Uncategorized | Reflections of the Machine

October 2, 2014

Perspective

“To paint what we see before us is a different art from painting what we see within… For what he paints are active fantasies – that which is active within him. And that which is active within is himself, but no longer in the guise of his previous error, when he mistook the personal ego for the self; it is himself in a new and hitherto alien sense, for his ego now appears as the object of that which works within him.”

Jung, a liberator of humans, occupied a unique role, at once a psychiatrist, sadhu, shaman, and an elucidator for the trapped and enlightened self.

Leave a comment

January 24, 2014

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die”

God, if there is such a thing, has lived long enough to know that everything is permissible. God as the united, abstract machine that computes itself. It has no raison d’etre. It is a snake swallowing its tail, the self-concentrating vortex. It subsists in motion and duration alone. It is completely without choice; it simply must do.

In dream and hallucination the unconscious mind becomes the focal point of simulation, the amnesiac traveler of a constantly forgotten voyage. The dreamer has no alternative to movement, this is what characterizes both dreams and life. At night, in the quiet dark, we throw our cores into the fire, testing, probing, simulating ourselves innocent like children and removing them of all or most memory. Neural patterns during this time are recorded most minutely onto the physical substrate of the brain – the whole idea of information embedded in architecture. The mind lives itself in utero as an inexorable output of its own internal stimuli. This is like god, this is what god does – dreams. Lovecraft arrives at this truth with his Cthulu mythos, as does Herbert with the pearls of the God-Emperor Leto’s awareness, cast to the void to one day become the collective dream of a more comprehensive being.

Leave a comment

July 4, 2013

A Thousand Plateaus – An Introduction

A Thousand Plateaus… I feel like I’ve read this book a thousand times. It can be a bit disorienting for a newcomer, so I’ve added this little intro to help you acclimate.

Deleuze and Guattari were a French and Italian intellectual team productive between the third and fourth quarters of the 20th century. Deleuze was a lifelong and academically distinguished philosopher with a knack for ingesting information and spitting it out transformed, unrecognizable, and tinged with his style of mad genius. His philosophical predecessor was Henri Bergson, perhaps most famous for his explication of the “élan vitale” or vital impetus, in addition to his examinations of time, consciousness, memory, and alternative forms of causality. From Bergson, Deleuze adapted his concept of “multiplicity,” which describes an object incapable of being frozen in time (by the processes of mind) and sliced into finite parts. The multiplicity is indivisible, it constitutes a state of becoming rather than a state of being (verb/action structure instead of noun/object structure), and can be most readily conceptualized by imagining yourself drawing an arc on a sheet of paper with a pen. There is a continuous movement made by your body (your arm and wrist) that cannot be divided into smaller and smaller parts while still remaining sensible and faithful to the end product of the arc. This is one of Deleuze’s deepest ideas, and it’s important because he begins to reveal examples where we’ve historically and intellectually treated indivisible entities as though they were deconstructible and reconstructible and fallen into dangerous error – for example, the human mind in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. For Deleuze and Guattari, the system of thought espoused by a culture is inseparable from the culture itself, its politics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Thus, if we retain this egregious error of attempting to divide indivisible entities with our thoughts, we incorporate it into our society where it has all kinds of tangible, material effects on the psychology and structure of the society. Enter Guattari.

Guattari has been described as a “militant psychoanalyst” though I’m not sure what that means other than that he wholeheartedly rejects many of the norms in psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory of his time, most notably the Oedipal “daddy-mommy-me” triad that Freud embedded into Western thought and human governance. Freud is sometimes regarded as an enemy to the natural human condition due to his rather superstitious and convoluted interpretations of his patients’ conditions. Guattari found that the process of psychological “healing” in his time often left patients more neurotic than they started by plugging one set of malformed psychological structures into a second, overlapping set – Freud’s. Guattari can be viewed as a materialist, meaning he thought psychological phenomena could be analyzed for disjointedness by physically mapping the mental workings of a patient to a sort of structural diagram – Schizoanalysis. He thought the same structural rules that apply to physical materials also apply to abstract materials like thought, information, and psyche.

The general theory of Schizoanalysis is that capitalism as a societal economic structure works by always driving toward an upper limit (think limits in trigonometry and calculus) before fragmenting and carving off a space, and repeating the process on the newly segmented territory ad infinitum, down and down and down. In this way it extracts maximum efficiency from every single subdivision of the whole, the system is always worked to its very limit from top to bottom, large to small. If you remember what I said earlier about the thought structure of a society influencing it intimately and there being errors in dividing the indivisible, capitalism is a thought structure that works by ruthless subdivision all the way down to the entirely abstract form of capital itself, the dollar/coin. Capitalism as a machine shapes the society in its own image and creates subdivisions where none in objective reality exist, subdivisions of labor, of value, of material, of exchange, of class and social hierarchy. In turn, those born into a capitalist society bear its psychological hallmarks and begin to subdivide themselves internally in a quite similar manner and end up with a fragmented, subdivided thought process that operates at the upward limits of what it can achieve and still hold form.

