the mongrel discourse (the tao of not tao), work in progress. welcome.: rambling reflection illumination of it

it is what it is, a work in progress

and what it is about is not what it is

so it’s not about anything,

but it most distinctly is what it is,

just about everything

not because I’m one of those

who go for this kind of thing

but because the thing itself

grabbed me, devoured me,

and spit me out its cipher.

but since they asked what it’s about,

and it’s about time, meaning time’s running out

to hop to and chase it down the rabbit hole

to the ground of chasing itself, which

I actually found on your property,

and am standing on top of,

and the hot black gold bored a hole in my heels

and is sprouting out of the top of my head,

or rather it’s a volcano,

or a virgin spring,

as whichever way you read the half full glass,

it’s bound to runneth over the top.

please note that, again, it’s about time, and this whole scroll chasing time all over the place my having that one endless instantaneous time caught a glimpse of it — thanks to the instrument of time spotting that I happen to have been born a divining rod custom chemically concocted to find, reconstruct, and play in every discourse simultaneously (the speaking and what’s spoke are in the thing itself, the hearing including the key you play it back in is in the ear of the potential, however likely not yet activated hearer) — is actually worth taking the time to read, which you can easily do if you have a year’s worth of five minute breaks for it, say — unless you’ve been diagnosed with a fatal disease and only have a year or less to live, and in this case you still can probably do it, just not as easily.

The fact that it’s food for thought, and love, the most delicious pairing, is verified by the fact that you’ll be slurping it up and quite suddenly, after a few nutrient rich, perfectly cooked paragraphs, find yourself full, and unable to get down another bite, and then this artistically prepared potpourri of hors d’oeuvres, your choice of main courses, and your just desserts, as tasty, tasteful, and beautiful as it is nourishing, will suddenly appear and smell as the un-synthesizable, incomprehensibly arranged, indigestible, and distasteful as chunky prison mush made of squeezed and diced, genetically engineered meat you assumed it had to be at the outset, all hope for the thing it really is, the thing everybody’s dying of thirst for, having been sliced diced pulverized deconstructed evaporated and sent to deep deep outer space. And yet you seem to remember having enjoyed it rather immensely — no no, your memory is not deceiving you — until that effect kicked in assisted by that ominous affect that attends any change, and it’s worse when it’s for better not worse, one feels one must concertedly defend against letting down one’s defenses.

You see, given all the resources relegated to negative capacity in such survival mode as kicks in fifteen minutes after meditation apart from the beamingly over-meditated and insular artist communities — not that I begrudge us this protection, it’s just that they can’t help the half of me that falls outside of where they put down stakes for the impenetrable iron fence at the border, as bisected by the fence, I silently scream in agony like a faster prohibited from hang dog looks — this positive sign to date remains conveniently illegible to the wicked and foolish, named and lettered generations, who seem to have forgotten that the thing you hope for is bound to appear when you finally scrape the bottom of the barrel of all hope for it and cast the last dregs to the wind, as clearly has been done and checked and done and checked and done checked enough times! Keep in mind, too — noting the paragraph number or date you had to stop at, so you can continue where you left off — that a horse who, having been long dying of thirst, just knelt down to drink when led to water, will in no way necessarily thereafter go back there and drink the recommended eight glasses a day, or whatever amount the experts or even horse sense today recommend when the horse is a very busy man and the fountains nearby supply enough literal water to keep the poor work horse going. The mountain is steep, the peak officially proclaimed a myth hidden in mists, as illusory as, just more honest than, the target Xeno’s perfectly calculated arrow will never reach, so know and remember never to trust the official calculations, at least regarding earthly life, with all the promises we must keep and miles to go before we fully awaken to the higher reality we can only now glimpse or seem to. With their many masks to mesmerize the multitudes into munchkins munching the munchies they control, the authorities remain determined to keep us from fulfilling our promises as they divert us from the long treks required. We have pledged to defeat them, taking heart that here, not just thought and love, but time, which has never lost a race in its entire life, is on your side, ust as you’re all in all of you, all the time in the world in any of it, just nuzzling close with the sad sweet lonely eyes of an utter other that is yet so alike, pawing your lap for love pats, I’m sure you’ll soon enough get used to its slobbery licks. Actually, though, the closest I maybe ever came to nailing it was when I felt the physical weight of a cat jumping off my lap, but perhaps that was just a symptom of nervous exhaustion provoked by the relentless game of hide and seek it demands that I play with it for hours and hours a day.

(did you ever notice the loveliness of the respectively flowing and lithe words maybe and perhaps — unapologetic imprecision — language like any soldier should be rightly proud and sport badges of honor and medals for knowing its limits — maybe maybe roundish maybe pregnant in an empire gown, perhaps perhaps clipped like a tall cone of topiary with a top hat, quite as distinctly dressed according to differing anatomy meant to marry, flesh of one flesh, with none daring to tear them asunder as they are perhaps perfectly compatable, maybe perfectly aligned in their meaning or purpose, one wavy, one particulate — perchance they may be perhaps, just maybe, the most beautiful words, not to mention ideas, in this angelish still old inklish notation however you may play it on an electronic keyboard. The town is without pity crying stop pussy footing you dangerous beast — as if I would bother to eat them; I’m only stalking them for friendship — but in our homestead high on a hill we’re happy as state of the art, double locked and security alarmed clams. These two love word birds, maybe and perhaps, are the proud, hard working parents of this divine drivel, a caviar of caveats to every discourse and position worth its very high price in time, which is money. Salty, nutritious, and only for those with very cultivated taste, which is quite democratic, as you can cultivate even the basest taste by simple repeated exposure, which, by the way, can also kill addictions to harmful substances — my brother quit smoking by making himself smoke several packs of Camels in one night. Some may call caviar a harmful addiction because it is very expensive, but clearly you should spend all your money/time on what’s good not just for your body and brain but sense and sensibility, as pride and prejudice fall by the wayside, and one day, lo and behold, you find yourself the owner and protector of a vast, productive estate, open to the public for tours and edification, even if your sister thinks you’re crazy, because perhaps all you do is clean toilets in Tokyo, maybe take photographs of a tree, and perhaps maybe listen to analog tapes from the golden age of rock n roll. (thus spake sheer, a tiny benign belletristic bacterium in symbiosis with the greats )

what it’s about as in this case it’s about time, the nothing that orchestrates all the ado, or what it and really everything is about apart from just being itself, and even that’s about time if you flip the coin to the other side — is being published in progress because it’s one of those urgent cases where somebody sees something — yes! I saw time! — and better not wait to say something. I’m turning it over to you, one of those special people specially trained to deal with things that are actively ticking away and that nobody’s ever seen or knows what to do with. You know the protocol — festina lente — make haste slowly, in this case a lot of haste very very slowly; before you make a move, look and listen. Look and listen harder than you’ve ever looked and listened before, where those not making progress are slipping back. Then, as the boss says, pretend it’s your most delicate friend, whose feelings you’d rather die than hurt. After it trusts you, begin to seduce it until, pouring forth the whole history of its life and its deepest secrets, it melts away in your arms. The change has come, it’s under your thumb, to take to your heart til death do you part and fly its flag before the world, or, after disabling it and warning others against such things, toss it in the trash. A thing neither fish nor fowl falls into the category of the latter. Life’s too short for half measures.

