In Praise of Hippasus, His Turn in the Endless Golden Braid

From the Proceedings of the Invisible Order of the Pythagorean Hydra 314.

A Poem for Lulabell, Sweet Petunia

green to the cripple’s wilderness,
a newcomer sees ash as soil...

where abominations of
animate stone lie senseless
before the sea, far beyond the
deep worn grooves tread into
the earth by the sleepwalkers
muttering in their sleep, as if
to their sleeping brethren,
following one another endlessly
past the same dark horizon...

were the moon to rise, they
would follow its light away
from the sun, if only to prove
what others before them
have proved perfectly well.

just one could stop and hold
up an eternity, cause endless
marchers to climb up out of
their trenches, bring them

to stand at the threshold of the
mechanical hall of mirrors, to
listen casually as the crack
of doom shocks the airwaves.

when the wise man blames
the fool, and the fool does
blame the wise man, leaving
each to babble oath below
the burning rivers,

as many living souls as leaves
on trees shall yield their hold
on boughs and through the
early frost of autumn fall,

blind prey unto the blue-eyed
terror between the framers
of meanings, formless
yet everywhere, animate
amidst the static emblems
of a virus creed...

until some of the morning, when
broken records of phantom
histories might yield a strange
light falling, symmetries of the devil
and the emergent efficiencies
of flame...

weaving silence and discourse
while white snow flies in midsummer,
and the moon ablaze in the water
at noon sows discord from the
only sounds after prayer.

for only sound remains, a melody
amidst the machine and my
heartbeat, a shock of thunder
to disturb the haunted church
music infused with a pious fury

at the inarticulate dementia
that is salvation for the blind,

who demand that time shall
yield to the sufficient and convenient
brutalities of our profane sciences
of need...

leaving a trail of puberties and
constellations across surrendered
visions of extroverted rodents,

all their conscientious fascinations
and inhuman suppositions, weather
forecasts, divinations, and salient
tenderness abandoned for an
abyss that dissipates gradually...

enduring in silence or ignorance
the midnight bloom of the saintly
mathematician’s treatise on the soul,

a concrete echo set free from
the ghostly image of the builder,
slain by the architect’s hand.

once more these vacant dreams
abide beside the grotesque adornments
of perverse determinations, delights in
slights and envies, indulgent to no end...

such that only those overcome by the
opaque terrors of conviction remain,
befriended to the tangled mountains,
like sculptures, when toppled by the wind.

Art is Not the Tablescraps of Commerce.

Julio García Espinosa has argued against the refined “reactionary” arts, and for a revolutionary art which is “no longer interested in quality or technique.” By this he does not mean to assert that aesthetics should not be a concern for those devoted to artistic exploration, but rather, that an aesthetics of “art for art’s sake” is insufficient when confronted with an aesthetics of hunger.

Espinosa recognizes that art possesses “its own cognitive power,” while asserting that this power resides not in elite academies, but in art’s potential to express the diversity of culture as a whole. He rejects claims that art must be seen as either “committed” or otherwise, purposeful or self-serving, and suggests that art might be liberated from these arguments if it is viewed as an activity fundamental to daily life.

Only if art is regarded as a life activity, produced by all for the appreciation of all, can it be a pure and uncommitted activity, while at the same time serving to further revolution.

Only if every man and woman has incentive to become a man or woman “of culture” can the artist be freed of struggling at the margins of society, and thereby allow art to diffuse from the domain of the elite to the domain of the many. Because revolution is an ongoing process – one which is never complete – revolutionary art ought to address itself to this incompletion. An art wholly entrenched in timeless institutions cannot change as culture changes. Only a popular art can do this: an art which fails to engage the popular idiom will fail to reveal the processes by which a society expresses and transforms itself. At the same time, it should be noted that a revolutionary art demands an awareness of the materialist histories against which the reactionary arts define themselves.

A revolutionary art is an assertion of Life. Art is a basic human activity, like eating, sleeping, or making tools. Only when it is controlled by elites does it only yield its pleasures by engaging “the functionality (without a specific goal) of our intelligence and our own sensitivity.” Such a condition undermines the role of art as a basic human activity. The elites who control distribution thereby dictate the terms of production, and transform art into employment. When art is regarded by industrialist societies as employment, it becomes subject to Fordist pressures to specialize; a specialized art as employment demands the full devotion of an artist, too often to the exclusion of other human endeavor.

