I’m restructuring my life, top to bottom (I believe). What do I mean by that?
Back in the 1960s I read a novel entitled, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. From Wikipedia:
Parts campus novel and travelogue, the book was first published in 1966 and is largely based on Fariña's college experiences and travels. Set variously in an upstate New York college town, in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution, and in the Western United States, it is a comic picaresque story of the protagonist, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a modern Odysseus who navigates the challenges of early adulthood via an array of hijinks, psychedelic experiences, and relationships with various women. The book has become something of a cult classic among those who study 1960s or counterculture literature, and has been cited as a source of inspiration for many artists ranging from Hunter S. Thompson to Earl Sweatshirt to the Doors' album L.A. Woman.
Pappadopoulis was a hipster free spirit. He knew where to get the best pot, knew the best jazz club in town and was in with the musicians, and could get laid at will. From a certain point of view he had it made in the shade.
But then he fell in love with a woman who wore green stockings, as I recall. She got him involved in campus politics, which he’d always avoided. And he ends up, I believe, in Cuba, perhaps in prison. But he also feels connected to life in a way he’d never felt before, hence the title of the book. While his earlier life had seemed ideal – smoking weed, hanging out with the hip jazz musicians, getting laid, what’s not to like? But his new life, while superficially a disaster, seems likely to have more substance.
Well, in an abstract sense, I’m like Gnossos. To be sure, he was a young man while I’m rather old. He smoked weed, but I’ve not partaken in years. He liked jazz and hung out with hipsters. I like jazz too, not only that, I play it, even opened for Dizzy Gillespie. He got laid at will, me, not so much, and not at all in years.
But, just as he sequestered himself from deep engagement with the world though his casual hipsterhood, I’ve sequestered myself through my intellectual life. While I’ve not met with much institutional success, still, I’ve managed to publish a bunch of articles in the formal literature, and two books in the trade press that were well received, though neither earned back their advances (Visualization, Abrams 1989, Beethoven’s Anvil, Basic 2001). And I’ve published a ton of working papers online, some of which I think are very fine indeed. No, on the whole, the intellectual life has been satisfying. And, in a way, it is engagement with the world.
Still, I want more. THAT’s what’s going on. Searching for more. I need to form an intimate relationship with a woman, sex yes, but not only. Just how to accomplish that, that’s not at all obvious. But I’m working on it.
And isn’t that what changed Gnossos, led to his deeper relationship to the world?
That’s not all. As you know, I’ve been working on a book intended for a general audience, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena. I thought I’d gotten the basic structure outlined at the beginning of June when my good friend, David, suggested I needed to rethink things. He also suggested a new title: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. I like that title, a lot – and FWIW I have no qualms about accepting that kind of help. Since then I’ve been dragging my feet about the new proposal. Oh, I’ve got a list of chapters that I like. I think I pretty much know how it's got to go. But I’ve just not been able to bring myself to do it.
What’s up? I don’t know. One never really knows about these things. They’re difficult. Is it mere neurotic dilly-dallying or is something more interesting going on?
I’m thinking something more interesting is afoot. It’s not like I’ve never written for a general audience before. My two previous books (well received, remember?) were for a general audience. I’ve been writing for a general audience at 3 Quarks Daily for over a decade. But this book is different.
For one thing, it’s going to end in fiction. I’ve never written that much fiction before. And I’ve never really published any fiction. Well, not quite. There’s the Virtual Feudalism stuff, and the Kisangani 2150 paper. But this is, needs to be, deeper. In some way this book project reaches out to the world in a way I’ve not done before. That puts it in the same psychic region as the need to develop an intimate relationship with a woman. There’s no direct relation between the two things, but there’s a subterranean relationship between them.
THAT’s what’s going on. Somehow, the WHOLE THING (my mind) needs to be restructured. That isn’t easy. It’s not something that can be done compartment by compartment. It’s all got to be reorganized, organically, in one large, sprawling, slow moving, campaign. What do I mean by that? Check out this old blog post, Abu Simbel: Two Modes of Thought (an analogy).
More later.
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