and the creeping Arm&Hammer’ageddon when the bubble under Greenland bursts—the future shall be dominated by the voices and surround-sound and stimulating vision of the artificial intelligentsia (the AINTelligentsia) who shall provide the ongoing lenses of our social landscape. And the K-Notes shall be paying very close attention to the terrain of intelligence, for indeed I suggest the Kaleidoscope provides a very appropriate model of the self, and its abilities to focus on things.

And believe that we can learn how to work with our kaleidoscope(s), I can remain optimistic about an ability to navigate the future. With that said, this Preface can offer hope that these essays can provide a glimpse of a better world that still retains the colors and texture of the past such that our ancestors might be proud to have taken part in the whole shebang…. indeed, Thebang.⁸

We shall make mistakes. Abrupt changes in historical perspective in just these few years since 2000 AD (before 9/11) make it clear we need to take a long-view. And this is what our trip to Merry Old England provided, walking with the ghosts of the 1800’s, 1700’s, 1600’s, 1500’s, 1400’s, 1300’s 1200’s, 1100’s and Saxon and Roman times wherever we stepped.

The Kaleidoscope as a TOY (Theory of Yourself)

[The artist & the clown…an age of poets shall precede that of prophets.]

We all know that a kaleidoscope is ONLY a toy for amusement, for it is NOT a telescope. And yet, I shall say that toy is quite important, for turned to letters, as an acronym it represents a Theory of Yourself. I’ve also suggested something to the effect that when we come to accept the Kaleidoscope within us we shall begin to live life as we ought, but shall counter this with the assertion that most of us would respond that they already have such a theory and are playing it as well as they can.

Now if you think about it, on the surface, that theory is also built from multiple threads, or lenses— for most of us have different roles which we play under different circumstances with different people. For a simple example, when we are multi-tasking these different worlds of relevancies and priorities are playing out side-by-side. We may even be switching between two or more spoken languages. So you see the kaleidoscope metaphor is already be appropriate here.

The the “Theory of Yourself” (T.O.Y.) is punning on the ‘scientific’ search for a Theory of Everything (T.O.E.), which is mentioned in talks by physicists or complexity theorists. Yet our T.O.Y. is more than a pun, for in this case a Theory of Everything IS about a Theory of Yourself, and includes the human purpose which is the what why and wherefore of creation. A T.O.Y. is merely a local version of the global T.O.E., and from the standpoint of the woman and man in the street (with parents and children by their side and the homeless at their feet), that theory of themselves is really all that counts. If we weren’t here, who needs a theory of everything else?

In writing the Kaleidoscope Notes, my hope is to provide the basis for a T.O.Y. that can fit in, and nest nicely with a dominant Theory of Everything that helps define current society. If we are to search for a T.O.E. in merely scientific terms, that most conceive of through some equation or another, it shall leave most people out. The Kaleidoscope metaphor provides a bridge between the person on the street and science through our concept of ‘chaos.’

Returning to the Riddle of Truth, or the Riddle of All Riddles that I mentioned at the outset, the question “what has no shape and all shapes and none can bear to live with” can also be answered with the word ‘chaos.’ The idea of “chaos-artistry” referring to a larger art-form of chaos management is pertinent here for it lets us compare the poet to the hard-nosed executive who takes pride in their ability to handle seven things at once. The multi-tasker in us is managing multiple streams of rules and behavioral priorities (or strategies) and language that, were they not kept separate and managed by the executive function would end up a mess. If you were to compare that to a player of professional sports such as basketball, soccer, or football, you could see that skill at the game represents another form of chaos management, even with only one field and a single set of rules there are multiple players all working against one another. The cognitive scientist would tell you that your mere getting up in the morning and negotiating your balance, or the incoming stream of sensory data in optic, tactile, audio, and neuromuscular feeds is a brand of chaos management…where the result is a sense of self that is promoted and confirmed to our minds.

So you see, I believe my suggestion about the Kaleidoscopic nature of the self can be well-taken. The question is, what does one do with it, or take from it?