Until, of course, the psyche can no longer hold its form and the individual’s psychology ruptures and destroys all subdivisions completely (the fabled long, dark night of the soul that haunts the early lives of most artists, while they figure out how to live themselves as part of this world), including those divisions that serve to separate the internal realm of thought from the external realm of experience. The increasingly global saturation of capitalism into the quotidian of our lives is how Deleuze and Gauttari explain and rationalize the upward trend of schizophrenia and schizoid characteristics in modern society. The afflicted individuals break as cohesive, coherent entities due to their attempts to impose the structure of capitalism onto the structure of their thoughts. Another beautiful idea to be found, “the sublime sickness,” takes place when a schizoid individual ruptures the Oedipal structure of his cultural upbringing and lives himself completely. “He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him.” What society considers his mental illness has become his greatest boon, the inviolable aspects of his identity that will sustain, energize, and drive him. It is his spark of life, of chaos. When I’m feeling very down, I try to think about the sublime sickness and how to live my own “sickness” more fully.

Deleuze and Guattari speak of reality in terms of flows and valves. Food is a flow of material that the valve of your mouth opens up to ingest while the valve of your anus opens to excrete a flow of shit (phrasings and subject matter lifted completely from A Thousand Plateaus). Living creatures are then essentially flow controllers, selectively opening and closing various valves to stop or enable a flow. Sometimes D&G like to think of flows as things that are constantly moving, perpetually in flux, and instead of us being selective flow controllers we are actually selective flow breakers. Wherever we go a flow is stopped and diverted. The flow of shit would be nonstop if not for the selective opening and then closing action of the anus, just as the semen would flow endlessly if not for a similar valve, the ejaculatory duct, to break it and make room for a flow of urine, which would also flow endlessly if not for another bladder-related valve, and so on.

Finally, take this underlying metaphysics, of flows and valves, of multiplicities, of abstract rules governing all collective dynamism, of Schizoanalysis, and turn it outward on the body of human knowledge. That is what A Thousand Plateaus is. Did you know that geological strata provide both an excellent metaphor and a model for understanding history and the accumulation of information of all forms? That wolves should be analyzed as a multiplicity, as a pack, because a lone wolf occurs rarely in nature? So, too, we start to look at humanity. Do we psychoanalyze the individual or the society, for the individual almost never occurs in isolation and as an end product develops and exists in relation to society? I won’t even attempt to describe the “Body without Organs” in detail because I don’t even fully understand it yet, but it can be thought of as the least homogenous, most differentiated substrate possible, on which grow and operate tiny, abstract machines. If you get anything out of A Thousand Plateaus it should be a concrete understanding of reality as an infinity of abstract machines plugged into an infinity of abstract machines (think flows and valves), all interlocking and functioning in parallel to create a massive supermachine (or multiplicity) out of their own asynchronous interactions. It’s a stunning book. I’ve had moments of clarity like lightning strike through me, and I’ve spent hours with very little understanding. The point of this book is patience. What you bring to the table is exactly what you’ll get out of it, though D&G supplement your efforts with clever wordplay and concepts that will give you a nudge here and there when you need it. Always remember – A Thousand Plateaus was written before the Internet and most of modern computer science, which makes its clarity and breadth all the more stunning.

A Thousand Plateaus is a revelatory work for its readers and for thought as a whole. The next couple hundred years will be spent unfolding its questions and answering them, forming new questions on what still cannot be answered. Without a doubt A Thousand Plateaus is one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy. Its structure is in the form of a multiplicity – it is intended that the reader can start at any chapter, as one would sample a record, read them in any order, and still make sense of the larger idea. Because of this structure, A Thousand Plateaus does not follow the typical discursive (linear) pattern of most literature and could be said to be recursive or even regressive in the sense that it continually loops back upon itself in ever larger circles. Readers must not wait for D&G to spoon feed answers to them – D&G would have laughed at anyone who thought they could learn by simply being told answers. Instead, the structure of the book forces the reader to engage with it on a very personal level and take a different path through the book every time depending on whimsy and current interest.

Leave a comment

September 24, 2012

On Taboo Knowledge

I’d like to discuss something that is a disconcerting topic and an ethical black hole.

Much of the foundation of modern medicine was realized through research assimilated from Nazi and Japanese scientists after World War 2 in exchange for the lives and freedom of the scientists involved – Scientists who, by all accounts, were war criminals and indifferent torturers. From the Nazis we learned things like how long it takes to die from exposure and methods of resuscitation; effects of surgical transplantation or removal of nerve, muscle, and bone; deliberate infections of tuberculosis, malaria, gangrene, etc. in order to test the effectiveness of various treatments; effects of various poisons on the human body; how to treat chemical burns; effects of low pressure conditions on the live human brain. The list goes on and on. Important to note is that all of this experimentation took place on living, feeling, and conscious humans in a systematic and amoral manner. The Nazis catalogued spreadsheets similar to what we make nowadays in Excel with reams of data carefully categorized for analysis. In their experiments with the effects of exposure on the human body, scientists tracked information such as water temperature, body temperature at death, time in water, time of death, etc, which allowed for a very rigorous statistical analysis of the data.