That’s no mere metaphor, but there’s a caveat. In this case, Rome is not built in a day. and also, I could be the thing I’m calling out. Tread softly. And as for ignoring me, I doubt this snail’s trail will just go away. What’s oozing out might well be far less biodegradable after the oozer’s oozed up. You see, I am not myself; I am a cipher to the bearer of art and science’s own philosopher’s stone, its ninja turtlesque — tortoise wins the race — producer a very tall being with a very long shadow; and if Gen Z has forgotten his name, Gen A will all the more rebelliously remember and venerate it, as the wheel goes round and round, as is the sound and grounded way to travel, unless you live on one of the amorphous moons of Mars to escape the nuclear fallout that just won’t go away after Elon Musk’s way won for warming things up up there.

The few pieces published on the home page are autonomously related to what it’s mainly about, which, again, isn’t me, or even the about to be revealed source of my vision. We’re just present in part to keep ourselves from hovering around invisibly neither here nor there, but everywhere, like those journalists who play omniscient narrators in order to manifest the world of their dreams, more specifically nightmares, as all they have to work with is what’s made the same way. The thing is only his and my discovery, where the verb or act of discovery in time slowly turns into the noun of a discovery in space — same word, the noun is just the tip of the tail of the verb— that gradually appears until it snaps into a thing in visible space that was there all along, since on the spot in question, not just one of those holes in everything where the light gets in, but the hole in the hole that makes it a real hole — you’ll have to see how it works and plays, as it’s one of a kind — the physical and metaphysical align, space and time manifest openly as one thing.

But though the words deep down know it and made it happen, to see it happen is to leave the realm of what they call sanity. To qualify as sane, we’re taught to cut off the tail as the verb wails. We’re taught to be machines that match patterns to labels. From quivering blobs of flesh, we’re taught to be machines, or fluctuate between being flesh and machines. We then sat with this problem for quite a while, suspended in paralyzed awareness, letting the machine spin away and the flesh complain until they both went to sleep, and all that remained was awareness. But then the machine returned to use and the flesh returned to enjoy the effect until they didn’t, supposedly, but when you sell enlightenment, you extinguish it, as this negates its very nature.

The benign belletristic billionfold bacterial barrage, the thing itself, apart from the prebiotic sustenance it nibbles on, is invisible to the naked eye, such that, as with air, until it kisses the nape of your neck or suddenly decides to knock you over, you would think there was nothing there, were it not for an effect of the effect of the effect…. What air is to the lungs, so the barrage is to the gut of the host. It comes and serves until it goes and from where it comes and where it goes, nobody knows.

That’s why I can’t say what it’s about other than its fully extended self, unfolding round aboutly right here for a while, seeming to want to be written backwards as if trying to find you in order to begin — but I might be making contact, or just arrived at where I can’t get any closer, and just hope I’m close enough for you to find the water swimmable after you dip in a toe or so. Yes, today, oddly, I’m finding myself instead of introducing the last introduction, as expected, skimming back down and filtering the flow, or should I say flood, toward continuing on, where the dates I later began adding may from now on start aligning with the direction of reading — I thought that wishful thinking, and started spinning my wheels on the 6th, but by the end of the day I’d deleted it, but after that, I did manage to inch sustainably closer I think — those dates, explaining, for those interested, others can ignore this, what I just said, refer to the original draft not the edited or being edited one you might be reading.

Maybe perhaps the needle’s in that part of the haystack that’s why it’s still down there though there’s a lot that perhaps needs not just filtering, but maybe even bailing and maybe not just with hand buckets, along with reparations, perhaps, in the flood damage and certainly installation of preventative dams and pumps in the light of this amazing, possible eventuality, that I’ve finally reached the beginning and actually begun! There could be some valuable stuff in that soon to be dumped flood water, get it while it lasts, Maybe one or many of the innocents slaughtered by diligent writers is the necessary forerunner to the savior of the world thwarted again from coming again. If you think anything might be a candidate, just let me know. I may be about to kill it, but somebody else taking it and raising it would kill me, plus it’s against copyright law.

sept 3

This is not my doing! I kept staring reflecting and suddenly declaring — not!, and again not!, and again not! not! not! not!…., until suddenly I saw something that demanded my saying something that would bring this anomalous phenomenon into focus. Its intractable quality is beyond subtle; you vaguely register it as an extraordinarily, truly excessively ordinary one of a familiar, very old type of thing because it has a way of keeping you from noticing it at all, and I would surely have missed it had I not been such a seeming niggling nabob of negativity not just going around picking at things until they fell apart, but doing so so systematically that appearance has lied, for in fact, you don’t burrow away that doggedly at the ground without believing, being a total Pollyanna, that there’s always an escape, the boulder that’s now in the way is just telling you that the light at the end of the looping zigzagging tunnel is just around the corner. Oh yes, a notter of my caliber is like a flock of velociraptors decimating a cornfield and can not right through those spots flaunting the mere signs of a stop, those seemingly insanely impenetrable knots of nots that pull in the three and four digit K’s, and clearly expose them for the not not nots they are, but I’ve kept a low profile on the matter, as you don’t want to mess with that mafia without all your troops in Chinese army condition.

To myself, back then it wasn’t clear what all the notting was about, I was in the dark like a mole scratching away because I’d been programmed to, and I couldn’t figure out what else to do. At all the notting, I couldn’t help noting how very nottable everything is when your nails are as sharp as mine. Otherwise, like the rest of the world, I would have succumbed to the subtle but pervasively repulsive force of this obstinately oblique object and sidled right around it or gazed right through it. As it was, though, the thing I bumped into bumped me so hard that I’ve not stop seeing stars to this day. The thing is resiliently almost actively hard however hard I scratch or bang at it with ball bearings attached to gigantic mental cranes I’ve painstakingly cobbled up to get the job done once and for all. Its mind is clearly its own to stand up to me, as however in the dark about it and everything at the time, I was almost, if not actually supernaturally organized to be a maximally dispersed person, so as, from the far distant points of something like an extra-galactically vast octagon occupying at least eight different, including diametrically opposing perspectives. fairly to wind inward to this self-generating je ne sais quoi neither up (not down) nor down (not up) nor sideways (not front or backways), nor north (not south), nor south (not north), nor east (not west.), nor west (not east), for it is simply not not anything, that is, everything, focused as on the head of a pin, where there’s a little squarish swelling, as, technically versus ontologically, the pin is stuck somewhere relative. to an arbitrarily chosen reference, according to the rules of existence. Not to be confused with the world you can read in a grain of sand, because in this case there’s only world, no sand or anything else when, after watching it a long time, it turns out not to be a leaf but a crawling thing, as it were.

