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Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
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heartbreaker, with your .44
I wanna tear your world apart

stones


Valued Readers:

Despair is a black hole. Funny where we get our metaphors these days.
A hundred years ago, no one would know what you meant. What did we
call it before? Melancholy maybe. Now we think that the people who
talked about that -- in The Anatomy of Melancholy, say -- were really
talking about depression. And depression has been redefined to mean a
chemical imbalance in the brain. I guess. Because from one point of
view, who could argue? Is there another point from which to view
despair? All god's children want to know. Deep down in their hearts,
our hearts. When the light bends inward and the day goes dark, what
maps in the tracks of our tears?

I've been working on the outline for my next book, finally getting
somewhere after wrestling for nearly a year with various angels and
demons, trying to see them, name them, understand what they have to do
with my life. If they exist at all. They are bits of stories. Other
people's, my own. Sometimes it seems, just flashes out of nowhere. In
a certain light, as long as the light lasts, they look like pieces of
some larger puzzle. Fascinating. They beckon me to look deeper. And
there is a warning attached to some about this deeper looking, into
the nowhere they seem to come out of. Longing to return, to find
source and meaning, you could be lost forever in alien night.

It's a risk I'm willing to take, I think. When the sun is high, when
the fascination is strong. Surely around this bend, or this one, or
the next. I am waiting, said the stones in their most stoned hour: all
year, all year. By the time I notice how deep I've gone, it's too late
to leave a trail. And that moment came long ago. Not just for me. For
you. For everyone. Now it seems, the best we can do is connect a few
bits at a time. A handful in a life, perhaps. But each connects to
thousands more, and those thousands to millions. There aren't enough
breadcrumbs to go around.

It's a hypertext. A web of webs. And you can't go home again. Thomas
Wolfe said that, over and over in many books. The Web and The Rock was
one, a memory of my own childhood. He was talking about North
Carolina, at least on the surface, and whatever is underneath North
Carolina. It was a simpler time. A romance of stories. A murder of
crows.

I am holding two pieces now: Coyote and the Uncertainty Principle.
Coyote can wait. That is his story. He has always waited in the wings.
That is his warning and best trick. Coyote is a curse left behind for
the white man. Some stories are spores. They can lie dormant in the
desert for ages, forever. In the deserted imagination. Then the rains
come and fascination germinates. You look deeper. The story unfolds.
Coyote can wait.

I was going to say that, for this outline I am working on, was working
on before the roof caved in, because it did, which could be another
story, or it could be this one, it's getting hard to tell, I put
together a timeline of significant events and their dates. I laugh
here because of the way that sounds -- how it reads if you read it the
way I just did. Like Carbon-14 dating could be the latest thing. Try
it! Come to our website and find your soul mate. But perhaps to speak
this way is to date myself. You see what I mean. Every word, every
turn of phrase, connects and connects and jumps and links. So easy to
get lost. Focus then. Hold your mind just so. Otherwise, Coyote will
lure you ever deeper, laughing.

I thought they were significant anyway. From a certain perspective.
The perspective, that is, that I hope they will illuminate. For as it
is written: shine on you crazy diamond. And one of the dates, without
further comment on the love life of concepts, was 1927. What happened
then was that Werner Heisenberg, about whom I know next to nothing,
came up with the notion of indeterminacy. This had to do with a new
and highly abstruse form of physics. Specifically, it involved certain
-- actually, not so certain -- subatomic particles.

"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely
the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa."

That's what Heisenberg said. One of the many things, I'd have to
guess. He probably also said things like "What's for breakfast?" and
"Do you really love me?" But, of course, we can't be sure. We can't
determine this with any certainty. That's not what he meant by
uncertainty, though. He was talking about electrons (are there still
electrons?). What *I'm* talking about is the valence of this spore in
another register altogether. For my purposes -- the purposes I could
sense to be forming from these unnecessary details -- the details
are unnecessary. What's important is the bit of story this provided.
A model, a pattern, a motif for further imagining ourselves. These
spores are metaphors transposed from their original contexts to
suggest quite different meanings. They are how we dream the world.

In the late 1950s, the musician John Cage produced a piece titled
Indeterminacy. It consists of 90 fragmentary and apparently
unconnected texts accompanied by piano and prerecorded electronica.
Here's one fragment:

"While we were sitting on top of Slide Mountain looking out towards
Cornell and Wittenberg and the Ashokan Reservoir beyond, Guy
Nearing said he had known two women who were bitten by copperheads.
'They were just the same after as before,' he said, 'except they
were a little more cranky.'"

