Transcendent Astronomy

and Other Real Things Turned Visionary

Going to Pot

Since smoking pot was such a catalyst for everything wrong in my mental health in my 20s, I personally have a grievance against it, and those who’ve whole-heartedly campaigned to de-stigmatize it.

Activists always optimize for rhetorical absolutes. They engage in dialectical warfare, so all their good arguments made will never be tempered with any prudent warnings against their goals. They’ll leave those warnings to the opposition, whom it is their job to defeat. And, eventually, anyone who tries to be more even-handed ends up becoming their opposition.

Personally, it concerns me greatly that lab-grown frankenweed is insanely potent. Dank bud played a major part in each of my multiple psychoses during my early adulthood. I developed a reliance on smoking tons of it to blast my imagination into space. I was high so often that a sober base-line personality didn’t even have chance to develop past my teens.

I said in another post that “The senses aren’t for perceiving realms above or below or beyond the secular, material world—they’re for perceiving and surviving in that world itself!”

The self who I was developing into in my 20s was mostly “perceiving and surviving” in the world, if doing so barely adequately. I had weed as a constant element in his constitution. And the sensuousness of being stoned—the body high, and the aesthetic of percieving the beauteous pattens in the mundane, and in music—was the ground for who I was. I couldn’t be who I was when I wasn’t stoned—there wasn’t a person there to be. People exist in relation to their sense of the world outside, and sober Clinton wasn’t making that sense, because he barely ever existed.

Seasons in the Sun

But there is also the inner journey of day-dreams and “castles in the sky.” You don’t need weed to do this, but it enhances one’s capacity for this a lot. And like every young idealist, I had dreams and visions of the world I wanted to see, mostly surrounding the possibilities for computers empowering people.

What was missing, of course, was any sort of negotiation with the reality of what everyone else in the world thinks and wants. The last step to be addressed in every grand world-building scheme is the mass indoctrination of everyone else into the greatness of your private scheme—during the fun part of dreaming, the dreamer just assumes takes it for granted that everyone else will go along with it by some means. The righteousness will just be obvious, it’ll be a revelation when revealed.

Or, if they have some cruel streak, punishment or forced re-education or irresistable seduction or brainwashing of those against their plan will be fun to imagine too. I see that kind of indulgence in cruelty emerge in partisan political cheerleading which thrives on the misery of those one oppose. I’d be a much happier, more “well-adjusted” person if I could just pick a team and partake in the social joy of mercilessly mocking the righteous fate of our enemies in their defeats and anguishes.

Space: The Final Scalar Relation

But these are all terrestrial dreams. Where is there to go otherwise? As I quoted above, we still have visions “perceiving realms above or below or beyond the secular, material world.” Since I wrote that, I thought of a caveat—I should have included the qualifier “human-scale.”

I like to beat up on Carl Sagan. Not because I think he was a necessarily bad person or anything—I’d probably like him if I knew him. But aesthetic space porn is just such an empty, vacuous sensory trip that I recoil in disgust from Cosmos whenever I see it. There is a conceit that one is learning science when blowing one’s mind with massive scales of time and quantity and distance. Of visions of nebulae and black holes and supernovas and quasars.

Getting stoned and thinking about space is not an intellectual activity—it’s intellectual masturbation over a sublimated size fetish. “OoooOooo! Space is soooo big! I don’t know if it’ll fit into my poor little mind!”

The seduction of scale is so ubiquitous as to go without comment. The breadth of Alexander or Genghis Kahn’s conquest has enchanted dreamers for centuries. The height of a skyscraper, the size of your bank account, the specs of the new computer or car you want—the world’s economies are built on wanting bigger and more. We just love seeing small things compared to/becoming large things—especially when we are or we have those things.

Size—or, better said, proportion—is literally a fetish, where a fetish is “a substitute for something missing which saves us from confronting the full impact of its absence.” What’s missing is growth. And I’m not even talking about sexual or sexualized body parts, except insofar as adolescence growth indicate—but do not replace—personal development.

