tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74032269279979711122024-03-05T06:49:46.664-08:00Institute for the Promotion of Learning DisorderUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger122125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-31542167555778412332014-09-16T07:54:00.003-07:002014-09-16T07:54:53.370-07:00The public libraryApologies to those who discovered a blind link attempting to check out materials from the <a href="http://fendersen.holeinthewallhosting.com/index.html">Inner Public Library Depot</a>. This should now work for the sighted. The rest of us may have to wait a few days or go back to trusty old equipment and archaic land mines, er, lines.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-11416603229600148452014-09-09T09:28:00.001-07:002014-09-09T09:28:24.243-07:00On Democracy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmwckj6vRFy1LAWWs-q0dlqUhfseTuJWBydHFkn72vpg4RzNDhGzXcDARTwmFt1BrkzSmhguKp8YeKTsQxVKig0Z4MDGFyhLu-847Rrsb4MMW5JyTPVTpAwwdwIUd0t3_JR06i4-yk5is/s1600/Mars4Martians.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmwckj6vRFy1LAWWs-q0dlqUhfseTuJWBydHFkn72vpg4RzNDhGzXcDARTwmFt1BrkzSmhguKp8YeKTsQxVKig0Z4MDGFyhLu-847Rrsb4MMW5JyTPVTpAwwdwIUd0t3_JR06i4-yk5is/s1600/Mars4Martians.jpg" height="253" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>It was said somewhere nearby:</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>"The only impediment to democracy is local sovereignty".</b></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-28191959348086627582014-08-09T17:35:00.000-07:002014-08-09T17:35:34.782-07:00MACDONOUGH'S SONG<div align="center">
Whether the State can loose and bind<br>
In Heaven as well as on Earth:<br>
If it be wiser to kill mankind<br>
Before or after the birth-<br>
These are matters of high concern <br>
Where State-kept school men are;<br>
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)<br>
Endeth in Holy War. <br><br>
Whether The People be led by the Lord,<br>
Or lured by the loudest throat:<br>
If it be quicker to die by the sword<br>
Or cheaper to die by vote -<br>
These are the things we have dealt with once,<br>
(And they will not rise from their grave)<br>
For Holy People, however it runs,<br>
Endeth in wholly Slave.<br><br>
Whatsoever, for any cause,<br>
Seeketh to take or give,<br>
Power above or beyond the Laws, <br>
Suffer it not to live!<br>
Holy State or Holy King -<br>
Or Holy People's Will -<br>
Have no truck with the senseless thing.<br>
Order the guns and kill!<i><br><br>
Saying<br>
after<br>
me:<br><br>
Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth;<br>
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.<br>
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!<br>
Once There was The People - it shall never be again!</i></div>
<div align="right">Rudyard Kipling, 1912</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-17763671265862815702014-06-20T11:37:00.001-07:002014-06-21T07:13:27.169-07:00Pre-Face<blockquote>My first real indication that there was a universe outside myself came in 1962, after Alice's husband – the one in the song – gave me a copy of the Tao Te Ching. At the time, I was singing all those euphoric songs about how we're gonna save the world, & Lao-tse made me wonder: Will the world be any different because of anything I do? He struck a chord that made me sense that I was a little discordant with the cosmic universal tune. It wasn't a major musical atrocity; but it forced me to pay attention to myself – like when you know you have a cold coming on. You could say that was the start of my midlife crisis. I was about fifteen.<BR><BR>For years I kept showing up at all the right demonstrations & singing all the right songs, & one day I realized that the world still sucked & my own life was out of control. I'd done all these things to save the world, & I couldn't even save myself. I understood then that my real work was me, not the world. <DIV ALIGN="right"><i> – Arlo Guthrie</i></DIV></blockquote>
<h4 align="center">1. Thinking Against Ourselves:<BR>‘Human strike’ designates the most generic movement of revolt.
</h4>
<p>The adjective ‘human’ in this case doesn’t have any moral connotation, it is just more inclusive than ‘general’, because every human strike is an amoral gesture and it is never merely political or social. It attacks the economic, affective, sexual and emotional conditions that oppress people.
</p><p>The interest and the difficulty of this concept lies in the fact that it is a concept that thinks against itself. And thinking against ourselves will be the necessity of the revolts to come, as desubjectivisation (taking distance from what we are, becoming something else) will be the only way to fight our exploitation. In fact our new working conditions see us being exploited as much in the workplace as outside of it, as the workplace has both exploded and liquefied and so gained our whole lives. Thinking against ourselves will mean thinking against our identity and our effort to preserve it, it will mean stopping believing in the necessity of identifying ourselves with the place we occupy.
</p><p>The movement of thought normally used to describe facts and processes of life cannot be applied to the investigation of the particular form of behaviour that we call ‘human strike’, because the human strike transforms the common ways of understanding and expressing things that actually entrap us in the very situations from which we must escape. Because our perception always includes the position from which we perceive.
</p><p>Human strike, therefore always strikes partially against itself, and this is why when the historical toll is taken of its manifestations, as for example in the case of the feminist movements of the 1970s in Italy, it is hard to separate the constructive aspects from the destructive ones. It is difficult to bring out the positive sides, because the achievements of this kind of strike are inseparable from the lives of people, they cannot be measured in terms of numbers, wage increases or material transformations, but only in different ways of living and thinking. To the distracted gaze of a superficial spectator, a landscape crossed by human strike might even seem more damaged than radically revolutionised.
</p><p>What we are looking at, then, is a movement of desubjectivisation and resubjectivisation, of exit from a condition – from a certain type of identification that goes with obligations, stereotypes and projections – and an entrance into a new state, less defined, more uncertain, but freed of the weights that burdened the previous identity and allowed the perpetuation of the status quo.
</p><p>For example, when Bartleby opposes the lawyer with the inertia of his generically negative preference, he politely withdraws from the obligations of his job and revolts without directly confronting the hierarchy. His rebellion creates a ground that nothing can get a grip on, because he does not say what he would prefer to be different (he does not formulate a claim) or what he dislikes about his condition (he does not express a denunciation). His gesture robs the power of its power, at which point that the lawyer who employs him experiences inappropriate feelings for Bartleby, something akin to love, and falls prey to the impression that his virility is being shaken. The roots of his authority are undermined by the situation and he finds a part of himself, the one which takes sides with Bartleby’s revolt, hostile to his own role as a boss.</p>
<DIV ALIGN="left">Claire Fontaine, 2012<BR><BR><a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Emetonymy.htm" title="Existential metonymy and imperceptible abstractions"><Big><B>MORE ...</B></Big></a></DIV>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-31631948147452092412014-06-16T01:03:00.002-07:002014-06-16T01:03:18.039-07:00Forward<P>What follows is a selection of texts with different stories and different intentions. They are all sediments in the margin of something else, which remains liquid or gaseous, probably more important than the rest.
<P>The practice of writing can only pursue the processes of thought and it rarely catches their tails. Human strike is not even a possible prey for it, since in any case it remains a horizon, a possibility, a disquieting guest, that cannot (and doesn’t need to) be described by the written word. The traces left by this phenomenon find their own scriveners: human strike is not the invention of an author, it’s actually what proves that any form of hypostasised individuality is nothing but a dirty compromise, the result of indecent commerce with some power. What truly counts in the economy of freedom are human relationships, what happens between people.</P>
<P>Radical theory is composed of texts that wish to accompany experimental practices – preserving the space of their potentiality, trying not to prevent things from happening by predicting them – and other texts that prescribe and show the way, texts that exterminate mistakes and kill questions.</P>
<P>The writings that are grouped here don’t belong to any of these categories, maybe because they aren’t ‘radical’ and they are not exactly theory. What they try to do is capture the space in which subjectivity opposes power and by doing so transforms itself into something other that doesn’t even need to fight the same enemy, because this enemy cannot damage it nor access it. These moments can be rare and volatile, they don’t accumulate, they don’t become a system, but what is certain is that this exercise can highlight what will save us.</P>
<P>Today if subjectivity doesn’t become simultaneously the weapon and the battlefield, the means and the end of every struggle, we will remain the embarrassed hostages to hope in social and political movements, with their tragic incapability to build a present that isn’t just another state of exception. Militancy has shown that even within the most sincere and passionate quest for freedom relationships remain instrumental and therefore deadly. And even if the end is liberation, its tragic separation from the means transforms it into the worst slavery. Patriarchy has put everything to work: feelings, bodies, friendship, love, motherhood. And everything – within that libidinal economy – is nothing but a work of reproduction and preservation of the world as it is. The task of human strike is to defunctionalise all these useful activities and return them to their quintessential creativity that will unhinge any form of oppression.</P>
<P>Human strike is not a strategy and it’s not a tactic, it has always already begun when we join it because it has always been there. Politicising its protean forms is the task that we can assume: recognising it in our spontaneous and unconscious behaviours, letting ourselves be nourished by the energy that every pertinent refusal emits.
The absurdity of the crisis we are living in is nothing but the confirmation of the necessity to coordinate these gestures. Police brutality and governments’ ruthlessness can seem surprising when they shamefully present themselves as the only answer to a disaster entirely created by the ones in power.</P>
<P>In fact there is no possibility of having a dialogue with an organised power that, for the first time in many decades, explicitly betrays all over the planet even the most superficial illusion of democracy and honesty. A dialogue with the very iron fist that strangles the masses and progressively wipes out the conquests of workers’ struggles is totally impossible. What is needed is a change of nature of the subjectivities where this power plants its seeds and plunges its roots.</P>
<P>If fascism could be eradicated it is because the subjectivities that embodied it at a certain point refused to reproduce it, broke with their past, decided that a new dream of cohabitation, another idea of mankind had to be born. If fascism hasn’t been totally defeated it is because patriarchy and the colonisation of life by commodity are still our daily bread.</P>
<P>The possibilities that a concerted human strike could uncover are virtually unlimited. We cannot know what could happen if we did agree to change ourselves and change each other, because the very categories at our disposal today aren’t the ones we will use in this possible future. Human strike will change the way we have to apprehend it, it will be a psychosomatic transformation, extremely difficult to criminalise and extremely contaminating. It will not happen through mysticism, through alternative techniques of the self, through a specific training, through the reappropriation of violence, but it might also happen because of these practices, although it will not be their direct result. What is at stake is the discovery of a new intimacy with ourselves that will make us resistant to cruelty and retaliation as much as lucid in front of abuses, flexible and detached, freed from the need to follow instructions or leaders. The experience of unlearning, which is necessary to spark this change, will require the abandonment of all superstitions, including the belief in revolution or the possibility of communism as it has been dreamt of through the past couple of centuries.</P>
<P>The refusal to reproduce models of the past, to represent a position or a group, will bring a new abstraction, a new imageless practice on the scene of politics, which will connect us to the consciousness that human strike is already happening, that it happens all the time, that we just need to listen to it and play it, like one plays in an orchestra or on a stage, as we all have a place in it. And the human strike needs us as much as we need it.</P>
<DIV ALIGN="right">-- <i>Claire Fontaine,
San Francisco, November 2012</i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-80691518234351454592013-08-03T23:08:00.003-07:002013-08-19T10:07:34.549-07:00The State of Reception<blockquote>"Let us then acknowledge man a born poet. . . . Despite his utmost
efforts, were he mad enough to employ them, he could not succeed in exhausting
his language of the poetical element which is inherent in it, in stripping
it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked
stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this, but
it will only need for him to become a little better philologer, to go a little
deeper into the study of the words which he is using, and he will discover
that he is as remote from this consummation as ever."
<DIV ALIGN="right"><i>— Richard Chenivix Trench.</i></DIV></blockquote>
<p>The demand for plain-speak, that is to say, precise, clear and
distinct language, illustrates a classic example of Freud's defense
mechanism he labeled "reaction formation" – where the chance to
exercise muscles within the brainpan is viewed as an assault upon the
ego. The outcome is a clamorous invocation just begging for some
answers or a truth with easy-carry handles like self-rolling luggage at
the airport.</p>
<p>If, on the other hand, flowery speech (or its writing) is generative of what we like to
call "thinking" or "imagery" then the clear and precise or "given"
exchanges the emitter-receptor dance flowing across synapses like
slithering snakes living in sin (where the ambiguity, equivocation
and/or inversion of simultaneously experienced multiple entendre may
feel more like squirming maggots), exchanges all that for a
monotonous state of reception and regurgitation on demand. In
educational circles, this is known as the drill, on analogy with
dentistry or a terrifying tonguing into unexplored orifices. The more
(in both quantity and quality) reflective the vomitus, the higher the
score and one is said to be an independent thinker and is graduated to
the next level with or without ceremony but celebrated nonetheless –
drilling is a chore but well worth the effort for would-be authorities
as well as those out for revenge, those who are more likely to go on
themselves to become teachers or members of the so-called "helping"
professions. The result, of course, is that thinking has actually
ceased in exchange for the accumulation and systemization of thoughts
or more precisely, isolated criteria given independent status distinct
from their matrix. The process is variably qualified "objectivity" or
labeled "reification".</p>
<blockquote>'Names,' as it has been excellently said, 'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>ibid</i></DIV></blockquote>
<p>The word or name is an index or memory-as-hook in a metaphoric relation betwixt oral and/or aural cavities and sensual experience (in literature, the hook is visual, conflating that which "makes sense" with what is written). In nominalisation, the point of course, sets up the dialectic such that the criterion
as a former inhabitant is removed, ghetto-wise, from its native
habitat or territory subject to exploration transformed into a subject for exploitation.</p>
<p>It is forgotten that the former inhabitant was merely a criterion or
perspective within (in- should be a clue, but who these days considers
the words they use?) a field of perception which, if not static, is as
well a field of communication which, without imposed constraints, can
set up wakes and ripples undulating around the globe like radio waves
hurling across the black we like to call outer space. Clear and precise
boundaries limit the field of perception as distinct as a barbed wire
fence would to a cow on its way to electro-shock therapy at the packing
plant. The theory of barbed wire is like commercial fishing: the more hooks thrown out simultaneously, the greater likelihood something will be poked.</p>
<p>And they have the balls to suggest telling stories is fiction as
opposed to the truths (or select paths toward them) revealed in the exclusive halls of education.
It's a sacred place like a temple, obvious from the toll-booths facing every
entrance. A certain ambiguity may be the only thing which wakes one up
or invites a changed direction, like it was fuel for an amoral machine
or food for beasts of transformation.</p>
<p>Might it be the urge to get our stories straight (in philosophy and
religion it's called "a systematization" – whether scientific, philosophical or Thoretical) is just a sound defence in
case we're caught transgressing by some cop-like authorities? "Explain
yourself!" is rarely confused with an invitation for some mutual
wordplay or other pleasant tonguing; it's more like when the dentist
says "Open wide". That is also the point for drilling holes or minor
extraction if one recalls a mine and all things mental are a cavity,
and not always lingua-dental – we more often use the word, "abysmal".
<blockquote>Unless you can produce an appearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder only without magnificence. <i>– Edmund Burke</i></blockquote>
<DIV ALIGN="left"> – <i><a href="http://giambatistavico.blogspot.com/2013/08/free-speech-or-just-another-virus-theory.html">Free Speech?</a></i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-24332321451549014182013-07-22T10:36:00.003-07:002013-07-22T12:53:30.862-07:00Trace, Race & Ambiguity<blockquote>"From the Indin's point of view, 'white man' is not a race, it's a psycho-social disorder." <DIV ALIGN="right"><I>– Sequoia Chesterfield</I></DIV><BR>
"It is said a black white man once became a human being, but mostly they are strange creatures. Not as ugly as the white, true, but just as crazy."<DIV ALIGN="right"><I>– Thomas Berger/Dan George</I></DIV><BR>
"For it is not merely that a race of men bleached white with the failure of courage would do well with a prelaid scheme of action: they refuse to move on without one."<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Dora Marsden</i></DIV><BR>
"What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature."<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>DH Lawrence</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>It seems we're not talking about race at all in the twentieth century fashion. Recall that DNA wasn't "discovered" 'till 1956 and that was only a molecular chain synthesizing proteins from a vat of acid called the cellular nucleus somewhat resembling a chamber pot of variegated minestrone. Up to that time, Darwin's blood-born trace-as-blueprint passed from generation to generation as a mere theory subject to much discontent, compared to today – it's more passport than a postulatum – but discontent seems coming 'round again, despite the proofs of religious science and secular religion.</P>
<P>Prior to the twentieth, the argument over per- or preconceived types did not concern itself with the variability of humanity, but it's defined existence: one was either human or not human, that is, man or beast, and for the yet unconvinced, "more or less" demanded some kind of ranking. Variability applied to the animal kingdom alone – the distinction hinged upon the easily recognisable absence of a soul or for liberals, one that's charred with sin (as seen in all our children) and blackened by an unexpected (that is, immoral) action. Purity is the dentist class well washed with fluoride (or in former times, the puritans who washed their souls with spirits of turpentine or hydrogenated chloride). One could deny and in fact, change one's race by moving on to Croatan, that would entail a loss of face (and more should the patriots up and catch you – with bit and brace they'd run you through. In more enlightened times or nations the drills are used for carpentry and education).</P>
<P>The more embracive liberals spoke of race, not as a function of spiritual biology so much as inferring types of nation, culture or language or in distinguishing (it works both ways) the civilised and savage. The most embracive spoke of the human race, and were on sounder footing, considering no polly ever mated with a cracker, no human-chimp nor any catwoman babies were forthcoming but there were swells blossoming from every possible experimental reconnoiter amongst bipedal locomotives. All these senses revolve around a moral criteria concerning marriage or who gets the goods which others make while shackled to even yet another's acreage. And we learn from Romeo and Juliet, in olden times such sentiments were not of common folk but came direct from factions of the ruling regiments.</P>
<P>Elsewise, one might see a clustering of sensual aesthetics. It's oft been said a dog and its pet eventually come to resemble each other. Science gives the most ambiguous of definitions or states outright the whole affair is indeterminate or illusory. Grace value (in paid gratuities) is just the cost for saving face, sometimes in installments. A genome or a clade is just an average like the 33rd and one third state west of Wyoming. It sounds just like that language never spoken, the infamous proto-indo-european. Epigenes just posit an out-of-sex influence and genes would only express some inertia in a kind of relay. For some it might be tea leaves or a random recitation, dna analysis should work no less well than any other sort of divination (like placebo still works better than experimental medicine).</P>
<P>Of course today a race is just a cover-term for everything beyond the gates, illustrating a return to the sense existing twixt Rome and the ancient city states: it's just a word-like axiom referring to barbarians – from inside what is different describes everything that's scary. If you can't see or hear the difference, it's still there – we call it "class", just like in higher education. It's in the nature of a city or any other walled or gated community. What's unnormal to your senses, but mostly sight and hearing provides a likely subject for any proof of any pudding, most likely to be charged with any judgement such as antipatriotic or out of fashion clothing. It's the only thing that gives the normies a positive turn from their self loathing – it's a classic form of self-fulfilling prophesy learned early in the form of scientific reductivity right alongside reprisals toward one's own experimental inquiry.</P>
<P>Selection is deduced from the survival of survivors who are said to have an advantage over the dead or dying – it suggests that evolution is improved upon by escalated killing so the leap to warring states is considered native proof of a progressive evolution. But the punctuated equilibrium inferred in some biologies describes a jump or leap from one to other species, like a werewolf it concerns a transformation with the exception that there's no going back despite the moon or mushrooms in the rainy season. It may only mean that all the normies dropped dead from some catastrophe, leaving all the freaks or "meek" to carry on somewhat more congenially. Such has long been prophesied by more than one mythology. If genes are selfish, only concerned with their perpetuation, in evolutionary terms the best bet against extinction would be to mate with every freak (or the exceptional) which frequented their establishment. That, of course, presumes the gene's endowed with human ego. Colored white it thinks exclusivity's a sign of some distinction, thinking only of the nasty rebels, the course it's taken only leads to natural de-selection, given the existence of catastrophes beyond the reach of even capitalist recouperation.</P>
<blockquote>The objective rational truth that gets hauled out in defense of racial types is just as much a component of one myth as is the muskrat who swims down to the bottom of the sea to bring up some earth to plant on turtle's back a component of another. Everyday life, even in postmodern societies, does not function according to a set of codes established upon objective facts; at least, not entirely. A lot of what one does when one negotiates the quotidian (e.g., in New York or Des Moines) is active myth-interpretation, for in the end, one has to forget much in order to get anything done. Myths are stories that are comparably much more practical for integrating experience than are the raw data of biology. Were people to really pause and consider the reasoned basis for their views on race they would be thrown into a conundrum. Inevitably they would become less productive employees, for they would be compelled of their own trajectory to contemplate the reasoned basis of their society, a reflective activity that has always threatened the status quo with its revelations and subsequent disrupture. The myth of objective truth is the myth of the culture that sought the conquest of nature. It functions like a good myth ought to: it sufficiently explains the contemporary society in a favorable way that encourages an ongoing compliance with its rules and constraints. And just like a good myth, it conceals its mythical nature in a veil of truth. How very magical.<DIV ALIGN="right">– <i>Neal Keating, <a href="http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/ajoda/37/sp000786.txt">What is a Race?</a></i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>For pragmatics we have a more practical solution: a race, when not a game or competition, is just a form around a rolling pin or bearing useful for a smooth transition – from what to where is not the prime consideration, unless the sun or moon or stars as data for to catch your bearing – in which case we're on the topic of provisional contingency and dancing with affinity. Considering the variables of living, in a bazillion years there'd never be a single blended unity. There's not a single standard which can articulate a "nature" without contradicting all the others – by it's own imagination even Western reason considers rigid categories something quite absurd, but that's how lawyers win their cases and governments make laws concerning im- and emmigration. Did someone say the civilised embraces contradiction?