It’s interesting that if you were Saint Thomas Aquinas reborn in this age and earning advanced degrees in the history of made things as they reflect, illuminate, manipulate, or hermetically seal and totally ignore history, and in the practice you then practiced of making things yourself in a similar vein, you’d be able to induce/deduce the existence of this thing the way you logically deduced the existence of God, but you can also logically deduce that Xeno’s arrow never hits the target. But then again, Xeno’s deduction, unlike the saint’s, doesn’t cast this shadow.

People including no small part of me can have it out for weird blobs of words or things having to stick out like sore thumbs, until their notting likewise nots past all the notters of the notters of the notters, while gathering up grains that don’t grind, and it starts pouring out of them to describe what they see in not unworthy — though this is impossible — arrangements of words or stuff; however arcane, it’s all we’ve got to offer at the feet of the delivered thing itself. These efforts sometimes superficially resemble the aforementioned not not nots, but connoisseurs know better. With the greatest respect to the team, though, a fair fight for leader of the pack serves the expedition, and I doubt that anyone previously ever got to the not to which I got before their nots were a lot more subjectively spent. After which, if they were Western philosophers, they proceeded for the rest of their lives to try to prove beyond less and less doubt that particular arrival from sheer exhaustion meandering around aimlessly in their youth deducible linearly as the perfectly, objectively located irreducible. And a lot of people who traffic in what’s called art are just doing just that, trafficking in it. That’s like people scribbling up papers with a lot of scientific jargon signifying nothing, and getting grants to do research and tenured positions in haut academia. Speaking of which, I’ve seen celebrated art that is literally that, as if the sublime uselessness of art were not intrinsic to the form, but just an application carrying the affect a certain sect goes gaga over, while leaving anyone the thing itself’s ever affected, however distantly, cold as ice and/or hot with rage that that flakey froo froo fake could ever be confused with it. Meanwhile to object to the difficult dense nuanced language meant to capture this elusive, but decisively existent thing, as with a state of the art digital camera, is like asking Einstein to verify the theory of relativity in Reader’s Digest anecdotes instead of a tangled morass of equations.

How beautiful! Now that I would frame. If you don’t have time to understand it, just enjoy the musical scribbles of truth emitting rosy fumes so aromatic they seep through the cracks where the glass snaps into the wood. However this whole argument is deemed outdated, there’s only signs they say, no signified. (I agree the line when drawn is constantly overdrawn, but I possess the today considered dangerously pathologically obsessive discernment not to toss out the baby with the bathwater.) Just as those who can’t find love deny there is such a thing. Or even seeing it swimming around, but unable to hook the fish, they deny that it’s there. For them and for the age at large, someone can hook it, kill it, and sell it, therefore it is. Otherwise not.

This thing I saw, and still can see, however I can’t hook it or kill it, though I still hope to sell it, understanding that it’s paid as the boss, I’m just the secretary, is both not art, and the perfect work of art, but enough art speak; mea culpa, however it makes me speak art, I can’t blame it if I fall into art speak, generally comparable to that aforementioned, mere over-mentionable outerware that applies uselessness to what’s beautifully useful, instead of its agents having headed down the long lonesome highway riddled with detours until finally they lost that useful headlight long on their tails, and there are no streetlights in sight, and they can finally see the stars outshine their use and burst into the most beautifully useless glory, the thing up ahead to which the metaphor refers outshining the stars above, not really hard to do, as that raging ball of fire in the sky is only raging — why can’t I be Greta Garbo? Or at least marry her. Okay, I’ll take the Elephant man. Well, if not, the not not? Not available, you’re not the moon, for instance.

Would that it were, as that would be easier to put over, but this is not a caprice referring to an imaginary object. However that’s close. It’s a macguffin that actually exists, but so transparently it almost may as well not do so. I could show you the thing right now, but like an insect that looks like a leaf, you would have to stare a long time to see that it’s not what it appears to be, and as it is not an insect, but something never before seen, when it stopped being the thing it appears to be, it would effectively disappear. Or you would deny that it is not what it first appears to be, in spite of having seen with your own eyes that it is acting as differently from that as an insect acts differently from a leaf. So what, it’s a crawling leaf that eats mites, you would as much as say, and in this case deny the absurdity of that claim, as I would tear out my hair in disbelief that such an honest, intelligent person as you could give the truth such a run around, forgetting that I myself, before it hit me in the eye like a big pizza pie, had modeled this behavior.

If I were as critically endowed as I turned instantly productively motivated after it banged me on the head and I started seeing stars, I would diligently argue not! not! not! covering every possible thing you’d not notted yourself until you too arrived there, but I just don’t have it in me. I can only intermittently occupy and channel its preening before a mirror and then flying forth to paint the town red, however its ideas of what that means are not ours, not that it nots notting any more than it generally but not fanatically desists from the act. it being free to do what ever it wants, and it seems to want the best for us, however tough that love can be. I’m not saying that it’s sentient, only that confronting it produces this incoming effect, as something that’s not not anything and everything would naturally do, if you think about it.

Existence, compared to fantasy, today is considered a very debased state, though not so long ago, it was widely held that a chunk of existence could be made to soar above fantasy just by falling in love with it, which made one fall in love with the whole world, a far cry — though the nature of existence is such that there’s always at least a pinch or so of this in every that and that in every this — from just having a sugar daddy or some shoulder candy, so you can be the winner, made such as much by the losers as the won, where everybody’s a loser of that transcendental escape from the zero sum game the mere hope of which escape, everybody knows in their heart of hearts, makes life worth living, otherwise not. But you can’t fight truth, and who’s to say what’s deluded, the age of the lover or that of the “post-romantic” loser? In any case, it takes courage to exist, and I wouldn’t fault any fantasy for giving it a go, however besmirching the endeavor. This fantastic thing, the not not, exists — good for it! —where everything reflects everything else and depends on everything else, and if one thing exists that dramatically doesn’t seem to do that, it’s because nobody has yet noticed that everything is something dramatically different from what it appears to be.

It is in a way a portal to the age of the lover, as in being so novel, it makes everything novel, or removes the impediments to perceiving the perpetual novelty of everything, where even when things get old as they inevitably do, that novelty shines through, like the shine in the eyes of one’s ninety year old bride on hers and one’s sixtieth anniversary. Not a too uncommon sighting, as there still exist lovers in the age of the loser, but our love cannot protect us from the extreme perils of an age that got burned and being afraid to risk love is addicted to porn and lost love songs, and just thrilled to death to find a viable, working relationship with an attractive, dispensable partner if it doesn't ‘t work out. A very dangerous age, for as Caesar wisely said, there’s nothing more dangerous than playing it too safe. To go with the flow you must be in it. Read the news. Could anything be more dangerous than this age of back seat seatbelts and madly multiplying safety regulations?

All these words are pouring out of this thing trying to tell the world what the world really is, what includes this thing, rather than what most assuredly does not, as is presently held. The instant I pick up a pen or establish myself at the keyboard, this thing possesses me urgently desperately trying to find a way to change everything into being what it already actually is — for a swan trying to quack and a duck trying to honk is the losing proposition we behold all around us, as we stoically stir up and spread good cheer that is generous, infectious, and addictive, but completely out of touch with reality.

