Greetings, Future Fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 192 of the podcast that explores our place in time. And because both of the scheduled interviews I had lined up for this week have been rescheduled, call it a side effect of Mercury retrograde if you're willing to go there with me. And if you're not, then you should probably listen to episode 186 where I make an impassioned case for revisiting a lot of what the modern world has thrown away now that we have access to vastly more sophisticated computational techniques for investigating this stuff.
Well, anyway, one of the main features assigned to a Mercury retrograde period is that everything characterized by the archetype of Mercury, travel, communications, technology, all of those things turn from the exoteric to the esoteric, from the outward facing to the inward facing. And so it feels appropriate to make this episode a personal reflection, a contemplation of a major challenge that I have been living through for the last couple months and was dealing with entirely in my own private way until very recently when I decided to step out and talk about it. So my hope is that through the lens of this monologue, I can bring ironically into focus a lot of what's been on my mind lately where I feel that all of the threads of my life are woven together. I'll make it clear from the outset that this is by no means an exploration of the causal relationships between all of these different things, but to the extent that our world is becoming more and more dreamlike, largely thanks to the influence of A4-mentioned digital technologies and the all connected to all logic of living in the internet age, I am increasingly comfortable with and inclined to thinking about the events of my daily waking life in a kind of dream interpretation framework, seeking themes, applying an attitude of literary criticism.
And every once in a while, when as seems to happen to me more than some people, everything in my life kind of swirls together into a pattern of meaning and threatens such a suffusion of significance that my own enculturation as a rational and skeptic person starts to dissolve as though in a cataract of potent import. Well, then it's time to take off your shoes and stand directly before the mystery with your eyes and hands wide open. So today I want to talk to you about my latest initiation into mystery, which is what it's been like to go for my entire life with perfect vision in both eyes, only to suddenly over the period of weeks this summer develop a cataract in my formerly dominant right eye that no one, not any of the doctors that I've spoken to, nothing I've managed to read about this online can explain to me why or how this has happened with any kind of reassuring certitude. But if as they say, by their fruits shall you know them, then I look at the effects of this troubling and humbling experience and it immediately brings me to think about statements made, for instance, by my friend Todd Norman Gess about his own aging and the lessons inherent in midlife and the loss of function.
So to timestamp this episode, it's Friday, September 23rd, yesterday was the autumnal equinox and on September 29th the little appreciated holiday of Michael-ness swings back around once again. It's one of my favorite times of year, not simply because it is a celebration of my archangelic namesake, but because a few years ago, my buddy Mitch Manana, who's been on the show a few times and was a student of the writings of Rudolf Steiner, loaned me a book of lectures by Steiner about Michael-ness and about the significance of the turning of the seasons into autumn, the original and largely lost value of this holiday that stands next to Easter, Christmas, and St. John's Day as a cardinal turning point in the energies of the earth and the wheel of change as it moves inexorably through its cycles. Michael-ness as Steiner teaches is a celebration of the end of the summer.
It is the time of year where leaves begin to decay and fall in a kind of incandescent display of color and a vivid reminder of our mortality and then in the words of Mizuta Masahide, a 17th century Japanese poet and samurai, Barnes Burn Down. Now I can see the moon. In fact, the last piece of writing that I did for my never ending book in progress, which I will link to in the show notes, was an essay for Return.Life called The Future is Noisy. This is part of a series of essays, some of which I've read on the show before called How to Live in the Future, which applies insights from evolutionary theory and complex systems science to the practice of speculative futurism and offers people a set of kind of perennial truths whereby we can orient ourselves with respect to futurism thinking by anchoring all of it with what we can say for certain is true at any moment in time.
And one of the evergreen realities of our world is that noise in the information theoretical sense, the complement to signal is a kind of ever-present friend. For those of us willing to embrace it as more than a source of costly inefficiency. In episode 161, I spoke with my buddy Michael Philip, host of the Third Eyedrops podcast, about the role of noise in evolution and in play, the way that it helps us jostle ourselves out of ruts in our thinking, the way it helps us keep ourselves from optimizing to fixed points on what is actually an ever-shifting landscape, the way that biology has learned to utilize play and art in an ever renewing process of exploration that ultimately does actually serve the longer term objective of adaptability and innovation. And so as I mentioned in the future is noisy based in large part on the work of childhood development psychologist Alison Gopnik that over the course of our lives, each of us moved through a kind of parabola from a cognitive style dominated by noisy inefficiency in the brain, a low signal to noise ratio, when most of us tend to have a drastically restricted filter for relevance and an eagerness to exploit the world more than we explore it.