<blockquote><DIV ALIGN="center">When a groove enclamps a ball 'tis said it's bearing<BR>
but only when of age, a race for lube and proper caring.</DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Atka Mip</i></DIV></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-7600922133980231792013-07-16T15:41:00.003-07:002013-07-16T15:41:11.946-07:00And then it gets complicated<P>Or does it? It's very likely there never was a time when "things" were simple. History is a compressor like the piston in a steam engine where much complexity goes up in smoke, and to suppose the people back when or now are sheep-like is a good assessment, but not perhaps in the same manner that a sheep herder would present it. In fact, there's little flocking among sheep without a herder and the dog (to emphasize the point) or a farmer's imposed fences or a desert all around oases. When sheep get pissed they split in all directions (even 'cross a desert) and by the time you find a one you notice they're in small groups scattered here and there. They're also practiced in deception: they might feign contented feeding just to bore the herder into sleeping, and then they're gone before you can proceed to blinking.</P>
<P>A clever one might see a call in all this splitting, for further ratcheting our alienation. Unless defined politically expedient, amongst friends that can't describe the situation; not by any stretch of even Webster's definition. But wait a minute! If there's no way out of any state or weird condition, since fate or invisible hands are pulling strings like we're just puppet things, and surely we never asked for our surroundings, how is it that some can get together in tanks or cloisteries or ivory towers and on a whim proceed to blow us all to smithereens? It's either magic power or as Dora Marsden said, it's never just the law that people find so dear or guns and knives or spears they fear. What's in fashion is obedience itself – it appeals to authors and performers. Doesn't everyone just want to be loved? Well, sometimes we hesitate throwing bushels of tomatoes at the stage, not just out of politeness but because we feel sorry for them, like we would an aging garbageman suffering a bout of on-the-job hernia. It's the author and director hiding in the wings who need the egging. On the other hand I've seen some sheep give chase to a biting dog clear into the next state, and then returned to gentle misbehaving with a glance up at the herder as if suggesting "Make me!" On occasions horns play hell with even coyote livers. In the end, of course, like everyone the miscreants were rounded up, then sorted out and put in cans of dog food. Fido finally had his way (proved in the eating), but at least the sheep had had a day of living.</P>
<blockquote>"THE offending aspect of the pretensions of "democracy" is not that in the name of what the "majority" supposedly thinks: we are supposed to be pleased and happy to be "ruled" by a clique "for our good." Far from it, since, in truth, but few of us are "ruled" at all. It is merely our little foible to pretend we are. We give our "rulers" to understand they "rule" us because it pleases them so greatly to think they do: and then there is the consideration that a docile demeanour serves to divert their too too kind attention; probably the most servile-seeming member of a "state" the most bent upon fulfilling the role of step-grandmother fundamentally is untouched by "rule." The obedient attitude is a very convenient garb for the perverse to wear: and if the mere doing of it does not jar the temper too much, appearing to submit will define the line of least resistance to doing what, under the circumstances is what we please. Thus under the shelter of the servile demeanour there forms a residue of mulish waywardness, especially in those who appear to present their parts to receive the kicks which keep them going between gutter and cesspool: a waywardness which even more than temper succeeds in making them into a kind of clay unmeet to the hand which would govern. The great unwashed will accept the infliction of the bath which cuts a slice off the space of their limited premises with resignation and reflect that it will indeed have a use as a wardrobe and coal-place. Though they are cast down by such things they are not defeated. "Rule" slides from them, as water slides from a duck. "Rule" has effect only on those who are indoctrinated with the Dogma: those who are under the spell of the "Word." Even these – these intellectuals – are not placed in bondage by the rulers: theirs is a voluntary bondage – true freedom, according to the Word – and if they act as automata it is that they subscribe to the dogma that it is their duty to be as automata. They submit themselves to the law: because they approve not always indeed of the law, but of the attitude which submits to law.<BR><BR>
It is not therefore for its supposed prowess in the line of government that democracy's claims are obnoxious. It earns its odium through the commodity which the "rulers" offer in exchange for their investiture with authority to govern. "Rulers" appear contemptible not for what they take but what they give. That they lay hold of authority and all the ready cash which their positions render available is, if regrettable, yet tolerable: the machine will go until it breaks; the vexatious thing is that in order to become installed in their position of advantage they must needs undermine and bemuse by flattery the intelligence of those whose lack of it is sufficiently evidenced by their willingness to have truck with them...<BR><BR>
Every new creed is ninety-nine parts rechauffe of all the creeds which by virtue of its hundredth part it is supposed to supersede: the fact that the ingredients are incongruous proving no bar to such rehashing. To mince the whole to a uniform state of non-recognition where possible, and to accept whole what resists the process according to its external merits, is the method of treatment. Naturally therefore in the cult of equality-cum-democracy it is not surprising to be met with the spirit of "Noblesse oblige," notwithstanding the fact that democracy knows no "Noblesse."...<BR><BR>
A civilisation is the attempted working out of a Scheme of Salvation: a plan of escape. It is the imperfect form built up from the perfected plan which the religious philosophies of the "great" "constructive" "thinkers" of its age have projected. For it is not merely that a race of men bleached white with the failure of courage would do well with a prelaid scheme of action: they refuse to move on without one. They bleat for a Deliverer – great constructive thinker-as sheep for a shepherd. Being without prescience, without inner compelling desire, they wait to be told. The great world of audiences puts out its distracted agitated tentacles, swaying about aimlessly, dumb appeals to be told how to expend themselves, and where. Culture, training in the art of spending oneself, is the imperious necessity of the bleached race, whether lettered or simple. Life without the courage for it, is so bad a business that they must needs approach it with caution. Earth is so little to their taste that they demand the construction of a heaven. To construct the "New Jerusalem," work to the plan of the Deliverer, and make a heaven on earth is a task they can put their hands to. But to live for themselves – to lose "faith"? They would as soon not live at all...<BR><BR>
To understand why killing at times is, and at other times is not murder, one must turn not to law, but to the theory of "order." "Order" is that arrangement of things – including people – which fits in with the whim of an individual, or an individualised group. If the "order" of those who are maintained in their position of governors demands the killing of certain people, as it does in a war, in overworking to make profits, or any of the thousand ways in which the lives of the common people are jeopardised and "taken " – then "killing is no murder." It is instead, " patriotism" or "bold statesmanship." But if the common people begin to think that the ways of the governing parties are incompatible with their ideas of "order" and they take to killing: then killing is murder: double-dyed, heinous: a hideous, heart-shuddering blasphemous affront to God and man: to the universe, to "morality," to the heavenly host and all the troops of angels, and must be avenged. So, Call out the entire army and navy and see that God and the Church are bustled up!!!!! Killing then is murder and no doubt about it...<BR><BR>
"Culture" is the outcome of Gadding Minds – minds, that is, which are dull "at home," and which have fallen in gladly with the notion that there is a "Truth" which can be come at by assiduous and ingenious manipulation of phrases. They are very willing to attempt short cuts to understanding especially if they can in that way travel with a crowd of gadders like themselves. The culture-epoch of the last two thousand years will have to pass before the Searchers for Truth begin to inquire "at home ": to understand that the only things which are "true" for them are the few things which their own individual power to perceive makes them aware of through the channels of their senses. Their present habit of Hunting for Truth with thimbles and forks, anchors and care, clappers, tracts and a wild whirling sound will help them as far towards awareness as – to use an analogy we have used before – the presentation of bound volumes of the works of Darwin will help the jelly-fish up the ascent of being. The clutter of cultural concepts – mere words – are choking the frail fine tentacles of perception: preconceived notions hang as a film over the eyeballs and until they can slip the entire burden their way in life will be mad and melancholy...<BR><BR>
It is clear that the one emotion which the moralists cannot afford to permit to weaken is: Fear. (They would call it reverence, but no matter.) Whatever strengthens human fear is to them the basis of "good": because "Fear" is disintegrating, and throws its owner in submission on to the breast of any and every concept which is thrust forward and called "salvation." The moralists exploit and play upon the feeling of smallness and loneliness which is the first outcome of that sense of isolation and separateness which is called self-consciousness. It is because men are in the first place lonely and afraid, that the feebler sort move in herds and act alike: hence the growth of "customary" action: moral action. The outcry against the "immoral," i.e. the unusual, is the expression of distress of the timid in the presence of the innovation. It is the instinct which feels there is safety with the crowd and danger as well as loneliness in adventuring individually which puts the poignant note into the epithet "immoral." To be "immoral" is to be on precisely the same level as the unconventional and the unfashionable: that and no more...<BR><BR>
The commandment "Love one another" is an advance in subtlety as compared with the injunctions it was intended to supersede. It is an attempt to establish an intra-conscious police in the shape of Conscience. It is what the Webbs for instance would call a move in the direction of "efficiency in administration," as the spy-system is more "efficient" than an ordinary police-system. More efficient because more intimate, and more effective because it is easy to control actions once feeling has been surrendered under control. The favour with which the command to "Love one another" was received is evidence of the strength of the desire for neighbourly espionage and democratic control of "each by all" of which all modern legislation is but the grotesque parody in action. (Now with democracy merely an infant, "loving one another" only mildly, we control each other in the realms of marrying, being born, housed, clothed, educated, fed and similar minor matters only. When all "Love one another" with zeal our inter-neighbourly control will begin to show something of what it can be.)<BR><BR>
It is therefore quite clear what motives of economy would operate in the point of view of "Authority" in substituting "compulsory love" for "compulsory circumspect behaviour" such as the decalogue enjoins. If only universal "loving" could be made the fashionable habit, the supreme "moral," how easy the work of "leaders" would be. When individuals love one another how easily they work together: how they appear successful in overcoming the otherwise unmanageable ego. Then why not make love among the herd compulsory: and hey presto: the New Dispensation: the Christian era...<BR><BR>
The irony of the efforts of the advocates of the new dispensation to press "love" into the service of the "moral concepts" is not immediately apparent. It is customary to regard "love" as the outcome of "culture" and therefore in some special way amenable to the service of culture. It has become too much a habit of speech with the "civilised" world, i.e. the moralised idea-ised world, to look on "love" as in some sort a means of "salvation," to expect it to analyse why it does so. If it did men would realise that the explanation is the reverse of the current one, i.e. that love is the consummation of moralisation. It is in fact an effort to escape from it. The heavy incrustation of habitualised actions, i.e. morals, increases in tenacity as life goes on, forming a sort of hutch which is half shelter and half tomb. The taking on of its earlier incrustations is called "growing-up": as they grow more obviously oppressive it is called "growing old." To be "morally-minded" is to have lost the instinct which revolts against this walling-up of the changing spirit: revolt that is against either growing up or growing old. As most people are morally-minded the world is left with a tiny remnant of individuals of whom if we spoke of them in terms of time-measurement we should say ranged in age from two years to five: the people of genius and charm. The age of maturity, if we may put it like that, when all that we mean is the age at which the soul has made itself familiar with its new dwelling-place and is at its best, brightest, most inquiring and "true," is from two years to five: not twenty-five or fifty-five as the moralist would like to pretend. From five onwards the browbeating process which is called moral education begins, and as we have said only spirits which are bigger and more resistant than their would-be instructors resist it and stand firm at their height of growth. The rest are slowly driven back by "culture" to the state of automatic living which was their pre-natal existence...To introduce an attitude into a relation whose very existence is a revolt against attitudes is to snatch from the conventional what is literally his one means of salvation, and that none too certain...<BR><BR>
The characteristic of the "rebel" position is a feeling of angry temper against – something: i.e. conditions, presumably static. Now as a matter of fact "conditions" of a relative degree – precisely in that relative degree under which the agitator conceives them, are an illusion. There are conditions which men would find absolute, as for instance an explorer without food in Arctic territory: but in a "land of plenty" such as these in which the "rebel movement" is trying to make headway: conditions – static – hard and fast – are illusory, and impermanent as the blocking out of light from a room by a night's frost is impermanent. Heat the room and the window-panes clear and the light streams in. Now seemingly-harsh conditions of wealth acquiring in fertile lands with instruments of production such as we possess are as formidable as an army of snow warriors exposed in the glare of warm sun light. Conditions dissolve under the thawing influence of human initiative, energy, and temper. What is amiss, in the worst (of these relative) conditions human eye has rested upon, is not the condition: but the conditioning human quantity which has enabled it to take shape. The condition was not there first: it followed in the trail of the human beings who allowed it to settle round them as an aura; and altering the condition is not the first concern: the seat of the agitator's offending lies in his trying to persuade the "poor" that it is: the folly of the rebels is that they believe it so to be...<BR><BR>
In fact, the conclusion to which one is pressed is that we – that is the people who talk and write – take all theories, politics and propagandas too seriously: far more so than ever was intended by those who amuse themselves by such species of Sport. The permanent role of propagandists and politicians is that of public entertainer; and they stand or fall by the answer to the question, "Do they entertain?""<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Egoist_Marsden.html">Dora Marsden</a></i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>In simpler terms: Utterly, in lieu of an existing thematic social organisation, the well-fit (euphoric, meaning 'good form') juxtaposition of novel (dialogic) utterances and pantomime (dramatic performances) of a cultural mythos, a narrative pantomime of one's ethos some call "theatre", others "culture" and others yet "delusion", the novel (or themes and theses) uttered (or performed as drama) reveals a contemporaneous alternative cosmos (from Greek kosmos: 'order', 'universe', 'ornament' from Fr. 'objet') whose enduring livability is yet to be determined, but is discarded before the experiment or comparative analysis can proceed, "acting as if" one verse were a unified reality split into fact and disposable fiction, the really real and the fantastic. All argument is a fight for the superiority of one's own goods (or gods – see "spook", "phantasm") or the equivalent subsumption (appropriation) of those of others, of the others themselves. But this one mostly concerns their stylistic form over their practical, hands-on content, thus the split between science and philosophy (or physics and metaphysics) overlaps factitious documentary and fictitious narrative, cutting off the history wherein factic and fictic were once alternative expressions (exgesia) of an oral cavity on a single face regarding the same ingestive content (ingesta). In such a struggle, all possibility (potential) steps to the background until a fist (or vomitus) flies, in the end trading off possibility for a secure moral sense at no rate of interest in the sociological (also known as democratic) construction of a novel religious order.</P>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-9471611535912120242013-07-14T20:04:00.002-07:002013-07-16T08:32:12.076-07:00The Procrustean Epoch:Conspiracies in applied singularity<blockquote>Saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "for whereas, there is but one way to do nothing and divers way to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards". <DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/"></a>A. Bierce, on indecision.</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>Largely due to the inability to appreciate a sound flogging put forth by the skeptics but only after the institution of smarmy lawyers to discredit the even sounder linguistic intuitions of the sophists, the stoics prevailed behind the heels of the up-and-coming media personality, Plato. Rather than acknowledge independent thinking which might just put an end to voluntary sacrifice, stoics organized as the nouveau class of philosophers modern cynics might call sycophantic wankers, christian atheists or merely, ministers of unnatural science – that is to say, well-schooled dogmatics.</P>
<P>So the stage was set, not unhindered by the trials against impiety, for the more conservative of thinkers to fill the think-tanks with the smells of fish-like swells of the theologic systematizers who put together the first bible (still largely oral) for the growing Aegean state or region and called it Orphic Mysteries, named for the chairman of that illustrious committee, Signor Orpheus who said even bigger than that contemptuous Zeus and his afterthought, Apollo was the world creator Phanes (the name means lighthouse: "brings to light", the dude who laid the cosmic egg, that is controlled the monopoly of appearances, but in Latin it means mere image, unreality, a specter or apparition), named for a former Egyptian general who was prior, pissed off at the administration so led the Persians into alliance with the Arabs, as guides across the desert as if protecting just another caravan from unruly pirates, and entailed a hostile take-over of the Egyptian state. Some say for blasphemy Orpheus died of thunder-bolt, but the consensus said 'twas a gang of angry ladies cut his throat.</P>
<P>But back to Phanes, such seems the fate of alliances and empires who would share power. Bureaucrats must get a regular ass-licking – it's what they give so is their due – no matter how untasty or one's assured superiority. That's the lesson chairman Mao found out but all too late. The alternative is to reduce the levels of bureaucratic hierarchy to nil (impossible 'cause who would tend the til?) or avail the profitability of shill, the Public Relations Industry. JP Morgan was not just a banker, but treated information and research as if it was monopoly money – little even made it to the patent office censors without his signature. More a king or feudal duke than any smart-ass corporate puke – the rabble that he sired are the suits we all too often see today. But Phanes was more like the disgruntled bureaucrat or general-mover prone to temper tantrum, J. Edgar Hoover. The other Hoover was presidential, but like all things executive – increasingly – in name only. More properly, his only claim to fame was in his title – a little dick or nix, unsuited to J. Edgar's spittle.</P>
<P>But such things are small potatoes to the grand scheme of things, which is too far-fetched to entitle a conspiracy. The push was always hegemony of internal dependence, that is to say obedience itself, the fuel of state efficiency regardless of who's in power and what he's got to say. Empires can only reach out effectively to others by systematizing global entanglements – the trend in entropy is chaos. Such is where lawyers and other priests come in handy. The only alternative is always posed as a total global disaster,and still spun in terms of famine, pestilence or a great big solar flare. It's never mattered which ideology is in vogue, what's always concerned statesmen is that everyone is on the same page – of the hymnal, that is harmony – or playing on the same board – that would be monopoly. The field of economics is created when the currency which Milton Bradley provided in the box runs short so there's a frantic running after other currents. Exchange rates must be regulated just like irrigation water, and who better for the stand than the high priests (if certifiable) of the Order of the Invisible Hand? Oih!</P>
<P>But Hegemony is an unrealistic ideal even in the tightest system. In every dialectic, there are the bleeding heart but smarmy running opposition to the conservative but slightly stupid, well trained in aristotelean sentiments (or Babylonian religion), yet straight forward and foolhardy, they'd rather destroy the world on principle than be caught with their pants down jamming their torpedoes with the throttle set to full. It's why unitarian dictators rarely last more than a season, the two party system has since become indispensable. Plato's Republic slightly tempered with a little Aristotle. It's based on ancient marriages which ran on one or four or eight year cycles. By the time it comes around again, no one remembers, well-hid are all the little infidelities: "Thank the gods for rehab; this time will be different...he's our man!"</P>
<P>Like the greek patriarchs before had imposed a patrilineal genealogy onto diverse myth-time figures from different regions and changed the way that time is reckoned from a moon-year lasting 13 months (with one day off recovering from the party) which effectively took the meat out of stories useful to calculating diverse topographies as well as changes in the seasons, when and where the deer are there for all the meat eaters or some peppercorns, wine and taters for the veegers, Orpheus systematized a single rendering and came up with a greek religion not unlike christianity, specifically the catholic church from Constantine to Augustine, that saint named for the emporor, so in the end, based less on pastoral Greek than the Roman tax collector. Yet they were still working on the Classic Greek detournement in the fifth century ad., then after sixteen more centuries perfected by Hollywood and DC comics, should the neopagans ever take the revolution. Either way, as has been, will again be said "let them eat cake" which is a euphemism for old weevil-infested bread and the circus is just what is circular in any revolution – that is to say many casualties. What's changed in all this time is we've got not so many horses in our cart, plastic coin and everywhere a wall-mart.</P>