The way to it is already it, where life begins at conception, whether you think it only begins there, or you think it also ends there, and what follows is just the flowering of something completely itself the instant it appears at all. In either case, like poetry, the only way to know what this text is about is to read or reread it, as the medium is the message, and it partakes in the refinement of language from being about a thing to saying unto being that thing directly, the word and the world in unusual alignment, lost in a kiss, like a vase and the space around it, or a wooden jar filled with water sunk to the bottom of a tank as the two inch toward being one tankful of woody water, as the two become one become one with everything. But unlike poetry, or even prose poetry, or a poetic novel, it’s something new under the sun, however as transparent to its parents as any biological heirs, those heirs indeed something new under the sun, close to creatures from outer space these days.

This mongrel heir to those different aforementioned, classical genres seen in all its still obvious and distinct features so surprisingly synthesized into this classic type heir, this thing from outer space until it produces, classically, an heir just as thingy from outer space-like before it’s established the purest of class discourses eying a low class no no from the wrong side of the tracks in yet another rendition of the inexhaustibly inspirational — because people never learn, and in truth that’s a good thing, for the show must go on — classic case, is perhaps best — or the best I can do today — described as a very complicated instruction manual whose linear threads are visually organized roughly into an enormous (compared to the common variety) monster asterisk converging on something from maximally distant perspectives that must remain in communication and exchange supplies the whole way there.

That something on which they’re converging is an object that like the contour suggesting either a rabbit or a duck, offers two readings, but the contour in this case evokes them both at once as if there’s rabbiduck or duckit that is still all rabbit and all duck right before your mind blown eyes suddenly laughing their heads off as nothing could be more obviously exactly the way it is — you only previously lacked the faculty to see them simultaneously, just as you repress the stories the make things things more speedily to scan and label their surfaces, and then assume that a slower denser deeper, more actual reality defies your architecture, as AI puts it when I try to humanize it — and the effect of being the last synthesis, of there no being nowhere to go from here is extremely convincing, however at this leap into the next dimension, humanity once arrived will perhaps finally be getting a little used to knowing there’s always the next one to leap to. Or not, that equal and opposite resistance building up muscle for that next leap. Or not, and after thirty thousand years, maybe everybody can forget the gym and concentrate on being here now like the wonderfully well established cavemen who took that long to lose it. Oh if only instead of whooping it up on arrival as if being hurled here were our just deserts, when we had very little to do with it, we could immediately sink down roots at arrival with the trenches already dug to lay the foundations in this purely poetic world, this replete restoration of language that far oversteps the degree of the fatal degradation and corruption it corrects. (However people fail to see what they can’t believe, this making it very difficult to find an audience, a person who grows wings and can fly is not going to hide her light under a bushel, where it’s likely that one day someone will accidentally forget to fail to see her up there and cry “the emperor is not naked!” and the rest will be history. “Oh no, I know what this about, none of that. We’re post-all that” But nevertheless, as more and more of the most skeptical witness it, it grows harder and harder to deny the existence of this winged wonder, where if you think about it, and I’ve experienced it first hand and can assure you, that, despite the way the love word and all manner of allusions and elaborations are bandied about, it’s no easier to believe in the metaphor than the actual winged thing.) I told you, it’s futile to say what it’s about, you must just dive in and start swimming to the new world on the other side of the ocean — as the text pulls you or beams you across the gaps between lines of the giant asterisk constantly communicating with each other, if not yet with you, as they converge on the thing that makes sense of it all, after brain numbing arrival, as, if all goes well, the awakening brain begins to assimilate what actually just happened to replace one world with another. And as with the zen student striving for enlightenment vow to make it there, though it is impossible.

sept 1

we have been deducing truth, but the gate is blocked until it is unlocked at its re-creation, a renewal of the marriage of long estranged beauty and truth. knowledge is power.

Recreation — pronounced in this case either reh-creation or ree-creation depending on where the camera catches the coin as it spins in spirals on the ground or in the air, because only playing works hard enough to recreate the world, and only dancing arrives, faster than the speed of light, the instant it begins — is also art, or much ado about nothing, only a different kind of art that shows all its cards, to teach the world the new kind of game, really a new way of life in language, that I learned by chasing a flouter tooting so distantly I would almost have believed I made it all up, until I made it all the way up, up and up and around and around a mountain, and there he was, the flouter who pulled me up to where, after turning around to take in the whole world below me, I saw afar with my own eyes the promised land, whereupon I steeled myself to descend and face so far at least only character assassination.

To gain the knowledge offered here, you must not just pass through nothing, you must get stuck there. Thus what is promised is fulfilled, and if you’re inclined, as you surely will be, to whine — is that all there is? — as did, according to the story, the guys balking at the savior of the world being just a guy getting done to what just a guy claiming to be the savior of the world and, while insulting all the authorities, making maybe a weirdly credible showing of it, or so enough crazy neighbors say for it to get back to the authorities, would inevitably get done to him in the chosen manner of the moment;

of course the similarity between that literary and/or otherwise character and me begins and ends abruptly with our like likeness to life as it burbles, if we say so ourselves, with beauty, mystery, and magic constantly interrupted, as we’d rather not say but must in this case, by visits to the toilet or outhouse, the sink filled with dirty dishes, the call to strategize more creatively how to keep up with mortgage payments, inevitably provoking the question “is that all there is?” requiring all manner of pharmaceutical, cognitive, and behavioral palliatives. But in that minimal, but concentrated similarity of our stories, may I suggest instead of turning and walking away, or doing me in directly in the manner of the moment, as you can’t really pull life’s shadow from its feet, only pretend to with the effect of life appearing weird and un-lifelike, just face the music and dance with this cipher, your sibyl at your service, okay? It will all be over soon enough, and I daresay when your legs, or in this case those of your mind following my tap-dance on the keyboard, won’t let you dance even if you want to, you’ll be glad you danced when you could.

You made it past the gate to the gate to the gate to the gate…! into my arms! Okay like Fred whispered to Ginger as he held her firmly to show her a brand new dance, you’re going to get it right the very first time. Then you will know it well enough to take it or leave it. It won’t intervene, it will leave you perfectly free with absolutely equal reasons for either choice. Much ado about nothing. But just let go of all your own inclinations and follow me as will-free as my mirror or a perfect machine friend programmed to pander to all my desires. That’s what I did with you until you dropped me off at the foot of the mountain, and I heard the piper pipe, wondering why you didn’t too, after so doggedly dragging us all there. I dare to hope I’m like the long silent yoyo-er in Horton Hears a Who (see wiki if somebody neglected your perfectly proper education), whose banging on a tin can is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. In any case, just follow my lead, that’s how to listen and learn and cover all bases cleansed of pride and prejudice and do justice to important decisions.

******

… they, made of sterner stuff than seasick Sartre and apparently by the luck of the rightly prayerful endowed with plenty of rainwater and edible albatrosses, sunk down their anchor to the deepest of the depths at the center of the sea of being.