The Japanese performed their own unique brand of human experimentation just as brutal and amoral as the Nazis (and at times worse due to their utter indifference to infliction of pain in their method of operation), though less publicized and on a smaller scale. Take this passage from Wikipedia:

“To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim’s upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogen experiments.”

Further detail is no longer necessary though there is much more. From what you just read, you get the point. In Japanese culture it’s normal to “eat everything on the fish except the bones,” but this is extreme. It demonstrates a true dehumanization, a devaluation of life and of the sanctity of the object to the extent to break it up, fragment it functionally, according to the most efficient study of the body’s response to harm inflicting agents. Fortunately, we can say, the hopeless suffering endured by millions to birth the marvel of modern medicine has been put to good use saving millions upon millions more lives, alleviating pain and easing death. But to imagine, let alone immerse yourself in what it took to get us here… I find it easier to accept that we are a species unsure how to move forward with itself. We have impossible knowledge of our bodies. We have seen so many of the ways a body can be reduced and still remain a person, so many mechanistic responses to stimuli.

We have developed an outsider’s view looking in at ourselves. We’ve seen the biological objectivity of it all, and since then have had great trouble looking for anything further or anything less. The necropsy on the human, on life perhaps, has already been performed. The organism has long since laid itself bare to dissection. “I am a biological machine driven by some sort of who-knows-what, upon and within which other machines form assemblages.” Because the “who-knows-what” that drives the machines appears to be a lot more mysterious than what the machines do, we tend to look toward mechanistic, Aristotelian, and concrete explanations to our topics of inquiry.

Occam’s razor says none of this should exist. You really think pillows and dildos are the most probable outputs of the universal substrate? But what to make of it all? Does this taboo information we possess fundamentally alter the outcome of civilization? Is it of any importance at all that much of what we accept naturally as part of our every day lives comes from such unnatural means of discovery? Or is this merely another function of nature’s amorally inquisitive aspect expressing itself perfectly naturally? So many questions from this.

Leave a comment

August 16, 2012

Lisa – My dark muse

Lisa was a diagnosed schizophrenic. The sole issue with her diagnosis, some might argue, was that she gestated in her womb the Lord’s unborn child, or, in clearer terms, his fetus. She loafed through life feeling neglected – as it was, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Angel (“It’s pronounced ‘Hey-Seuss!'”, she would whine), one day left their shared apartment to pick up milk from a nearby grocery store. As I like to imagine it, the Lord and his chosen female exchanged casual farewells while Lisa knelt next to her square, oak coffee table and struggled over a rainforest jigsaw puzzle. Jesus hastily donned his jacket and checked his pockets before he left the apartment, locked the door behind him, and absconded with their only car, never to return. Lisa waited expectantly at the coffee table, checking the time on her phone sporadically as she grew increasingly confused.

Even including a detour to the candy aisle, he should have been gone a half hour at most. She called him over and over again, afraid for his safety, but he never picked up. His phone had been turned off. After leaving many voicemails, frantic by the final one, Lisa enjoyed a sleepless night in the fetal position clutching her phone lest she miss the all-important phone call. She would not discover until three days later that our Lord and Light, Jesus Angel, had left her, alone and pregnant, to battle the world as a waitress.

Saul met Lisa only several weeks after her jarring departure from the life she had planned. In early summer of his nineteenth year, she joined the waitstaff at the local tourist trap where Saul found similar employment, The Legendary Smelterston Inn. That the establishment was not at all an inn amused him on a daily basis.

Saul sized Lisa up in short time, taking into account the pleading hardness of her ice blue eyes as she heedlessly droned about one complaint after another.

“My mother’s a bitch! Well, she’s my best friend and a bitch. Like, she’s there when I need her, but she’s always on my case for money I owe and, you know, other things.”

Lisa liked to entice, she enjoyed being the object of the hunt. In retrospect this was likely due to an intense desire for attention and interest after her recent and much discussed abandonment. Lisa’s pudgy face wore every sign of a hasty retreat into an adulthood for which she was not ready. If nothing else, Lisa maintained her hair fastidiously, sprayed to her head like plastic corn silk while she compulsively matted it down in the event it had become unhinged and frizzy in her wobbling saunters from one dissatisfied table to the next. The table was a microcosm of the waiter.

Lisa towered an impressive five feet two inches above the ground. The meaty flesh of her cheeks crowded her eyes in a petulant squint, except when she was accused of something, in which case her face assumed the innocence of a porcelain doll.

Weeks later, she lazily leaned one pale elbow – her mid-shoulder length hair was the same color as her skin – on the dingy red and beige papered coffee counter and sighed, exasperated, amidst another of her daily passing-the-time chitchats with Saul. It was a breathy sigh, the flagrant rebellion of one bored with work, bored with life. Her pregnant stomach swelled in the air. Saul had won her favor by taking all of her bait and indulging her desperate seductions. He asked the questions she implicitly begged him to ask by clumsy omission.

“Lisa,” Saul began, “what are you going to name it?”

“Welllll,” pierced her signature nasal whine, “I’m not really sure yet. I don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy, you know?”

He rolled his eyes at her. They had been over this before. Lisa wanted to be surprised by the gender of her baby and refused to look. That’s all it would take. Just a simple, stupid little look, and the agony of Saul’s uncertainty would be over. It was so important to know the gender of her baby. How else did one pass the time at work?