And then our finely tuned senses and sharp mental processes start to fray at the edges, pulling us back into ambiguity, decoupling us from concerns about productivity or success. And being someone as quick as I am to observe the ways that the microcosm and macrocosm reflect one another. I thought a lot over the last few years about how the modern world, a world committed to efficiency and control, rational understanding, making sense as it draws to a close, paradoxically challenged by its own successes, by the perfusion of new information, delivered unto us by information technologies and the scientific method becomes increasingly difficult to synthesize into any single unifying framework, as our efforts to connect the world, challenge the very boundaries between categories that the modern world took for granted categories like the human and non human culture and nature, the inner world of the mind and the outer world of the body. As we move into an age dominated not by the linear logic of the rational enlightenment, but the non linear logic so well described by historians like William Irwin Thompson and his mathematician buddy Ralph Abraham as chaotic and dynamical as we lose our moorings on what we took for granted to be fixed points on an epistemic landscape and surrender into the swirling maelstrom of the liminality that defines our century.
Then it is as if civilization itself has come to the end of its life and all of us together individually and collectively must decide whether we want to approach the process of aging with grace or if we are going to insist as Alan Watts put it on clinging to the rocks that are falling with you. I mean it seems like everywhere I've lived in my life is at the end of some kind of golden period and I always show up right as the party is drawing to a close and people are filing out when a creative boom is starting to get stale when one utopian vision begins seeming maybe just a little oppressive and do for renovation when the honeymoon is over when it's time to carry your people out into the wilderness on an exodus make the scary decision to give up a sure thing and wander for a while to depart from the score and improvise to as the Chinese saying goes feel our way across the river stone by stone and you know speaking of hazardous crossings now seems like a good time to revisit what was quite possibly the inciting incident for the development of some kind of eye problem which was the automobile accident that I was in last year five blocks from my house when a mysterious white van blew through a stop sign and flipped my car with me and my daughter in it one week before her second birthday now this was St. Patrick's Day 2021 so pretty close to 18 months ago and yet I'm back to thinking about this because both an optometrist told me that there's no explanation for someone at age 38 without diabetes or any other obvious condition developing a cataract without some kind of unrecognized head trauma so like at the time you know the car was flipped on its side and the only noticeable injury that I had was when my arm went through the broken driver side window and hit the ground and I had a nasty bruise and scab that took a few weeks to heal up but they sent me into the x-ray to get it checked out and I had no broken bones I don't know that I had a concussion I can't say but nobody thought that I had any head injury at all at the time and yet that's the only thing that we've got to go on that's the only possible head trauma that I'm aware of I had thought possibly it was from dehydration because the furnace went out in our house we were running space heaters in every room all winter and then we have no AC because it's Santa Fe and then other houses were built with it before just I don't know ten years ago. So we've been leaving the windows open at night running fans all the time and I've been dealing with a lot of dehydration related issues so I brought that to the attention of the eye doctors and both of them dismissed it you know because if I were having any kind of internal organ system issue or body wide dysfunction I would have developed a cataract in both eyes can't be a liver problem it's cetera some of my colleagues at work suggested it might be due to an excess of ultraviolet radiation in my eye because of living at altitude but again that doesn't happen.