In considering things from the standpoint of chaos management, such as comparing meditational mindfulness to playing sports or losing one’s presence in an endless multitude of tasks performed side-by-side, you must allow “chaos” to include a wide variety of non-integrated activities and disintegrated states. There are categories of chaos and classes within the categories, and they are hardly the same. Elsewhere I suggest that it is the work of our emotions to sort them out.⁹ But for an easy analogy I offer a sidebar. It is about acronyms such as T.O.Y.:

Back in Roman days when the early Christians were considered dangerous and persecuted, there was a popular prophet in Lugdunum (modern day Lyons, France) named Marcus. One of the things he was preaching was considered dangerous within the new creed. It was the phrase, “Before the Word, were letters!” This was in contradistinction to the opening sentence in the Book of John, that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” Marcus’ teachings were considered dangerous because they hearkened back to the magic in Kaballah, which allowed for new interpretations through letters, and the juggling of letters to spell new things.¹⁰

Letters alone can be more than meaningless constituents of the words, as I have created a pun on a playful toy with the acronym T.O.Y. The acronym carries a double or multiple meaning, which one might call ‘poetic,’ for this is one of the ways poetry works. A Zen teacher will often begin by citing the fact that the world we perceive as real is ephemeral, and that through meditation we can see beyond the words to get to the source… and the meditation techniques which he or she passes along are ways to open and expand perception allowing multiple streams to integrate and harmonize in ways that are beyond any particular words attached. It is to develop a different kind of intellect for a different approach to our purpose.

This is to say our Kaleidoscope has different effects. And so I will argue that what the Zen teacher hopes to impart through the arts of meditation is comparable to what many of us already accept, and act on a theory of ourselves. And I would suggest it can be used to describe the arts in general, in absorbing the chaotic nature of experience, and re-projecting it in a newly re-integrated vision.

This is of radical importance to our experiences in taking in the immediate present and re-projecting it into our future. For we have just entered an era of AINTelligence, which is refashioning reality in the image of its promoters, a new aristocracy of human leadership. In the near-term we need a Theory of Ourselves (T.O.O.) to help us and our children weather this world, which will be run by A.I., and yet staying mindful of ourselves and our past; we must use it and our kaleidoscope nature as an assist. We shall, I believe, be driven to adopt our more poetic nature, learning to see things dually and through multiple lenses…. yet open to emergence, and harmonies that arise from without, and not the analysis of the word, and of logic, alone.

And if you wish, having read this far, you can skip to the end and read my summary, From Dawn to Decadence to Dawn, or ‘Phoenixing it’. Even better, dive in and read the rest of the book.

1. I am paraphrasing Gerald of Wales, here - specifically the 2nd Preface to his Description of Wales, published in 1089 or thereabouts, a little tome I tripped over at the gift-shop in Tintern Abbey and whom we shall meet in K-Notes 5, “Wisdom at the Wye, or the Archdeacon of Brecon” and elsewhere along the way.

2. St. Michaels Episcopal Church, founded 1703.

3. Reality shall always flummox total analysis. Handling the combinatorial sets of structures and their interfaces (for the human species alone), apart from the permutations of possible interfaces, would require more computing energy than there is in the universe. Don’t let any smart-ass like me tell you otherwise.

4. This is discussed at more length in K-Note #6, “The Activist Re-enactor, or Prof. Teufelsdreck’s Theory of Clothing.”

5. for those who actually spend the time with the K-Notes, you will see they link to a much larger opus of my thoughts on particular subjects at hand.

6. Even if the gods happen to speak to you directly through burning bushes or wheels within wheels, you still need training in how to get things across. I can’t see a well-worn approach for that.

7. Generation Y, born between 1981 and 1996, lying between Gen X and Gen Z.

8. The Big Bang, if conceived as continuous and the cause of the ever-expanding universe, suggests that our ancestors are still with us in this ever-expanding experiment. Wisdom, as conceived in the ancient Book of Proverbs, is the female principle that predates the later Bible. Given the Big Bang as the principle of differentiation, and Wisdom as its discernment, we have the whole Shebang. For more in this vein, see my parabolic essay, “The Mythic Singularity.”

9. my book,The Work of Emotion. Emotional Accounting accounting for our Emotions on Academia.edu.

10. All of this took place around 180 AD. Bishop Iranaeus was the one who tried to stamp Marcus’ interpretations out. Iraneus, who first promoted the Synoptic Gospels getting rid of all the others that were extant at the time, was also from Lyons. He studied under Polycarp, who studied with John the Evangelist in Smyrna. It should be noted that John’s focus on “the Word” quoted from the philosophy of logos, which was from Philo of Alexandria.