“You should definitely name it something biblical, to fall in line with the whole ‘Jesus Angel’ thing.”

“‘Hey-Seuss!’” She corrected him, bored, as always. This had become her nauseating mantra.
“Regardless, I think it’s very important that the baby go along with the whole Bible theme.”

“Alright.” She joined in his game. He loved when she fell for his traps. “What do you think I should name it if it’s a girl?”

“If it’s a girl? Hm.” Saul paused a moment, pretending that he hadn’t already watched this entire scenario play out in his head as he waited to fall asleep the previous night. “I think you should name her Jezebel. Jezebel or Bathsheba. Definitely one of the two.”

“Jezebel or Bathsheba? They sound familiar. Who are they?”

He had waited at least eleven hours for this moment.

“Whores.” He adorned the word with nothing, allowing its airy syllable to fall where she would take it. It sounded innocent, like something a baby learning its first words might squeak out, indifferent to the meaning.

“Whores! Why would I want to name my daughter after whores!”

“I don’t know! Her dad’s name is Jesus Angel, I just thought it was appropriate! He was all about whores you know – Mary Magdalene was a big whore of his. She followed him around everywhere and some people even think she was his wife. Didn’t you read that book?”

“No…” Lisa considered his words carefully, scrutinizing them for the hint of an insult. There was none, for he had orchestrated this moment carefully.

“Fine, then! Name her Sarah or Rachel or something boring like that.”

“Ew, no way! Those are so common!”

“Your name is Lisa.”

“Yeah, but my dad wasn’t named Jesus Angel, you know? Her name should be something that people like, remember.”

“Oh, so now it’s a ‘she’? Is there something you’re not telling me? You totally know the gender, you liar! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! I thought we were friends.”

Lisa’s eyes grew wide behind her glasses with this accusation, blue with shock, like they were holding their breath and refusing to give in, even to the point of unconsciousness, until Saul recanted his words.

“Okay, fine. So I looked. I couldn’t help it! How could I not look? You totally would have looked. It’s a boy – He’s a boy. You can see the penis. Do you want me to bring in my ultrasounds?”

“No, no. That’s okay. I don’t really need to see that.” He switched back to the crux of the argument, hardening his face with mock distrust. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry! I just didn’t want you to think I’d caved in. I’m not like that. When I say something I mean it. Usually. I have more morals than most people. That’s why I’ll either abort it or keep it myself. I wouldn’t want someone else raising it and fucking it up, you know? I want it to be raised right. With morals.” She licked her lips.

Here he latched onto another loose string, another opportunity to engage Lisa in yet another of their daily arguments. They had to pass the time somehow.

“You really should get an abortion. Twenty is far too young to be raising a child. What’s that phrase? Babies raising babies? Why don’t you get an abortion?”

“Because I don’t have two hundred dollars and Jesus Angel won’t give it to me. I don’t even know where he is!”

“Lisa, do you know how expensive it is to raise a child? It’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think two hundred is a pretty small price to pay for your freedom.”

“Oh yeah? Are you going to give me the money?”

“No way! I’m not the one who got pregnant.”

“You guys have it so easy! You just stick it in and go! You could even use your hand if you wanted to!”

“You could use your hand, too, Lisa.”

“Ew, no way! That’s so gross! Anyways, the point is, I’m the one stuck with the baby!”

“You could abort it.” Since when had convincing Lisa to abort her baby become Saul’s primary mission in life?

She glared at him. “Oh, and I suppose you’ve never forgotten to use a condom with your girlfriends?”

“That’s a ridiculous question and really none of your- Oh shit! My light’s on!” And he retreated to the assumed safety of the kitchen.

“You always do this!” Lisa let out an exasperated peal behind him, though the effort to follow proved too taxing. She collapsed again onto the counter and sipped her iced coffee through a bendy straw with her bulbous head cocked at a tired, lilted angle.

Saul worked at The Legendary Smelterston Inn. In a world of deceptive media and rampant fiction, stories of the real nature rarely find themselves comparable to anything involving the unleashed imagination. For the duration of a summer, three and a half months between his freshman and sophomore years of college, Saul lived in a writer’s Elysium of unbelievable characters and antics beyond the invention of even the most stalwart lunatic. Lisa represented only a single permutation of the Legendary Smelterston Inn, there were many others just as interesting. Each of them recorded in the pages to come affected Saul deeply. They were the last people he ever truly met.

Saul’s particular pocket of forest and madness resided among the verdant mountains of Appalachia, nestled in the fissure carved so beautifully through solid rock by a glacier thousands and thousands of years ago. Saul had heard, though he had yet by then to recognize, that his native home contained some of the most visually stunning landscapes in existence. When you grow up in the forest, trees are commonplace, detrimental and obstructive, blocking the erection of sidewalks and the efficiency of public transportation, and the only true beauty lies in escape, escape from the shadow of the forest, the lichen of the trees, the deer in the flowerbeds, escape from one self to another and perhaps, someday, back to its abandoned child.