The dissolution of contemporary controls over the means of artistic production and distribution demands not just a democratization of these means, but also a decentralization of them. Art must be free to express what it finds wherever it finds it, and must not be relegated to illustrating statements that “can also be expressed through philosophy, sociology, [or] psychology.”

To the industrialist, an artist engaged in developing a style is engaged in a process of branding his or her self. The industrial artist cultivates an image, and uses this image to engage the markets of spectacle.

To give one’s image to commerce is to surrender control of how one’s image is used. This is the basis of the commercial arts. To use images for commerce is often to analyze, reduce, and reproduce them, appropriating conventions from the fine arts.

The commercial potential of art relies upon the conventions of the fine arts, which supply the commercial arts with the material history by which artistic expression is rendered identifiable as a sequestered facet of our culture. The commercial arts exploit copyright to manipulate the conventions of the fine arts (which are produced by consumers of commercial art). Current definitions of copyright are political tools to secure the profitability of commercial art (do you assume a political message whenever you see an advertisement?).

Industrialists have this interest in reinforcing the illusion that art is an elite practice: scarcity creates value.

An Open Letter to Lulabell Petunia, by America Jones

sometimes too much
hurt for sleep, toss
cigarettes at dawn into
the troubled darkness...

a flower a stone
inkblots on paper
and silence like an
ocean

the fly will live for two days
bouncing against the window
trying to escape

(i feel flat like the discredited
mythic earth)

then go crazy
from banging
against the glass,

(i feel too flat)

one of my earliest memories
is of a recurring nightmare

(so to think of all that’s been
destroyed forever)

lost the ability to dream
(too often listening to the
latest imperial decree,
as blanket night falls
out the windows
or in the day,

a homesick nothingness out there
somewhere, which, as though hope
and struggle were a vacuum,
takes hold and tries to fill the
quiet dark beside
blue glow

drains away muffled under
whispers, a lone pilgrim wading
across the violent desperate
wilderness for news of fighting
at the front, where children die
and the mountains ablaze drown
the moon and steal the darkness.

our lady
of a thousand bleeding eyes,
with pangs of hunger that flow from
your heart as streams flow from
mountains to the lowland lakes:

i beg you bear solicitude to the
countless inherent confusions
relinquished at the gates of your
cathedral for beggars, who, thirsting
and weary from desert travels,
lick from the thorns and thistles of
the heartless wilderness lead and
mercury morning dew...

been getting on the wrong busses lately,
distracted.
twisted on the floor
a wrenching free of my selfhood,
into this struggle to spread goodness
resonating throughout the cosmos
by sheer force of will...

madness.
the doctor listens patiently
how i think if we decide
to violate the sovereignty of north korea,
perhaps before dropping bombs across
the countryside we ought first to spend
a few years and a few hundred billion
dollars dropping, every day,
rose petals and lego building blocks,
recordings of bach, miles davis, and kurt
schwitters, mash reruns and anti-war art films,
paint supplies, canvases and computers
and diesel generators, instructions for
producing bio-diesel fuel
and books of shakespeare, leroi jones,
and walt whitman’s 1855 leaves of grass,
and stuffed animals, and blankets and clothes
and grain and livestock and medicine
and soap and water filters and radios
and solar panels and wind turbines,
and then see whether the people will
continue to abide patiently in their
subjugation, or seek the liberty to
attain our company in peace and
mutual respect...

are we really a warlike breed, with wargod
wrath and warbroken spirits
and fierce to first taste blood
so long ago... why the whale went from land
back into the ocean, to maintain a breed
purged of potential cannibalism...

one human abstinence massages affably,
a ritual honor,
a bear quarrels coming under lingo,
a cappuccino is spilled, a mockingbird’s
ceremonial consecration.

beware the rocks ahead,
ye without faith but in the
sword and war-chariot!

they break open wide and fanned
to the wind,
deflated in some fatalistic
psychopathic daisy
quarreling down to the splintered
shards of corrupting implements.
keep an eye on more societies, and by
the clumsy
face in the rainy world!

omit the absurd cannibalism!
blood! blood! beware the rocks!

so many options in fierce clarifications,
a papal serenade upon patriarchal elephants,
to demonstrate by force that verse is no secret
miracle, but bloodshed...

why are psychological games
sins?
because
games evaluate.

a wide audience's jolly nuns often point out
the comfort a wide audience provides for the dainty,
the mathematical, and the deep. this is fine for them.