<P>The Byzantine think-tanks were more suited to restoring, not a greek democracy but imperial Rome which, contrary to public opinion, incurred some setbacks but never underwent a collapse. What's racist in the faux victories of the Gothic over Latin is that Bismark's heir or even an emir couldn't make an appearance as a distinguished roman citizen. What's common to the modern view in Agean, Judeo-christian and Islamic is the utopean platonic synthesis of republic mixed with a dash of Aristotle (the Islamic prophet and father of all atheistic science) together with Apollo (carried forth by christians in the figure of Roman Paul, no longer manly god but, like Orpheus, his smooth-talking – the word in French is where we get english parliaments – the gods' publicist and apostle).</P>
<P>Having successfully demised everything mysteriously pythic in Delphi before Apollo (like St Patrick) slew the snakes, by Mohamed's time everyone worth noting (that is, the patriotic) was already patriarchic. Of course today we don't speak of empires, and global village has had its day, and world-democracy is gasping for its final breath, the word that sounds so hip and intellectual is "singularity". But it's just another metaphor meant to draw our heads to hyper-sucking black holes or Borgs who look really scary.</P>
<P>If the verse was all so simple and straightforward and not multiply diverse or hectic in principle, there'd be no sense in science, philosophy and religion except as diversions into absurdity from all the endless monotony – but then we're led right back into it. And even if it's true there's not much anything that one can do to make everything better, there's just too much pressure, no imagination or wonder, we learn from Emerson that one can at least choose their own influences. This must be obvious given so many conflicting stories or perspectives as to fuel each version in explosive argument. There're still stories afloat unconcerned with any antagonistic polity or concrete (if "green") integument.</P>
<P>As to the claim that capital, or whatever current avant garde of civilisation, encompasses the earth so without deflector shields and warp drive, "out" is rendered meaningless, it's plain the claimant's head's already liberated but its body is stuck in the mud that's called the general economy. They might as well stick with Marx or Adam Smith for company. We heard that science is criticised as too reductionistic and justice and religion were just purveyors applicating blame but only slaves were blameless in their supplication. Isn't a conspiracy just sticking to whatever is in fashion? If only one avenue leads to truth or too much dam(ned determi)nation, every other way is radical, the root (one might say "route") to safety or salvation. Only the righteous call a field of possibility disorder and/or chaos. They only hold their nose because it smells like teen spirit, and that's not bad, it's just embarassing – every one knows deep down they had ejected prematurely. It may be the ever-rousing truth is what needs routed, and for the nihilistic bent the alternative is nothing: how can one get lost if there's no rigid plan for where we're headed? Procrustes' path gets everybody busted.</P>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-34656801632839216402013-07-05T18:06:00.001-07:002013-07-07T15:20:11.166-07:00The rule of consistency and free association are confused<P>Radicals as well as mental health 'workers' and social reformers have long efforted to expose the hypocrisy or contradictions (both collectively and individually) which modern society holds. Such is the long drive toward reason or rationality: "Headway". Unfortunately, this completely ignores the compartmentalization which rationalism requires lest it burst out with waves of absurdity. A brief look around will show most folks are not rational creatures except as pertains to the particular box they reside in. An historical look will return the impression that, of any form of enlightenment (and not just in the manner of a universal), the projects have all ended in failure. As B. Laska concluded, "we cannot be enlightened".</P>
<P>Social movements proceed much like Kuhnian paradigms, whose transformations merely result in the construction of new compartments after the old-timers are dead. The "What's the alternative?" question is loudest in the midst of the transformation or period of instability. Any truly radical change is therefore, and from almost any rational stand, deemed impossible. Then I'd like to ask, "why stick with reason?" This shaky status is only the ground for a grand systemic recuperation.</P>
<P>The "reason" is always given in a most circular fashion, "it's the only game in town!" The theory of inertia is no help at all. A game is just the rationalization of play, and one might think it just an excuse. The game is not even in the same compartment as play, and when I affix the adjective, "free-", one might consider there is a point made, but surely not a "win" even when it has to be admitted that everyone else seems to be cheating. It's a moral complaint like red meat in some circles or too much salt or deep-fat fried potatoes. The field of free-play is chaos, and that is the zone of free association where despite one's intention, up comes a surprise – sometimes it's pleasant.</P>
<P>Another way to put it, as Huizinga suggested when he said that play annihilates logic or reason, what really comes about is a de-compartmentalization – nothing's been broken but boundaries and some questionable connections which were beforehand well hidden. Intuitions are released from categorical constraints so, in distinction to gaming, the field of play is as infinite as the number of tunes to be played on a piano. Traditions or habits may follow you like the wind in a dust storm, but not like bullets unless no one else is playing, and then, watch out!</P>
<P>The poetic and mythic equally admit no discourse but the metaphoric (in it's most broad or non-technical sense) or contextual (rather than comportedly departmental). Dada suggested that only the juxtaposition of the habitually unsuitable will trigger the imp of perversion or bullshit detector. It's much less damaging than the shock required which might just come to instantly marry them. Like the young boy patriot who hates the government for its persistent treading (and so much he has heard) does not see the problem with joining up to fight its other enemies until he's been basically trained, and he's likely transformed, but into what we'd have to consider. If not in the gutter, a cop or good husband and wife-beating father? Whatever, they promised good jobs or an education, should he survive his commitment. The heightened chance of losing the gamble brings on the reply, "I'm a man so I'm not afraid to die so stop fucking with my decision to try!" And in this he'd be right and we've completely lost the topic. Percy Shelly's rhymes in Anarchy could probably provide better argument or at least a more child-friendly playfield with other sorts of portal to adventures.</P>
<P>From some point of view, logic is never logical. Make it tighter? Would this boy see the "logical error" of his ways when presented with a mathematical formula? Likely not. When under attack, even a mathematician will defend a position, no questions asked. This is why they invented irrational and imaginary numbers. It's less ego defensive than against all that's chaotic or absurd and the rest will appeal to authority, celebrity or otherwise the WORD as "revealed". A random montage might be better than Shelly since chaos has no orders to persuade, so observing it may actually be thought safe, at least from a distance or until you've been made.</P>
<P>More likely, there's already occurred, through a "proper" upbringing, a linguistic death of the "private reflection" where "everything's disconnected anyway". Well, that's not quite what we mean by chaos today. Like Tim Burton, the one-time rebel director (you can tell by the gothic and unruly hair), had the balls to attach his name to a view of the Yanks as protecting their station from evil Rebs who were fighting to up-bring a vampire nation. It's likely no Tenessee boy who died young had ever raised a colonial pillar. Or Alice returning from Underland to bring in free trade and industrialize China. Any descendant of Jim Bridger or Ghengis Kahn should really resent every 'foregone conclusion and all the implications they raise! Like every Ozark granny who lived in a shanty could wisely advise, "don't count yer hens a'fore hatch'n".</P>
<P>Haven't they already proved themselves bloodsucking nightmare creations? The same one's who say that anarchy is ever the plague of society! With all the payments of commitment and duties, they can't even guarantee you'll not be drained with your needle on "empty". Or like ol' honest Abe, whose pre-fabled station was prosecuting slaves to be returned to plantations and only reluctantly went abolition and thought up the final solution: invade Nicaragua and send them all there, or maybe Liberia as dummy farm workers just like off-shore corporations, oh what a wonder – full commutation of every sentence which might be uttered. Four score before was Grandfather Jefferson, who, praising the 'Injuns' said "unfortunately, every last one of em's in our way". Just who are they calling an Indian giver? It's fucking unreal, that's all I can say!</P>
<P>As to the potential for system collapse, the embrace of hypocrisy which Mark Twain suggested is the foundation of every civilization should guarantee a survival. But without the truths to be juxtaposed, and all the prophets to be made, just where in hell might that be? There may be no alternative to what we've been given, that is, except actually living (and we're not just referring to making it).</P>
<P>Often confused with the world of the dead, what's really real is everything else, or what's left outside the (compartmentalized) "known" or better yet, guesses and labels – inconsiderate of letters, its literary symbol is <B>...</B></P>
<p>-- see <a href="http://giambatistavico.blogspot.com/2013/07/time-loves-genetic-parody.html">Time & Genetics</a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-31604986959868726522013-07-04T11:27:00.002-07:002013-07-04T11:27:46.426-07:00Mythic Discourse<P>In mythic discourse, one could say everything, in its broadest sense, which is also to say each ambiguity comes in threes. Charles Peirce, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Asger Jorn are three moderns who re-claimed the excluded middle. Perhaps unaware of Baudelaire and Jarry, Charles Fort down-right expropriated it. Charles Fourier had to re-invent it, lassoing a gift from an honest giraffe and casting it into the future. In binary systems, the third is always attached to that which is ignored or excluded, as in the modern assessment, 'there's no way out'. Where acknowledged, the middle is average, derivative or unoriginal and mundane, undecided or wishy-washy. and in this sense, still excluded, even though it may be only a position of disinterest, it's often given a negative moral attachment such as "tasteless". It seems there are no unitary systems. Even democracy includes the good, true and beautiful and then there's everyone else, that is, "those kind of people". But in all eliptical thinking such as mythic discourse, there are three important points: two shifting centers and a recursive periphery. Avant garde thinking considers the periphery an obstacle or resource.</P>
<P>Myth-time proposes a space or an epoch from which we emerged, at least wherein times must have been better. In myth-time the mythic is grander than false. Without it, (and without a doubt), the justice delivered between the good and the evil is placed on any innocent bystander who happens your way. Excluding the middle or trimming it off (the dialectic of science, whether reductive or not) in the interest of the synthetic (which almost everyone deep down understands is artificial and overly complex) ensures a world we call "reality" of perpetual opposition (we call that progress). There are three ways to approach any mythic discourse: 1. literally; 2. the reversal or mirror, and 3. the leap or stretch which might lead anywhere.</P>
<P>For example, from the film "White Men Can't Jump", there is 1. the literal basketball reference; 2. the inversion represented by reverse racism; and 3. the actual leap, or idea that moderns, with their plodding feet ever on the ground in search of reality, can't make the leap to the third option which is sort of transcendental and certainly intuitive. Even when accepting the tripartite situation, we, like Freud dealing with Shakespearian choices, tried to pick the right choice, that is, the real meaning of the story, it's "truth" like an art critic who thinks the original intention of an artist can be revealed by dissection. Forgetting that the discourse comes from a "golden" age or Fourian reality and therefore unhinged from temporal inclinations (the point of triangulation actually circles around declinations) and it comes in the form of poetry, every interpretation is simultaneously and equally correct, it's just not euclidean so there's no contradiction, and even when there is, there's no either-or about it. As well, authorship is inconsequential except in its hollywood-esque revisions. Even so, and assuming they're just stupid or lying, something mythically grand and thematic survives and the periphery or audience or onlooker is revealed as the real art critic.</P>
<P>Every option or choice can be a mirror or telescope and Ravena may just have been Snowhite's sister or mother or grandmother assisting a ritual initiation becoming a maiden from childhood, including the coma or a ritual death. There's always an ambiguity in drawing the line between nursing and chemical assassination, with words or with looks. In the sequel, of course, Snowhite will become Ravena for somebody else. Woody Allen might have called it "In Love and Death" and we'd have a completely other rendition. The point is there are so many themes (Themis was goddess of social organisation) the fun in anthropology is not just observing but comparing them. Stories, on the other hand, invite one to jump in and if only for a moment, feel like you're in them – in the process, you've transformed, or become an other.</P>
<P>Freud's three "caskets" of course, all lead to the truth, which for the modern position is invariably death. But the first door is closed, the truth can't be known in the modern or biblical sense, that sense when considering, for example, marriage, in which the door would allude to the post menopausal grandmothers. The middle door slams behind you, your fate is sealed by total immersion, like suicide or foolhardiness. On the other hand the postpartum mother has delivered the future already, so your part is already inconsequential. The first door is for the morally righteous or curious but persistent. The second is for those without a backup plan, who may well come to know the proverb which advises "be careful what you wish for". The third door is taken as it will stay open, but mostly brings forth post menses maidens and that makes the suitor part of the future. Behind that door lies all manner of possibility, and that is authentic wealth. Still, one must beware of the past which surely will follow. Though Freud was right that death waits behind every door, so where's the choice? Mythic discourse is never straight forward. The choice is not between boxes, it only lives beyond the third door or out of that box. The third way the allusion is to the eternal return which lives amongst endless possibility. There is birth there as well, and that is the lesson myth-time will tell. Fate didn't used to mean doom and gloom, but sometimes alluded to good fortune. The other allusion is laid out as plain as can be in the Kalevala (the story, not what was on tv) and that was "At one time in the interest of grandkids, we didn't sell off our children, no matter the highest bids!"</P>
<DIV ALIGN="left"> – see <i><a href="http://insipidities.blogspot.com/the-ineluctable-im-stepping-through_19.html">The ineluctable:</a></i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-85977217549223936152013-06-30T13:44:00.001-07:002013-06-30T16:12:20.481-07:00The Rule Of Thumbs: Of Seventy-two Trivia, Seven terms are amoural and two are confused<dir><div align="center"><em>With no blood and no guts it's linguistic diversion.<br>Not a lemonade ocean, the Utopean vision lies in<br>the hyphen twixt Uto-aztecan and west european.</em></div></dir>
<ol><li><i>Virgin</i>: a sensual being come into a world which makes no sense 'less it's chaos, that is, <i>in potentia</i>, something to taste, otherwise it all seems downright dangerous. Raised as a princess or atop a pedestal, the world comes to you without question, or you take it away – no feeling's mutual. Raised under your boot gives the self-same result – either way "the world is shitty". The point's they're both prisoners riding conveyors for assembly and boxed up and sorted away. Unbeknownst to the moderns, no body ever was born a resource like clay, a product to finish or naughty, despite all the shit that they lay.
<br><br></li><li><i>Culture</i>: is just common sense, or repeated attempts to provide it, originally by mothers and childhood friends, by whatever means can be pulled from the kit, there giving courage or for the germane, a germanic mut, it's all the same. Without a doubt even doggies will do it. When the girls get together and mimic procedures, one could say, were they catholics, they're just wearing their habits, but mostly they're stories that travel the land, just like when a cowboy becomes an old hand. Like taste, experience is naught without trying.
<br><br></li><li><i>Mores</i>: an olden-time word for customs, not just trivial, in fashion, but iterations of vibrations worn like folds in a performing fabric. A bit of trivia (meaning by way of three or a trinary crossroad) from the middle of tera, the collective of three mothers was known as the Moirai, in Persia was Peri, in english the context, the peripheral area that is your surroundings – brings forth or it cuts off your fate. Maybe invective, it's what carries and gives you the "v" in subjective. A moral's a theme or the gist of a story and that is expansive. Begetting big its, the righteous give shrinkage: binary morality will imprecate all that is body, that is to say 'specially below-the-head senses, all excremenses and let's not forget good old amoure.<br><br>
What could be next? The reverse most would think: "<i>amoral</i>" lives past the begotten context or tastes something new that's inviting – peripherally it just means innovative. What most mean to be saying's "<i>immoral</i>" – Immorality's everything outside the city or any rigidity, and that's why it usually rhymes with mortality. It implicates death, an abuse of conserving, like "if it's all not our story then it's no story at all – whatever's to learn will be given, so don't give me no more of your snivelling!"
<br><br></li><li><i>Short term memory</i>: the inertia of sensing. Everything else is either drilled in (a habit) or art reconstructed if not a big shock stuck on looping (inducted). Then there's denied, ignored or excluded "phantasia", almost any excuse is good for amnesia. Memory is always a creative urge, so recall must be colored by the dream or ideal. Writing it down don't make it real. If they're looking for truths, no one can track 'less you start out with answers and then give the proofs (but only if time will allow). Should you give them the moral, the story's no use 'cause the point is for poking and bloody abuse. Just follow the orders or make an excuse. Otherwise, distinguishing morals from stories may be the extensivest ruse. Besides that, it's just plain, old fashion rude.
<br><br></li><li><i>Ideal</i>: sensations invite repetition like a bobbling buoy or booby, a lighthouse or road-sign that's pointing to all points of interest, at least those that are inviting. Or t'other way around where-in danger abounds – lines in the sand are just writing. Sometimes obsessive, it's never compulsive, like a harmless addiction to patterns of sounds. In the present it's everything given or shared – the thing's less important than ever the giving. In other words, taste, less concern with the past ('less it's cooler) than con-joining (a juggle) a future worth living. When they can't see the humours or don't get the joke, they repay you with facts that are "<i>real</i>". In old Norway you're sent to the yoke for a spell (Oh wait, they still do that in Jersey!). Like, what's so funny about blood and fluids and gaseous emissions you're tempted to toke or put off an off-puting smell or you're broke? The mysterious "they"? They're offending folk, like the angels and genis who nuked our Bikinis. No matter the duct tape they stick to yer teeth, the narrative insects implanted in ears or beneath the puss-oozing wall-screens infecting yer dreams, except paranoia they make for their meals, they can't put a dent in how everyone feels. Ain't more what is meant by that word, "ideal", it's no joke, it's a blast where such gods are ass-ended, that is them and thar's go all up in smoke?
<blockquote>With balls to announce just who is insane, "Bring it on" spake the bush 'fore it burst into flame. <br><br>Quoth the ball-rag with a match and the kerosene dripping, with a bit of a twist, "take care of your wishing, yer likely to get it" so sayeth Sutr.<br><br>It's not just for Gypsies, it's a Utopean curse, when it's sung with some feeling, mettle from gutters like in Phoenix a'flutter from the ashes of the excluded, the middle-third verse.<div align="right"> – <i>Madame Blatsky</i></div></blockquote>
</li><li><i>Creation</i>: Literally, it means making meat. In fact it's a meeting of muscles and sinews in vats that are seathing. Whether wuthering weather is just decomposing or grounds for the moving with seasons, you might think it's nice, but old Epicurus would say "I think it needs spice". Grandmother World (or the earth if you'd rather), with the help of her sisters, the rainy and windy (or maybe urainus from flatulent aether) and some fire and lightning, after making a meal of orange sunshining, a mana from heavens, maybe her forbearers, digests with a rumble, or some say a tumble and shat out some mud, that original excrement sprouting a bud. Since during that epoch, hell meant a mound or whatever's inland and Helen was princess of tall vegetation, to this day some think that earth mother is cruel, the domain of satan, a confusion of "shat on" with ga-elic saturn and arab shaitan<sup>[1]</sup> or what is to come from a lengthy gestation, one way or t'other erupted some fashion, a nation, the mistaken translation of all divination – what's muddy is hell under irrigation. Now all ways are coursed with precision, some clarity as well as distinction, but few, you will find, can tell shit from shinola or spam.
<br><br>Before that (or later) the trickster, her son (or was it a daughter instead? well them days for things immaterial so much didn't matter, or so old granny had said), fashioned the beings by shaping the mud. The proof of the trickster, even today is every time you notice small creatures at play. What was missing was fire cause all they could eat was the plants and each other with much indigestion and should the sun settle, they'd go and expire and turn back to clay from a cirrhotic liver. Now a grown-up is someone who can play with fire.
<blockquote><div align="center">Come on baby light my fi-ah.<br>
Send me to my heart's desi-ah.<br>Try to set the night on Fi-ah!</div><div align="right"> – Jim Morrison</div></blockquote>
Incendiary eating and sex, so hard to distinguish since one goes to such lengths to envelop another, was a fortunate mistake or unlikely abstraction since everyone knows the trickster gets bored (there's limits to any attention) so does nothing at all in a timely fashion. Unless put into tales, it's just babies who make one immortal. But that one's the story of birds and the bees – you can see for yourself if you peek through a portal and be very careful should you up and sneeze – should they catch on to your sneaking they're all apt to leave us, like o'r-sated leeches, such is of old Merlin and what Heisenberg teaches.