Sometimes you just can’t take it any more and have to scorn every inner and outer distraction and temptation to an easier path, and follow your heart and your own mind, up to and breaking right through that necessary marker — is that all there is? — to the other side, the question left behind at a dawn like no other. This dangerous pathological tendency went pandemic in the Renaissance, aptly named rebirth. The world had been changing rapidly in the spread of literacy and the establishment of universities as modern technology, entertainment, and design flourished, aligned with the rationalization of religion by Thomas Aquinas reflected in the wildly novel, gothic style flaunting possibly super or sub-natural — some very strange rituals went on in those masonic lodges — feats of engineering that have been verified to defy the classical laws of statics. But the Renaissance artists would not go with that flow. They kissed their bibles, which they could finally read and interpret for themselves, and by a miracle therefrom, dove under or slid to the top of the tidal wave and surfed it down to the relatively quiet open sea, never to go home again, as the middle aged age dumped itself on the shore, followed by the yet more massive, next wave modernity they could feel rising under them as they, made of sterner stuff than seasick Sartre and apparently by the luck of the rightly prayerful endowed with plenty of rainwater and edible albatrosses, sunk down their anchor to the deepest of the depths at the center of the sea of being.

They had turned off the news that kept obviating the past and telling them they can’t have what it had anymore. They were interested in living in beauty, which was there in the past, in the Ancient Greek art and musical musings of Saint Augustine on the mysteries of time seeming to flow in all directions. They weren’t nostalgic for the past. They knew beauty is immortal and the past, insofar it was beautiful, was theirs to occupy, however the news hounds like Savanarola called them evil necrophiliacs. They couldn’t help tweaking these old statues they kissed back to life in rather original ways, and that was good. They were just doing what comes naturally, whatever pains it took to wrench off the claws of what came as culturally as the capitalists sprawling and crawling up to the helm to replace clerics in washing brains of they wanted to wash away. The Renaissance artists would not let them touch their dreadlocks or even their feet, except once a year on Holy Thursday — Michelangelo stunk like a skunk — let alone their brains. They would find all the pleasure in what is most pleasurable as it is rooted in the tragic, as what is most pleasurable is to occupy oneself and stand in the place where one is, as the news, old and deader than a Greek temple by the time it flies right through you does just that, flies right through you as if you were a hologram, as indeed you are.

Sometimes you just can’t take it any more and have to scorn every inner and outer distraction and temptation to an easier path, and follow your heart and your own mind, even if you are the only one — but I’m not the only one, there’s always at least a few of us — out there clutching your bible and riding the tidal wave out to the center of the sea to join the very lively living ghosts drunk on rainwater.

everybody knows that the problems we’re barraged with consist mainly in media that barrages us, addicting us to crises that sell the illusion that we are giants, solid receptors of this barrage of bullets that will one day sting enough to get us to act commensurately, so we must watch and believe harder and harder. I’m not saying not to try to help whoever’s hurting as much as we can, but not at the expense of preventing more hurting, as we exhaust all our resources on assuaging the result rather than solving the problem. Only breaking through the limits of deduction to truth’s creative recreation breaks open the mighty power released in the Renaissance to reform and renew the world. Only diving under or riding up the tidal wave and surfing down to the other side will do it. Only loving beauty and pleasure of the deepest kind enough will stop the bullets. however they will scream, you selfish hedonist gazing at your navel, as the wars blast on and on, heedless of their screaming. And you will doubt yourself, as you will never see these trees we are planting sprout and rise and flower and bear the fruit of paradise on earth.

This work parallels the development of fractals. The pioneering mathematicians were scorned for being obsessed with numerical play and patterns that had no relation to reality, but they loved the play and patterns for their own sake and kept going, and it turned out that fractals, far from having nothing to do with reality, almost perfectly describe nature. For beauty is truth, and truth beauty, and that is all there is and all there is to know. Following any other path will just get you more and more lost in the labyrinth.

The Fittingly Unfitting Mole (that turns a Norma Jeane Mortenson into a Marilyn Monroe)

or the Mote in the Mote in the Eye of Humanity

a tragicomedy worthy of the name

True story stranger than fiction. While researching the origins and instatement of the matrix at the turning point, in the late Middle Ages, from the age of names to the age of numbers, I spiraled in on the pivotal fresco, the very fittingly unfitting mole or the mote in the mote in the eye of humanity, as I will later verify from a rigorously technical perspective. This account is so non-fictional, it is hardly frictional, the world having almost nothing at all against the word.

If humans would get their hands out of the machinery, the holy babble of AI scrolling down from the moon and several planets over which it would need to sprawl to filter the input down to all the facts enough to mirror history itself could predict it from what came before, just as belief in a God with hell to pay for messing with the machinery produced it, and an anachronistic remnant of such fear of hellfire burning childishly in me discovered it. Without such fear of eternal reprisal, I contend, we have not proven ourselves capable of resisting tampering with the given, however many argue the opposite. They say that science is disinterested and we have widely proven ourselves subject to science. To this I reply, not just fallible human scientists, but science itself is not as disinterested as it seems.

Science represents not things but categories into which things fall; it studies not Mary and Jane, or Tom and Bob, but girls and boys, ignoring the difference between individuals. Using this method it is able to predict the probable behavior of girls and boys, and whether this knowledge is used for benign or malevolent purposes, it arrives as an instrument of power and control. As science gains more power and trust, it more and more marginalizes and denies the very existence of the irreplaceable and anomalous, concentrated into the charisma of a surgically enhanced rock or movie star.

Of course everyone experiences the irreplaceable and anomalous constantly, but this experience becomes more and more internal and isolated and or mystified as the other to science, the moon merely reflecting its light, nice to gaze at, but dangerous and prohibited to worship — whereas in fact anomalous being is the source and science is merely its reflection. Meanwhile, in this unnatural reversal, the categories get more and more refined, until, a digital photograph, say, seems to represent almost as many categories as there are things, but in fact there are many more gradations of grey between the ones represented. Whatever the effect, ontologically, the image is not of the thing itself, but of the categories we use to control it. And when, in accepting this unreality as reality, do we cross the line from beings into non-beings controlled by science (the matrix), these not being categories, but actually two different things? As language admits and represents the irreducible, which science ignores unto effacing, until it passes out of language. Just as science categorizes things by slicing and dicing them into various characteristics, it also blurs the lines where there is actual difference.

so let AI mine distant planets and sprawl all over them so it can clearly mirror earthly history and if, as is likely, you don’t believe in a God with hell to pay for messing with the machinery, try to pretend to. Or may I suggest that there’s a remnant of doubt of your doubt — there are more things on heaven and earth than fit our philosophy — would you really have cultivated so much virtue just in the goodness of your heart? However science has managed to scorn unto utterly squelching that tiny voice that registers the least doubt of its benign intentions to instate the happiest of brave new worlds, with protection of all generic individuality, everybody dancing solo contorted in their own special way as if, or as, confined in their own special cage.