if one yearns to long for the support of the divine,
one must escape as from a slaughter, break out
of each youth, increasing the number of fenestrations,
campaign around psychological games! one must
subjugate languidly the feelings of biochemistries,
the principles of golden chauvinisms!

a minister of uptown beings
was buying bugs for hopeful queens
these dreamy tiny harvard queens
were pricing dreams for random beings...

with automations,
ordained sensually
only the quite clinical
people around the bath
know how to rationalize
bewilderment

but their angelic yarn is
variable, a spinster’s swan
in the chastity, or an arrogant
cautionary or malignant respect
which far surpasses women of
fatalistic atheists, foulmouthed
parenthoods and competitions,
useful obligations, or willing
daytimes, fallacies, or captors,
or even absolute, bizarre orgies...

they
give something
madonna.

the firm cosmic parenthoods
complain
seething crafty obsolete apartments...

a fisherman of uptown deans
was fixing drugs for silent fiends
these hopeful random harvard fiends
were pricing sex for new york queens

flavorless capricious charismatic onslaughts
will be
celestial formless...

loving man of hopeless scenes
was catching drugs for friendly deans
these new york hopeful hopeless deans
were pricing fun for harvard deans

a strange chorus follows...

what else, then, to assert
a lack of confusion but
profusion of utter bewilderment,
in all truth,
when words
must fail,
but poetry live...

The Modern Contemplative in Wartime

It is difficult to live the life of a contemplative in an age so fraught with strife, iniquity, and callousness. History, replete though it may be with violent conflict, has until recent decades never presented so many individuals with the threats we face today. Climate change, global war, and the spread of preventable disease, despite our collective ability to end such horrors, are epidemic. It is hard to make sense of a world where so many individuals struggle under these and other pervasive oppressions, with meaningless employment or debt, while the unimaginably wealthy, who profit from these struggles of others, cloister themselves away from the misery they’ve wrought.

When by the hands of ruthless oligarchs, lobbyists, and corrupt legislators, employment is systematically converted into a form of global oppression, there are relatively few problems that can be directly confronted by individuals, who are enslaved by market forces and daily distracted by unnecessary struggles. One turns perhaps to anger, violence, indulgence, or subservience as means towards the cessation of one’s struggles, if only for temporary release from bewilderments that render one deaf or mute before the presence of seemingly insurmountable corruptions, which threaten by their weight and inertia to drag down or hold back even the most simple of aspirations.

The contemplative of the Globalizing era, who seeks to struggle against war without engaging in violence, to procure sustenance without engaging in exploitation or oppression, who must look inwards while the sounds of the city beg endless distractions, must contend with an array of strange influences which the archetypal contemplatives of ages past were able to avoid; our present state of media saturation ensures that even if one does not watch commercial television, one is still made aware every time Tom Cruise has a baby.

Lovers of nature and seekers of simplicity are today most often without recourse to agrarian self-sufficiency or freedom from an increasingly invasive media landscape. Although by enculturation we lack personal knowledge of the ways of the seasons, of the soil, and of the stars, we move mountains, carve valleys and craters, redirect rivers, and create lakes. We shape the earth with machinery and color the heavens with the din of sodium vapor electrified, and claim dominion over the air itself with bands of electromagnetic radiation that turn the ionosphere into a deadly weapon. And what outrage will halt these machinations?

Anger, violence, indulgence... a fearful subservience before these unnatural powers, which can take from men and women their livelihoods or their lives with the stroke of a pen or the push of a button...

For all our modern refinement, we mask the visage of war in grotesque displays of nationalism and sacrifice, and deny our “savage” forbearers the nobility of their insights into the horrors of violence. The Vikings who fought their battles hallucinating on mushrooms, or the Aztec priests who, in ecstatic trances, tore out the living hearts of youths knew that to obscure the nature of violence was a grievous error that their civilization could not endure.

The symbolic lessons of our Western culture are so often buried under the clinical verbiage of disease and disorder that we no longer see why we inscribe our skin with tattoos, pierce our flesh, or why at birth we mutilate the genitals of our boys (to remind us all how powerless we shall be at the time of our death). Our clinical rituals are designed to hide from us any inkling we shall one day perish, while at the same time, on the other side of the globe, we cause scores of senseless deaths and permit the brutalization of the innocent for the sake of some man’s profit.