<br><br></li><li><i>Tale</i>: something you follow or what follows you – for the ear, proper spelling is never a clue except that at one time folks weren't so hell-bent on making distinctions and other dissections for making you grovel – however you smell it, a spade's just a shovel – at the top of the food chain are worms and some beetles who'll eat you up just to raise some more hell.
<br><br></li><li><i>Shrewd</i>: In Sanskrit, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Aruti"><i>sruti</i></a>, which is literally the word of a mouth, so I've heard, is considered divined out of chaos or beneath the subconscious, in more psychoanalytical terms. Feelings, archetypes, intuitions, vague memories of vaguer old stories. Stand-offish science objects "It is written!" and they're right in a sense but they follow it's tradition as long as it's spoken objectively and the younger must always proceed from its elders like all things genetical. One identifies true offspring only by attending to the inheritance of property. Surely not shiites, they all went to SUNY! Now who is ambiguous when "objective" is simultaneously a material particle, it's detached observer and somebody else's bullshit detector? Before there was pencils and microphones, there was never a word jump-starting the world, unless god was created in the image of men. It may be all jive, but everyone knows that the whirling began with the likes of Khadijah in the year five hundred and fifty-five!<br><br>
But where your gut leads you ain't always to truth – that's whatever's swallowed without puking. Where there is a question, divination precides over a reconstruction, the order of words or the calculation, unless of course, it's all just a matter subjective for further experimentation – "In the beginning was invented two lips. It may suck, but the tongue was discovered for tasting!" First principle of poetic interpretation is not babble – it's dada – and only encourages get-up and go. More toothy than dental, less incisive than insightful, it's rarely exclusive, except when it's sent off to school, where the measure of ecological relationships is the same as the steps between eight-ball and pool.
<br><br></li><li><i>Smarts</i> (<i>Smriti</i> 're-collected tradition'): a sometimes-useful fiction like book learning, being both incisive and exclusive (ignoring the context looks's more like a purging), so it sometimes hurts as it is the primer for laws and for rules for every behavior (and all look at somebody else for to blame). The juxtaposition of shrewdness and so-called smarts creates Octavia, the way of eighths (it's multiply divisible within certain circles but there's no room for jazz in a major scale), so ever confusing "authority" with "guesswork" and else-wise and when-ways "to fabricate". But isn't the blues from excessive beating?<br><br>
There's a third position that's often excluded for reasons we suspect are defense mechanism, as if to suggest there's much agency in a cybernetically arranged information that's an inverted heat sync called Sir Gray Matter Brainy with inputs and outputs and feedbacking fibers processing data like rigged pinball machines, but we've lost our ball bearings or spring in the wallop. Whatever is said of reality, our world's just an aftershock of generalized bumbling, which is to say chaos is mother. Culture is just a collection of stories. Rivals for cultural authority, "Show me the data" they're likely to say. Without rules of enclosure, there's no information – data's whatever you happen to use for an over-expedient explanation. By accident, force or tricks and deception, the "data" will fit into any system. A system is fine, as long as it's open. To plug up the scheme, you've just made religion. Try to inflate it or make it much neater and comes Ouroborus, the world eater, and finite and infinite aren't just outside-in, from some points of view they're just more o' the same.
</li></ol><hr align="center" width="25%">
[1]: Shaitan, if you're Hindi, a name for a boy, who carries a torch for Lucinda or Venus or following Saturn, in a sense Dyonesian but it means an affectionate and giving demon with a rambunctious urge for some free expression. Sometimes it's too much but ya can't shut him up. In Islam, a genius who doesn't bow down to the patriarch, Adam, the author of particles proceeding to sink and then drown all the waves in the proverbial drink. Like Helen's father had slaughtered her daughter to settle the weather and stirring the seas for proceeding to conquer, all for heeding her taste rather than complete the transaction, to the highest bidder and the king's satisfaction. The story was likely constructed beforehand, a ruse to excuse what was already planned. Like the void was invented to abolish the egg, excluding all mothering. Man, what a scheme! 'cause nobody prior paid tribute to nothing. Ever since then the war-cry of profits, <i>creatio ex nihilo</i> or "Somethin' fer nothin!" was heard through the land – most folks understand it was only a scam. Boys will be boys only when they're believers (that is, when they're or there're polices). What became sacred duty was once just a feast, is now over-paid to one or more gods, begetting both sacrifice and beating the odds, and everyone else is still starving. And still they insist "t'was girls caused the problem!" With thumb up the ass and head in the phylum, it's a living assylum. If any's to blame, I'd say it's not eve, it's the void and that little, cantankerous, wanker named atom and all of them cards which fell from his sleeve.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-27205542022937862802013-06-21T12:57:00.002-07:002013-06-21T12:57:50.776-07:00The witch's promise was coming<P>Like Ulyses, Poe's tyrant Tamerlane discovered way too late that the future's not what you've bought and paid for, not by any means of currency or blood. It's bad enough expecting much from our commodities, one must also be careful what you wish for. Like product quality, and given the morality of efficiency, repulsive dystopias are just easier to design, construct and defend. Without a destination in mind which may require more than cognitive maps, utopia is just a direction, anything but here is out. Like in grade school I watched the clock to hurry up and get to three. It's just a turning point and not a compass.</P>
<P>Like major depression, mediatic education can only claim a victory as bloody as Odysseus' slaughter if one comes to see outside the pit of eternal stench, the air is even fouler. Maybe let's not throw out utopia just yet – as long as we remember it's the way and not the product (line or destination) even when the most shocking idea has always been productive termination. Need we be reminded again that taking the journey is everyone's fate and destiny? This is not an invitation to stand still (in line or in formation) to purchase an ounce of immortality. Sustained development is the fuel for a commodity without a shelf-life. That's a utopic destiny called heaven for gods alone – and aging democrats who expect at every whim the world will come to them. And need we be reminded that a haven's just a resting spot or free hotel and not the end? They say that hell is only as hot as you can make it. They also say that should be enough for anyone! As to Tamerlane, who set out to conquer and suppress the world as a gift to his high school sweetheart<B>:</B></P>
<blockquote><DIV ALIGN="center">
Lend me your ear while I call you a fool.<BR>
You were kissed by a witch one night in the wood,<BR>
and later insisted your feelings were true.<BR>
The witch's promise was coming,<BR>
believing he listened while laughing you flew.<BR><BR>
Leaves falling red, yellow, brown, all the same,<BR>
and the love you have found lay outside in the rain.<BR>
Washed clean by the water but nursing its pain.<BR>
The witch's promise was coming, and you're looking<BR>
elsewhere for your own selfish gain.<BR><BR>
Keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be,<BR>
well, you're wasting your time,<BR> they're not stupid like he.<BR>
Meanwhile leaves are still falling,<BR>
you're too blind to see.<BR>
<BR>
You won't find it easy now, it's only fair.<BR>
He was willing to give to you, you didn't care.<BR>
You're waiting for more but you've already had your share.<BR>
The witch's promise is turning, so don't you wait up<BR>
for him, he's going to be late.</DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Jethro Tull,</i> The Witch's Promise</DIV></blockquote>
<P><B><Big>"</Big></B><em>The incredible thunderbolt of a propelling idea suddenly
surges up from the grey monotony of everyday life. A desire to be beyond the
abyss, well beyond it.</P>
<P>...the real movement is rediscovering the explosive potential of utopia. It is acting in such a way that its radical critique of the process of recuperation cannot be recuperated. It is not by chance that this position has appeared at the same time as economic claims are diminishing in importance. There equality was seen as the result of the repartition of produced value beyond the endemic division between capitalists and proletarians. But we are sure that any society that were to pass more or less violently from capitalism to post-revolutionary socialism through the narrow door of syndicalism would necessarily be a grey parody of a free society. The heavy trade union self-regulating mechanism with its ideal of the good worker and the bad skiver would be transferred to society as a whole. The students have faced the problem of the impossibility of any outlet in the labour market. But their analysis strengthens (or should strengthen) the conviction that only with a radically utopian way of seeing the social problem will it be possible to break through the boundaries of a destiny that those in power seem to hold in their hands...</P>
<P>Why, one might ask, are we so sure of the revolutionary content of an idea that, after all, has moved with varying fortunes in the world revolutionary sphere for at least two hundred years? The answer is simple. The propulsive value of a concept cannot be understood in social terms if one limits oneself to examining existing conditions. in fact there is no causal relationship between social conditions and a utopian concept. The latter moves within the real movement and is in deep contrast to the structural limits that condition but do not cause it. In the fictitious movement on the contrary the same concept can move around comfortably. Here in the rarefied atmosphere of the castle of spooks the utopian concept, having lost all its significance, becomes no more than a product of ideology like so many others. Research into the causes of utopia or rather utopian desire could certainly be interesting but would give poor results if one were to limit oneself to the study of the field of the social and historical conditions in which the concept suddenly appears.</P>
<P>For this reason we cannot outline the limits of a presumed operativity of a utopian concept starting from these conditions. It could go well beyond the latter, in other words could itself become an element of social change...</P>
<P>The strength of the utopian concept multiplies to infinity at precisely the moment in which it is proposed, so long as it emerges within the real movement and is not an ideological plaything within the fictitious one.</em><B><Big>"</Big></B>
<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/Alfredo_M._Bonanno__Propulsive_Utopia.html" target="new">Propulsive Utopia</a> (Alfredo M. Bonanno)</i></DIV>
<P>Battaile called the "real movement" the "intimate order" and is not confined to the fiction department at the local library. Order is isolation and exclusion, which are simply two views on the same process – one from the inside and one from the out. But this only applies to a mechanical universe. A common mistake is to shout the name of chaos at everything unlinear, like apples in eyes and pies in the skies. Intimacy outside the confines of mere proximity points our ears toward affinity, and that must entertain a notion of aesthetics or it's just hear-say or a game of follow the leader or connect the dots, not to put too fine a line on the matter. In artful things, only an aristotle or rockefeller would want to set a standard for everyone else's taste. That really only makes the profit margins more predictable and big.</P>
<P>What is the difference between finite chaos and infinite complexity? In linear terms, it's always where you draw the line. Finite chaos is in the order of a bomb going off or the death of an individual or, in more galactic terms, an epic or a pox-ecliptic, or even epoch-elliptic revelation like a supernova, or big bang as a creative urge, even if always in need of further evidence for any sound determinism. Even capitalists understand a sound investment relies or lies again on some insider information – otherwise it's just a gamble. It wasn't a call for deeper cuts or further articulation when they use to say "seeing is believing", it's just that if you can't trust your senses, why bother with another's?</P>
<P>A mirage is no lie by evil senses, the mistake is just their misinterpretation, sometimes a distortion. If taken as auspicious message of a by-passing phantom, it's still food for thought if not a later-than-expected materially metabolic satisfaction. The line between a taste bud and a spud is always wiggly. The phantom only bids you try it. How else could you know to change direction or keep moving without the curiosity (once called bravery) to engage with what may be only an illusion, wishful thinking or a hearty meal?</P>
<P>Everything's provisional. It's why without the security of a bird in the hand, a free gift must arouse the trust detector. If there's any sense in reductionism, the mammary gland is a give-away for all mammalian babies. Before religious orders, god and darwin, there were no orphans. What's inherited genes or property got to do with anything when every child knows a mother's not only one who satisfies your belly but makes you giggle. A smarmy ass-licker is only interested in excrement or caca. He's a phony. If only to preserve a sense of integrity, even an untrained monkey will call bullshit and hurl, or freely give him what he wishes – sometimes there's room to take the metaphoric quite literally so might refrain from criticising bricks hurling through bank windows. It's not immoral violence like playing with your food or barfing on your shoulder, just some freedom of expression. If malicious, what the devil? it's conditions made them do it! Any way, who's complaining, the glass or the banker?</P>
<P>Data, of course, must refer to sense data or an echo from another receptor which we refer to as literature and tall tails. Or it's a harmony between a sight and what one smells. Beneath the data is ground, making archaeologists and potato farmers and all variety of critics the most suitable scientific fodder by virtue of digging up the dirt. For the dead, it's no great concern but for soon-to-be live beings, it's a premature extraction by an all-to greedy or impatient or conformist (in other words, a sleeping) obstetrician.</P>
<P>Once upon a time phenomenology was the word which said to only trust your senses 'cause the further from that phenomenon called "data", you'll need some stronger lenses. With polytics and other seizures, metaphysics and religion are for the ownership of reality when they ask what underlies the data. That, of course means more theory or systematised ideas and it's the more arrogant among them who proclaim reality is nothing BUT a set of grand ideas, the numbers or go on to invent an absolving god-creator, a tool to absorb them their mundane responsibilities (only meaning here, the ability to dance, that is, respond) and then to take the blame for their cooking the books instead of cattle and thence and then again with much destruction, created poverty.</P>
<P>The christians added heaven as an unearthly reward for intentional starvation and toil in the here and now. Or so said Mark Twain. To this day, even atheists consider reward as just the temporary withholding of punishment and call that humane treatment. Humanity always justifies the ghettos with more humanity. Truant workers call it leave which is the only opportunity to live, as if by someone else's permission, learned early on with the proprietary grammatical distinction between may and can. Life itself has become affixed to utopian idealism when all that's left is a virtual simulation. Fortunately, our ancestors were skeptics when they coined the word "lies" to apply what lives beneath the gods' ideas – beneath the ground the only sounds are heard from corpses. D. H. Lawrence only said reality is only found the other side of Benjamin Franklin's barbed wire fences. In other words, "beauty's coming out of the box" is all was meant by all apocalypses. Shelley said Pandora was a godess for all-giving. The problem wasn't what came out, according to Promethius, but what was missing, and for that he lost his liver and Atlas dropped the ceiling.</P>
<blockquote><DIV ALIGN="center">As I went walking I saw a sign there<BR>
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."<BR>
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,<BR>
That side was made for you and me.</DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm" target="new">Woody Guthrie</A></I></Div></Blockquote>
<P>The thing about receivers and emitters is when they resonate or dance together and then you can't tell one from the other, and you shouldn't lest they fall away. An harmonic can ring truer (which in auditory language means beautiful) than either end and everyone with taste or ear for it prefers a good harmony over a monotone or loud cacaphony. So for immersion or participant observers, the real data lies not beneath but amongst or in between them. What makes sense for Goethe is a portrayal of the context, not a systematic explanation or in architectural terms like syntax, an arrangement of its constituents. Olmec Masons understood that leaders are the ones who cut the corners. From the stone's point of view, it's all just falsification of data to fit someone else's scheme to build enclosures. Any good story either resonates with your experience or peaks your curiosity for exploration. That's all. The social agreement is for commisurating retirees always complaining about the youngsters.</P>
<blockquote>“A ‘cause’ (or gene) is something without which some ‘effect’ (or character) which you expect
fails to occur, while something else occurs instead. To turn the sum of such negative statements
around and fashion from them a positive doctrine of plenipotency (of causes or genes) seems to me
a reprehensible somersault of logic.” <DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic25/paulweiss.pdf" target="new">paul weiss</a>, 1973</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>Could it be that the ego is NOT that which is defended, but merely the set of all defenses? To the pure, all things may be pure, but Nietzsche reminds us that to the swine, all things are piggish and Reich adds that underneath the layers of body armor or the masquerade is a bloody mess – nothing pure about it. And by the way, as to those puritans at the nsa, we're laughing – they've learned to do a google search so now have the entire web at their fingertips. Ah the beauty of seduction. A real spider spins a web from its ass – it's the fly which experiences sticky fingers!</P>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-62188726871150815852013-06-17T12:57:00.002-07:002013-06-17T12:57:49.480-07:00The other Ethnography: Studies in Literature<blockquote><em>Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.</em></blockquote>
<P>So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness.</P>
<p>But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.</p>
<p>The terrible fatality.</p>
<p>Fatality.</p>
<p>Doom.</p>
<p>Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!</p>
<p>Doom of what?</p>
<p>Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.</p>
<p>Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.</p>
<p>Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.</p>
<p>The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'
</p>
<p>That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.</p>
<p>The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.</p>
<p>What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.</p>
<p>And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.</p>
<p>The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.</p>
<p>Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.</p>
<p>Oh God, oh God, what next, when the <i>Pequod</i> has sunk?</p>
<p>She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.</p>
<p>Now what next?</p>
<p>Who knows ? <i>Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?</i></p>
<p>Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.</p>
<p>The <i>Pequod</i> went down. And the <i>Pequod</i> was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business-like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.</p>
<p><i>Boom!</i> as Vachel Lindsay would say.</p>
<p>To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.</p>
<p><i>Consummatum est!</i> But <i>Moby Dick</i> was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?</p>
<p>Post-mortem effects, presumably.</p>
<p>Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.</p>
<p>POST-MORTEM effects?</p>
<p>But what of Walt Whitman?</p>
<p>The 'good grey poet'.</p>
<p>Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?</p>
<p>The good grey poet.</p>
<p>Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.</p>
<p>A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes.</p>
<p>DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!</p>
<p>ONE IDENTITY!</p>
<p>ONE IDENTITY!</p>
<p>I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.</p>
<p>Do you believe me, when I say post-mortem effects ?</p>
<p>When the <i>Pequod</i> went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas. The <i>Pequod</i> sinks with all her souls, but their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners. Corpses.</p>
<p>What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.</p>
<p>So that you see, the sinking of the <i>Pequod</i> was only a metaphysical tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.</p>
<p>I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.</p>
<p>What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization. First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God! Better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS LOVE!</p>
<p>Think of having that under your skin. All that!</p>
<p>I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.</p>
<p>Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn't include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.</p>
<p>I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.</p>
<p>CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!</p>
<p>CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!</p>
<p>Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They're the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam-pressure. CHUFF!</p>
<p>An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the fashion.</p>
<p>It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.</p>
<p>Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that he is mechanical.</p>
<p>They talk of his 'splendid animality'. Well, he'd got it on the brain, if that's the place for animality.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> I am he that aches with amorous love:<br>
Does the earth gravitate, does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?<br>
So the body of me to all I meet or know. </em></div> <p>What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of bliss- fully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all helplessly hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of the sight, smell or sound of the rest of living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.</p>
<p>No, Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways.</p>
<p>Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical.</p>
<p>And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you meet or know, why, something must have gone . seriously wrong with you. You must have broken your main- spring.</p>
<p>You must have fallen also into mechanization.</p>
<p>Your Moby Dick must be really dead. That lonely phallic monster of the individual you. Dead mentalized.</p>
<p>I only know that my body doesn't by any means gravitate to all I meet or know, I find I can shake hands with a few people. But most I wouldn't touch with a long prop.</p>
<p>Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman. The mainspring of your own individuality. And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with everything.</p>
<p>You have killed your isolate Moby Dick. You have mentalized your deep sensual body, and that's the death of it.</p>
<p>I am everything and everything is me and so we're all One in One Identity, like the Mundane Egg, which has been addled quite a while.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> 'Whoever you are, to endless announcements-'<br>
'And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.'