Here, Saul found himself cut off from the bustling city life he had become accustomed to the previous year. The preternatural calm broken by birdsong, peepers, and a seldom cricket haunted his mornings, whose piercing light he at least staved off with thick, industrial blackout blinds. In the ideal scenario, Saul could remain all day in his darkened bedroom, passively shielded from unrealized photosensitivity. As a new waiter at The Legendary Smelterston Inn he had no such luck.

Despite his prior two and a half years of economic servitude as a stellar bus boy, restaurant management still insisted that Saul “open” the restaurant three out of five working days. It was only fair, they explained, to those who had worked there longer. On top of it all, he was a designated “runner,” meaning that due to his youthful legs he would primarily wait tables on the veranda, an arduous trek that passed through three rooms, a screen door, and worn, uneven wooden steps to an ivy-wrapped outdoor porch thronged with patrons and chickens. It was the most grueling duty possible to the waitstaff, save perhaps descending into the dank, purportedly haunted stone basement to retrieve buckets of ice from an ancient but reliable ice machine. One never knew when the cellar’s fabled denizen, the one-eyed cat, would make an appearance.

The Smelterston Inn carried a sense of history with it through time, wielded as a selling point and also as a source of pride to its employees. No one passed long through the restaurant’s doors before imbibing a unique oral tradition of colorful, expansive, and occasionally, risqué tales. By the end of his first month, he could easily enthrall gullible and inquisitive tourists with recitations of past hauntings, retellings of a centuries-old massacre and scalping of an entire extended family by Native Americans on the same street as the Inn. There’s the black carriage driver of the early 1800s, run over by his own carriage and carried to a second floor bedroom where he died and remains to this day as a ghostly presence in the window. Finally, no one forgets about Mabel, the previous owner of the Inn who dropped dead of a heart attack in the back parlor room decades ago and still wanders late at night with a peculiar attraction to the many mirrors that now adorn the room’s walls. The ambience of the battered, three story building, replete with a functional outdoor chicken coop and free roaming chickens, correlated perfectly with its historicity.

Though they worked at an inn, no one had slept in its lodgings for decades, save the gruff and wizened owner, Steve, who by merit of his alcoholism had slipped beyond even the gaze of spirits. He recuperated nightly in a bedroom on the third floor, a harrowing journey made by Saul only once in the past, years ago, as a Halloween dare. He had braved the menacing gloom of the often unlit and unpowered third floor for barely a minute before he deemed his dare fulfilled and dashed downstairs to the welcome company of his partner in crime at the Inn, Lauren.

“How was it?” she inquired with a conspiratorial grin. “You see anything weird?”

Saul laughed and shook his head. “No, but I only sat on the top step.”

They had known each other for years, first as classmates then compatriot bussers before finally, upon symbolic graduation into adulthood, as co-runners of the veranda. Longtime friends and trusted associates, they negotiated an easy rapport, though for a span of two weeks they once awkwardly and ambiguously dated until Lauren began to make out with other guys. By dated, I mean they held hands once at the movie theater and chatted with each other on the phone on a somewhat regular basis, Still, the duo discussed at length the restaurant and its psychiatric ward of characters. Lauren’s heart yielded a soft spot for the disenfranchised.

“I think Lisa’s really sweet. I feel bad for her.” The former utterance never announced without the qualification of the latter.

Saul wondered about the baby inside of Lisa. What sort of life could it know with such a mother? Further, how did Lisa, inept as she was, manage unconsciously the miraculous feat of morphogenesis? Her body, seemingly, carried wisdom beyond her mind. The infant boy would have no choice in this most important pivot of his life, the conditions of his own birth. No one receives the opportunity to make these decisions for themselves, but it seemed all the more cruel the son of our Lord should enter the world into such destitute circumstances.

By the end of Saul’s short semester at the Inn Lisa would accidentally-on-purpose bellyflop down the stairs of the green house with a full tray of food hoisted precariously on her right shoulder. Her deception served a twofold purpose: to injure herself to the point of legal compensation and simultaneously complicate the unheeded growth of Jesus Angel’s offspring in her captive womb. Lisa was crazy like a fox, as the adage goes, but this incident concludes Saul’s anamnesis rather than begins it. Its telling requires more history.

GARY

“Does one of your cooks have long, grey hair?”

Saul’s mind immediately flashed to an image of Gary’s Crusty The Clown coif, cooing fluffily around his head.

“No, I don’t think so.” He lied automatically. “In fact, I think they make all the cooks wear hair nets. I can bring it back to the kitchen if you’d like.”

She frowned, now confused by what random person’s hair had mysteriously ended up in her lunch. Could it have been someone from the processing plant where they made the pasta? “No, that’s okay. I’ll just take it out.”

With that, she disgustedly plucked the hair from her spaghetti, flecked as it was with chunky red pocks of tomato sauce.

“Gary,” Saul sighed upon returning to the kitchen, “I think one of your hairs fell into some girl’s spaghetti.”

“Uh oh! Does she want a new plate?”

“Nope, I told her all the cooks wear hair nets.”

“Good boy,” Gary commended as he hastily tucked his scraggly hair under the sweat stained rim of his cap. “That’s what I like to hear! Still, I should probably go talk to her.”