Makes sense I mean my left eye is the one turned toward the window at my home office and it's my right eye that developed the cataract and yet there is something mythologically appropriate about all of this. There's a number of layers here at one point in a meeting with the president of the Santa Fe Institute I asked him as my vision was starting to go in that I if he ever felt like working in a place committed to the revelation of fundamental theoretical insights into the hidden order of our cosmos was kind of like staring down directly into the abyss and that in his years of working for SFI he ever felt like Odin trading an eye for divine oracular sight into the great beyond at which point he said it is trained British Oxford accent something like I'm going to botch this is like I would have only I had an eye buried in the roots of Idrisill and I had a good laugh about it but you know that was one of the ways that I was making sense of this that I have committed myself to cosmic insight and to intuitive guidance and so maybe this is kind of boss along that mythic quest I've also considered the many ways that constraint and limitation challenge us to see through the ostensible boundaries of our lives and into the unified and the boundaryless back when I was under state supervision in Texas for cannabis related nonsense back in 2013 and 14 the only way I was able to get back out on tour and work at festivals was to lead talks on sobriety at those festivals and so in the show notes I'll link to talk that I gave on transformational sobriety at Arise Music Festival back in 2014 where I talk about how a huge piece of the lesson of not being able to cross county or state lines while I was on paper was to go deeper inward to run away less to challenge my escapist impulses and to find the lesson the current the lesson the kernel inside stories as diverse as the origin of Merlin in Arthurian legend or the origin of Shriora Bindo who being a Cambridge trained subcontinental Indian was considered an enemy of the colonial British state and was at one point in his career as a political dissident locked up in solitary confinement for three days from which he emerged on the other end of a life transforming non dual realization experience that turned him into the originator of integral yoga and made him by far a more dangerous figure to the systems of power that had tried to neutralize him through his confinement relatedly one of my favorite collaborations of all time was with the Swiss data artist corral Benzi in 2020 called evading confinement where I took the instrumental seed that later became the song autonomous zone and put it to a short video that he made by training neural networks on landscape photography and he created this gorgeous trippy high fantasy ever shifting landscape for which my music which I've always thought of as a kind of impressionistic parade of fleeting scenes fit really perfectly watching this flowing succession of landscapes pretty much anybody is going to recognize it as deeply psychedelic in the way that as my friend and mentor Eric Davis talked about in episode 132 second lecture reveal a kind of metabolic ontology that there are conditions whereby the world is enacted in radically different ways according to the dilation of our energetic channels I guess another way of thinking about this if I understand him correctly is the Kundalini awakening or how the ego death of an LSD trip the diminishment of activity in the brain's default mode network and the narrative continuity and boundedness of what is perceived as a separate self diminishes at the end of the world as both the pupils of the eyes and the notties or subtle energy channels of the body both dilate themselves why am I thinking about this well I'm just riffing really but the last time I had my eyes dilated I was sitting in the ophthalmologist's office getting a vision screening from an assistant with a tattoo that I found really interesting and commented on at the time had a whole conversation with him and the significance of it did not occur to me until I was taking a break between recording clips for this episode and realized there was something really potent going on here the guy had a circle on his arm with a reven or a crow flying through it and at first I thought that the circle was the heptopod glyphs from arrival the movie based on Tetchiang's short story of the story of your life these giant space squid looking things communicate in these circular ink sprays that are very intentionally look like the Enzo of Zen Caligraphic brush painting one of the features of brush painting is the flying white with a gap left in the ink as the brush loaded with ink becomes increasingly drier and given that it's a one stroke painting technique and it's Japanese and my understanding is that it's a celebration of the emptiness and of the idiosyncratic stochastic elements that arise and are communicating something kind of singular holographic through the gesture of one stroke and of course you know the key feature of the Enzo is the flying white but also the void in the center of the circle so he tells me it's an Enzo and not a heptopod glyph and at the time the significance of a raven flying through an Enzo was lost on me but to call back to that conversation I had with David Crackauer this is of course very evocative of Odin trading his eye an oracular or transcendent sight of course Odin always has the raven and ravens are frequently depicted in order as picking the eyes out of dead bodies etc etc it also happens that weirdly enough I was watching the Sandman series on Netflix on the week that my eyesight really started to deteriorate and there are a lot of rhymes in that show as well with crows and ravens crows and ravens as the emissaries and the remote surveillance platform of Morpheus the Lord of Dreams is the way for him to see like Saruman sees through the Palantir in the Lord of the Ring series very very old theme and magical traditions and there is a nightmare in the Sandman series called the Corinthian who collects people's eyes so a very strange show to be watching at the time that all of this was going down but to double back a moment to this notion of dilation and the way that the eyes dilate in experiences where information rushes through someone the word cataract invokes waterfalls