</em></div> <p>Do you? Well then, it just shows you haven't got any self. It's a mush, not a woven thing. A hotch-potch, not a tissue. Your self.</p>
<p>Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe.</p>
<p>Post-mortem effects. The individuality had leaked out of him.</p>
<p>No, no, don't lay this down to poetry. These are post-mortem effects. And Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.</p>
<p>All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth! No, no!</p>
<p>I don't want all those things inside me, thank you.</p>
<p>'I reject nothing,' says Walt.</p>
<p>If that is so, one might be a pipe open at both ends, so everything runs through.</p>
<p>Post-mortem effects.</p>
<p>'I embrace ALL,' says Whitman. 'I weave all things into myself.'</p>
<p>Do you really! There can't be much left of you when you've done. When you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.</p>
<p>'And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his own shroud.'</p>
<p>Take off your hat then, my funeral procession of one is passing.</p>
<p>This awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.</p>
<p>Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time, as far as his rather sketchy knowledge of history will carry him, that is. Because to be a thing he had to know it. In order to assume the identity of a thing he had to know that thing. He was not able to assume one identity with Charlie Chaplin, for example, because Walt didn't know Charlie. What a pity! He'd have done poems, paces and what not, Chants, Songs of Cinematernity.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> 'Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another film is done-</em></div>
<p>As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak.</p>
<p>Now will you tell me exactly what a kyak is?</p>
<p>Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me <i>sitting in a kyak.</i></p>
<p>I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity.</p>
<p>DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY.</p>
<p>The universe is short, adds up to ONE.</p>
<p>ONE.</p>
<p>I.</p>
<p>Which is Walt.</p>
<p>Hispoems Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in additions and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF.</p>
<p>He reaches the state of ALLNESS.</p>
<p>And what then? It's all empty. Just an empty Allness. An addled egg.</p>
<p>Walt wasn't an Eskimo. A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Eskimo. And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Eskimoness, unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no more. Eskimos are not minor little Walts. They are something that I am not, I know that. Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy little Eskimo. Outside the egg of Whitman's Allness too.</p>
<p>But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world. And he saw everything that way. Just as a motorist does in the night.</p>
<p>I, who happen to be asleep under the bushes in the dark, hoping a snake won't crawl into my neck; I, seeing Walt go by in his great fierce poetic machine, think to myself: What a funny world that fellow sees!</p>
<p>ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along it.</p>
<p>Whereas there are myriads of ways in the dark, not to mention trackless wildernesses, as anyone will know who cares to come off the road - even the Open Road.</p>
<p>ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.</p>
<p>ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian.</p>
<p>ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motor-cars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.</p>
<p>God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> A woman waits for me-
</em></div> <p>He might as well have said: 'The femaleness waits for my maleness.' Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function.</p>
<p>'Athletic mothers of these States -' Muscles and wombs. They needn't have had faces at all.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> As I see myself reflected in Nature,<br>
As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,<br>
See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see. </em></div> <p>Everything was female to him: even himself. Nature just one great function.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> This is the nucleus - after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,<br>
This is the bath of birth, the merge of small and large, and the outlet again -</em></div> <div class="poem"><em> 'The Female I see -' </em></div> <p>If I'd been one of his women, I'd have given him Female, with a flea in his ear.</p>
<p>Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> 'The Female I see -' </em></div> <p>Anything, so long as he could merge himself.</p>
<p>Just a horror. A sort of white flux.</p>
<p>Post-mortem effects.</p>
<p>He found, as all men find, that you can't really merge in a woman, though you may go a long way. You can't manage the last bit. So you have to give it up, and try elsewhere if you insist on merging.</p>
<p>In <i>Calamus</i> he changes his tune. He doesn't shout and thump and exult any more. He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful.</p>
<p>The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the intervention of woman, the female.</p>
<p>So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades. Over and over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love. Out of this manly love will come the inspiration for the future.</p>
<p>Will it though? Will it?</p>
<p>Comradeship ! Comrades ! This is to be the new Democracy of Comrades. This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship.</p>
<p>Is it? Are you sure?</p>
<p>It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in <i>Drum-Taps</i>. It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative activity. And it is extreme and alone, touching the confines of death. Something terrible to bear, terrible to be responsible for. Even Walt Whitman felt it. The soul's last and most poignant responsibility, the responsibility of comradeship, of manly love.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots, you make me think of death.<br>
Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)<br>
I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death,<br>
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,<br>
Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer<br>
(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most)<br>
Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean— </em></div> <p>This is strange, from the exultant Walt.</p>
<p>Death!</p>
<p>Death is now his chant! Death!</p>
<p>Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge.</p>
<p>The great merge into the womb. Woman.</p>
<p>And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man love.</p>
<p>And almost immediately with this, death, the final merge of death.</p>
<p>There you have the progression of merging. For the great mergers, woman at last becomes inadequate. For those who love to extremes. Woman is inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of man-for-man love. And this is on the brink of death. It slides over into death.</p>
<p>David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan.</p>
<p>It always slides into death.</p>
<p>The love of comrades.</p>
<p>Merging.</p>
<p>So that if the new Democracy is to be based on the love of comrades, it will be based on death too. It will slip so soon into death.</p>
<p>The last merging. The last Democracy. The last love. The love of comrades.</p>
<p>Fatality. And fatality.</p>
<p>Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was the goal of his manhood.</p>
<p>To the mergers, there remains the brief love of comrades, and then Death.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> Whereto answering, the sea<br>
Delaying not, hurrying not<br>
Whispered me through the night, very plainly before daybreak,<br>
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.<br>
And again death, death, death, death.<br>
Hissing melodions, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,<br>
But edging neat as privately for me rustling at my feet,<br>
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,<br>
Death, death, death, death, death— </em></div> <p>Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life. A very great post-mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet of the soul's last shout and shriek, on the confines of death. <i>Apres moi le deluge.</i></p>
<p>But we have all got to die, and disintegrate.</p>
<p>We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live.</p>
<p>But even then the goal is not death.</p>
<p>Something else will come.</p>
<div class="poem"><em> <p> Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.</p></em></div> <p>We've got to die first, anyhow. And disintegrate while we still live.</p>
<p>Only we know this much: Death is not the goal. And Love, and merging, are now only part of the death process. Comrade- ship - part of the death-process. Democracy - part of the death-process. The new Democracy - the brink of death One Identity - death itself.</p>
<p>We have died, and we are still disintegrating.</p>
<p>But IT IS FINISHED.</p>
<p><i>Consummatum est.</i>
<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Studies.htm">by <i>D. H. Lawrence</i></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-26348405011025164712013-05-28T08:42:00.000-07:002013-05-28T08:42:02.836-07:00Awake is for working? You must be dreaming! The informal oppositon to enforced sleep and termination<P>There may be emerging another world than the world of work and it's binary opposition, which is said to be sleep like death and dreamed fiction. Neither wakeful nor sleeping, as indicated by their common prefix of negation, 'a-' (or 'an-' before a vowel) in the stative tense or season. Prefixed to verbs it suggests the continuation or enduring, as in "I'm a'walking", meaning of course, undergoing a transformation, a'way from a static norm toward which direction or end is not essential unless we have in mind a state of ambiguity. In Japanese, the suffix 'ne' only negates affirmation. It's not a positive response like yes or no, it just turns the preceding <em>prima facie</em> statement into an invitation like the canadian "eh?".</P>
<P>The really (negative) answer we would translate "no" is spelled "Ie", and pronounced like we would emotively say "yeah". You can see the difference: in other words the former question is merely an offering, tender, unlike the negative pronouncement which must always be down deep a positive affirmation. Rendered in Japanese, to "really" ask a question like que? is to suffix the former seemly affirmation with -ka, okay? For example, where we might say "It is!" (or 'tis – in niponese 'desu' – and the 'u' is mostly silent), instead of switching front to back like english speakers might have said ("Is it?" – when some athabascan speakers say "innit?", what they really mean is "ne?") in niponese one merely juxtaposes -ka (des(u)ka). In words like kaboom, the ka means getting from here to there without transcending the intervening space, as if a catalyzing cataplism going from ice to steam without experiencing intervening water. It may be a leap or merely an unexpected arrival. Capitalism gets someone else to do it for you, on the same basis of slaves providing for an archaic greek democracy coming soon to a theatre near you. That's what we are afraid of!</P>
<P>On this analogy, to be awake is no all-night party over a corpse. Or is it? You're supposed to be alert and attentive to detail, the proverbial opposite of being in a coffin and no laughing matter though it may take volumes of caffeine and not a little subdued coughing just to clear your throat or attract another's attention as if it was Tinkerbell's mirror in your eye or way too much mascara. Too easy we mistake the hidden plan with a coming massacre. Perhaps it should have been expressed or answered with a cackle – isn't that what's intended when there's a twinkle in the aye? In and out of any interrogation it may just be a slap in the face or figuratively, a whackin' on the too inquisitive behind.</P>
<blockquote>asleep (adj.)<BR>
c.1200, aslepe, o slæpe, from Old English on slæpe (see sleep). The parallel form on sleep continued until c.1550. Of limbs, from late 14c. Meaning "inattentive, off guard" is from mid-14c.<BR><BR>
awake (adj.)<BR>
"not asleep," c.1300, shortened from awaken, past participle of Old English awæcnan (see awaken).<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://etymonline.com/?title=Special:Search&search=asleep">etymonline</a></i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>If not for an original word play, what is criticized today as colloquial, anomalous or mere and childly, of insufficient analysis to resurrect some teleology, I would say "how else" can the waking world of work be justified by functionalists as "how the world works", established by the WORD which in olden times 'twas said "god given'? Unwilling to time-travel that far back, science is still satisfied with the law as wholly representative, that is they've only added a great big 'W' to what was formerly called "holy". Both forgot the more ancient central tree which in europe during solstice-time simply was a holly. You can look it up in hist'ry books, it's not my word, the language told me!</P>
<P>But still, what of that other world I said might be emerging? The language only says it might have been before us. Psychiatrists have a pill and will call it simply madness. Punch the clock or let it fly and you've transcended space and time. You could say the men with electric prods and butterfly nets are only there for your assistance if you're stuck or cataplexic in a hole, despite their own obsessive stand against a counter movement, especially clockworks running out from their control.</P>
<P>Sometimes it's just for show, like when chased by charioteers throwing sticks and stones behind their errant spears at comrade-leader moses, it was the plain-speakers demanding clarity who interpreted the flowery metaphor of boating 'cross the deep red sea, who thereafter shouting "It's a miracle!" or on any other hand is "scientifically infeasible!". Perhaps concentrating on precision and clarity in effort to diagram reality or pinpoint any holes in speech will either miss the boat entirely or puncture the hull and sink it. More than one ambitious nimrod has been swamped by others wakes.</P>
<P>A wake is just the water's ripples traveling long behind you. It is the water's memory as if to say only the present can induce or reveal the past or be possessed by it. The wake behind cannot occur until you part the water – it's harmonic. If there's a goal or destination, the future's had to happen before you can find it. Not fate or destiny which is totally euclidean, we're talking mimicry, like when the parrot says what goes around comes around, unaware that in all this commonality nothing is the same, or some old greeks who thought the future sneaks up and kicks you in the ass, sometimes from quite a ways behind.</P>
<P>Discovered irony is just a clue the world is funny that way. A no brainer is that magnets are attracted most to iron. Lacking that floating in water or upon Spring they head north. Without regard to jeans or things genetic, it's in your blood until you're out of it and in this way pathetic. So when loved ones died, the irish threw a party but everybody cries for dears departed. It just proves the spectacle's the same, independent of emotion – one can take it or leave it. Like underlying meatly meets and mealy meals and malignant malls, one really lasting question concerns what's to eat for energy to do what's next and that's what Bergson called transgenerationally maintaining life's duration. But heed your taste, they'll call you hedonistic. Old mariners have dreams of mountains and never want a burial at sea, and not for want of freedom from oppression – it's just nice to get a change of scenery. Our native fondness for water should be a clue that for such as us and killer whales, sustained immersion must be interspersed with leaps for air and room for breathing. For some it seems, however, there's never any pleasing.</P>
<P>It may be once upon a time a trance was never needed for some dreaming. But that's when all the critters on the earth communicated and we were not excluded. Now we sleep, ingest barbiturates or 'poison' mushrooms to gain barbarian experiences and when we try to relate, it's called fiction, but only if we're lucky. It means they really lied, appearing tolerant, and our discourse never really was invited. But there's just so much word play can be had, how could any disregard it as irrelevant or bad? Really? I would think it evidence that play is what is primary, and that's a process you can't take to any bank for future spending. As some mended alcoholic once was heard to say, "if you ever want to keep it, you've got to give it away".</P>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-54571663205108900102013-05-24T15:44:00.002-07:002013-05-26T10:33:12.163-07:00reciprocitY<P>A collision of gifts is no exchange no matter how symmetrical or repetitiously trodden its route, which is also to say a habitat enframed by habits. A bullet may absorb or fortuitously bounce away: there will be mushrooms in any case only depending upon the mutual fluidity of the impact. Or it's not the law of gravity, nor grammar, makes a basketball bounce – try it sometime without air and you'll come up flat – with or without reverse english or a clever spin by your eulogist!</P>
<P>As good as a reflection, or for the hearing-enabled, an echo, another word for the principle of reversibility is "reciprocity" – the reference is to kinship (or aesthetics) and only tangentially to naming – it's not politically economic whatsoever which is a cause-effecting mathematical thing, that is the barratrous flight of fanciful exclusions. The name is an address or reference, like when a mountainous landmark IS the destination, not merely a signpost or its mealy-mouthed representation. Without impersonation like the exchange of tits and tats, there are neither lines nor continua – all it really takes to float is buoyancy and only where you're looking does a bobbling bouy mark a spot, hence the serenic screams of sirens and flashing lights of titans.</P>
<P>The concern is more with harmony (or non-abrasive sensibility or resonance) than reproduction (see the phonological association of "artful" and "heart-felt"). Consequently, endurance is merely a word for continuity and when we do get to reproduction, a sort of <em>ex post facto</em> mimicry through immersion, we're really talking transformation like weighing anchors or cutting strings of attachment. Without the lines of linearity, there is nothing to exchange so no direction which can't run both ways and nothing is the same even though the only sense made is through a lens of commonality. This is why for Alice, the looking-glass world is not just backward but well-twisted (and vice-versa). Reversibility is not confined by mathematics, its just that jailers are often in-the-closet mathematicians so prisoners themselves – of logic.</P>
<P>The language of "a", the language of "an", the article and it's negation just like anarchy, the contraction's apostrophe or excuse for ownership only looks like a non-sequitur or artificially sequestered juxtaposition. Compare "the man's a dog" and "the man's dog" – "a dog" as "not-dog", "is" as "has". We should laugh at such language-cops or other varieties who'd make formidable attempts to distinguish themselves – they ARE the joke of irreversibility. Substantial literally means good footing (as in "under stand"). To be merely under foot does not indicate a favourable stance: one could trip. Like the trickster, substance is just as happy being a nuisance as getting you off. Water-walkers are rare outside of the insect world so flying may be the safest option, and not in the direction of a moth toward a light-bulb or camp fire. There is also the less apparent quicksand to consider. The law is hyper-reason, which is also to say it bends: deep down it's just an insubstantial system of substandard excuses flexing in direct ratio with it's holder's muscularity.</P>
<P>With the nature of mawing and clamping and states of voluptuous emotion, vice and Vice are never really far apart. A vise is an american tool for squeezing immorality. From the start, law creates the space or zone for an all too-apparent hypocrisy. It is the tool of choice for non-believers – where there is no belief, not just a suspension of judgement, there is no real hypocrisy, just exclusion put off. The exceptional state and state of exception are joined at the hip. The law merely provides an expediency. The pope can annihilate pagan villages while adorning his church with pagan and even, according to the laws of propriety, unvirtuous imagery of saints and goddesses flaunting the dress code, and still be proclaimed patron of the arts as well as of polyamorous kings named henry:</P>
<blockquote>on island nations like Japan, eight is always the lucky number. For the seventh son of seven sons, the eighth's not always father. For some it's baby jesus if not an aristotle; the more poetically inclined still call her mother and are less inclined to throttle.<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Atka Mip</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>While the law expresses consistency (by definition) its application has never (nor can it) – for most of its duration, unless perturbed it's flaccid. The nature of power is ever and only whimsy, while protocol is attended so no one else will notice. Consistency is a fetish when not disingenuity. The default position concerning laws is their breaking asunder (read as well "us under"), like a ball that's never really happy to settle down, even and especially after a slam dunk. Punishment of such faults is thereby among the most futile of absurdities, like beating an earthquake for its transgression. Punishment's nonviolent emulation is the mark of hypocrisy which is also to say, "meaningless", like asserting one is deader after clubbing than would be the case from excessive choking from the office of the governor.</P>
<P>Like the reversibility of applied immolation for heresy and barbarians burning down the city, all that's really happened is closing a circle to prevent spiraling about and fluttering away. It's the moving nature of a coven, not the crispied critters' steadfast stance within the cooking oven. And while for run-aways or not, "spaced out" is an acceptable amnesia, as a likely destination, the only real gibberish may be "outer space". As a wishful manifestation, watching star trek may be fun, but funner still is when you see it watching back.</P>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-88347403398301379632013-05-16T16:26:00.002-07:002013-05-16T16:26:52.558-07:00Fetish is a spoiled cabbage<blockquote>Lintel (as 'threshold' < L. <em>limin-</em>): "To suggest rather than to state, to make a crossroads of each word in the street of sentences. Something new will always come to light if texts are dissected <em>ad infinitum</em>, and in this all written works - and not just those of genius, as some have claimed in error - resemble the works of nature."
<DIV ALIGN="right">- <i>Alfred Jarry</i></DIV></blockquote>
Of course, we are all well aware that the young cabbage is a child, snipped off and snapped up before maturation 's even formed a concept. It takes a different sort of cabbage farm to produce the seeds for tomorrow's soup pot, one on which the young are tended and nurtured so they can vegetate and mature. Brother Dupont suggests maturation is the cumulative limitation of possibilities. This is the civil take on the servant-subject. Adorno & Horkheimer might have said (with no sense of disagreement) that maturation is the accumulation of injuries and both Kropotkin and Mark Twain spoke of the accumulation of contradictions moving toward a complete embrace with hypocrisy.