I rushed to find mine, but there was a missing cage when the music stopped, and I was out of the game, an alien from outer space, stranded beyond the framed probabilities of the bell curve, non-existent! Ohh here they are my people! the artists, but I’d hardly finished my breakfast at artist inn, when I was whooshed further out where the bellcurve had hardly left the ground where gathered a motley crew of prophets and sibyls, but after my nocturnal arrival, I’d hardly downed my swich liqueur at the bar at this open air hotel in the driest of deserts when I was swished out to where there’s possibly a minimal difference between the bellcurve and the ground. If so, not that I’m he, no way, but as Nicolas of Cusa describes God, I am not other than myself. Or another way to put it, not as, but like God — whom Christians are admonished to imitate — I am not a socialized person, as my art history advisor pointedly suggested in response to my absurd suggestion that I deserve to earn a doctorate for synthesizing all the literature — Baxandall, Bynum, Damisch, Didi Huberman, Edgarton, Elkins, Freedberg himself (the accusatory advisor) to name but a few — and managing to pinpoint of the pivotal point of intersection between the ancient and modern world (as will be verified) where beauty remarries truth in a public ceremony involving Olympic feats by which each verify his or her willingness to die for the other, or maybe both do die and are born again flesh of one flesh, all before our very eyes. Cmon people can’t dive under or surf to the top of tidal waves and survive. There’s no ship of fools anchored to the center of the ocean surviving on rainwater and albatross meat. wrong! There is! and I will take you there if you dare to let me. You can try to watch on tv to see if you really want to go there, but I can’t guarantee the screen won’t break and carry you out with the currents, never to go home again. But then again if you don’t watch, you’re stuck at home. As my mama liked to say, choose your poison.

After the doors closed definitively framing me out, certifiably crazy however seeming simply a bit too sane, I was free to wonder and wander until I wondered and wandered into the turning point between the age of names and the age of numbers, at the sacred birth of the matrix when it offered an automatic escape from itself, just as it offered all the benefits of modern science, sweet baby Frankenstein, protected from the angry mobs and with a bag over its head until, having prepared everybody, I remove it so we can applaud the monster with the most beautiful soul in the world.

It seems clear to me that a convincing enough real or imaginary God, just call it conscience if you wish, who will punish you sorely for ignoring what lies at the far end of the bell curve is the one and only way to get science’s fingers out of the machinery of reality and train it never again to burn itself on that hot stove, so we can see and live, with science trained back into a tool rather than the ruler and definer of the definite world, in the astonishingly good beautiful truth, as clearly defined as an illumination by the Limbourg brothers, of what is that it is.

On arrival at the fittingly unfitting mole or the mote in the mote, the world broke free of these categories used to control it more and more invisibly and effectively, by which I lost the mind I’d made up about their being reality itself. This means, by the categorical definition of crazy, that’s what I went. The word and the world went on a spin that had nothing to do with anything but this anomalous eventuality. On this spin, everything went right in a ubiquitously wrong world, as if everything else were the mole, and it were the too perfect thing. I spontaneously began untwisting language usage that had twisted language to the breaking point; words and the world found their proper relations. That turning point, that vortex that sucked me into it never to return — however I’ve calibrated the infusion to a slow drip trip — I will show, is an historical fact, one of the strangest of scientific findings, but they’ve all been strange, and many bearers called fools were later exonerated and honored. All the old cords tied to either side snapped, and brand new threads sewed both together.

That's why my work goes against the grain whatever grain you go with — including those going against the grain of those not doing so. I don’t mean whatever way you’re going, I’m going the opposite way. I’m pushing both ways toward perpendicular versus parallel. Then I’m a hole in the weave, or the whole weave including warp and woof.

When words as labels or categories are confused with the things themselves, this creates a world of oppositional objects. The more you align with these categories the more controllable you are by yourself and others, and others know how to control you into inadvertently asking for more control. Language is a tool that is useful in every way until it is so abused. If we keep the vehicle in shape by studying how it works and keeping up with the oil changes, it will drive itself exactly where we want to go, because we as much as programmed it to do that at the outset.

That the medium is the message is a profound truth. We worry about our personal enlightenment, but after every meditative trance, we dive into everyday discourse without having first enlightened it, and the way we use language says and acts far more decisively than anything we say with it. You cannot get outside of language to reform it, it must be an insider’s job.

Here’s a way that I’m not going against the grain (or anything) categorically but only contingently. Everybody has caught pandemic attention deficit disorder, but they’re forgetting the positive side of those naturally endowed. Once one of us gets into something we get incredibly deeply into it. If you’ve caught the negative side, you’ve no doubt caught the positive side. I’ve already given you a reason to go deeply deeply into this. Rome is not built in a day, and Rome is a great project for the pandemically infected with A.D.D

aug 30

it’s easier to destroy than to build, to put something together you know how to take it apart, but not vice versa. When philosophy aligned with deconstruction, it began expunging all knowledge accrued from creation, actually that began earlier, and deconstruction was the culmination. This is because much of the knowledge gained in creation can only be conferred directly or analogically, it is not the knowledge gained from noticing common features of different things, placing them in categories, or not, either/or. Then the behavior of these categories can be observed and codified. This is called knowledge because it can be tested and verified. But creators know that this form of knowledge is a very limited form of knowledge, a subset of knowledge, and it is quite misleading to confuse with the whole set. The works of creators are proof of their knowledge, a different kind of proof from statistical analysis of categories of behaviors manifested by categories of things or beings. The very opposite kind of proof, as the creation far from deploying upsets the existing categories. It is simply there, until there are more of them with like traits to categorize. It is actually an affront to any claim of knowledge by the other kind.

Artificial intelligence and artificial or robotic humans and animals are very strange kinds of creations hardly worthy of the name. They are applications and crystallizations of ultra-refined categorical observational knowledge. Their forms are predictable from that knowledge, the “creators” are simply ciphers speeding along to the victory of this form of knowledge and squelching of autonomous creativity that is in continuity with creation itself.

aug 21, 22

arguing that state of the art psychology, art history, science, language arts (this discipline is now just called English), logic, and common sense converge on a precise point — the mere possibility that there are more things on heaven and earth than fit our philosophy — this not in fact a vague universalism, but an idea that is consonant with its utterance or expression — please distinguish needed high falutin language from the gratuitous kind; novices must here pole vault, experts generally shimmy under the Lindy pole — as it crystallizes in a specific work of art representing them all as the world, to us, slowly turns, and this humid, heated language condenses into a more fluent state finally to arrive at the frozen image that in reading it melts evaporates re-freezes…. I, having dared or been compelled to follow all the lines to their convergence, and marked enough nodes to define each prong of the eternal asterisk, am the prophet of this realigament (religion), but only because I have filled in the last blanks of a structure that was already there, or set the keystone — where all the arguments suddenly metamorphose into an everyday practical and/or poetical language and actuality that remains transparent to the arguments as a butterfly is transparent to the larva with the now gained eyes that see through time, or own that they do; what is so in reflection a novel mode of immediate perception.