We have stockpiles enough of weapons to defeat any adversary by way of wiping clean the planet of our race, yet we continue to invest more resources in our military than our education, our art, and our starving citizens combined. Although our military expenditures are equal to those of the next nine most industrialized nations together, we encounter great difficulties gaining ground against insurgents in an impoverished plot of land in the middle of the desert: what can this mean but that war is some madman’s game, who defines victory how he sees fit? How can this be more sensible than peace?

Ouroboros Meditation

America Jones was born the day the burning building, the burning bush. Was first the crow to cross the birth, broke the window flat on floor, maggots turned from splintered break. Was thus she raised the son with pious fury. Utterly alone. America a war red white and blue stripe and star, alone an island ocean. Alone her savage want of suckle at her breast. With want to taste her honey. Beyond the water ocean darkness demons fell to madness in the winter silence nordic forests all was still. Was then with song the seed was laid and grow. Them seed as water taint the sky, falling ash. Her sing the hymn of forests. Have winter here is darkness.

Soft! What possible music, my dear sweet lady, could scarce then deign to consecrate the carnal rectangle of your nubile eyelash, to whisper amber sweetness, in gardens of flowerly bliss...

there are trapezoids such, octagons, and newsprint... when the device is activated with radio waves, it emits a quick burst of identifying data. this is how we keep track of you. very soon, somebody will turn you in.

you can drown in emanations, saintly prefix exclusion, the arabesque radiocafe...

analytical devices analog maneuver, i do not travel by auto. always then happens always most often, eternity never repeats. yet still this strange, uncomfortable titular consolation, that perhaps it is not God who judges, but rather it is God who is judged. This is a sickness to heal the heart like starvation, a cathedral then, home to beggars pimps and priests all the blessed poor in spirit, a sickness of the heart the automobile daily rapes her ovaries to suckle the genitals of banking institutions, and lives taken in occupation...

A betrothal in chains to this tender war machine, a life to struggle with wakefulness or sleep, fear or love of marriage for a martyr’s death... i do not think it well to hope for recovery from this sickness, as lust is but a cruelty of imagination, such is the danger in truth (the open grave of faith), a stale dew upon the corpses of whole civilizations gone mad...

What whispers tell of what remains, what should yield the hunger of these savage thoughts, this animal need... i do not think it well to hope for recovery from this illness... nor needn’t watch the moon as swallowed by the pregnant ouroboros vagrant escapades, nor the tangled bowels of the living machinery torn from the bleeding wall...

And broken glass, so beautifully abused... nor need to hear these screams through night, sickly hallucinations above the rooftops, and radiate disease in luminous night... for buildings to dream the cathode rays fluorescent, beneath the unanimous horizon...

A Living Doctrine

When one is consumed with War one can see no hope for Peace, but only that immediate victory with which one secures a stronger position for the next conflict. War is a virus, a sickness, an ideology which upholds the Natural death of the Body beyond the mystical transfiguration of the Soul, while espousing the sanctity of Violence. War is costly, in that it extracts from Life all those things for which a Man or Woman struggles until Death makes its frightful presence known.

Peace also comes at a price, albeit a small one compared to the Myriad costs of War. Peace does not mean giving up one's pride: there ought to be pride in saying, "I made this Peace." Peace does not mean giving up one's Life: Peace is antithetical to this. Peace is not compromise, cowardice, or perfection. Peace is, most simply, the renunciation of Violence.

Peace means struggle: against the influence of Fascism, terror, brutality, corruption. There are many things worthy of great struggles, and it is true that sometimes struggle means combat. But combat is not Violence. The martial arts are quite beautiful and football is entertaining. War is Violence, killing is Violence, torture is Violence, and bigotry is Violence.

There is no Violence in a State of Nature: Freedom is perpetual combat. But Liberty demands Peace because it represents a commitment to Life.

If the value of Liberty is determined by Absolute means, it is important to recognize that a superlative Liberty is paradoxical, with flaws and incompletenesses that entail their own - often, contradictory - ethical imperatives.

The alternative is to view Liberty as a Living Doctrine engaged in a Struggle to perpetuate Life, Beauty, and Goodness. If we accept that Liberty is alive, and so imbued with Intelligence and Grace that we, as Citizens, deem it fit to be led by such a principle, then we are bound to provide what this Life requires for its sustenance: we must struggle for all that Peace represents.