The least active bullshit detector should begin to smell rotten fish in Denmark, but, unfortunately, the sense of smell is fleeting and so, most prone to habituation. Plant botany and horticulture are, therefore, the only source of data which are able to put to question the myth of the spoiled child. The one thing young cabbages need, that is, if they're not expected to go into the soup or shit can, is just about everything they want: smotherings of motherings and one day, if not young'ns of their own, at least the grounds from which they sprout (and not as our examples in abundance show – de-force). It is the one thing outlawed by the proverbial saint, Paul, who first said "spare the rod and spoil the child". Unless there is another entendre for a rod which has only a freudian connection to fly-fishing, but that would be more the tangled line of Wilhelm Reich and not Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, it has always been easier to hold the nose and cook up the cabbage than to tend it to the tall, proud stalk it aspires to become. For any plant, love comes in the form (and not in the way) of sunlight, good earth and as much refreshment as can be drunk without tottering. For everyone else, there's the college of education or the space behind the shed for the lessons in propriety, that sacred fealty given toward all but your own property.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-72092758499976431442013-04-29T22:24:00.000-07:002013-04-29T22:43:15.368-07:00Turnip, n.<blockquote><DIV ALIGN="center"><em>Fresh garbage. . .<BR>
Fresh garbage. . .<BR>
<BR>
Well, look beneath your lid some morning,<BR>
See those things you didn't quite consume <BR>
The world's a can for your fresh garbage. . .<BR>
<BR>
Fresh garbage. . .<BR>
Fresh garbage. . .</em></DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Spirit</i>, '68</DIV></blockquote>
<dir><B>Turnip</B>, n.<BR>
1. <i>botany</i>: an unbleadable fodder or growth subsisting between a rock and a hard-on, of late spreading to northerly latitudes;<BR>
2. <i>cybernetics</i>: the penultimate object of the course of progressive consumption prefatory to a desert of cannibalic pellagroid.<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://insipidities.blogspot.com/2013/04/epistle-to-turnip.html">Epistle to a turnip</a></i></DIV></dir>
<P>It is becomining obvious to all that a sequestor has etymological affinity with the verb, '<em>to squeeze</em>'. Even so, as exageration is not always a reaction-formation, nonsense needn't be a defense mechanism; purposelessness is no mere substitute for drive – it's just more fun – in the same fashion that "CAPITAL" is just a giant Martian "BANTH" [a "cat-like" carnivorous scavenger] with material implications. Like digital dollars, virtual reality is without nutritive substance no matter one's sense of taste. As the laws of thermal dynamics clearly illustrate, even god is impotent without his pressure cooker and cadres of deathless archers. Besides a profitable expenditure, cops & armies are the necessary bet-hedgers 'til the debate is concluded in mutual insolvency, hence TS's prophetic whimper and not a bang<B>:</B><DIV ALIGN="right"> – see <i><a href="http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm">The Hollow Men</a></i></DIV>
<blockquote>[On that note, just like a Tenessee boy named "Sherman" or even honest "Abe" at home or over sea, what self-respecting theo-sophist joker would give a son the name of a fourteenth-century tyrant who in bloody wars procured himself, for all posterity, a bigger dick than even allah? Goodness me! There may just be an inverse ratio of imaginary senses to official intelligences. So who now's being most reactionary?]</blockquote><BR>
<DIV ALIGN="center"><small><B>THE ETHERIALIST & REALIST DEBATE:</B></small></DIV>
<p> "Come!" he whispered. "Or he will have the bowmen upon you, and this time there will be no escape. Did you not see how futile is your steel against thin air!" </p>
<p> Carthoris turned unwillingly to follow. As the two left the room he turned to his companion. </p>
<p> "If I may not kill thin air," he asked, "how, then, shall I fear that thin air may kill me?" </p>
<p> "You saw the Torquasians fall before the bowmen?" asked Jav. </p>
<p> Carthoris nodded. </p>
<p> "So would you fall before them, and without one single chance for self-defence or revenge." </p>
<p> As they talked Jav led Carthoris to a small room in one of the numerous towers of the palace. Here were couches, and Jav bid the Heliumite be seated. </p>
<p>For several minutes the Lotharian eyed his prisoner, for such Carthoris now realized himself to be. </p>
<p> "I am half convinced that you are real," he said at last. </p>
<p> Carthoris laughed. </p>
<p> "Of course I am real," he said. "What caused you to doubt it? Can you not see me, feel me?" </p>
<p> "So may I see and feel the bowmen," replied Jav, "and yet we all know that they, at least, are not real."</p>
<p> Carthoris showed by the expression of his face his puzzlement at each new reference to the mysterious bowmen—the vanishing soldiery of Lothar. </p>
<p> "What, then, may they be?" he asked. </p>
<p> "You really do not know?" asked Jav. </p>
<p> Carthoris shook his head negatively. </p>
<p> "I can almost believe that you have told us the truth and that you are really from another part of Barsoom, or from another world. But tell me, in your own country have you no bowmen to strike terror to the hearts of the green hordesmen as they slay in company with the fierce banths of war?" </p>
<p> "We have soldiers," replied Carthoris. "We of the red race are all soldiers, but we have no bowmen to defend us, such as yours. We defend ourselves." </p>
<p> "You go out and get killed by your enemies!" cried Jav incredulously. </p>
<p> "Certainly," replied Carthoris. "How do the Lotharians?" </p>
<p> "You have seen," replied the other. "We send out our deathless archers—deathless because they are lifeless, existing only in the imaginations of our enemies. It is really our giant minds that defend us, sending out legions of imaginary warriors to materialize before the mind's eye of the foe. </p>
<p> "They see them—they see their bows drawn back—they see their slender arrows speed with unerring precision toward their hearts. And they die—killed by the power of suggestion." </p>
<p> "But the archers that are slain?" exclaimed Carthoris. "You call them deathless, and yet I saw their dead bodies piled high upon the battlefield. How may that be?" </p>
<p> "It is but to lend reality to the scene," replied Jav. "We picture many of our own defenders killed that the Torquasians may not guess that there are really no flesh and blood creatures opposing them. </p>
<p>
"Once that truth became implanted in their minds, it is the theory of many of us, no longer would they fall prey to the suggestion of the deadly arrows, for greater would be the suggestion of the truth, and the more powerful suggestion would prevail—it is law." </p>
<p> "And the banths?" questioned Carthoris. "They, too, were but creatures of suggestion?" </p>
<p> "Some of them were real," replied Jav. "Those that accompanied the archers in pursuit of the Torquasians were unreal. Like the archers, they never returned, but, having served their purpose, vanished with the bowmen when the rout of the enemy was assured. </p>
<p> "Those that remained about the field were real. Those we loosed as scavengers to devour the bodies of the dead of Torquas. This thing is demanded by the realists among us. I am a realist. Tario is an etherealist. </p>
<p> "The etherealists maintain that there is no such thing as matter—that all is mind. They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.
</p>
<p> "According to Tario, it is but necessary that we all unite in imagining that there are no dead Torquasians beneath our walls, and there will be none, nor any need of scavenging banths." </p>
<p> "You, then, do not hold Tario's beliefs?" asked Carthoris. </p>
<p> "In part only," replied the Lotharian. "I believe, in fact I know, that there are some truly ethereal creatures. Tario is one, I am convinced. He has no existence except in the imaginations of his people. </p>
<p> "Of course, it is the contention of all us realists that all etherealists are but figments of the imagination. They contend that no food is necessary, nor do they eat; but any one of the most rudimentary intelligence must realize that food is a necessity to creatures having actual existence." </p>
<p> "Yes," agreed Carthoris, "not having eaten to-day I can readily agree with you." </p>
<p> "Ah, pardon me," exclaimed Jav. "Pray be seated and satisfy your hunger," and with a wave of his hand he indicated a bountifully laden table that had not been there an instant before he spoke. Of that Carthoris was positive, for he had searched the room diligently with his eyes several times. </p>
<p> "It is well," continued Jav, "that you did not fall into the hands of an etherealist. Then, indeed, would you have gone hungry." </p>
<p> "But," exclaimed Carthoris, "this is not real food—it was not here an instant since, and real food does not materialize out of thin air." </p>
<p> Jav looked hurt. </p>
<p> "There is no real food or water in Lothar," he said; "nor has there been for countless ages. Upon such as you now see before you have we existed since the dawn of history. Upon such, then, may you exist." </p>
<p> "But I thought you were a realist," exclaimed Carthoris. </p>
<p> "Indeed," cried Jav, "what more realistic than this bounteous feast? It is just here that we differ most from the etherealists. They claim that it is unnecessary to imagine food; but we have found that for the maintenance of life we must thrice daily sit down to hearty meals. </p>
<p>"The food that one eats is supposed to undergo certain chemical changes during the process of digestion and assimilation, the result, of course, being the rebuilding of wasted tissue. </p>
<p> "Now we all know that mind is all, though we may differ in the interpretation of its various manifestations. Tario maintains that there is no such thing as substance, all being created from the substanceless matter of the brain. </p>
<p> "We realists, however, know better. We know that mind has the power to maintain substance even though it may not be able to create substance—the latter is still an open question. And so we know that in order to maintain our physical bodies we must cause all our organs properly to function. </p>
<p> "This we accomplish by materializing food-thoughts, and by partaking of the food thus created. We chew, we swallow, we digest. All our organs function precisely as if we had partaken of material food. And what is the result? What must be the result? The chemical changes take place through both direct and indirect suggestion, and we live and thrive." </p>
<p> Carthoris eyed the food before him. It seemed real enough. He lifted a morsel to his lips. There was substance indeed. And flavour as well. Yes, even his palate was deceived.
</p>
<p> Jav watched him, smiling, as he ate. </p>
<p> "Is it not entirely satisfying?" he asked. </p>
<p> "I must admit that it is," replied Carthoris. "But tell me, how does Tario live, and the other etherealists who maintain that food is unnecessary?" </p>
<p> Jav scratched his head. </p>
<p> "That is a question we often discuss," he replied. "It is the strongest evidence we have of the non-existence of the etherealists; but who may know other than Komal?" </p>
<p> "Who is Komal?" asked Carthoris. "I heard your jeddak speak of him." </p>
<p> Jav bent low toward the ear of the Heliumite, looking fearfully about before he spoke. </p>
<p> "Komal is the essence," he whispered. "Even the etherealists admit that mind itself must have substance in order to transmit to imaginings the appearance of substance. For if there really was no such thing as substance it could not be suggested—what never has been cannot be imagined. Do you follow me?" </p>
<p> "I am groping," replied Carthoris dryly. </p>
<p> "So the essence must be substance," continued Jav. "Komal is the essence of the All, as it were. He is maintained by substance. He eats. He eats the real. To be explicit, he eats the realists. That is Tario's work. </p>
<p> "He says that inasmuch as we maintain that we alone are real we should, to be consistent, admit that we alone are proper food for Komal. Sometimes, as to-day, we find other food for him. He is very fond of Torquasians." </p>
<p> "And Komal is a man?" asked Carthoris.</p>
<p>"He is All, I told you," replied Jav. "I know not how to explain him in words that you will understand. He is the beginning and the end. All life emanates from Komal, since the substance which feeds the brain with imaginings radiates from the body of Komal.</p>
<p>"Should Komal cease to eat, all life upon Barsoom would cease to be. He cannot die, but he might cease to eat, and, thus, to radiate."</p>
<p>"And he feeds upon the men and women of your belief?" cried Carthoris.</p>
<p>"Women!" exclaimed Jav. "There are no women in Lothar. The last of the Lotharian females perished ages since, upon that cruel and terrible journey across the muddy plains that fringed the half-dried seas, when the green hordes scourged us across the world to this our last hiding-place—our impregnable fortress of Lothar.</p>
<p>"Scarce twenty thousand men of all the countless millions of our race lived to reach Lothar. Among us were no women and no children. All these had perished by the way.</p>
<p>"As time went on, we, too, were dying and the race fast approaching extinction, when the Great Truth was revealed to us, that mind is all. Many more died before we perfected our powers, but at last we were able to defy death when we fully understood that death was merely a state of mind.</p>
<DIV ALIGN="right"><i> – <a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/ERBurroughs/mars.htm">E. R. Burroughs: The Marxian Series</a></i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-11402072710046452582013-04-27T08:48:00.000-07:002013-04-27T08:49:12.653-07:00The Poetic Principle, The Poetical Effect<P>Time and Space... It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.</p>
<P>Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility.</P>
<P>It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.</P>
<div align="right"><i>– Henri Poincaré</i></div>
<blockquote>So whose reality is it? In dream or an induced halucination, the figurative frame of experience is taken as if it were literal, like it was mana for sympathetic magic or how some petrol can relate reality to napalm, the lit fuse or imaginative figment is required to even notice another's torment. Unless it's pulled a trigger, the literary idea of it is absurd: words never do justice. At best they uncover a sewer-hole or open a window-shade like a dropped jaw just prior to a bout with nausea or the wink and a grin reeking from a ghastly intruder. It's only the uncensored eyes and the nose who are first to take notice and it's read from a face, not a page. No act is believable if the ego's still visible. Otherwise the play is deceptive, an illusion.<BR><BR>
Only an artist could pull off the scam to not only survive but get paid selling their own internal organs on the open market or with them playing tunes within a church. Though the effect is the same, opposed to expressions of pretentious fakery, at least authentic unfleshly possession does not well succumb to practice. A synonym for magical powers or imagination, empathy can never be sold or bought, it can't even be rhymed with commodity exchange without a major metamorphosis like a bash on the head from a fallen flowerpot. Flights of fantasy are not an enigma. It's the fear of a landing which calls into question a developing sense of paranoia. Otherwise, whose business is it anyway, however well-reduced to a materialist economy? Dissemblance of mentality is only that which interferes with work – otherwise the label would be "criminal" so you'd have to pass inspection by the county clerk.</blockquote>
<p>And in regard to Truth, if, to be sure, through the attainment of a truth we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience at once the true poetical effect; but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth which merely served to render the harmony manifest.</p>
<p>We shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct conception of what the true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect.</p>
<p>He recognises the ambrosia which nourishes his soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven – in the volutes of the flower – in the clustering of low shrubberies – in the waving of the grain-fields – in the slanting of tall eastern trees – in the blue distance of mountains – in the grouping of clouds – in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks – in the gleaming of silver rivers – in the repose of sequestered lakes – in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds – in the harp of Aeolus – in the sighing of the night-wind – in the repining voice of the forest – in the surf that complains to the shore – in the fresh breath of the woods – in the scent of the violet – in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth – in the suggestive odour that comes to him at eventide from far-distant undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored.</p>
<p>While the epic mania, while the idea that to merit in poetry prolixity is indispensable, has for some years past been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresies of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: – but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.</p>
<p>With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man, I would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical and chasmal difference between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth. </p><div align="right">– <i>E. A. Poe</i>, <em><a href="http://72.52.202.216/%7Efenderse/poetic.htm">The Poetic Principle</a></em></div>
<P>"At bottom Kropotkin conceived nature as a kind of Providence, thanks to which there had to be harmony in all things, including human societies. And this has led many anarchists to repeat that “Anarchy is Natural Order”, a phrase with an exquisite kropotkinean flavour. If it is true that the law of Nature is Harmony, I suggest one would be entitled to ask why Nature has waited for anarchists to be born, and goes on waiting for them to triumph, in order to destroy the terrible and destructive conflicts from which mankind has already suffered. Would one not be closer to the truth in saying that anarchy is the struggle, in human society, against the disharmonies of Nature?" <div align="right"><i>– Errico Malatesta</i></div></P>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-13105590093844488922013-03-19T13:24:00.002-07:002013-03-19T13:24:24.108-07:00Anarchism is not Enough: An Anonymous Book<p>The most curiously integrated of the groups of stories which may be classified as a single dramatic (or philosophical) unit of the book is the queen-group. Indeed it is possible to discuss this group as if it were but one story, the episodic variations seeming no more than caprices of style—the same story told in different degrees of earnestness and so in different personalities, as it were. The one fixed personality of the group is the Queen herself; the others are all stylistic personalities. The Queen began as a photograph used by a newspaper at discreet intervals to represent the female bandit of the moment or the murder-victim or the fire-heroine or the missionary’s bride. By experience and variety she became a personality, and a fixed personality. It is quite remarkable in fact how under our very eyes this anonymous author should be able to transform a fiction into a fact: for the Queen is as true for always as the photograph is each time false. Indeed, the whole transformation is merely a matter of style. To illustrate: “As Maxine, the world’s sleeplessness champion, the photograph had great momentary importance but did not know it because it was part of a newspaper dynamic in which everything happened with equal fatalistic effect, everything was accident, in the moment succeeding accident it was always clear that nothing had happened. As photograph therefore the photograph saw all this; it was permanently unimportant but it knew this. And as it had a knowledge of its unimportance, it also had a knowledge of the importance of accident; and as the first knowledge made it insignificant so the second knowledge made it Queen. The Queen, the photograph without identity, this anonymous particularity, did in fact dwell in a world in which she was the only one and in which the world of many was only what she called ‘the chaotic conversation of events.’ So she resolved to put her queendom in order, not by interrupting the conversation, which would only have increased the chaos, but by having minutely recorded whatever ‘happened,’ whatever ‘was.’ Nothing then in her queendom contradicted anything else, neither the argument nor its answer, neither the burglar-proof lock nor the burglar against whom it was not proof: everything was so, everything was statistical, everything was falsification, everything was conversation, and she was an anonymous particularity conversing with herself about her own nothingness, so she was outside the chaotic conversation of events, she was Queen.”</p>
<p>Her three chief statisticians (we learn) were publishers. They were all pleasant fellows, each with a touch of the universal in him, and came and went without suspicion everywhere in the queendom because of their peoplishness: they too, like all the rest, were statistical, so statistical indeed that they were statisticians. They went about preaching the gospel of the communal ownership of events. They said: “Primitive man believed in things as events. As civilized man it is your duty to believe in events as things.” And the people did. And they permitted the statisticians (or publishers) to know what happened to them and what they did with what happened to them as faithfully as they reported their possessions each year in the great Common Book. In this queendom there was no loss and no mystery and no suffering, because everything was reported as conversation and nothing therefore thought about. All was automatic spontaneity, even their love for their Queen. As for the Queen, she would walk (we are told) through the dark rooms of her palace at night, having each room lit only upon her leaving it, until she reached her own small chamber, which remained unlit all night while the others shone; until morning, when in her own small chamber the curtains were drawn, the lamps lit, while in all the other rooms of the palace there was daylight. The meaning of this is plain: that in the anonymousness of the Queen lay her non-statistical, her non-falsificatory individuality. She is the author, the Queendom is her book. She is darkness and mystery, the plain, banal though chaotic daylight is her unravelling. By making the unravelling more methodic and so more plainly banal she separates in people the statistical from the non-statistical part, the known from the anonymous. She shows herself to be a dualist of the most dangerous kind.</p>
<p>For a long time the authorities from the internal evidence of the queen-stories suspected the anonymous author of being a woman. They said that it was not improbable that the book was the Bible of an underground sect devoted to educating female children to be statistical queens. But this view had to be abandoned as unscholarly, even ungentlemanly, because in nothing that the Queen said or did was there any accent of disorder or ambition: she merely, with miraculous patience and tact, saw to it that records were kept of everything. The authorities eventually concluded that she was a Character of Fiction, and so stainless, and could not help them. For some time their suspicion was fixed on a character in one of the stories with whom the Queen fell in love. But as he was Minister of Pastimes to the Queen it was thought that it might prove generally disrespectful to State officials to pursue the matter further (as when, in the story<i> Understanding</i>, suspicion was fixed on the character who bribed the magistrates to convict him, the inquiry was stopped by the authorities—the detectives even put on the wrong scent—as too metaphysical and cynical).</p>
<p>It must now be clear that the strain of my task is beginning to tell on me. I have become very nervous. In the beginning my emotions were all scholarly, my task was a pleasure, I had the manner of calmness with an antiquity. Towards the end fear has crept upon me. I must speak, and after that go on till I can go on no longer: till I am prevented. I say<i> prevented. </i>For I am haunted by the obsession that the authorities are still watching. They do not suspect the Queen. She was or is a fixed personality, so anonymous as to be irreproachably a Character of Fiction. The others vary in earnestness; in anonymity; they are, as I have suggested, personalities of style; they point to the probability that the author was not or is not a Character of Fiction. I dare go no further. I have become very nervous. I shall nevertheless attempt to continue my task until—I am prevented.</p>
<p>One of the three publishers was a Jew. He was tall, his ears oustanding, his grin long, his voice loose in his mouth. He had been financial adviser to a charitable organization and had had much general statistical though humane experience. He was gross but kind and therefore in charge of all sentimental records: his grossness assured accuracy, his kindness, delicacy.</p>
<p>He had the historical genius, and several specimens of his work are given—though with a touch of dryness in the author himself which makes it impossible to enjoy them as we might have were the book without an author. Indeed, they were not meant to be read at all, but merely written to satisfy the political instincts of the Queen, who never read them herself. I find it difficult to pass over them myself, for aside from their part in the book they are very interesting. There are several small extracts that might be used here with complete propriety and even in a scholarly way. And after all, the author wrote them down himself, did he not? But he was writing and not reading. But am I not writing and not reading? My position becomes more and more uncertain. I shall hurry on.</p>
<p>I shall give one of the Queen’s monologues, to tide us over this difficult period. The monologue does not appear in the book itself: it would have been a piece of naturalism contrary to the theory on which the book was built. Therefore I give it here, as reading. No questions must be asked of me, for as a scholar I should feel obliged to answer them; and the passage would then become writing; and I should have produced a piece of naturalism. Here then is, shall I say, a variety: which is not the anonymous author’s writing but we might almost say his reading, and after that my writing but of his reading, which remains reading for all my writing. My conscience is in your hands: the burden of curiosity and falsification falls upon you. With you rest also the rights of anonymity, the reputation of style, the fortunes of publication, the future of philosophy and scholarship and the little children, for whom these contrive sense. Sense, I say, not satire.</p>
<p>And now for the Queen’s monologue, which the anonymous author did not write and which for this very reason requires, as the reader’s part, sense, I say, not satire, even more immediately than what he did write. Furthermore, you will have to discover for yourself where it begins and where it ends: were I to mark it off it would become writing and so a piece of naturalism and so belie sense and give encouragement to satire. I mean: restraint, statistics, falsification, are more accurate than courage, reality, truth, and so truer. For the Queen’s monologue, since the anonymous author did not write it down, is true; had he not statistically, falsificatorily, restrained himself from writing it down it would have become a piece of naturalism and so a subject of satire. To tide us over a difficult period I set myself the difficult task of writing down the Queen’s monologue without turning it into writing, and so defying satire (if I succeed, which depends on you). The important thing is to defy satire. Satire is lying: falsity as opposed to truth and falsity as opposed to falsification. It is betwixt and between; against sense, which, whatever it is, is one thing or the other-—generally the other, it being for practical purposes impossible for it to be perpetually one thing. By practical purposes I mean of course the question of boredom, as truth finding truth is monotonous. Therefore things happen. Sense, I say, not satire. Imagine a woman has her heart broken and imagine a man breaking it, then her heart heals and he ceases to be a villain, and then they meet again and her heart is whole and he is not a villain. Does she weep because her heart was once broken and does he blush because he once broke it? This would be satire. No, they both smile, and she gives him her heart to break again, and he breaks it. This is sense. Or they both smile and turn away from each other, and this, too, is sense, but sense too academic to survive the strain of academically enforcing itself. The One Thing must be saved from itself, it must not be allowed to overwork itself or to go stale. That is why sense is one thing or the other and generally the other: falsification to relieve truth, broken hearts to protect whole hearts, weakness to spare strength. Fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is puff! puff! everything that satisfies it and which must be carefully recorded in spite of contradictions and lengthiness. Desire is the other things, in great number. And what is satisfaction? Not the other things, which satisfy, but the one thing, that cannot satisfy or be satisfied, and so, though but one thing, equal to desire, and so to all the other things. Fact is<i> it</i> not<i> me;</i> fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is the other things. Satisfaction is me, which<i> it</i> calls Queen.<i> It</i> is a lot of<i> him’</i>s,<i> it</i> is a queendom,<i> it</i> is desire speaking the language of satisfaction,<i> it</i> is a great looseness and restlessness of fact and confusion of eyesight and costume, into which the Queen brings sense through order. And what is order? Order is observation. Her first publisher (or statistician) is a gross, kind Jew. Her second is a subtle, cruel Turk, who brutally forced events: he has the political genius. But the people do not mind, since the events happen anyhow: they shrug their shoulders good-naturedly and say “Old Hassan Bey smiling with Turkish teeth,” and call on the first publisher to take notice how smilingly they wince back. Her third is a Christian, and he does nothing: he has the philosophical genius. His idleness and talkativeness exasperate the other two into efficiency. His favourite harangue is: “Let the people create their own order.”</p>
<p>“But how, their own order?”</p>
<p>“Let them think.”</p>
<p>“But if they think, they will all think differently, and not only differently—some will think more powerfully than others.”</p>
<p>“Exactly: those who think more powerfully than others will create order.”</p>
<p>“But this would not be real order, rather the disorder of a false order created by the most powerfully thinking individual or individuals of the moment. This would be anarchism, and anarchism is not enough!”</p>
<p>“I have heard that said before, but how is the order created by the Queen not anarchism?”</p>
<p>“The Queen does not create order, she observes methodically, she creates<i> her</i> order. That is why<i> it</i> is<i> her</i> queendom.”</p>
<p>“But is this not merely a refined form of anarchism?”</p>
<p>“No, it is more than anarchism. The Queen is not the chief individual of her queendom; she is the<i> me</i> of the<i> it;</i> she is the one thing, her queendom is the other things; she is satisfaction, her queendom is desire, a lot of<i> him’s.</i> The more<i> me</i> she is, the more<i> it</i> it is, and the more anonymous she is, and the more she and her queendom are diplomatically indistinguishable. The domestic situation is of course another affair. But to carry the distinction beyond the boundaries of the book is to fall betwixt and between, into satire.”