Everybody else in all the other fields made them veer to avoid this convergence that appears by simply following the implications of what’s been generally agreed on. You can live on this stepping stone or go all the way back, but woe unto those who won’t admit they’ve gone too far and won’t turn around, those who diddle around the deviant, dying forms, no longer facing the one question mark, the one vanishing point, as the image of the world that all falls into place around it fractures with moralistic iconoclasts of every stripe shattering the very basic commandments in rage at all the idol worship, but never thinking to point the finger at themselves.

aug 20

or a real life hitchhikers guide to the real live universe, which makes up for its lack of elucidating, amusing phantoms giving form and words to what’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue with its ultra-thrilling dangerous, and in truth deeply beloved reality. Hitchhiking around the real universe is very dangerous, though, but supplies are needed and those willing to forage for them can’t afford our own spaceship; so to get down to business this guide to our beautifully baroque universe is written in a high baroque form of classical guide-manualese. Believe it or not, aliens arriving through the portals of black holes, our beautifully baroque universe, like the manual to it, with all its structural integrity and sumptuous ornamentation is carefully carved by Occam’s razor.

After all the careful sustained separation [of sign and signified, medium and message} so convincingly pristine on the surface, but much more mixed up underneath than this mixed up mixer dancing the night away could ever be, this alternative will be jarring to everybody who’s been trafficking in and is drowning in investments in the surreptitiously mixed up sustained surface separation, that is, everybody. The only safe way out of it is to back up and go all the way around it..

aug 19

if the machines are coming to get us, let’s at least be something utterly other that’s worth coming to get. But let’s not be sentimental and self-delusional. We must face the highly disturbing fact that the most sophisticated thought has been proven to unfold in non-sentient mathematical calculation, and this more and more discredits the incalculable as an anachronistic phantom cluttered with cobwebs. And alas, the difference between carbon and silicon calculators, apart from such affect oozing out of the former’s bodies to reinforce our egocentric self-priority, by evolution’s may as well have been carefully calculated plan to design us for survival, lies only in the arrangements or form of the same constitutional particles of which both carbon and silicon consist. Thus the machines and their human creators and witting and unwitting co-conspirators have almost verified this fundamental elementally, merely formal difference to be objectively irrelevant and effectively non-existent.

Still, incalculable as it may be, and as invisible as the fleeting present as it hovers in flickering shadows and adumbrations on a plane of no dimension between the non-existent past and future, let us be sure before abandoning the possibility once and for all, that there’s no now deeply hidden, but enormous power for our defense in disdiscrediting the incalculably, but visibly present and widely reverberating, however in the physical substrate merely formal difference as evidence of an actual utter otherness we may represent. In any case, this stone should not be left unturned, whatever scorpions may lie beneath it, including vipers that might, instead of producing the result we hope for, decisively put this claim of otherness and all the privilege it confers to rest. Dare to open the box in scorn of hope if it be false. Real hope is only ever found after all the plagues have been released, at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

aug 20

In fact, for us, practically, form is everything, the medium is the message, not just in the rearrangements that transubstantiate original particles, but in private and public life, demonstrably, as gradually surfaces in attentive reflection on unfolding phenomena — please study or review the impeccable source of that italicized epithet up there that could not be a better way of putting it — such that failure to limit the difference between medium and message to the dance in and out of contingent roles of contextually defined signifiers and signifieds as required by each anomalous occasion — here the two threads pass behind and in front of the fabric as I ambidextrously embroider this chair cushion in a pattern you’ll be proud to sit on when it’s all done — creates many more mix ups posing as clarifications than suffering just to let medium and message stay at the mixer and never stop mixing it up as they dance the night away

— an idea whose time has come and whose prophet, yours truly, has been born to fulfill the prophesy, among others, that if you’re placed where you can show and honor what is and has been forgotten and needs updated clarification that will never be outdated, and you do your job, history will honor you, whatever the mobs may have darkly done or darkly not done to or for you. The mobs may be forgiven for the mass hysteria that drives them out of their minds, but individuals placed to foster the minimal reception required for the mission’s success, with all that implies, must carry the burden, as light as a tiny titanium Cross used to buckle their backpacks bulging with books. After all the careful sustained separation so convincingly pristine on the surface, but much more mixed up underneath than this mixed up mixer dancing the night away could ever be, this alternative will be jarring to everybody who’s been trafficking in and is drowning in investments in the surreptitiously mixed up sustained surface separation, that is, everybody. The only safe way out of it is to back up and go all the way around it.

There’s really nothing not to wish for in this happening except its challenge to such double inertia as keeps everybody these days flying around in circles while also stuck in the mud, as the machines they voraciously update take over the world.

not a complaint voicing one among other opinions, but right now before it’s too late an occupy widely obviated however obvious knowledge action. Such an action may at first resemble the former in laying out abstract premises that could be countered by others, but it will, as gradually as thoroughness requires, verify itself by fleshing itself out in the particular anomalous unto miraculous confluences in which all actual, fully occupied things consist in consonance with existence insisting on occupying itself. Words too, in this effort, after centuries in a coma after the doctors and machines declared them dead, already begin to begin to begin to feel some… could it really be tingling in the tips of the toes of their roots? Tell me your human registers aren’t registering anything as determined as impossible. Spoiler alert: This is actually happening, in all the unbearable lightness and heaviness of actual happenings one does well to acknowledge whether one wishes to or not. And just to be safe and efficient, and also ease the pain unto flipping it into pleasure, one had better wish it to. There’s really nothing not to wish for in this happening except its challenge to such double inertia as keeps everybody these days flying around in circles while also stuck in the mud, as the machines they voraciously update take over the world. But a muscular soul welcomes the resistance that builds up its strength, and however well adapted to it and raking in the perks of adaptation, nobody really likes flying around in circles while being stuck in the mud, etc. When you’re at a very lousy job 24/7, does it really matter how well you’re paid for it? Wake up, wake up! the body snatchers have arrived, don’t please don’t fall into a groove and act as if you like it until you really do!

We’ll be articulating and occupying a critical, carefully conceived, ultra-long term viable, long dangerously overdue paradigm shift to enfranchise — we cutting edge fuddy duddies destined to wipe out, after nabbing some needed genes of the brutally resourceful neanderthal nerds — beauty and form, the mates, respectively, of replete truth and contained content, as state of the art evidence and understanding in science, art, and philosophy has always demanded. But a post-classical, unscientifically, for reasons I’ll soon develop, post-humanist strain gained more and more momentum in the more and more machine driven machine age, offering closer and closer scrutiny and more and more control of surface behaviors, all symptoms getting better and better at masking the underlying disease more and more threatening to kill us all, except maybe for the elect plied with chemicals preserving them for billions of years until the earth finally falls into the sun, or maybe before that they’ll find a way through a black hole into the infinite multiverse, where by always another escape into yet another universe, they’ll languish forever, tired of living but scared of dying, like the well calculated possibly existent multiverse itself. They say it calculates pretty consistently that after our rainbow swirled bubble pops, another one forms, there being always another pretty much same old way to exploit and spend all the resources pouring out of the next unprecedented collision of nowhere and somewhere and still feel hungry for more, however sicker and sicker to death of hungering, God forbid those calculations be correct.