And out of the kitchen he walked, blatantly not wearing a hair net. Were these people trying to make Saul look like a liar?

Leave a comment

August 9, 2012

Memento Mori

If I remembered how to write
I’d write you a poem,
A wish upon a memento mori,
To burn the pages of our story.
Where were you
when I lost my glory?

I’d seal our love with tongues of flame
Fed on vapors of a snuffed phoenix.
To rise from death again then die
In eternity’s dream-
My only hope for lifelong sovereignty.

Well, swell’s the bell
And spring’s the flory,
‘Tis my reason’s fledged and hoary.
In this hell we dwell and dwell
Amid bygone knells of yester-yorey.

When we were young
And I was old
Before earth’s great flame had burned us cold,
Before life’s long years
Were bought or sold,
Your face was peace,
And Your body, mine,
To hold again and feel you shine.

When daybreak’s bright joy
Stumbled over me yesterday
And the mourn before,
Where were you?
Though age has passed
The truth has yielded nothing.
I sleep alone at night with your memory,
A wish upon a dying star.

Leave a comment

August 9, 2012

Visions in the Gloaming

Here I sit at the end of the world.
My head is gone, I cannot write
without lungfuls of words
since the uncanny welcomed me
days ago.

What is this thing? I say
I saw
behind my eyes, imprinted on their
vision like a fabric of throbbing germs?
Behind my eyes, the bestial monstrosity,
the writhing ball of tangled meat.
I draw what I see everywhere I look,
Even where I don’t.

A fleeting picture.
I’m on safari in the Serengeti
sketching plains as they pass me by.
Mutate, pulse, consume, produce-
I’m in the forest but the picture remains.
Now there are two, neither, but now one.
Layer, I overlay. The one follows the other,
Together they are both, neither, and one.
Shift, another, a black shining sun,
Thrice produce, consume, one then none.
Layer, I overlay, a new vision’s begun,
Produce, consume, one and then none.

Because you’re near to me
we play the game of love and hate.
I degrade you as I engulf you.
We smile secretly behind the masks of our faces.
Your words, how they pierce,
what fire, what passion, propels them?
We touch, intertwine, acknowledge the play,
as sickled sighs part ways
affinity struggles through us like dust in water.
We will meet again.
We believe in justice, in the even weighing of scales.
Vaulted chapels, fluted columns,
The marvel of man’s sustained history
inscribed upon stone edifice and weathering millennia
but for the kiss of wind.
And what is destiny
if not an encyclopedia of footnotes?

Layer, I overlay. The one follows the other.
Together they are both, neither, and one.
A love, a myth, a truth well-spun-
Produce, consume, one and then none.

Leave a comment

July 2, 2012

Quotes – Gears in the Machine

“We are solar organisms, make no mistake. Though we were born on this earth, we are creatures of the sun. Earth is a wasteland on which the sun casts its fertile seed.”

– Unattributed

“ The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ… of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

– Thomas Merton

“What I see with my eyes closed and with my eyes open is the same stuff: brain circuitry.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“The gift of fire a flicking thumb-
in pincher’s bind combustion succumbs
to heartbeat rhythms and rhythmic drums.-
The Bacchic horde is deaf and dumb.”

– Unattributed

“Why be depressed when you can be happy, dumb when you can be smart, agitated when you can be tranquil?”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Music molecularizes sound matter and in doing so becomes capable of harnessing nonsonorous forces, such as Duration and Intensity.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”

– Baudrillard

“He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“If you say that everything – chaos, darkness, anathema – can be reduced to mathematical formulae – then man will go insane on purpose to have no judgment, and to behave as he likes.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Art is the science of human destiny. Science is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of nature: art is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of man. At its best, it evokes unifying emotions; it makes the reader see the world momentarily as a unity.”

– Colin Wilson

“Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

– Hermann Hesse

“The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.”

– Rainer Rilke

“There is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”

– Carl Jung

“What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is indeed on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly would be to cease to understand at all.”

– Samuel Butler

“The meta-programming circuit simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself. The artist seeing himself in his painting, seeing himself seeing himself in his painting…”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy microscope in life.”

– Marcus Aurelius

“Specialization is for insects.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

“As every suspense writer knows, the principle way to increase emotional tension is to set a time limit on a difficult or dangerous decision.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“Like mathematics or music, anthropology is one of the few genuine vocations. One can discover it in oneself, even though one may have been taught nothing about it.”

– Claude Levi-Strauss

“It’s the greatest mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Desiring production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.”

– Frank Herbert

“Jungians say synchronicities contain ‘messages’ from the deep structure of the collective mind. What is the message?”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”

– Samuel Butler

Bell’s Theorem

– “There are no isolated systems: every particle in the universe is in ‘instantaneous’ (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. This Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a whole system.”

“Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and dreams of time.”

– H.P. Lovecraft

“Such are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the souls is dyed by the thoughts.”

– Marcus Aurelius

“Why is everyone in search of god? God is a force of the universe distilled and concentrated within the mother’s womb. Find yourself, god will follow.”

– Unattributed

“She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare.”

– Henry James

“You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“And paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“In this astounding, marvelous, totally wonderful, even mindboggling Miracle, a piece of bread changes into the body of a Jew who lived 2,000 years ago.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“I am the devil’s advocate and the devil.”