<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i> by <a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/anonym.htm">Laura Riding</a>, 1928</i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-30352148065336168182013-03-04T15:37:00.003-08:002013-03-04T17:08:04.101-08:00The Thing about Sunlight:<small><DIV ALIGN="center">In Dante's inferno or Blake's deranged pit,<BR>
in a cosmical egg or à plomb chaotique,<BR>
whether one world or many doesn't mean shit.<BR><BR>
Should you fall to the bottom, your ass gets a kick,<BR>
not slightly transformed, (did you think I meant lick?).<BR>
Not sure of your hist'ry, thrown back through the mirror,<BR><BR>
if you trust it's a myst'ry, you needn't keep score.<BR>
If this wasn't as true as you lick off your thumb,<BR>
then where do you s'pose all that sunlight came from?</DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Pyrrho's Technique</i></DIV></small>
<P>By its own definition, "thing" is either and both an unnamed and indeterminate autonomosity, so therefore, is only presumed to be materially existent, unless as a stand-in or proxy for some relation or process, in which case matter is immaterial and existence incorporeal. In any language it translates to "garble". And applying to anything, once named or observed, it loses its thingness, and hence, its material objectivity – now it's glaringly subjective – for
<ol><LI>consideration on the one hand, or <LI>'exploitation' on an other, and <LI>ignorance by any other criterion than luminosity (like stars in your eyes) or feeling (like a headache)</ol>
an affinity perchance or adventure which may lose its thing for animosity or paranoia: by association in the first which makes it relative to something else so is no longer independent; destruction in the second by virtue of its consumption or corruption (something we can't be directly assured of when even repressed skeletons emerge from dark closets); and outright disappears in the third like a closing wound or zipper – in any case it may just be a phantom, so we can with confidence proclaim "no thing exists" in dream or awake but for that we have just named or witnessed.</P>
<P>By any reasonable extension, nothing is unknown and all that's left is reality, a world where there's naught left to know. When all questions are obsolete the thing as such and any other self is dogma or what's read in any dictionary once one erasses all contra-dictions. Ignoring any sophistry annihilates all poetry, the chief`linguistic substance which so upset Plato, the nature of language games of which entendres or polysemy, anomolies are the`necessary conditions for any comparison, definition and assessment concerning any context, predictive predilection, and without any of which witness wanton predicates or you're placed under predation, sometimes called "into perdition".</P>
<P>Without some kindred for comparison, to name an unwitnessed thing eliminates all chance for consideration, use or antipathy, a thing which only authorities can offer (it's often all they have) so is taken as such, like a ding an sich as if one missed the garage door entirely, and with no ambivalence, call for property damage or a speedy ambulance. Dogma's truth is given, no questions asked, but it's no gift when every thing else is taken, most of which is room for curiosity and exploration. Doubt and fallibility or each judgment fast suspended returns the gift as an offering or suggestion and nothing gets expended. In lieu of inquests for an answer or tit-for-tat exchange, nothing can be shared except erotic poems and carnage, in either case transformed, it means it'll never be the same and even when if noticed, nothing will be missed, except perhaps the sunshine or more light on the subject though not directly in your eye.</P>
<P>Skepticism, ranging from a simple suspension of judgement to the outright denial of truth (although Pyrrho suggested "we neither deny nor affirm anything"), need not lead to passivity (that is literally impassive or "impressively impassable") and indifference nor to morality and the formulation of an ethics (as has been traditionally demanded by seekers of the right and true – but not the beautiful), nor to an impossible impasse, (just to double emphasize the point) although there may be no shortage of dilemma for decision-makers, meddlers and other fast-talkers equiped with intellectual ammunition in thirty round clips. A proper dialectic is just a pair of shoelaces or a set of reins<B>:</B> right and left make no difference to keeping your boots on while holding your horses.</P>
<blockquote><DIV ALIGN="center"><small><B>ANTISYNTHESIS:</B></small></DIV>"The <em>mode, power, might or technique</em> of the Sceptical School is to place the phenomenal in opposition to the intellectual "in any way whatever," and thus through the equilibrium of the reasons and things opposed to each other, to reach, first the state of suspension of judgment, and afterwards that of imperturbability. We do not use the word <em>power</em> in any unusual sense, but simply, meaning the force of the system. By the phenomenal, we understand the sensible, hence we place the intellectual in opposition to it. The phrase "in any way whatever," may refer to the word <em>power</em> in order that we may understand that word in a simple sense as we said, or it may refer to the placing the phenomenal and intellectual in opposition. For we place these in opposition to each other in a variety of ways, the phenomenal to the phenomenal, and the intellectual to the intellectual, or reciprocally, and we say "in any way whatever," in order that all methods of opposition may be included. Or "in any way whatever" may refer to the phenomenal and the intellectual, so that we need not ask how does the phenomenal appear, or how are the thoughts conceived, but that we may understand these things in a simple sense. By "reasons opposed to each other," we do not by any means understand that they deny or affirm anything, but simply that they offset each other. By equilibrium, we mean equality in regard to trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, so that of the reasons that are placed in opposition to each other, one should not excel another in trustworthiness.
<BR><BR><B>...</B> The fundamental principle of the Sceptical system is especially this, namely, to oppose every argument by one of equal weight, for it seems to us that in this way we finally reach the position where we have no dogmas."<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Sextus Empiricus</i></DIV></blockquote>
<DIV ALIGN="center"><small><B>AGRIPPA'S OR MÜNCHHAUSEN TRILEMMA</B></small></DIV>
<ol>
<li>All justifications in pursuit of <i>certain</i> knowledge have also to justify the means of their justification and doing so they have to justify anew the means of their justification. Therefore there can be no end. We are faced with the hopeless situation of an infinite regression.</li>
<li>One can stop at self-evidence or common sense or fundamental principles or speaking 'ex cathedra' or at any other evidence, but in doing so the intention to install <i>certain</i> justification is abandoned.</li>
<li>The third horn of the trilemma is the application of a circular argument.</li>
</ol>
<P>The agreement of slaves or antagonists, consensus leads more to dogma if not politically, democratic submission, a sacrifice or compromise. Like the Zapitistas the German assembly was a thing, but only birthed after being held up against the wall by Latin broadswords or their equivalent. Before confederation for defense from French and English conquistadors, the Iroquoian council called up nothing and stood nowhere. They were called up to help with someone facing some impending uncertainty (or so the story goes).</P>
<P>Before any administrative council, the thing was a festival or what happens within a circle of interest. A meet, moot or meat, the sense of which is the same, a stretch or an affair, the place for a fair. Prior to the middle ages, which is to say, in myth-time and truth was just what's trusting, the thing of aesthetic mutuality 'twas neither an economic fare nor politically fair, that certain place where justice must always proceed both from and with some jousting and never just in jest. In lieu of divinity, recipe or chance supposition, a thing is just another choice or means for a movement when confronting uncertainty. As they used to say, "bad company often makes strange bed-fellows" just prior to prescribing a strong laxative.</P>
<blockquote>"We say that the Sceptic does not dogmatise. We do not say this, meaning by the word dogma the popular assent to certain things rather than others (for the Sceptic does assent to feelings that are a necessary result of sensation, as for example, when he is warm or cold, he cannot say that he thinks he is not warm or cold), but we say this, meaning by dogma the acceptance of any opinion in regard to the unknown things investigated by science. For the Pyrrhonean assents to nothing that is unknown. Furthermore, he does not dogmatise even when he utters the Sceptical formulae in regard to things that are unknown, such as "Nothing more," or "I decide nothing," or any of the others about which we shall speak later. For the one who dogmatises regards the thing about which he is said to dogmatise, as existing in itself; the Sceptic does not however regard these formulae as having an absolute existence, for he assumes that the saying "All is false," includes itself with other things as false, and likewise the saying "Nothing is true"; in the same way "Nothing more," states that together with other things it itself is nothing more, and cancels itself therefore, as well as other things. We say the same also in regard to the other Sceptical expressions. In short, if he who dogmatises, assumes as existing in itself that about which he dogmatises, the Sceptic, on the contrary, expresses his sayings in such a way that they are understood to be themselves included, and it cannot be said that he dogmatises in saying these things. The principal thing in uttering these formulae is that he says what appears to him, and communicates his own feelings in an unprejudiced way, without asserting anything in regard to external objects<B>...</B><BR><BR>
It is evident that we pay careful attention to phenomena from what we say about the criterion of the Sceptical School. The word criterion is used in two ways. First, it is understood as a proof of existence or non-existence, in regard to which we shall speak in the opposing argument. Secondly, when it refers to action, meaning the criterion to which we give heed in life, in doing some things and refraining from doing others, and it is about this that we shall now speak. We say, consequently, that the criterion of the Sceptical School is the phenomenon, and in calling it so, we mean the idea of it. It cannot be doubted, as it is based upon susceptibility and involuntary feeling. Hence no one doubts, perhaps, that an object appears so and so, but one questions if it is as it appears. Therefore, as we cannot be entirely inactive as regards the observances of daily life, we live by giving heed to phenomena, and in an unprejudiced way. But this observance of what pertains to the daily life, appears to be of four different kinds. Sometimes it is directed by the guidance of nature, sometimes by the necessity of the feelings, sometimes by the tradition of laws and of customs, and sometimes by the teaching of the arts. It is directed by the guidance of nature, for by nature we are capable of sensation and thought; by the necessity of the feelings, for hunger leads us to food, and thirst to drink; by the traditions of laws and customs, for according to them we consider piety a good in daily life, and impiety an evil; by the teaching of the arts, for we are not inactive in the arts we undertake. We say all these things, however, without expressing a decided opinion." (ibid)</blockquote>
<P>But a virtue itself, particularly one of submission (piety) or aloofness (disinterest), is incompatible with every-day life taken together with any other pro- or im-posed value<B>:</B> there is an impiousness lurking 'neath the lines of every skeptic wishing a voice without being cast into the pit undone or too early. Virtue is only true of and in itself or when in the isolation of solitary confinement, which is to say out of space or context, emulated or enframed, in-flamed and therefore false or dying, but without the insinuation of lying and that is sometimes called hypocrisy or else delusion. It may just be outside of myth-time, everything's absurd or cast with self-allusion – a thing witnessed shining on every regime may be as certain as any sunburn on a cloudless day or gamma rays when shady so to wish to further cloud things up would be by all a thing of virtuous desire often, traveling underneath the name of mayhem.</P>
<blockquote>"One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive."<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/3183/">Žižek</a></DIV></blockquote>
<P>What is thought to be a dilemma concerning reality is no such thing should you follow Einstein's advice and enlarge your circle of interest or compassion to let things fall where they may but not refrain from taking action or speaking things relatedly. Such as was in myth-time is now mislabeled ancestor worship, the same folks who say "If it was good enough for grandpa then it's good enough for me.</P>
<P>To wit<B>:</B> Consider a child is in the street and comes along a bus. Either may be your own but the juxtaposition presents three alternatives. <ol><LI>The first, if you're a human and you don't drop dead in shock, is your heart clogs up your throat and your gut falls down an elevator shaft and you're there (the "mother panic maneuver"), and just in time at that. <LI>On the other hand your grasp comes up empty – the child was just an optical illusion – and pausing in momentary dismay, the bus grinds your new haircut out from the pothole and into the asphalt. <LI>The weighty analysis. Should you have prior stopped to consider more carefully the options and the situation and then proceed with more certainty or do nothing, walk without a care and guarantee your safety or prevent the accusation you've been once again in error?</ol> The smart thing would be to have abstained from all demands that say that you should cut your hair and hope for the best because if it's not one thing, it'll always be t'other. Burying your feelings on any matter never meant, except by chance, you'll come out any other end unscathed or less demented like reversing the transmission back across the railroad tracks to re-align your front suspension. But just in case, so said Pascal, all lacking in a certainty, you give it a shot, and that's experimentalism, believe it or not. On clear days even juries cast the shadows of a doubt.</P>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-5236620169492778492013-02-24T09:11:00.000-08:002013-02-28T12:29:32.168-08:00Titanomachy Comes Around to Reconstructing Carpetbags<blockquote><em>Teleology's an anticipation of a pay-off. A free expression doesn't need ulterior motive, sometimes just a great big perturbation. There's nothing more abusive than a truth that's not elusive. Should you catch it take a rest and liquid else yer cursed so go to hell or somewhere even more insipid.</em></blockquote>
<P>It's said the gods themselves were one-time titans, and then they got religion when mighty titan force was no longer sufficient to sustain the realty of kingly or more philistine estates from invasions or assassinations; when habit proved too fickle as the new invaders were oft' the miss-content of what was formerly an outward trickle, "good form or good riddance!" no longer suitable, the Truth was invented<B>:</B> what cropped up now and then was henceforth to be a universal. Of necessity were there priest-kings, then on Egypt's fine example, realigned into religion and after many corpses came the all infallible, <em>The Reason</em>, good for use in any season.</P>
<P>Good reasons always need a partner, so our Hegel once had said. Synthesis is fabrication, a structure placed upon the dead. Before offing old Goliath, young Prince Dave was prob'ly no more an itinerant goat-herder than the giant, Honest Abe had been a logger (he was a lawyer), but since the Yellow Emperor, history's written as an epitaph a'top some speechless heads, but only by the conqueror after vanquishing the Rebs.</P>
<P>As a means to classify (with the singular criterion) now by nature folks divided along lines of status, race and gender, impiety and treason or for any handy reason. Such was Greek democracy (and someone, always trickling upward, both works and pays and to this day, to prey and pray sound just the same – it's sequestration mixed up with well-timed negotiations). With new smarts and realizing the error of their old ways, it hadn't after all been war which needs defeated, but peace in any season – what stays inside is justified, without is bad, none could deny – enclosure laws and prison walls are for our own good, and that's always been the greater, inner peace now means "security", or what's in or done for, favour. Whatever's in the basket, it's the same – protection racket. There's always risk. Sometimes it is a bomb, sometimes you miss.</P>
<P>Railroad trains and freeways only interfaced equivalent absurdities, the illusion you can freely move to new and different prisons, I mean cities. Once the righteous good, now it's the baddies hiding 'neath a hood or up against a wall with red and blues a'flashing, crashing through them. It's all the same, and every time it comes around it's different. It was war that birthed the structures, made them all rigid and regal, kept them straight and narrow, lines a'crossing space as if a symbol forever thing eternal (but that's internal "aye's" as in "Because I said so"), and not to lose the point, the arrowhead's a reminder of our history and grammarists use it to control the meaning which is "<em>generate</em>"<B>:</B> for every child the question's "Why?" – before a corpse of course it looks like this <B>––></B> and then the <B>X</B>, the spot of all degeneration.</P>
<P>As rows and columns preceded all accountants, suits and pigs, so now they've come around again back to the tried and true, the lethal, proving only that a straight line can come back on itself like a spiral made of squares. But it's all illusion: the space had bent at right angles so no one really lost their place (a swerve depends on curves), and pretty soon we all can live in the big outdoors of outer space, that is, when we can alter it, conform to our position which has always been the goal in any race for new material. There's no going back, all else has been forgotten – high or low, for all it was for bidding, like once upon a time they only meant "for having" and "for asking". The most important word 'twas lost was "smithereens"<B>:</B> what happens to all multifarious union is corruption, that certain dissolution of controllers of the mean or what's in fashion.</P>
<P>Today's Mythic narrative was called <em>The Idiocracy</em>, and everyone believes it might just be the last to be. Controllers have departed 'cross the cryptic overseas (it may be near Miami) and Dunderheads, that race of con-patrols and the richest you will see, the one-time petty burgeoisie've been left no reins for which to hold or lead, they've gone quite raving and unstable, and all that will remain may soon be called <em>The Uncontrollables</em>. But there's still hope for rectal types to get up, wipe their ass, regain their youth, to dig out with a hook or ladder, perseverate along the lines of truth, which now we know is just construction work and for some others, letting loose your bladder.</P>
<P>Or not. It's probable at some point anything can rot except the truth, for that's impossible as there's no more points beyond this dot.</P><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Carreck Hoursabhorus</i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-44856195228435499352013-02-16T00:41:00.000-08:002013-02-16T00:41:47.044-08:00THE VOGOS, of TAU or DEATH<blockquote><em>Myth-time is the shaky ground lurking under every truth or calculation. No realm, nor a union, nor reality, a timeless landscape stripped of corpuscles of distance and sequentiality, but occasionally brimming with history. And it comes in all shades of paisley 'cause it's birthed free of a boundary (or at least one it easily sheds like placentas or hard-boiled eggs). The Stewart Principle which proclaims "Every picture tells a story, don't it" (and like a coin or Etruscan mirror, always has another side) is modified by Bergson's durative simultaneity or Butler's reversability of the chicken-egg argument such that every "story is a picture, ain't it" and the quantification which came first is irrelevant to the polyvagus swimming with Mr. Graymatter, who had more in mind the spokesman, Polybius who forgot that betwixt and between every floater and sinker is no more ambiguous than all things amphibious – it's just indeterminate and risky.</em><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Rodney King</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>Might I go so far as to suggest that, though they are equivalent in sense, there is received a difference altogether when we hear that "<em>myth-time is non-euclidean space</em>" and its inversion, "<em>when we hear the phrase, non-euclidean space-time, what is meant is myth-time</em>" and that sort of myth is not the fiction that's the classical physics of Richard M. Nixon. As the old Tibetan saying goes, "A" is not "A", therefore we name it "A".</P>
<P>With such logic, and if what we call space were a multidimensionally woven fabric (so to speak), even a paisley tapestry in dark undulation like waves flowing beneath a stationary boat, such that the directional movement of either is an illusion, the measurement of motion a misunderstanding of the intensity of the wave inducing a bounce on all the water that touches it or inversely, is mimicked by them <DIR>– in rough seas there's no telling an original pebble perturbing the water just to make waves or rings of concentricity – there is no pebble so its search is what's known as contingent futility – unless there's a port-hole or index to elsewhere (all that which representation excludes) <B>. . .</B></DIR>and whose own undulation flows to the shore yet the water has not moved except in relation to the land beneath it as the tides from the moon, like a long, distant lover, which distracted and thereby displaced it, or if in a tub it goes down the drain whilst the floating scum doesn't, and if to this we suggested the no-thingness which is not paisley fabric is the ultimate, par excellent brightness, the infinite everything from which was spun the fibres that weaved the tapestry, "moving" its spirals in every direction whilst going nowhere, (the bisected yinyang is only a leaf on a mango tree), then the most obvious excuse for the stars would be holes in the fabric letting the light through.</P>
<P>We're talking about the inversion of perspective which makes the standard line or come-on, previously important, presently impotent. We're also talking Lewis Carroll's looking glass world with which the same "reason" can apply to both, even the same measuring implements for the spatially insecure, but no direct translation is possible. Each seems fit as a straight jacket for the other. The formula, "<i>A is not A so we call it A</i>" portrays a metaphoric relation, so there is no room for tit-for-tat representation (neither in 'art' nor 'marriage'); at most, conjugation's an orbit, not a property exchange where speed has no bearing on an incurred debt, unless there's a recurring pebble coming your way set on eating out your liver.</P>
