A dream controlled

I feel a little bit petty going for the Albatross badge (30 days of typing 750 words in a row), but somehow it motivates me to think... I have this goal in mind, and I may be able to stick with it over time. Actually, there are a lot of things that motivate me in the same way. It's this comfortable feeling that comes from things working they way they should. I don't know if it's an aesthetic of "clockwork", quite. It's hard to tell what makes things feel good: maybe it's the trains running on time that does it, or maybe it's the percentage of milk fat that's present in the cups of hot cocoa. Maybe it's knowing that the streets are relatively safe at night. Whatever it is, the thought is that they have some of this sort of quality in Switzerland. Maybe they have other aspects of it here and there. Is it aesthetic? Is it something else? Maybe it doesn't have so much to do with progress -- I mean, the kind of progress that you could have from spending 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, in front of a computer. Instead maybe we imagine a kind of quality like the way a hand-crafted hammer's handle fits the hand of its maker. In this sense quality is a sort of ergonomics -- not necessarily a watered-down ergonomics either, I mean, there are plenty of tools that are "ergonomic" in ways that bring surprises or even death! So what gives with this sort of thing?

To be clear: are we talking about forward progress, or about maintaining something that works for now? What would forward progress even mean? It sounds nice and all, but just what is it? Does it mean that people who are hungry now have food? Or does it mean that people who are blind can now see? Is it a matter of traveling to other planets? Or experiencing things that we haven't experienced before and expanding the comfort zone in this fashion?

I sometimes feel like a degree of progress takes place when I read a new book and get some new ideas, and these get integrated into my mental "network" somehow. But I get even more of a kick when I think of some strange idea -- say, the other night, I was talking about Diego Rivera -- and then there's some weird instance of synchronicity -- in this case, a couple hours later, a friend of mine started talking about Diego Rivera. It's not like every single day of my life I'm talking about this guy Diego. It happens fairly rarely. But then she brings him up on the same day. That's weird!

William Burroughs talked about something he called "intersection points". These are the features of experience where something that you've been working on (maybe in a cut-up) suddenly comes up in real life experience, or vice versa. It's this "weird" feeling of synchronicity. The mind is so interesting in this way.


 * Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. -- George Santayana (source for the title of the film "Waking Life")

Sometimes something weird happens, and you then assume that weird things are going to keep happening like that. They don't, of course, at least not typically; not the same way. It's completely unclear what makes it possible for people to "call" the weirdness in advance sometimes though -- coincidences aren't exactly something you can bring about, unless you mislead yourself. And yet, the world is only so complicated, and if you reduce the number of dimensions (say, if you consider people who come from the same cultural background) there are only so many permutations of things. Much like in a group of about 30 people, you expect two of them to have the same birthday, coincidences are likely to arise for purely combinatorial reasons.

But are these coincidences really interesting? Or, why are they interesting? People seem to absolutely love patterns, at least, some people do. They go apeshit for them because a pattern might be a way to make someone recognize something that you made, it might be a way to get some brand-name recognition, or it might be a way to pull something valuable, something qualitatively "good" out of the otherwise misty nature of day to day experience. How does this work?? It's really one of these mysteries of life, the difference between "coincidence" and "control", the way that sometimes these things play against each other, creating circumstances of pleasure or power.