Ever since Monday, it's felt like Friday night; thank God it's finally here. I don't know what it is that's made me feel this way this week. Probably the Holiday Season -- that weird American phenomenon that warps minds and curves space like some Einsteinian algorithm come unglued, some rough-trade Beast, its hour come at last, slouching toward Anaheim to be borne. Or at least passively tolerated.

Steven Pinker knows nothing about it. Trust me. This is how the mind works. An irrational feeling, a random trope, a metaphor groping to explain -- and somehow synchronicity connecting the flow where no flow flew before. I was looking for three syllables to stand in for Bethlehem in the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, the ending of which I butchered above. I ask Robin, "Are there a lot of malls in Anaheim?" It fits the scansion. "Not so many," she says, "but there's Disneyland." So you see, I was in no way planning this. Then it's off to Google images to find visual representation of the Magic Kingdom in which we metonymically all live. Something more than the literal, something connotative, extending further into the imagination, like Brando slipping ever deeper into the apocalyptic jungle. I find first a site, then a book: The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks.

There are these terms in psychiatry: depersonalization, derealization. I turn to Google again. I find this page on which are listed other terms associated with these vague anxieties. One is: "in a Disney-world dream state." Again, none of this was planned. So what? Is the world just shaped this way? Are there connections inherent in the matrix of what we call reality, subterranean tunnels between and among ideas that seem on the surface to exist independently? If they exist at all.

I tell myself to be careful here. This is how all that esoteric New Age crap got started in the first place. Secret Hermetic symmetries, hidden meanings in natural symbols, wormtrace under treebark, imaginary constellations in the stars. Be careful. Could be The Beautiful Mind Garage again, I tell myself. That scene in the movie where Nash's wife discovers he's been mad as a hatter all along. Wow. I've adopted that flash as my own personal reminder of how far out it can get. As if I needed a reminder. And is this art? Or is it... something else?

After seeing that movie, I found a bit by Nash himself on the Nobel Prize site. Consider the following clip:

So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his "madness" Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.

Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future. [emphasis mine]

When I went off in search of that just now, I was thinking about the first graf -- Nash's clear nostalgia for his former madness. I guess when I first found this page a year or two back (in the middle of my own), I hadn't noticed the bit about the 25-year vacation. Hey, works for me!

You think I'm kidding about this? I got email a minute ago that begins, "Hi Loretta." I'm telling you: derealization. It's endemic. And no cure in sight. But that's the wrong way to look at these things. By "wrong," of course, I don't mean to pretend I have some inside knowledge of what's "right." Look, we need to get past all this binary logic, OK? The internet is rotting our brains. Or, to be more precise, it's not the net; it's the zero-one zero-sum either-or Cartesian dichotomy that was burned into the 20th century mind by Computer Science. If all this seems a tad abstract, what I mean can be illuminated by a simple question, which I've been doing my best to demonstrate here: Who says blogging has to be about  something?

Still, it requires research  to tie together all the tiny bits that constitute our shared understanding...


...or confusion. Proof is impossible since the dawn of the postmodern Aha! (More like an ohmygodnonotthat!) But corroboration is sometimes comforting. Granted, the following clip is a bit um dense. Nonetheless, try to stick it out...

At the beginning of the 1990s, [Museum of Modern Art] curator Peter Galassi took over Szarkowski's reins in the photography department and attempted to reiterate MoMA's role as arbiter of photographic aesthetics. His first exhibition, "The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort" in 1991, retooled the notion of "New Documents" for a younger generation. In his catalog essay, Galassi argues that in its golden age photography had conquered the world and the street, and that in the era of postmodern uncertainty, photographers were turning to the final frontier, the home. [emphasis mine]

from: Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s
by Lucy Soutter
source: Afterimage, 1 January 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Visual Studies Workshop

See what I mean? It's not till you get to the end and see that article title that it all makes sense. Sort of. I think. Yes, home: the final frontier -- (WTF?) -- where Disney rules and Hoyle goes begging. Where a man hangs his hat. Where the heart is.