How can We find Peace while in fear of the State? Where is Peace when we have weapons of mass destruction at our disposal, starvation in our streets and elsewhere, oppression, desolation, and apathy, when we daily throw away the daily Labor of untold numbers of Men and Women simply because it is convenient? What does it mean when we have whole industries devoted to managing our waste - not to extract useful materials from it, but to take it by truck, rail, and boat to the nearest place out of sight?

It is our responsibility as Citizens in a participatory Democracy to not just observe our National Rights, but to own and assert them.

On the Symbolism of Dr. King's National Memorial

When one considers Dr. King, I think it is important to separate the Man from the Icon. Although the Man may be considered flawed in some way, his spiritual struggle was always to increase the total Good in the Nation and in the World. Men are never perfect: our Literary Christ also cried, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” For Dr. King, the Man aside, the tribute paid his Name by the National Memorial is a truly poetic way to incorporate his Icon into the fabric of our Nation’s heritage.

The Memorial site, situated on a “line of leadership” connecting the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, is landscaped to include cherry trees that blossom at the time of Dr. King’s death, and a stone walkway along the water’s edge.

The intent of the landscaping is to emphasize Water, Stone, and the Tree as key symbolic features of the site.

Water is used to symbolize Justice. Justice, like Water, will dissolve all obstacles, by Force or by Patience.

Stone is used to symbolize the Democratic Struggle. The relationship of Dr. King’s National Monument to the Monuments of other leaders urges us to remember that other Men have struggled to erect these Monuments. Deliberately unfinished channels of Water flowing into the Stone walkway remind us that the Struggle is as unending as the Tide.

The Tree is used to symbolize Hope. Although Nature is a product of cycles, and the Mother of cruel Winter, Life must by Nature pursue the Beautiful and the Good.

Venerated messages from Antiquity resonate with the symbolism of Dr. King's Monument, from Plato who taught that Life is worth little if not for Poetry, to the Icons of our Democracy.

This symbolism is universal: Nature sees that mountains always rise, and Natures sees that any mountain can be washed away... but we, as Men under Nature, need Peace to preserve these Monuments for other Men.

Kafka Saddam Hussein

"Trial resumes with Saddam's empty chair..."
- Monday, January 8, 2007.

structure of religious experience

there are two fundamental types of religious experience, each with a distinct structure.

the religious experience common in semitic/christian traditions is of the structure subject-content-object, that is, the subject (worshiper) has an experience (a prayer answered) of a particular object (god). in this model, the content of the experience is evidence that the object (god) exists if the causes and conditions of the experience accord with the attributes of the object (god).

the religious experience sought after in buddhism is of the structure subject-content, that is, the subject (adept) has an experience of enlightment or satori, which has no particular object necessarily. in this model, the cause (object) of the experience (content) is irrelevant; all that is relevant is that the content of the subject's experience accords with attributes consistent with enlightenment or satori.

the latter type of experience can be found in semitic/christian traditions in the concept of time (and causality) found in the old testament book of ecclesiastes. it is akin to poetic truth, which is different in kind from logical truth, but literal in much the same sense.

paul valery wondered why defunct philosophical theories are still studied as having philosophical value, while defunct scientific theories are relegated to history. he concluded with a certain idea of poetry, a poetry of ideas...

a poetry that transcends the forms of art, to live through its very own being...

to embody even wretchedness, because there is no distinction between samsara and enlightenment...

because distinction is entirely arbitrary when confronted with the truths of the soul...

when the truth of the soul is seen from afar, and whose presence is felt with a sublime pious terror...

when all one can do is follow this truth, and revel in the beauty of the world...

mere ideas struggling to inhabit the world with this beauty...

metaphysics and linguistics

whether knowledge and belief
entail the same type of truth value,
or whether one entails the other...

if one knows something must one also believe it?

are knowledge and belief subject to
different standards of validity?

knowledge is traditionally defined as
true justified belief...

what if one overhears a stranger using
bigoted language? one may then believe that
this other person is a bigot. how can one then
acquire knowledge of whether or not one's belief in this
case is true (such a belief is justifiable, since it
is supported by linguistic evidence) or whether
one's anger at hearing such language is
justifiable?

in a sense, one's orientation towards such a
situation is entirely dependant upon what is
in one's own mind: it is a product of both
what one has heard another person say and do,
as well as what one believes oneself.