At least dreams of scale in empires (in territory or business) or cars or ear gauges entail proportions against human scale—some aspect of one’s embodied self is half the proportional equation. Accomplishing a difficult work includes a you doing crazy amounts of work compared to some baseline norm of lazy fucks you get to be better than. All these things take place, in other words, on planet Earth.

As Eric Voegelin (the mid-century critic of gnosticism and “don’t imminantize the eschaton” fame) tells it, we got rocketed off into space 500 years ago with Copernicus, Leibniz, Bruno, Galileo, and Newton. McLuhan would then finger the telegraph’s popularization in the 1850s as another insult to that injury, undoing our day-to-day sense of stability in causation mediated purely by the physical motion of objects through space.

It just seems so naive to mindlessly celebrate, like activists, the wonderful progress of science in this light. William Shatner’s grief at going into space is not accounted for in the worship of banishing superstition and backward, human self-importance. When society first looked down on the blue marble in 1972, the last useful proportional scalar for a meaningful life today was set. As it has always been, it’s you versus the world. But of course, at that time we had entered into what McLuhan had called “the satellite environment,” and the world is always considered from the God’s eye perspective henceforth.

Humans have been crossing the world by foot, on the backs of horses and camels, and in boats for as long as we can remember. The world is big, but we know how to measure ourselves, our bodies and our stamina and our abilities against it.

Cosmos is virtually infinite. We are reduced, asymptotically, to virtually nothing against the scale of the universe. Yes, we exist, but we just as well may not.

We cannot exist meaningfully in relation, in proportion to space as a whole.

World Building

I really hope that humans colonize space—but time spent dreaming about it is time wasted. I—and you—need to dream about ourselves accomplishing shit in our lives with what we’ve got. With our capabilities and relationships and material means, whatever they may be. To repeat myself again,

The senses aren’t for perceiving realms above or below or beyond the secular, material world—they’re for perceiving and surviving in that world itself!

Between nerds who dream of space, and jocks who dream of The Stanley Cup, I’ve been startled in my thirties to find myself with more respect for the latter—because they’ve actually got a potential road to their destination. Observatories are not economic drivers of the economy.

Since, ironically, The Matrix, entertainment companies have reoriented their productions around multi-media universe building according to the tenants of convergence culture. Everything is a fandom. Fanatics—as I’ll say, just to remind you the meaning of the word—make a whole world out of what they obsess over. And to make a whole world out of something that isn’t the world is to make for one’s self a groundless identity. It’s to be discarnate—without a body.

I had no body when I lay stoned in my bed, listening to prog-rock with expensive earphones. I’d love the loss of proprioception—knowledge of where your limbs are—which occurs after a minute or two of stillness with a body-high, and wouldn’t want to move a muscle so as to break the sensation. Weed and a comfy bed is the poor-man’s sensory deprivation chamber.

Space operas place humans back into the cosmos at human-scale by inventing faster-than-light travel and other gimmicks. This is one way to ignore, or fetishize, the loss of our scale of human living here in the real world. But Shatner’s Kirk also overthrew robotic planetary overlords on the regular—and the space porn was a worthy bait to tell those stories!

In Cosmos, space porn was the point. And by legitimizing dreams of space as an intellectual endevour for everyone, stoner Sagan left us floating. Of course, since we didn’t really lose our bodies, we were just left with our bodies as aesthetic objects for “self-expression.” Self-making in symbolic terms, rather than personal development.

I’ve much more to write about the developmental psychology I’ve been reading. But if we want to grow as people, we need to re-gain means to get outside of our partisan, dialectical social worlds of half-truth and our immaterial mediated worlds of discarnate fiction, back to the world which pre-industrial thinker were trapped in and wished to escape. Not because it’s better, but because it’s the baseline for real. It’s where the work on our selves begins. Until we get there, we haven’t started.

At least, that’s where I’d like to go. Who’s with me?

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