"The Truth is Not Real"

Some housekeeping on this Saturday afternoon. Things pile up over time. You mean to do something, say something, and it never gets done or said. So where does it go?

Last weekend, last Saturday morning, suffering through a run, on the back end dealing with significant cramping in my right lower calf (which was a problem again this morning), I thought of the runner's race consciousness. There is a moment, usually in every race, where you are up against it. It being the primordial nature of being. The pain is extreme. You don't know if you can go on. You are looking into a mirror. It is opaque; the mirror is a dark wall you are looking into, but what is coming back at you from the dark mirror is a voice, the chatter of a monkey. Yes, it's you; you're looking into you, but you're not seeing anything; you're just hearing this monkey chatter telling you, "Oh, stop. Please, stop! Don't you see, you're hurting yourself. Give up. It doesn't matter. Nothing will change. At least slow down."

On it goes. You have to smash the opaque mirror, or, less dramatically, ignore the monkey chatter coming from it and push on to the finish line. It is why I love running road races. They put you in touch, glaringly so, with what it means to be self-conscious; the runner gets an immersion in the golden truth at the heart of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the transcendental unity of apperception. We are just a frame for fleeting images, sounds, pains. That's all the self is.

Maybe a month-and-a-half ago, when my bad left foot necessitated running on the artificial turf of a nearby soccer field, I cramped up in my right calf. Just when I was cutting my jog short a song shuffled on my iPod, "The Truth is Not Real" by Sagittarius. What the song really says is "But the truth is/You're not real."

How true. I am not real. I am a frame, a transcendental unity of apperception. My body is real. But I, my self, am not my body. I am not real. I am an invisible unity of a fleeting consciousness.

I went home and looked into Sagittarius. Sagittarius wasn't a real band but a studio project of Sixties super-producer Gary Usher. Usher is known for his work with the Beach Boys and the Byrds. For instance, he produced The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968) the same year as the album Present Tense (1968), on which "The Truth is Not Real" appears as the last track.

"The Truth is Not Real" was on my iPod because I had loaded Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965–1968 (2009), the Rhino Records collection devoted to the Sunset Strip scene in the mid-Sixties. The LA freak scene prefigured in many ways the rise of the Hippies. It needs to be explored as part of my now dormant Hippies vs. Punks project.

Gary Usher is an interesting person to look at. He seems to have got his ideas for "The Truth is Not Real" from one of those LA-based esoteric groups that show up as convenient foils in Raymond Chandler pulp fiction. The group is Builders of the Adytum and Gary Usher produced an album for them, An Esoteric Qabalistic Service (1966) featuring the Rev. Ann Davies. Worth looking into.

After Physics

When one lives alone, as well as enjoys a life unencumbered by the dynamics of a romantic relationship, it is very easy to see the animality that undergirds all our actions. We are creatures ruled by appetite. This simple truth is somehow obscured when in the company of others. It must have something to do with projection, how our ability to communicate and cooperate provides an ideational curtain on the id; hence, metaphysics, not in the traditional Aristotelian sense of a study of the ultimate nature of reality, but metaphysics in the literal sense of "after physics."

Today is the the first day of winter. Last Saturday I woke up with the worried thought that my waning testosterone is being depleted all the more rapidly due to the environment at work. The overwhelming majority of my coworkers are post-menopausal women. There are only two young women. Haven't there been studies done that show that men frequently around children have lower testosterone levels? Well, I'm throwing it out there that for a guy to be around a bevy of non-fertile females his testosterone is going to take a hit. Which all in all shouldn't be a big deal, it is just that I'm pushing 50, an age when the loss of muscle mass and stamina becomes apparent.

This worry from last weekend was coupled with a workweek epiphany that went something like this:

We are just animals. And you know what happens to animals? They die.

We mistake consciousness, which is collective, with our individual identity, which we cannot imagine life without. 

But it will disappear. Not to worry though. Identity is not identical to consciousness. 

When we die and lose our identity this does not necessarily entail a lose of consciousness.

It should be interesting.

Alter Ego

Earlier I said here that the ego is poison. It is, but it's a necessary poison. It is the will-to-live of the self-conscious animal. Too much of it leads to constant conflict; too little, the same. Then there is the alter ego, which we usually associate with psychiatric disorders, comic book superheroes or creative types. Since self-consciousness is necessarily never unitary, maybe we should move the alter ego from the margin to the center of our understanding.