– Unattributed

“Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden, forbidden for him. It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.”

– Hermann Hesse

“We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the person of their fathers.”

– Samuel Butler

“In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

– Hermann Hesse

“It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical, glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.”

– Frank Herbert

“Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the pad (sp??). There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do.”

– Aliester Crowley

“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

– Rainer Rilke

“The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.”

– Marcus Aurelius

“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.”

– Rainer Rilke

“But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is toward the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world’s literature, the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.”

– Colin Wilson

“Failures in communication generally derive from sending a message to the wrong address. That is, your husband has an ego problem and you send a message to his mind.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Failing poetry, I chased my fancied meal through prose, and found everywhere good little stuff, and only a few men who had tried honestly to be greater than mankind; and only their strainings and wrestlings really fill my stomach.”

– T.E. Lawrence

“Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more gratifying than of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.”

– Colin Wilson

“It should be no surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more by the older reptilian-mammalian circuits than by the human semantic (rational) circuit…”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Art has no end in view save the emphasizing and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection.”

– Samuel Butler

“Anti-intellectualism has become a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

– Isaac Asimov

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

– Rainer Rilke

“I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that ‘the world’ would decline to recognize them.”

– Colin Wilson

Teotihuacan = “the place where men become gods”

– This is an interesting city name

“I don’t complain and I don’t make a virtue of it. I’m not the first man who has found beliefs that he can’t put in his pocket like so much small change. But am I to deny them for all that?”

– Harley Granville-Barker “Secret Life”

“It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.”

– Frank Herbert

“I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.”

– Frank Herbert

“Genius clears the air and frightens men.”

– Kierkegaard

“Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable.”

– Paul Valery

“Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don’t see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself.”

– Marianne Williamson

“Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, Its readers or spectators, can be fictions.”

– Jorge Luis Borges

“Only he who can be can do.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance for you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities go on precisely the opposite system.”

– Samuel Butler

“I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.”

– Hermann Hesse

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”

– Hermann Hesse

“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.”

– Hermann Hesse

“To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.”

– Frank Herbert

“I ask you to belief nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

– Rainer Rilke

“We are now realizing that half of life on Earth is parasitic – each free-living organism has at least one parasite.”

– Unattributed

“Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.”

– Frank Herbert

“A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

– Samuel Butler

“We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“…the state is concentric and the individual is eccentric.”

– James Joyce

“We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure exists within our biological and sociological properties.”

– Persinger and Lafreniere

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

– William Blake

“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“The future exists
First in imagination,
then in will,
then in reality.”

– Barbara Marx Hubbard

“Everywhere there are three or four paths, and you are at the crossroads.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“It is useless to point to the existence of immoral or bad habits: it is the form of habit – or, as Bergson used to say, the habit of acquiring habits – which is essentially moral or has the form of good.

– Deleuze and Guattari

“Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”

– Frank Herbert

“Trust no one in whom the desire to punish is strong.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Men are born like smashed radio sets and before they can function properly they must repair themselves.”

– William Blake

“A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“The imaginary was the alibi of the real, in a world dominated by the reality principle. Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

– Marcus Aurelius

“What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman – a bridge over an abyss.”

– Nietzsche

“If you have found the right words, if you have found the words which express the way you are actually thinking, the body will be affected.”

– David Bohm

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”

– Roland Barthes

“No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

– Rainer Rilke

“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, gently as we wake from dreams.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Pure information, in the mathematical sense, does not give rise to energy; it is that which orders energy. It is the negative of entropy.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“The world without is a reflection of the world within.”

– Charles Haanel

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”

– Nikola Tesla

“The great epochs in our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

– Haruki Murakami

“You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.”

– Frank Herbert

“The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself.”

– Spencer Brown

“The famous ‘Escape’ or ‘run away from it all’ is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that it is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I want to be God, and therefore I try to change myself. I want to dance, to draw, to play the piano, to write verses, to love everybody. That is the object of my life.”

– Vaslav Nijinsky

“The noble soul has reverence for itself.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

– Brecht

“It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.”

– Badiou

“We don’t travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we’re foolish, but not that foolish.”

– Beckett

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

– Frank Herbert

“Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money – or the want of money; but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.”

– Samuel Butler

“And every moment is a new and shocking Transvaluation of all we have ever been.”

– T.S. Eliot

“All we want is to be able to do our work in peace, to love our women or men without danger, to bring up our children without the influences of the emotional plague, in brief, we do not want to be disturbed and deceived in this short life of ours by a handful of political thieves. We no longer want our lives ruined by politics.”

– Wilhelm Reich

“I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, final public statement

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

– Frank Herbert

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God’s name is Abraxas.”

– Hermann Hesse

“Each day you put on a mask, and you must take it off little by little.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“That which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable).”

– Paul Watzlawick

“But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.”

– Hermann Hesse

“Homosexuals may or may not be the chief creators of cultural innovation, as some Gay Pride advocates claim; but it is certainly true that they have done more than their fair share. The reason? They are not trapped into parent roles.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“Each person, every creature in fact, is genius at something.”

