to feelings. Every piece of material has a specific attitude, such as “I’m worried about . . .” or “I love . . .” or “I’m angry about . . .” This Margaret Smith piece comes out of how she feels about her manager: “I hate my manager. He’s always giving me advice like ‘Wear red lipstick up there. Look pretty.’ What if I’m not funny and it’s coming out of these big old red lips? It’s like being a crummy outfielder with a paiseley mitt.” (Carter 18)
Prudence involves attitude. The attempt to learn something about attitude from the tradition of the wise fool is further indication of what separates concept avatar from philosophy, in that Deleuze and Guattari reject the entire history of the sages, whose figures they say remain within a transcendental metaphysics. Heuretics uses our sources as relays, not to recommend them literally. We have something to learn about attitude adjustment (about orientation) from the sages. Take for example this report of an incident involving a Yogi, a Priest, and a Sufi. It is an example of persona and anecdote.
Nasrudin put on a Sufi robe and decided to make a pious journey. On his way he met a priest and a yogi, and they decided to team up together. When they got to a village the others asked him to seek donations while they carried out their devotions. Nasrudin collected some money and bought halwa with it. He suggested that they divide the food, but the others, who were not yet hungry enough, said that it should be postponed until night. They continued on their way; and when night fell Nasrudin asked for the first portion “because I was the means of getting the food.” The others disagreed: the priest on the grounds that he represented a properly organized hierarchical body, and should therefore have preference; the yogi because he ate only once in three days and should therefore have more.
Finally they decided to sleep. In the morning, the one who related the best dream should have first choice of the halwa. In the morning, the priest said: “in my dream I saw the founder of my religion, who made a sign of benediction, singling me out as especially blessed.” The others were impressed, but the Yogi said: “I dreamt that I visited Nirvana, and was utterly absorbed into nothing.” They turned to the Mulla. “I dreamt that I saw the Sufi teacher Khidr, who appears only to the most sanctified. He said ”Nasrudin, eat the halwa—now!” And of course I had to obey. (Shah 75)
9/11—20/20
There is an arresting statement deep within the 9/11 Commission Report, that makes explicit an organizing theme, suggesting an opening for attitude adjustment, or reorientation. “It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing the exercise of imagination” (344). The immediate context is concern that security experts had not foreseen the scenario of the hijack attacks, despite many contextual signals. The comment is made in a chapter entitled “Foresight—And Hindsight,” in which imagination is listed, along with policy, capabilities, and management, as the four categories of failure demonstrated by the surprise attack. We may be witnessing the creation of an addition to the list of oxymoron jokes: military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, bureaucratic imagination. Scenario of a bureaucratized imagination: You: “I need an idea, now!” It: “Take a number!” or “Please hold while I transfer your call.”
The wording in the Report suggests a misunderstanding about imagination, as if it were a way to eliminate surprise, when the reality is just the opposite: the function of the imagination is to enhance “surprisability” (the capacity for surprise). “In composing this narrative, we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly—with 20/20 vision. But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply into shadow” (339). We are reminded of Kierkegaard’s observation, that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Here is our singularity as sequence: the intersection of the aphorism of thought and the anecdote of life. The point in our context is to propose that the Report’s observation about the value of imagination applies not only to strategic planners but to citizens in general. To admit this truth is already a proposal for a transvaluation of values. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security created the Analytic Red Cell Unit, in which such authors as Brad Thor (who claims Glenn Beck is his Oprah Winfrey), and Brad Meltzer, both specializing in thrillers, consulted on various disaster scenarios. Why don’t they consult with the EmerAgency?
Mythology
Edith Hamilton provides convenient summaries of Greek mythology. The aspect of the story of Prometheus (Foresight), Epimetheus (Hindsight), and Pandora (Disaster), to be noted in our context of image metaphysics is the role of prank, joke, trick, governing relationships among the characters. Prometheus first tricked Zeus over the matter of animal sacrifice.
Prometheus had not only stolen fire for men; he had also arranged that they should get the best part of any animal sacrificed and the gods the worst. He cut up a great ox and wrapped the good eatable parts in the hide, disguising them further by piling entrails on top. Beside this heap he put another of all the bones, dressed up with cunning and covered with shining fat, and bade Zeus choose between them. Zeus took up the white fat and was angry when he saw the bones craftily tricked out. (Hamilton 70)
A case of originary fumisme. Spin and sting: the ways of the gods.
Zeus’s revenge for this prank was to create his own bait-and-switch device in the form of the first woman, Pandora (“The-Gift-Of-All”), so-named because each of the gods endowed her with a favor. Pandora (Cameron no doubt courted the bachelor machine echo) is “gift” in that sense developed in Derrida’s discussion of pharmakon, generalized from the German word, meaning both “gift” in the English sense, and “poison.” Derrida activates this terminology to work within his own critique of “present,” to exploit its amphibology to provoke thought about the role of temporality in metaphysics. One version of the story attributes Pandora’s motivation not to malice but curiosity. “The gods presented her with a box into which each had put something harmful, and forbade her ever to open it. They then sent her to Epimetheus, who took her gladly although Prometheus had warned him never to accept anything from Zeus. He took her, and afterward when that dangerous thing, a woman, was his, he understood how good his brother’s advice had been” (Hamilton 70). When Pandora opened her box, “out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind. In terror Pandora clapped the lid down, but too late. One good thing, however, was there—Hope.” The iconography of this (X) “box” evolved from the original giant round jar used in ancient times for storage through a small, square cosmetics or jewelry box to (in modernism) the female sex organ (Panofsky and Panofsky): the mandorla as guiding emblem (celebrity girls-gone-wild). Flash reason searches the euphemist detours of tropology.
In which I Laugh
I took a break from the perplexities of concept avatar to watch Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 3, “The Good News.” In a scene of domestic relations between Joan Harris (the redhead office manager) and her doctor husband Greg, Greg tells Joan a joke. Freud commented that we do not know what we are laughing at when we laugh at a joke. It is an involuntary reflex associated with unconscious motivations. Here is a version of the joke.
Hillbilly 1: Let’s play twenty questions.
Hillbilly 2: What’s that?
Hillbilly 1: I write something down on this piece of paper, and you can ask me up to twenty questions to try to guess what it is.
(Hillbilly 1 writes down “donkey dong” and tells his friend to start guessing).
Hillbilly 2: Is it something you can eat?
Hillbilly 1: I suppose so.
Hillbilly 2: Is it donkey dong?
Laughter. How many stories have I read about Eureka moments in history? Some hero of heuretics struggling with an impacted interrogative, in a distracted moment during