invokes the rushing of water and the blurriness of the cataract is akin to staring through a waterfall which is why we use the same word for this as well as for the sections of a river where water becomes turbulent and flows rapidly downhill the hardest parts of a river to cross or to navigate with a raft or boat and before I told anybody that I have been going through all of this I made a comment in the Future Fossils Facebook group about how we are traversing now the epistemic cataracts and you know this is a theme that anybody listening to the show for a while knows I hammer on relentlessly we are as yes Zach Stein said I think back in episode 97 we are in a time between worlds and that calls for a reembrace of metaphysics of the unquantifiable as I mentioned in the show notes of that episode Zach's answer to the epistemic cataract is to get more rigorous about the scope and limits of the world disclosed by science more honest with ourselves about the context bound claims we can make on knowledge and more open to how all reality starts in direct experience as conscious subjects where we meet to make new open ended and ever more refined evolving answers to questions what is human what is love and what are we here to do in other words modernity has brought us to a point as I discuss in the future is indistinguishable from magic that the material agency of glass which we started manipulating as a species in an opaque form translucent used it for bottles and later for stained glass to evoke transcendence and shape people's experience as a part of early AR in sacred spaces before we learned to refine it into a transparent form and could start using it for scientific vessels and chemistry experiments and then later fiber optics and lenses and screens has now brought us full circle to a time when the dominant use of refined silicates is in our computers is in the channeling of light through labyrinthine structures microscopically is in the so-called black mirror of our illuminated interfaces with technology which is to say that glass is exerting its greatest influence in the 21st century as an opaque or translucent substrate not as a transparent substrate of course there are exceptions you know the James Webb telescope the cathedrals the modern world has made of glass as skyscrapers in dense metropolitan downtowns but we live in a balance now between the clear and the unclear what Terrence McKenna would have called the archaic revival or Marshall McLuhan would have called the exhumation re-emergence and retrieval of the mystery inherent in pre-modern oral societies and so to the degree that your warbling host is a canary in the coal mine of the modern era someone attuned and sensitive to the zeitgeist then I like to think that this cataract is in fact a literal not just metaphorical instantiation or microcosm of the epistemic cataract and invitation to reflect on what cannot be fully understood what cannot be rationalized and again this doubles us back to weave all of this into my earlier comments on aging and the acknowledgment of one's limits but of course if I'm going to get an artificial lens in this eye and right now I'm scrambling to raise money to acquire a better lens than my insurance will cover a multifocal lens that will not perfectly imitate a natural lens but will nonetheless allow me to make it through life without reliance on corrective glasses that is carved not along a continuous curve like my natural eye but incrementally along a series of discrete rings then I can't help but reflect on how I'll basically have one analog eye and one digital eye and each will be appropriately tuned to the corresponding functions of my right and left brain hemispheres which respectively handle the rational chunking and linguistic syntactic ordering of the world and the intuitive holistic unified sense of things the side of the brain that notices and appreciates the negative space the gestalt and not just the figure emerging from the ground of an image so back to my essay the future is noisy and thinking about comments that Eric Davis made in his MIT press strange attractor release high weirdness which is the one we discussed in 132 the last section of his book he talks about how Philip K. Dick used TV static and hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery arising at the edge of sleep to communicate with a mysterious other and this is very true throughout oracular traditions it was Eric in his show expanding mind who first drew for me the correlations between instrumentalizing the randomness in dice the throwing of the bones tea leaves the shuffling of a tarot card deck the casting of straws or coins for the eaching and started me down the trail of contemplation about the way that the archetypal trickster manifests in both analog and digital spaces after all even though analog currents run through circuitry logic gates by and large are still on off binary because of thresholds required in order to shift them and then you go deeper and if the intuitive unification of quantum mechanics and gravity turns out to be correct then there is actually a quantum of space and time the plank length where physical reality is ultimately digital but then again is that just the output of a sub plank length computation performed by a magnetic vacuum hologram arising in the superfluid substrate of our material reality and the right eye of constellation Taurus is the fixed star Aldebaran I want to read you a little bit about Aldebaran from Darkstar astrology website I deeply enjoy for understanding the mythological underpinnings of all of this it is probably the most famous of the four Archangel stars representing St. Michael God's military commander and opposite his nemesis Untari's in the scorpion the scorpion, Scorpio, constellations Scorpio Aldebaran seems to have gained a better reputation than his opposite number but really Aldebaran and Antares the heart of scorpion are two sides of the same coin just pause here to tell you that my wife has five planets in Scorpio and when I was on tour over the years and away from her Antares was a constant companion in the sky and it felt very personal I felt like I had developed an intimate relationship not just with her but with the constellation where so much of her birth chart resides so where is Aldebaran in my own chart?