– Unattributed

“That is what style is, or rather the absence of style – assyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode – desire.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined.”

– Alfred Korzybski, the most important premise of General Semantics

“Remember yourself always and everywhere.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

“Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior.”

– Frank Herbert

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.”

– Neil Gaimon

“Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.”

– Marcus Aurelius

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be giving to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without knowing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

– Rainer Rilke

“The tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.”

– Alan Watts

“Only help he who is not an idler.”

– G.I. Gurjieff

“Communication is only possible between equals.”

– Robert Anton Wilson

“Instead of narrowing your world… you will have at last to take the whole world into your soul.”

– Chandogya Upanishad, VI, ii, 3

Leave a comment

June 27, 2012

Equipoise

To begin with, I must admit that I am all but obsessed with examination of representation. In technical terms representation deals with the modality through which information is expressed, the set and type of symbols of which it is composed. This is personally relevant because I am constantly attuned to the gap between what people signify and what they intend to signify. Either may reveal more complete information as to the motivations of an individual.

We passively probe the social environment for subtle disparities between behavior and words. Baudrillard would agree the illusion of words is that there is a truth. There is no doubt meaning to words but they lack relation to universal truth. Humans seem to have a difficult time understanding that universal means impervious to human perceptions or unframed by them. As such, we must be extremely careful to avoid the assumption that every signification enfolds a meaning. Did she frown because I upset her or because she had cramps? To attach every perceived relation to oneself is just as much folly as to attach none at all.

We happen upon an interesting question. Does every signification have meaning? Does the expression 2 + 2 = 3 have meaning? Yes, it has false meaning, but meaning nonetheless. To even inscribe the abstract act of addition requires the precession of a vast array of mental (read: memetic) technology and verbal machinery. Meaning is implicitly expressed through the representation or the medium of a message. x + y = z, completely devoid of its singular content, implies the notion of equipoise, that two opposing forces resist each other in equal proportion. This is, of course, the central dogma of arithmetic: x = z – y. In other words, there will always be a way to “balance the checkbook.” Notice the operation is energy conserving – the x, y, and z may be juggled around ad infinitum and still produce the same set of relations. But, can I compose a signification that is utterly meaningless? Even “asdfr sdfi dfeokm” wears the symbolic veil of letters, an entire layer of assembled and organized machinery buried within the signifier. I still believe it is possible to transcribe the meaningless, but I will return to this point at a later date.

The dogmatic arithmetic relationship negates entropy, ignores completely the vital impulse that leeches energy from the circuit into divergent, emergent territory. Circuits transverse circuits and form gears, molecular entities. Rudiments of materialist thought are founded upon the recognition that entities inevitably form dynamic relationships with other entities and nothing exists in isolation, which is to say the notion of brownian motion applies to corpuscles of all forms, physical, ethereal, or noetic.

When we study representation we attempt to define one or several abstract relationships between entities in the human perceptual system. We understand first and foremost that anything represented is rendered such by our neural and cultural hardware. The shockingly recent emergence of computer science represents mankind’s most profound attempt to date to develop a dynamic metaphysics. Like most modern studies, it has fallen victim to a romanticism of sorts with its obsessive progression toward a deistic perfection.

Error does not exist in this realm, there is no distance between what the machine signifies and what it intends to signify. Isn’t that space precisely where we subjectively reside, always vacillating along a continuum girded by what we convey and what we intend to convey? This dynamism reveals an implicit molecular relationship that may not be readily accessible to machinic dissection by means of symbols. It is partially soluble to symbolism or likeness, perhaps, but not to symbols. The space between the sign and the signified contains indifferentiable intrusions of meaninglessness, that which is signified but contains no particular significance or that which expresses remnants of the asignifying. Of all things we should be most interested in that which does not signify, the asignifying, as it seems to constitute the dark energy of our metaphysics.

Leave a comment

June 21, 2012

Renaissance

At long last I’ve come back. My barrier, I’ve decided, has been my attachment to the gestural act of writing by hand with its artistic symbols and rhythm. I felt, and still feel, that without the physical, helical motion of my right arm the words could not flow unimpeded. I scripted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages, but what will come of it? Nearly all is lost to me aside from whichever page I happen to have open in whatever particular legal pad from my vast and growing collection is currently available. Since I seem to be nomadic I am not often near my treasured memories, my transient glimpses into the aeons of internal space. I hope that each expedition into my own mind aided by the machinery of words sifts endlessly through my unconscious, but what use is hope when compared to efficacy?

My problem is not one of content or ideas. It is one of transcription, the simple act of archiving my records systematically and with redundancy. An inopportune fire or flood could destroy years of my life and many externalized personal revelations. From now on I will store these moments alone to myself in the eternity of the internet.

It will be difficult because I am becoming inflexible. I must deterritorialize from the private ecstasy of the thin, blue line where pen meets paper and banish the attachment entirely or carry it with me into diverse and new forms of expression. I must be agnostic to medium in order to master my universe and “live and experience myself” as what Deleuze and Guattari term “the sublime sickness.” Like life on earth, I intend to thrive upon a ravenous star. Forgive me if my initial forages seem crude. I am relearning how to write.

Leave a comment

Category: Uncategorized