What reality is

"Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more." --William Blake

consensus reality
is like a fragile raft
of lashed-together coconuts
floating on a roiling sea
of unlashed coconuts

and innovation is like wrestling
a new unlashed coconut
out of that roiling sea
and lashing it firm
to every other coconut in the raft

.

The physiology of will

perhaps the most sinister trend
in the fiasco of 20thC social science
is the near-total disappearance
of the topic of will

wm james gave it a whole chapter in 1890
but more recently
the predominant characteristic
of college-educated liberals
is the weakness of their wills
as if
the sinister 'They'
can't abide
strongwilled liberals
preferring bloodless eunuchs
like Chomsky or Nader

and marginalising anyone who manifests
a streak of Blake
(or Christ his Tyger)
as emotionally unstable
tying gentilepeople in knots
of guilt over Original Sin

while Their secret societies'
satanic initiations
require ritual shedding of
guilt and conscience

a process mirrored more graciously
but slowly
for the deeply spiritual
as karma-burning

(joyce had miraculously mostly achieved this
by 1904
but silently, cunningly
exiled it into his work

with an occasional attested oral slip
systematically marginalised by Ellmann
as emotional instability)




but how strange
that our nervous systems
so easily hand themselves over
to others' wills

how unfamiliar
the physiology of mind-wrestling [broken link there]
as we strain to resist
Their persuasive evil

what might it look like
in an nmri scan?

the most elegant design
ought to employ
one of the two available brain hemispheres
jungianly
as acting-agent-of-the-Other

but i think too
the muscles of the will
must be mainly in the face
especially around the eyelids
showing worry and strain

(wilhelm reich taught an exercise
for breaking down
character armor
involving slow alert 360-degree
rolling of the eyes)

Judgments on the Yahoo zodiac

instead of green for
things you do willingly
and red for unwilling

let green be
things you approve of
and red disapprove

so the teachings of holybooks
can be boiled down to
incomplete and inconsistent constellations
of red and green dots




and consider that
we judge others
by whether they fit
our version of this 'profile'

but that our own
too-human nature
rarely fits it either

and that demagogues
leverage these differences
to incite wars

while most people
would naturally
agree on most values




and consider the revolutionaries
jesus blake nietzsche crowley et al
who reject blind conformity

and nature herself
who knows only natural action
(with bonobos
as the prime incarnation

or housecats
closer to home)