well it is opposite Mercury Neptune and Jupiter all of which form a stellium in the last degrees of Sagittarius and the first degree of Capricorn that may be nothing to you but Darkstar astrology characterizes an aspect between Aldebaran and Mercury as affecting health and domestic affairs prominence through mercurial matters, material gain and many learned friends these subjects seem to take upon themselves to speak out against evil they may swing between sinner and saint and have the archetypal mercurial talent of switching abruptly between conflicting principles they may confuse people with their twin personalities but have a talent for being able to build bridges and mediate between opposing forces they may like to play devil's advocate also sound like anyone you know people with an aspect between Aldebaran and Jupiter are conferred great ecclesiastical honor and high military preferment this placement seems to be a great success in inspiration whatever field these subjects find themselves in, chiefly because the subjects unsakable faith and determinations pursue their dreams no matter what the obstacles and then Aldebaran Neptune connected with science, art, occultism and mediumship, good intellect, lost through fire my mother calls the loss of our house to the bank in 2009 the fire, electricity or speculation but gain through metals, military or scientific instruments but like Google Glass especially if Mars is strong many journeys, obstacles to domestic happiness oh boy tell me about it to have strong social ideals centered on minority groups or minority issues to dedicate one's life to a seemingly hopeless or noble cause say does the unification of evolutionary theory and reconciliation of esoteric traditions and modern science seem hopeless to you? for some reason I can't quite convince myself it's as hopeless as I know on some level that it is anyway curious isn't it that the dominant star of my namesake seems to be beaming down more or less directly from the world more or less directly from my mid-heaven on the chart where it offers a constructive tension with the center of gravity of my karmic fingerprint or personal essence and that the right eye of the ball as Dark Star Stology notes is a ball's eye someone else born with a notable Aldebaran Neptune placement is the mystery writer Agatha Christie with a descent into the mysterious dark but actually I think the more interesting point here is that Agatha Christie wrote the novel Halloween Party in which spoiler alert the murderer turns out to be none other than Michael Garfield described in the cast of characters as a landscape gardener recently returned to the area noted for being unusually beautiful and fascinated with beauty itself let me read you a short quote from Michael Garfield in the TV series adaptation of this story as he tries to convince a woman to poison herself he says now you and I will drink to the past and future and to beauty it'll taste of whatever you wanted to it's magical you see it's quite magical you remember what I said Miranda about returning to nature look at the moon and you will be there soon up there amongst the cold stars immortal well how about that two more things I want to say about all of this because I only discovered Aldebaran when I went down my last major synchronicity vortex in the spring of 2017 right before my last UFO sighting and I wrote a little bit about this in the liner notes to the album Pavo Music for Mystery which I want to read to you now I am a Capricorn born on 8 January under the fixed star Delta Pavonus in the constellation of the peacock only after this album was recorded in the track art chosen did I realize that the persecuted Yazidi people link their peacock angel of Meliktaus with Enki the Sumerian seagot and with St. George the more human earthly form of Michael the Archangel and the Pleiades the constellation that for some strange reason I have always felt a deep affinity with Enki was responsible for the decay of the original one language into all the modern tongues the god of entropy and babble which is weird because the peacock angel also plays a major role in one of my most cherished books Darwin's Pharmacy, Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noispear by Richard Doyle in which he makes the case that by an involution of attention on itself the psychoactive plants created the diversity of human languages as well as our aesthetic sense Doyle argues that Meliktaus is an eruption into history of a transcendental tale us guiding evolution through trans-species intercourse and boundary dissolving peak experiences read this book if you can handle it discovering this web of correspondences has shaken my reality why did I become obsessed with the evolution of language and consciousness in college why have I always identified with peacocks why do I emphasize the breakdown of signal into noise in all my music who are we and who is rigging this the last thing is I want to read you the very end of my essay on the glass age and the decay of modern rationalism through the epistemic cataract of the digital era and into the planetary dark age with all of its loamy, fertile, contemplative depth so here goes the glass age started with us rubbing glass and wishing in stained light then it matured with us erecting crystal palaces to make the heavens manifest on earth and in our century it ends