I'd never seen this passage until right now, as I'm writing today.
Writing to rearrange my metaphors, perhaps, trying for some new
constellation of my own fragments. And so I never knew that John Cage
knew about the Ashokan Reservoir. I haven't thought about that place
in many years. I used to live near there, in the Catskill mountains in
New York State. I have happy memories of driving to that reservoir
with my children and my first wife. Vague memories, but happy ones.
And maybe that's no accident. I don't recall the details because it
was a time when nothing hurt too much. We have all had such periods.
Or maybe they're semicolons.

I once knew a woman who dreamed of a snake. She told me about this
dream, in which the snake was coiled near her, within striking
distance, dangerous. But she didn't try to get away from it, and it
didn't bite her. She sat where she was and watched it, paying close
attention. After a while, it simply slithered away. It was an
important dream, I could tell. I could tell that was why she was
telling me.

The problem with stories is that they often speak in tongues, to each
who hears them differently. If we share the same vision, we grasp the
same meaning. Look in my eyes; speak my language. But the stories
themselves are how we say: "here is the way I see." Not what, but how.
Like a hologram, another metaphor, the whole not only includes the
parts -- the usual case -- the parts also include the whole. We have
only these images, these words. When vision is occulted, despair is a
black whole. The game is good if your heart is true. But true to what?
We're getting to that.

Or are we?

In the dream of my friend, I tried to read if I truly was her friend
and she mine. Reading, as ever, between the lines, I did not believe
it showed that. I saw myself as the snake. I am dangerous to her, I
thought. She is hoping that I -- or that part of me -- will go away.
Without causing trouble. Without poisoning her. Even though I knew I
could be wrong, was very likely wrong about what this dream meant to
her, I felt a terrible deep sadness. She saw me and knew what I was.
She made no judgment, didn't flee. And still, my leaving restored the
balance of the world. Things as they are and should be. A deep and
abiding sense of peace.

Like a fool, I fought with her. I said to hell with that, I will not
go gently. It is not peace you want. You are afraid. And I am not here
to ease your fear or help you ignore it. I come out of the darkness
that is also within you. You know me better than you think.

I knew I was wrong about her vision. I thought I knew. I said, I think
I am wrong about this, but I feel it anyway. This darkness is at the
heart of how I see the world, so here, I want to show you: my anger,
my refusal. And she said I cannot trust you with my dreams. It was our
first real fight, but not our last -- yet another word that has two
senses. Last can mean latest or final. Wherever the corrosion of trust
began, we are no longer fighting.

It's strange that a history of snake bite would leave someone cranky.
Leave it to John Cage to think it worth mentioning at all. Heraclitus
pioneered the fragment genre. He said you cannot step into the same
river twice.

What I am trying to show with my timeline is a certain destabilization
of vision and viewpoint. A certain uncertainty. An imaginal
environment of increasing ambiguity as to center and fringe, identity
and otherness. Thresholds, you could say. The highlights are Luther,
Galileo, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc. The sequence
continues, but the rest would be a spoiler. I'm trying to sneak up on
where we are today. I'm trying to say the details of these theories
don't matter as much as the templates they provide. From Darwin we got
social Darwinism. From Heisenberg, John Cage. More careful historians
and scientists will tell you these are naive misapplications of
special truths to contexts in which they have no meaning. But this
misses a crucial point, I think. We are not trying to prove the
world's existence. We are trying to imagine it. Together.

The together part is where the real problems begin. I can have
visions, as can you. Natural selection, celestial mechanics,
superstrings. Tarot readings, intuition, love. Are these two
categories or one? Faith and proof are at war to know, while sugar
plums dance in our heads. If all you've got is a computer, everything
looks like a cognitive process. If all you've got is paradise,
everyone looks like a lion or a lamb.

Coyote has led us here, and he is laughing. But it is no joke. The
expropriation of other peoples' symbols is a crime. And the punishment
is built in. I once had a vision of myself festooned with such icons
and amulets, emblems of power I had borrowed, stolen. And I saw what a
farce and a mockery I had become, how hollow my life.

I relinquished all of them. To live, to live into the story, the story
must become your own. I went naked and alone into the desert, as it is
said one must. High places low, as above so below. But not to the
desert outside Santa Fe, with its comforting ecology and tony shops.
Not to ocean or forest or purple mountain majesty. I went to the
deserts of the modern heart. To Tokyo and Silicon Valley, New York and
Chicago, hog butcher to the world. I broke where no light shines, and
burned all the brighter in my darkness. Between zero and one falls the
shadow.

There is no one and nothing to see there. Only emptiness and silence.
Stay. Never seek to leave. Never look away. Slowly, a story comes
together out of nowhere. In bits and pieces assembled at great cost.
Here, waiting, listening, I choose my words.

I am Jaguar and this broken knowledge is my pyramid. Jungle
encroaching on these ancient ruined cities, warmth of your living
blood my breath. Whatever will be I remember. Whatever has been I
forget. Look in my eyes. Look deeper. See the world on fire.


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