<DIR>[Where I come from, the coin in the mouth or two on the eyes of any corpse but the ones you despise is no payment to an imaginary gondola operator, but has engraved a picture from popular stories depicting a portal or literally porthole out of this world and back in through another. Without such a navigational guide known to work for the living – better even than a lucky charm – it is thought the ferry'd get lost and then foundered. There's also the added advantage in the coin's weight and opacity which prevent distraction by rambling tongues and wandering eyes: It's both a blinder and pacifyer. It's the same logic which enables one sea-monster, swimming through interconnected underground streamlets to appear in any lake or wide spot in the river East of the Cascade Mountains known for bringing bad weather and make a local appearance at a moments notice, and likewise, the local ones do the same in inverted fashion.]</DIR>
<P>In mythic discourse, there is no economic transaction nor a need for justification to discredit the other, so the question of a reality or truth lying beneath the metaphor or symbolism just doesn't need to come up, and if it did, it'd be like trying to squeeze your ass through one of those tiny holes in the sky to put more light on the subject. That could only result in death, a cosmic boil or a great constipation. Either way, should it fester, one might expect a big bang. Instead of the <i>Logos</i> some gray matter orbits, the paisley is <i>vague</i> but sensed through the vagus and its unfashionable polysemous name is <i>The Vogos</i>, where head-on collisions result not in death but some transformation or for the more dense or gnostic, knocking your lights out is like plugging a hole:<BR>
<blockquote><B><</B> <i>vogue (n)</i>: 1570s, the vogue, "leading place in popularity, greatest success or acceptance," from Middle French vogue "fashion, success, drift, swaying motion (of a boat)" literally "a rowing," from Old French voguer "to row, sway, set sail," probably from Old Low German *wogon, variant of wagon "float, fluctuate," literally "to balance oneself" (see weigh). Apparently the notion is of being "borne along on the waves of fashion." Italian vogare also probably is borrowed from Germanic. Phrase in vogue "having a prominent place in popular fashion" first recorded 1643.</blockquote>
and from which we get <em>Witch</em>, (like Roma's to roam and rough is to rogues, a wand'ring relation before time was in fashion and Keruac's boat was a station wagon):
<blockquote><i>weigh (v.)</i>: Old English wegan "find the weight of, have weight, lift, carry," from Proto-Germanic *weganan (cf. Old Saxon wegan, Old Frisian wega, Dutch wegen "to weigh," Old Norse vega, Old High German wegan "to move, carry, weigh," German wiegen "to weigh"), from PIE *wegh- "to move" (cf. Sanskrit vahati "carries, conveys," vahitram "vessel, ship;" Avestan vazaiti "he leads, draws;" Greek okhos "carriage;" Latin vehere "to carry, convey;" Old Church Slavonic vesti "to carry, convey;" Lithuanian vezu "to carry, convey;" Old Irish fecht "campaign, journey"). The original sense was of motion, which led to that of lifting, then to that of "measure the weight of." The older sense of "lift, carry" survives in the nautical phrase weigh anchor. Figurative sense of "to consider, ponder" (in reference to words, etc.) is recorded from mid-14c. <DIV ALIGN="right">– <i>etymonline.com</i></DIV></blockquote>
<DIV ALIGN="left"> – <i><a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/tidbit.htm">The full treatment</a></i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-28013281204797197322013-02-08T08:08:00.000-08:002013-02-08T08:10:07.941-08:00Understanding may be over(alter)ated:<blockquote><em>Capitalism</em>, if it is truly the condition of our existence, cannot be <em>known</em>. We may hope at best, if we are successful in hoping, that it may become wholly <em>unknown</em>...That is not to say that knowledge ought not take a scientific or objective turn, only that this serves no transformational purpose.<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://insipidities.blogspot.com/2013/01/going-to-seed-on-principia-dialectica.html">Going to seed</a></i></DIV> </blockquote>
<P>Class consciousness is not the possessed truth of objects (or classes of them) by subjects (or vice versa). It's not even merely a perspective or variable of approach (ie., a 'theory'), but an extended perceptual horizon illustrating that wealthy leaders' very existence hangs upon the exclusion, misery, exploitation or extraction, in other words, the subjection of others. It's a matter of environmental awareness, even compassion should one be carried by experience or by the tales of those who are themselves so carried.</P>
<P>Subjectivity and objectivity are universally meaningless or they are interchangeable. For any detection, the object in hand is said to be data (circuitously defined as 'that which is subject to handling or sensory engagement and manipulation'). Like a bird, it may be the subject of inquiry or merely an obstacle to be tossed aside, in which case, the "real" data remains unknown or, like an undrilled oil well, is yet to be groped – it may be nothing. The object which is subjected to handling is the subject, whether the experiment or investigation is of things or set upon processes. Very often, like in psychological experimentation, a subject means "a live one", but then where does one place school subjects like history, math or grammar except as more real than students? It's all a matter of where you place your exponent.</P>
<P>Value as such, smooth or rough is the subjective experience of the handler of objects, and whose objective is manipulation (literally, 'fingering figures') or an intermediate stage in quite another purpose. This mediation is what we mean by exploitation – the ownership of the means:</P>
<blockquote><DIV ALIGN="center">"He who controls meaning controls the world"</DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Old Man's Tale</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>Where there is damage to the subject, object or process by the processing of data, the subjective experience is misery from one perspective and pragmatics from the other. It is the basis of (or it lurks under) capitalism, and is justified as "natural" when compared to eating and "neutral" when compared to art. On the other hand, it clearly rhymes with cannibalism, a rarity in nature and typically frowned upon as it is the last stage of any class or species prior to extinction. The rhyme may be chance but the equivalence it portends is not lost on either "side": From the perspective of the leader-eaters (gods), the eaten has always been classed as overwhelmingly other – meat, receptacle or "natural resource". On the brunt of such semantic transformation, one is said to be "objectified", made the equivalent of an inanimate object.</P>
<blockquote>"The Regnorak in Nordic myth-time is the last battle of each against all. Not a single god survived, but some folks did who'd left for the hills or rowed a boat back into mother, eons before or timely, when the shitaree had turned to fire."<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>Old Woman's Tale</i></DIV></blockquote>
<P>When there is death or destruction to the subject, object or process by the mining or processing of data, the subjective experience of onlookers from any one perspective (even when pragmatic or utilitarian from another) is war or rape so it, pragmatism, is clearly no universal justification for anything. In the same way, transgression is merely a cross-wise movement on the one hand but no mere "struggle" in the context of war. And like christianity, capitalism cannot thrive unless all of nature other than the immediate subject (the Cartesian ego) is considered a collection of obstacles or otherwise hostile. This is the basis of both Hobbesian and Cartesian (or narcissistic) philosophies and their infinitely recursive cogitations.</P>
<P>The ratios, misery to struggle and war to death, are equivalent. Such is mathematic or objective value in contradistinction to subjective experience. Money is merely it's medium of exchange creating the value-form or commodity. All such exchange cancels experiential value like an electrical shunt to ground, where justice becomes a euphemism for the inability to tell shit from shinola, leaving one always in need of expert opinion. When ensconced in the midst of hostility, value must always come from elsewhere.</P>
<P>One of the illustrations as well as problems with understanding is its method-as-destination, 'going to ground'. This is both the discovery and formation of the subject (thinking, therefore amming), and as integrity demands a line, position or a stand, one is now subject to all the vagaries of nature, be they kind or cruel. The subject position must therefore always come <em>from</em> the ground of slavery or other such stasis. Neither form of immobility has been uncovered by archaeologists digging for first principles. Going to ground with high expectations, one goes nowhere but under or atop a dungheap or other similarly constructed midden. It is home only to the excluded middle and lost art.</P>
<P>To de-fence requires wire-cutters; o'r-fence is a leap or a climb. Either destruction or transcendence demonstrates a will to distributivity, not the content stasis of being, even for more seedy types. Life is becoming and cannot be said to be mimicked by art, which coldly produces beings – still life – although at times, they may signal a favorable movement, just like a biohazard sign stuck in the ground can be a source of moving inspiration. Of course a sign in it's navigational sense and a gesture in any sense are rarely taken as representative. They invite or discourage.
<P>It's not even the other way around, except when life and art are seen as synonyms – one theatre merely mimicking another with no sense of representation and only in this sense it can be said to be reproductive, but not of identities such as the cloning operations along any assembly line, be it academic or industrial. A better word would be "generative", since what is produced is always difference. It may merely be the <i>play</i> of otherness. Why then, asked Roger Caillois, <em>wouldn't</em> a moth disappear into the bark of a tree even when there is no wasp giving chase? Certainly not always the errors of paranoia! That itself may be the stand from the paranoia of eros, and quite unbecoming at that.</P>
<P>If the subject is the seed, the fragrance of tomorrow's lilac bush is irrelevant. Any modification of perspective transforms the subject into object. Any third position does the same regarding the other two. First, second and third are therefore equivalent and interchangeable, and even trialectics decomposes. The problem, of course, is the logo, lect or ligature misunderstood as the landscape or territory rather than the simulation, snapshot or map that they are.</P>
<P>One may merge with any traffic, but there are always off-ramps – a moth has wings (with or without cammo) – even if the exit is through the guard-rail, and without the security of a seat-belt, there's a chance one will be thrown from the vehicle before the fuel tank explodes on the rocks below. In either case, the lay-off may be no gentler than a certain resignation. To move or be moved is often the question, but what difference if the destination is the same?</P>
<P>Understanding's destination is truth, a stoppage or turning point. Nominalism only comes up with lists of names, jargon and talking points – the basis of applied journalism. Equipped therewith, one establishes leadership, only practical when there abound barbarians, unbelievers and heretics. The 'lazy' follower is part and parcel of that leadership, having the same intention, a delegation or relegation of "will" (or "perception", in the sense Aldous Huxley used it) in the interest of conservation ( – see 'blinders'), so presents no antagonistic distinction in the same way that the head and tail of an ass present no zoological contradiction so are never expected to transgress, much less revolt one over the other.</P>
<P>Without truth, morality disappears and without that hobgoblin, war and antagonism are meaningless outside the context of eating and being eaten, and whose result is still a mutual merger, a transformation on both counts. Like integrity and consistency, we should not confuse consciousness or awareness (even coupled to the memory of familiar sequences or patterns) with knowledge or truth. Only the former are provisional, and as Einstein warned, without an arrival and departure point, speed is irrelevant and time itself is always relative to one or another's standing still. Hegel gave us the dialectic, but Charles Fort corrected it with the hyphen. To wit, master-slave and slave-master are identical according to the principle of reversibility. This principle only states that if something appears uni-directionally linear like a geometrist's straight lines in empty space, there is somewhere an error in judgment or need for an optometrist. Even a crow doesn't fly as the crow flies; sometimes we just confuse one thing for the other when what it is – is no equivocation, it's just one-another, oui?.</P>
<P>Without the objectivity of the nominalists (or environmental vivisectionists), barbarians, unbelievers and heretics are just folks, unless, of course, they're also run-aways. But what's in a name? Clearly the manipulation of language is no justification, much less rationale for anything. Sometimes it's just fun. Altered states of consciousness are not achieved until one substance moves through the environment or its substance moves through you. Such is adaptation by any means you have selected. Just be careful what you wish for: hard enough, you'll likely get it.</P>
<blockquote>"What exactly does this chorus mean? It means all that is possible to find in it. ...beyond the subject represented by the [word] "one," perhaps equally understood as being an outside observer (in this case, fully disapproving) and as being the subjective judgment of this youth (and, in this case, expressing a philosophically or cynically lucid satisfaction). All of this is true, one must not delete anything...
<BR><BR>Each time – and this is quite frequent – that a word or a phrase has two possible meanings, one must recognize and maintain them both, because the phrase must be understood as entirely veracious in both senses. For the ensemble of the discourse, this also signifies: the totality of the possible meanings is its only truth.
<BR><BR>...One must also sense that this is not a simple irony: must they ultimately be experienced as truly ironic? One must leave this doubt intact."<div align="right">– <i>Guy Debord</i></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7403226927997971112.post-80505081181664246172013-01-21T17:25:00.000-08:002013-01-24T09:36:57.538-08:00Some thi(ev)ery concerning signs and symbols, the former bearing the highest mysticism while the latter may be neither here nor there.<em>"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." </em> <div align="right"><i>– John Muir, 1869</i></div>
<blockquote>'The human face is an empty power, a field of death ... after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken & breathed one still has the impression that it hasn't even begun to say what it is & what it knows.'<DIV ALIGN="right"><i>— <a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Judgement.htm">Antonin Artaud</a>, July 1947.</i></DIV><BR><BR>
William Blake said it well in "<i>Auguries of Innocence</i>":
<BR><BR>
<DIV ALIGN="center">"To see a World in a Grain of Sand<BR>
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,<BR>
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand<BR>
And Eternity in an hour."</DIV><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/vagabondtheorist/from-the-armchair/why-not-in-wonderland">Apio Ludd</a></DIV>
<BR><BR>"When we see a person’s lips move and his tongue flap, we must decide whether what is coming out is ‘the universe expressing itself’, or some idiot rational plan that he has concocted."<DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i>emile</i></DIV></blockquote>
<dir><em>Sometimes ambivalence is exchanged for indifference, as in "I don't give a hoot", and if said with sufficient snarl, demonstrates a moral (at base emotional) commitment against morality itself. Contradiction be damned – it proves nothing but the shackling of symbols to mathematical sign language or the prosaic death to symbolism masquerading as a technical journal or symbolic logic for the more spiritually minded. Each symbol must be kettled. Once identified, labeled or extracted from the symbolic milieu, a "symbol" is just another sign: each sign must point to the status quo, the material present. Anything else is called utopian fiction (although in some circles, "imagination" is not considered a defect)</em>
<BR><BR><em>Every epoch-defining revolution has simultaneously been a counter-revolution. Only the criterion (such as "iron" or "information") changes, making the epoch nothing but a value judgement wrapped around a talking point. What revolves has been the state ("the condition or state of affairs that currently exists") because at base, progress, consumerism and gentrification (here in the country, called "rural economic development") represent a single phenomenon – the suppression of symbolism is the death of community, itself a synonym of free association (in both material </em>and<em> linguistic senses).
<blockquote>In the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass of society a “philosophy of futility” that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion; an activity done for its own sake. In that context, “conspicuous consumption” is discussed either as a behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or both, which are psychologic conditions induced by consumerism — the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations."<DIV ALIGN="right"><i> – wiki: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption">conspicuous consumption</a></i></DIV></blockquote>
The potential for rupture (which is to say "metamorphosis") in mid twentieth century Euroamerika was only a repetition of that which a full century earlier occurred on the Russian steppe, a terrain which looks even more familiar today. In the end, there has only been a single epoch, and historians, like theologians or other dogmatists have been correct to portray it as the only reality, but in geological time, six thousand years of civilisation only amounts to a nanosecond. History as media must exclude it's own subject matter to re-present each present age as the "Modern" one, unique above all others, a set of constrained symbols wrapped in gagetry, patriotism and war-mongering, because, after all, it's just got to get better.<BR><BR>Hence the nostalgia (or durative fetish) for failed revolutions is at the same time a longing for community, the renewal of openings, free-flowing symbolism oozing outside of transaction or economic/structural adjustments, poetry as subversive of institutions of exclusion, the embrace of ambiguity as a renewed interest in novelty, bringing possibility back into the cosmos:</em></dir>
<P>"The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, “dead” to humans only because of our neuro-muscular chauvinism … Look deeper. You’ll need a magnifying glass … On the atomic and sub-atomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles are spinning simultaneously forward and backward, sideways and forever at speeds so incalculable that expressions such as “arrival,” “departure,” and “have a nice day” become meaningless. It is on these levels that “magic” occurs.</P>
<P>The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters."
<DIV ALIGN="right"><i> – Tom Robins, 1984, 2008</i></DIV></P>
<P>It is above all the form of the media, not the specific content, which has an ideological effect. The media’s specific informational content is subordinate to the function of producing consensus by deterring thought. Knowledge of the event as an aspect of life is prevented, creating an atmosphere of stupidity. Consensus functions by the exclusion of more radical others, and the mobilisation of resources to destroy them. It is achieved by powerlessness. The personal response, and responsiveness, is not possible in mass media. Disasters past and present are neutralised in a simple emotional response. Events like Live Aid involve viewers enjoying the spectacle of their own compassion."</P><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <a href="http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-9/"><i>Functions of the media</i></a></DIV>
<P>"The University has always been, in some form or another, an institution for producing the ideological justifications, and consequently their material realisation, for the forces of the state, its image of splendour and the “happiness” of the ruling society. It has been as fundamental an aspect of class society as has been the dominant media: a society in which the ruling class speaks to, and tries to convince, itself and society generally in order to ever-perfect its forms of social control. Whilst academia’s differing illusions of “objectivity” and “neutral” acquisition of knowledge have changed and developed, along with its intake, over the centuries, its fundamental prop for this miserable world has always remained. So it should be no surprise that academia has produced more modern and subtler versions of how to preserve hierarchical order in the 21st century</P>
<blockquote>The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as a supreme principle that to make men moral one must have the unconditional resolve to act immorally. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact — that of the so-called <i>pia fraus</i> [holy lie] — offered me the first insight into this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.
<DIV ALIGN="right"> – Nietzsche, <a href="http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html"><i>Twilight of the Idols</i></a></DIV></blockquote>
<P>...Let no-one say ideological work is the same as building work or working in a hospital or a call centre: the hierarchical division of labour has always meant that capitalism, even in its initial development, wasn’t just capital but was also an “ism”. It meant that, as well as an armed and economic force, it was also an ideology brutally materialised. Ideas for the ruling class, developed by professional intellectuals, were not <i>merely</i> ideas any more than religion, developed by the priesthood before the bourgeoisie, was <i>merely</i> religion.”</P><DIV ALIGN="right"> – <i><a href="http://dialectical-delinquents.com/?page_id=9">Dialectical Delinquents</a></i></DIV>
<dir><em>Religion (or philosophy, if that is your bent) and Science: non-overlapping magesteria? It's beginning to look like there was no separation in the first place! And they told us "Never the twain shall meet". One can never directly see one's own backside except through the eyes of another, and that's how we know it's there. Another word for majesty is despot. A dogmatist or expert is merely a know-it-all.</em></dir>
<DIV ALIGN="left"> – <i><a href="http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/clip.htm">more thi(ev)ery</a></i></DIV>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0