mark von rosenstiel is present.

I’ve recently landed to live part time in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. It’s an ideal looking town of a bit over six thousand people, having a waterfront full of the signs of its local industry: fishing (lobestering? I don’t know what you call what lobster boats do). I do know that lobster boats are way hotter than fishing boats: big ‘ol butts. In the morning, I walk by character homes and trees — such green trees — and the smell of marine paints (chemical like resin) and slag (burnt electrons and sunburned skin) from the places repairing aluminum boat parts; there’s this toxicity in the marine layer that wraps the charming waterfront in a romantic mist; a protected harbor with a tinge of chemistry. It’s only present at a very particular part of the morning.

And this idealism wrapped in a marine layer of cancer causing agents, makes me to wonder a lot about stereotypes in this new setting. The stereotype of small towns and stereotypes within this new stereotype. I’ve never spent any time really living in a small town and I can feel knee jerk reactions to things I witness that are shitty and think to myself “fucking small towns”. But these aren’t unique to small towns. The extraordinary mundane pleasantness of certain conversations here could easily find their mental parallel in someone in LA describing a TikTok to me (is that how you say that?) or their favorite trashy Netflix show; my perspective jumps and mugs these conversations here in derisive tones, because in general I don’t like these types of conversations that are like barges that require no tugboats: they just plow forward without any ability to be swayed.

I think a lot of this disconnect is scale. Our values should be reflected consistently through different scales and rarely are. It's a bit like how I would deal with a roommate that was eating my food out of the fridge and an HOA that was making strange use of funds for building maintenance. Both require clear communication with individuals, while in the first case I may be more inclined towards passive aggressive hints, and even feel justified doing so. But both situations are the same, just different scales: people I’m in relationships to due to my housing situation; people that must be counted on in order for me to have a smoothly running home life. I should address both situations aware of the values I’m trying to exercise.

Small town or large city: they both are full of the same things just at different sizes. The good and bad people. The annoyances and the blessings. To hold one up as a better or worse version of the other is to focus on a toxic film, perhaps smelling of resin, over the simple fact: we are all the same. And I think focusing on this film turns a situation away from the possibility of what it can achieve, away from the overall protected harbor that is available for refuge, and instead places us in boats bobbing separate on an infinite ocean.

I had a night out in Yarmouth that ended in me getting punched in the face. It involved some guys that believed me to be gay. And to be honest a second time, I had quite a lot to do in provoking them (don’t blow kisses at angry men). Luckily no injuries came from the whole thing, but I was furious and upset after it in only the way you can be when you are forced into a situation where you know that violence should not escalate, but the reptilian part of your brain desperately wants it to. My wife dealt with the vitriol and vile I spit at Yarmouth that night with a calm collected patience. And in reflecting on the whole instance the next day, I thought about how in my head I had immediately felt like I saw the obvious intolerance that was present in all small towns. There was no safe harbor. Only toxic marine layers in a specific part of the morning light.

But I’ve met those same guys in a 100 bars in 30 different countries. I’ve met them in LA. And I think a larger danger of these men in any of these places is when their presence and/or actions gets labeled as something to do with them being an “other” or from “someplace else”. That’s a problem of a larger internal mechanism at work.

I think some of the ways we feel so acutely new discomfort or joy is in the fact that it seems unrelated to what we previously have felt. But I think it’s disingenuous to maintain that those feelings aren’t related to the structures we have already built in our life. To see how they are scaled versions of something that we have experienced in what we consider to be our own space.

Yarmouth taught me a bit about my marine layer.

My dad made my sister and me this set of blocks when we were kids. The blocks were all worn with pleasant edges and could be stored in a cart he made, also of wood, that had a slat bottom and wood wheels that were made on a lathe; the wheels were dark wood, the inner hubs a light wood.

Real craftsmanship.

I imagine kids start playing with blocks right after they can start to see some colors in the world. I read somewhere that at first kids just see dark and light shapes, with this perception slowly morphing into known shapes and colors, and then off we are to the races, making block castles.

It seems to me that at each of these stages of development we become able to order some part of our inner or outer space in a new way. When the world is made of black and white shapes — when we are newborns and staring wide eyed in amazement at what is just a pot on the stove — we order things maybe in the most basic of spacial ways; something is near or far to something else. Getting to blocks things get a bit more 3D: Stuff goes on top of, next to, under. We suddenly live in a world of luxurious prepositions.

But I think that the blossoming of subjective experience is maybe just an expansion of the types of blocks we can order. Relationships are blocks, political beliefs, really anything of value can be a block. And when I think about the idea of something like consciousness extending through all of space, I just think of the small withdrawn piece of all objects having an ability to place itself in relationship to other matter. And a relationship can be seen not only with eyes, but a stray electron bouncing off a closed eyelid. Or some Boson wandering from one space to the next.

Consciousness of all types, rising up to Thinking, is just an ordering of matter. How much a Thing (very broadly) can order is probably a lot of what we think of as being higher awareness or higher conscious engagement.

Recently I’ve been really into intuitionist mathematics, which I may or may not be digesting correctly, but part of its expression in the real world seems to be this continued feedback with measurement. An object can not have some property that exists with infinite decimal places of precision, but it can have infinite decimals added to some property with continued observation. In some sense this breaks the precision of an object, and maybe the object itself, into two parts: that which was measured and that which is still unknown. It’s a bit like if I had an entire jar of jellybeans and wanted to figure out how many there were, so I took jellybeans one at a time from the jar, placing each jellybean in a second jar. In front of me, I’d have two jars containing the entirety of an object called “jellybeans”.

I’ve been reading this book  by Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Other Minds”. There’s a long sub-title that I’ll leave off (what’s with subtitles in ALL books these days? I want to read something called “Stuff”.) It tackles the origins of consciousness by looking at the relationship between the development of the octopus brain versus the human brain. The book has gotten better as it’s gone on. The beginning seemed to be fluffing the rest of the book to get to 200 pages, but I’ve now gotten into the heart of it where it seems the author knows they’ll make it past the publisher’s requirement and is talking about some interesting stuff. (In some ways this reminds me of giving book reports in 8th grade, where the teacher wanted me to focus my presentation on conclusions I made from reading the book, but given that I didn’t have any, I’d just retell the story for the first 8 minutes of my 10 minute time.)

Besides all the fascinating facts about octopi (they can see with their skin!!) it’s interesting to think about a nervous system that has involved in a different evolutionary branch (we split 600 million years ago when we both were a worm-like creature) that seems to have not only made a creature that can interact with a physical word, but can also create an internal representation of that world in order for that animal to have a subjective experience maybe a bit like we do.

And when I think of building this internal world to mirror an external one and all of the default behavior that goes into that construction, it occurs to me how much the blocks we use to organize our experience matter in our ability to participate in a shared experience. While the blocks themselves become rigid the space in between their ordering can be impossibly large. The constructions we make can be extremely porous to those that don’t build with the same blocks. Scale matters. Values matter. Matter matters.

So while an octopus looks with disinterest at one more scuba diver swimming by, and I look with disinterest at a friend’s child, I will continue to think of blocks.