if anything ends in a dream which doesn't have to serve a narrative with us discovering that we're within the glass again this time as multitasking demigods whose power only deputizes us to work full time on grown up work we couldn't even fathom as the children that we were youth's wasted on the young humanity is wasted on the human and sufficiently advanced technology makes even great magicians yearn for simpler days when magic was a curiosity not a necessity the night I finish writing the first draft of this I am on vacation with my family and visit the Museum of the Moon a giant blowing floating one five hundred thousandth model where one centimeter equals five kilometers a mystifying orb amidst the varied trees in Stratford, Ontario, on town Patterson Island in the Avon River the sculpture totally transforms the nondescript but lovely parkland with its captivating silent potency the only way to punctuate that kind of patient humming curiosities with drumming and the tyco group breaks out and everybody's children get up front and dance like main adds truly wild and free a very Shakespeare fairy moment white moon looming low enough to almost touch the real moon shines pink like a strawberry warm and fuzzy soft in the sky the next day I record a guest spot on weird studies podcast episode 26 laying out the basics of the glass age and the return of the lunar archetype my friend JF Martell the co-host has a dream that night in which a menacing tall man like actor Kyle McLaughlin in a turtleneck breaks in breaks glasses in his kitchen tells him that the glass age is just getting started and smiles ominously as the moonlight through the windows slices across his eyes I tell JF what he could not have known before the dream that my close friend Mitch Maniano has for years mocked my excessive use of speech to text as if I'm agent Cooper Kyle McLaughlin's character from Twin Peaks JF said that the whole encounter felt quite trickster on the next day after over eight months of it sitting unused since delivery a fire up the desktop laser cutter and engraver I pre-ordered in a crowdsale years ago it is a major moment but the laser safety glasses that have always been on this one shelf right next to everything else static and secure for eight months aren't just not there they're not anywhere and in a moment of unconsciousness I turn and watch the beam an instant and a pink light slices both my eyes the engraving job comes out beautifully clear acrylic tickets for my friends music festival green tint on the sides to make the plastics seem like glass but I feel stupid although faded to be marked this way of by and for this blade of glass and light and what it focuses to our attention what it means I want to thank you for sticking with me through this unusually indulgent and poetic episode if you've come to future fossils through my work as a science communicator I'm not sure whether to apologize to you or double down on my insistence that as Shakespeare famously put it in the voice of Hamlet there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy I urge you as Hamlet does therefore as a stranger give it welcome and if you've enjoyed this episode or the show generally I hope that you will double down on your own commitment to weird philosophy and help me afford a multifocal lens by supporting the show at patreon.com.com or by reaching out to me through the contact form at link tr.ie slash Michael Garfield to inquire about commissioning original work of art or music or writing I've got kids to feed one good eye so I deeply appreciate more than I can say and everyone who has helped me keep this show even remotely sustainable including the latest patreon supporters, Manolis, Emily, Vietor, Gunsu, Lee, Darakshan, Philip Rice and Ellen Donnelly as well as everyone who has purchased my new EP Ephemeropolis on Bandcamp it is in the words of the ungoogable Michelangelo who's made several very notable appearances on this show, Vibe as the book so go download it and light some incense and enjoy and stay tuned for a series of really excellent conversations in the episodes to come including one with my old friend and University of Santa Clara philosophy professor Kimberly about environmental ethics, the relationship between the authentic and the simulated, the value of wild places and the importance of preserving dark skies. I can't really think of a more excellent and appropriate follow up to this monologue anyway thanks again for listening and if you support the show already on patreon or sub stack then I hope I will see you this week in the future fossils Facebook group or discord server where I will be available to wax with any of you on the themes explored in this episode and if you go to the show notes you can find a link to prints of my painting of the star aldabaran around which there is yet another curious synchronicity which is that I sent it as a gesture of gratitude to my friend Tammy Poudina of hyperdrive anthology.com for her help editing a few episodes of this show unbeknownst to me she had just recovered from a rather frustrating problem with her eyes and this is the week that I had not yet really put two and two together that I had a cataract but knew that my vision was getting progressively worse so there was some kind of weird carbon trade off going on there more fingers pointing at the moon see you on the other side