Flag, Episode and Transfer Function / Flags

Perhaps the first clear flag I remember was the ideas explored in Star Trek The Changeling. I absorbed this episode, without understanding, but I knew I wanted to. The original Star Trek series and the episode with the child-sized levitating robot. I was really young, this might have been the first time my mind bookmarked something. The trigger for the flag was Nomad stating “non sequitur.” It was a strong signal but only of the flag itself, “bookmark and revisit down the road, with more experience and a bigger vocabulary.” The City on the Edge of Forever was another Star Trek episode that my mind bookmarked. A few years later, at my dirt bike riding buddy’s birthday party I experienced the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Screened on their family’s curved, huge TV screen thing. Flag with signal. The playback tech and the ape-man opener of 2001. Tools amplify, tools are leverage! Then, there it was, a transcendent enveloping monolithic flag. But it was all flag and no signal. The meaty-middle of 2001 was and still is spectacular, the whole thing really. But to my eight year old mind the closer was a dead end. Interesting but empty, with no flags triggered. I was tired.

Those two Star Trek flags and the large-as-mankind black monolithic flag fell as soon as I tried to read Spinoza’s Ethics. Circa 1982 and I still had not yet been exposed to punk rock. Sure there were other events and stories between watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ethics but they came easy, I mean, what’s hard about Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Blue Oyster Cult, Rush? Maybe Rush was not easy, and there was Holst, Wagner, and Strauss. Flags sure but with signals that transferred to knowledge, ideas that flowed from creators through medium to my mind without interference. But Ethics, that was a totally different thing. Sure, I was fully lacking foundation and experience for the ideas expressed—I was raised Mormon and spend nearly all my waking hours outside or making plans to escape back into the outside. I tried Ethics because it was on in the bookcase, it was in view and it had an interesting spine. I have no words for what my mind went through in that first chapter, flags on flags on flags. Looking back, trying to put what I felt into words I use today, “What the [cuss]. Look at the ideas expressed in this sentence. What is the idea expressed. How does that connect. How long are these sentences. Is this some kind of cool style to make a single sentence this complex. I can’t believe how many times I have to read each sentence and I’m pretty sure I’m hardly getting it. I’m feeling dizzy, thank god (maybe not god) I am sitting down, less head trauma than if standing.”  It was all effort with little reward, almost no transfer of knowledge, it was levels of levels over where I stood in that moment. So I slogged through, maybe because I wanted to be smart and the ideas in, or at least the structure of that book seemed smart, and for what else? How didn’t I recognize that a flag of a flag is still just a flag and flags don’t transfer knowledge. Reasons for later, and the argument for a gapless, liberal education. No, I haven’t been back to Ethics, other faster, louder things where just around the corner and I could feel them. There was a final thought when I finished Ethics, a minor flag a Minor Threat, something that needs to be circled back on, that maybe his way of writing is slow as shit and Spinoza spent way too much time escaping the outside! Maybe. Maybe this was just self preservation, of writer and reader. In college, through the stunning works that are Ariel and Will Durant’s research and writings, I came to learn that Spinoza was in life much of what human beings might strive to be.

While philosophers and the spiritual might—no, will—argue and lead me to water, experiential episodic good times, and bad, and all that fits between remains my path, which is far from straight, sometimes narrow, generally dynamic.

A flag from the natural world around us, a signal from the crowd—what we see, how we think, what we perceive is largely, maybe solely based on experience. And yet, Upwards at forty-five Degrees…

Loving is the face of Jesus
Smiling is the Mona Lise
To penetrate the diamond, the pituitary gland
Gets torn on its axis and frees
Earth is a cannon of love
Shame beyond Socrates
Who's to blame but the man like any man
Who's to blame but the man who leads!

When people jump through time
They give themselves up to rhyme
and reasons of the heavens
They're recognizing themselves
Reconciling their thoughts to those of dutiful people
They're unashamed

Four hundred meters across
And hanging like a football field
Over the valley of the stone circle
Wondering what the crop will yield
For the mothership has come

Going upwards at 45 degrees
Going upwards at 45 degrees
Going upwards at 45 degrees

Won't somebody sign my release?
Won't somebody sign my release?
Won't somebody sign my release?

Bye bye bye

Upwards at forty-five Degrees  –Julian Cope