Derek Powazek - Meaning-Making Machines:

Recently a researcher named Jennifer Whitson published a study in the journal Science called “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception.” She did an experiment with two groups that were given a test. The “powerless” group was told that their answers were half right, half wrong, no matter what they said. The “in control” group were told that their answers were right.

Both groups were then shown a series of images of random static. Here’s the interesting part: The people in the “powerless” group were more likely to see images in the static - to find meaning in chaos - than the people in the “in control” group. So, while all our brains are meaning-making machines, the results of this study show that stressed out brains work harder to find meaning. They literally see things that are not there.

It goes something like this: symbolic orders survive at the cost of our dreams. They are sacrificed at the cost of everything. Joy and madness can be found down either path. If madness comes from the fear of what might compromise "everything," then it is best to sacrifice your dreams.

Those of us "after the fact"--those left without a façade of order, be it at the violent hands of an other and/or the machinations of our own hearts--cannot produce violence because the purpose of violence is the survival of the order. The positive outcome of violence is death--a reminder to those still "alive" that the lack is a fait accompli. (This is why we put the insane and dying away out of sight.)

What is interesting is how dreams survive the violence. They float there as the dust settles, taunting both the dead and the red-handed, frustrating a common longing for peace. These vile ghosts, these messengers of a cruel God... ...we can name them all day long because they reside outside the abilities of our words.

Those who are either chosen and trained or who thrust themselves upon the laughing Deity, they come at worst to compete with these Caspers of the Castle, at best they return to us as one themselves. We will build our walls and our weapons, and they will dance on the battlefield.

Yesterday I had my copy of Trickster Makes This World returned to me after about a year. (The borrower did not read it.) There's a link (in regards to identity) between love/hate, community, and trickster that is on the tip of my brain. I'm jotting this down mostly for myself so I don't have to take the whole book with me on my trip(s). I have written a lot about trickster before (most of it unavailable as my proper blog archives are down).

In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. he also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish--right from wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead--and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone's sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

(pg 7)

I had more thoughts but broke to SSS and now they're mostly gone.

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