one is then left with a metaphysical problem
and a practical imperative: one may feel one ought
to address the use of bigoted language without
being as radical oneself (lest one be hypocritical,
or more intollerant than that which offended one
in the first place).

although one, in such a situation, may be uncertain
how best to behave - in part, perhaps, for fear of
causing a scene over what may be a bad joke -
one may be left with the sense, however one
chooses to behave, that one ought not to have been
faced with such a problem in the first place.

bigotry is rooted in corrupt language.
a practical approach in a collective sense is
to take the power of bigoted language away from
the bigots. this effort was advanced by parts of the
homosexual community with words like "fag" and
"queer." by using these words freely themselves,
many homosexuals advanced a program to "normalize"
derogatory terms, to defuse this language of its incindiary
power. such an approach is fundamentally american
in its sensibility: if one american can use a word,
any american can. connotation is to an extent
consensus. there ought not be any privelaged
vocabularies: we all speak the same language, and
we're all americans.

this is not to suggest we ought to be frivolous or
irreverent with words that have a painful history,
but merely that exclusivity - in language as well as
economics or politics - breeds a power that will be
exploited.

a practical approach in a personal sense is to
remind oneself of the importance of tolerance:
the use of bigoted language by one person, if
addressed reasonably, may inspire another to
change his or her habits. otherwise, anger just
breeds anger, and anger is blinding.

if one is angry all the time, it is hard
to let love life beauty and satori into one's
life, and the bigots win.

a good place to start perhaps is by discussing
language, by finding out what a word means to
the person using it, what that person understands
his or her words to mean...

paranoid landscapes

Passed the ruined avenues
again, where the pale fingers
rest now on the broken glass,

while the curtains
through moonlight
flow endlessly away...

The thin American closed his eyes
as though crippled by some
disease of motion,
which has this need of the morning...

As for the fixity of powers,
to salient genitals abundantly
turns the residential night,

and with the attempt at smell,
our lady of a thousand bleeding eyes
might not fail to classify the influence of morning.

It shall come to pass
there fell upon the gentle disassembly
by shades a desperate stillness assailed,

by some bastard wisdom for an orphan prayer brought upon

this gradual damage, unanimous once again, where
pale fingers rest now against the broken glass...

The thin American closed his eyes,
stricken with some vulgar predilection to motion:

as for the fixity of powers,
neither the mutilated genitals
of banking institutions,

nor gently compared the residential night
should but fail to classify the influence of the morning.

Yet to admit only shadow, the thin
American dreaming closed her eyes while thinking
against the plenum echoes of defeated names:

rusting iron shackles and
crumbling marble statues
of men who have died
hungry tired poor and
alone...

Description remains, partial to pushing in
the narrow leaf. If some respite remaining
for this desperate stillness,

with neither need nor reason,
but a violent symmetry assailed...

The dreamer as though
ignorant of his own
perverse violence, which

beneath the burning rivers assailed
by arms to split open factories
and set fire to sea,

wanting only this one consolation:
to listen at the soft disorder.

So reconciled to the phantom traumas
of oxygen and light,

hours passed thus beneath
the burning rivers. While Henry
Kissinger, in love and tender,

dreaming in desperate stillness,
by moonlight when first
broke through the human silence

a subsequent hunger, assuaged
until the residential nightfall should
fail to classify the influence of morning...

And whole days spent in shadow, as shadow
(if I was awake or dreaming)

while reflected in windows along empty streets
at dusk, the blue glow of endless day

and the tangled bowels of machinery
torn from the bleeding wall.

short poem

an infinite reflexivity
everything arriving
everything receding
the universe speaking
in complete gestures
is silent

[notes] minimal interface requirements

minimal interface requirements are not exhaustive -- in virtue of the fact that there is no way to know everything everyone will ever try to make every interface do; thus minimal interface requirements need not include completeness (broken links in a web page are acceptable if they are recognizable as such); one ought, however, be given a way to discern (by explicit declaration or by the consistent implementation of contextual cues) which elements of the interface are complete and which are not (the code should be well-trapped (well-trapped means if one designs a good interface one has thoroughly (to a reasonable approximation (given what is knowable())) exhaustively) examined the logical consequences of the code to effectively constrain the operations a user will be able to perform, and to thereby diminish the probability that the execution of the code will be halted unexpectedly (in summary, therefore, if you make a program, either make it so simple and so observable in its operation that doesn't crash, or make sure it crashes elegantly by giving the user an acceptable way out)).