if it's not one rabbit hole to drop down, it's another

a tale of an unusually interdisciplinary morning, and it's barely eleven a.m.

rabbit holes upon rabbit holes (the garden of ramifying rabbit holes?)

I love the idea of a mashup of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, but “forking rabbit holes” sounded so dissonantly like a comic euphemism that I replaced the first word with “ramifying,” to avoid using the similarly alliterative “rhizomatic,” which would bring in Deleuze and Guattari and mix metaphors way too much—rabbit holes displace roots, not spread them out. roots, not spread them out. Anyway, this morning just keeps multiplying the rabbit holes down which I have dived (and it’s only ten a.m. as I write this), most of which turn out to be linking up interestingly or alarmingly.

In chronological order: 1)—but I don’t plan to number the subsequent paragraphs 2) or 3), just so you’ll know in advance—1) the news story about the transfer of the quintessentially post-New Age, pre-Singularity new religion Unicult from metro L.A. (“metro L.A. “ is a redundancy, I guess, as “metro Atlanta” is rapidly becoming) to Woodville, Georgia. Following the logical sequence of links from this news story about the religion’s creator, Unicole Unicron, led to the discovery that they (Mx. Unicron, that is) offer AI readings instead of Tarot readings, collaborating with what they regard as an alien intelligence.

In a vaguely alarming way, this piece of news about the current state of the farther reaches of the American religious imagination fitted in with the several crazy-sounding but perfectly sober stories in today’s New York Times about neuroscience using AI to read minds, literally, and about the newly published novella written by a chat program in collaboration with a human author nudging it with prompts, and the big-headline story about the AI co-developer bailing from Google and giving an already much-publicized warning about the societal dangers posed by AI, and then some seemingly unrelated accompanying stories about one or two other things that also portend societal dislocations: https://www.ajc.com/politics/no-a-bionic-bordello-isnt-coming-to-rural-georgia/DFZZUBSUCRBKHCBHIHDGG3XXAA/

Next, having nothing to do with AI, and being a separate strand about appropriate cultural contexts—contexts that are morphing so fast in today’s America I can’t keep up with them, sometimes merging with the also rapidly mutating African spiritual contexts that mental health professionals there are trying to cooperate with in order to overcome local resistance to psychiatric models, regarding which, see: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23402638/mental-health-psychiatrist-shortage-community-care-africa. (Paging Michael Taussig. Maybe.)

This intersects with the preceding strand because whatever disturbances in the field, or perturbations in the force, are reflected in the arrival of the Unicult in Woodville are also connected with the disorientation attendant upon the transmutation of gender relations and cognitive relationships coupled with epistemological conundrums in today’s Disunited States of America. We need new models of how to proceed in order to understand, or even deal with, all of this. But what models, and under what anthropological or epistemological sign—if there still is one tool that any academic discipline can possibly employ to analyze all of this?

I was already thinking about the rabbit hole metaphor when curiouser and curiouser news arrived from Whitespace Gallery that on May 6 there will be a reveal party for Ashley Benton’s new sculpture Odile realized she had the key all along, a companion piece to a bronze sculpture of a girl in a rabbit-head headpiece (her face is revealed in a white-rabbit head covering) that is titled When they asked her "why?," Odile thought about it and replied, "why not?," and the lock on her heart opened.

And that’s when I thought of the idea that the morning was turning into a mashup of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges. But it is far more than that. It is a morning that intersects productively, or not, with at least two emerging academic disciplines or interdisciplines. However, for now the tale of its intellectual itinerary is no more than an amuse-bouche for a main course that may never arrive.