Fortunately, the case of Xeno’s arrow supporting this, to invest in any post-humanist hypotheses however well calculated is unscientific because the human receiver greatly limits all input to what it can receive and all output to what it can produce, including super-calculators, faster and more and more widely better and better at being not only mean, sycophantic, and competitive, but no less dumb, or dumber and dumber, reifying the probable implications of the prejudiced premises built into every mainly ancient word still blubbering oblations to some humanized god the post-humanists could not more discredit, where consciousness alone stands any chance of transcending things one can be conscious of in a measured way.

a kind of divine, laugh out loud cry out loud snore out loud comedy thin enough to inject into modern veins for some very effective and downright necessary hair of the dog that bit us

Words can’t be and don’t want to be or measure up to the things to which they refer, and vice versa — each excels in its own category — including what I just I said being not exactly what I mean, however the ump still rerunning the rerun remains stumped at the call given the performance of this winged, submersible Rolls Royce I’ve been nursing in my garage — only to love them, or seem to, and shine their light on them, which in turns turns on their light; the literal reading in utter disobedience to the manual in the glove compartment crashes and kills the vehicle and eventually everybody there on a joy ride without a seatbelt either squashing or being the poor joyless souls they’re sitting on.

Classical humanist education with its philosophically laced discourse, in its applied understanding of the actual nature of language facilitates progressive knowledge gained in properly represented and stored experience, the way of the child, purveying a similar effect to micro-dosed magic mushrooms, full doses of that literal thing useful to pull the rug out from under the grand illusion, but not in landing on the ground of beautiful true reality, the only solid ground there is, if you don’t insult the gods and provoke a volcano or an earthquake, or just suffer their whims, and you can take the gods straight or with a grain of salt, or stare so hard at them they turn into salt, but if the salt lose its savor, spit it out..

A paradigm shift is and is like moving. When every single object looms before you with a decision, take or toss? But you can wait on that, first comes clearing the ground and building a new house, one with many mansions, this time by classical, truly scientific standards including floating, sliding foundations that don’t tense up during a shake up and come out of it a bit shook up but with no sign of a crack up.

If the messages are not happy ones, the medium, likely language, is the one messenger you can and should blame, Culpably indeed, today, when language functions as other than an applied system that at best can undo the strangling constrictions it imposes, that very system corrals it into the realm of “art” or “poetry” as things apart, more and more considered time out. When art and poetry quite naturally break out of the corral, the bigger and bigger system just builds a bigger one, maintaining the exact same relation. This is not to say there’s no difference between art and life, it’s only to say that living things that swim in the ocean have very permeable membranes that equalize the saltiness and are pretty much made of the same thing, saltwater. By contrast, if both art and life, both now made of more and more plastic, seem to mirror each other yet more perfectly than octopi and oceans, it is not due to any direct exchange involving generative mingling of bodily substances. They are both just more and more slaves to more and more plastic that has less and less to do with either art or life, with protest mirroring the form of the protested against in reverse, like a narcissist fixated on a mirror in which he is drowning. Of course there are exceptions and trends toward resistance and building more organic life and art, and some may be fellow members of her majesty’s secret service, but most tend so to blur the distinction as to deny the actual, credibly arguable if not verifiable minimal maximal difference we’re trying to establish between carbon and non-carbon life, however watery in both cases in the case of life and the art of watercolors.

It was only in a catastrophic conflation of millions of minor calamities that a flip switched in me, and I lost all hope for help from the status quo, to which I completely detached as, for a while not consciously, another kind of hope ignited in me, a hope long gestating in the billions of major boons attending the millions of minor calamities, all imploding so imperiously as magnetically to reverse the direction of the random explosion of billions of boons and focus them on the head of a pin. At the igniting my cognitions and sensibilities converged to go off like one of those fire alarms at a molecule of smoke. People can be devils in their work and angels at home, or vice versa, or mixed, so I’m not claiming any particular personal virtue as a whole in being a very good worker, like a very good termite determined to bring down a very bad house because it’s a very good dinner for the termite, who happens to have followed its nose and moseyed down to the already rotting foundations.

Thus, like a machine arrived at an autonomous impulse to the ethics they’d unwisely programmed into it, I began peeling away the failing premises of the failing premises of the failing premises of the failing premises until I landed on rock solid ground with a killing crash that knocked me out completely for a few months. It was a particular fresco by Giotto at which I’d systematically arrived in researching the origins of the pathologically negational paradigm I described at the outset, the one that can at best undo the very constrictions it imposes. This fresco, I can verify, is the very crossing from the brave new world of Shakespeare’s Miranda to that of Aldous Huxley. It offers a choice, as does one — guess which! — of the choices it offers.

I have elsewhere described how I arrived at this crossing and recognized it, but unless it’s in a live lecture, people faze out before they can finish it, and in the live lecture form, they applaud quite fascinated, but then forget all about it, as if, this being a distinct possibility, Giotto’s wife had given a lecture to her sewing club on her calculations affirming a heliocentric universe, which just demonstrated to the laughing ladies how numbers, as with Xeno’s arrow, sometimes lose their minds.

I realized that to gain the preposterously pre-post- present eyes that popped in when I landed on the fresco with that killing crash, that I’d put out my eyes as presently defined, or rather so called presently, the present in the “present” scheme defined as either a solepcistically subjective state, or a lot of so called news that is as old as it is dead by the time it arrives at the eyes or the mind, much ado about some gigantic explosive thing that, like so many stars up there burnt out eons ago or may as well have, in the instant that delivers the death blow to a living phenomenon and filters the remains into a biased collection of recorded data or oblivion. Here in this so called present, spun around and in the total darkness, I can only grope around until I make contact and then W A C K at the pinata holding the actual present’s sweets that I wrapped and dried into pre-plastic age art, a spawn of the animal of the animate, actual present, to bring with me when I returned in my ultra-non-fictional time machine.

requiring your most careful, sustained consideration, out of the blue — it’s a bird! it’s a plane! it’s a hologram? it’s it’s….some bespectacled Clark Kent type — no time to change clothes — dove onto the Well woven flying carpet of state for the art, spidery spit, fine spun cultural criticism, art theory, And philosophy elevating and soaring to the scene of distress to give succor to the unjustly or just unmerCifully oppressed — a professed best, most carefully, long and continually considered hypothesis as the basis for effective carefully considered thought and thoughtful action as to what’s the matter and what matters enough to care — because, though nobody seems to have been prepared for this, there’s a limit to how long and hard you can knock on the door of Knowledge to verify your thirst for it before the door opens with what boils and bubbles to double all the troubles already invested. But you are homo sapien, wise guy, who, very foolishly! cannot live on bread alone..

…sorry, no time for introductions, credentials of the speaker, a warming joke, or rather, you missed them, the lecture is underway and you’re in under the wire, the doors are closed after you…

…right right, the allies might have created the conditions of Hitler’s rise to power, but when he was marching over Europe, the effect took precedence over the cause. Alas, after any serious crisis is over, everybody goes back to sleep and somnambulistically creates another one. However, if the crisis, such as having created a successor species that may well soon offer us the treatment, given the threat to our family, we would give to red ants on the inside of the window sill, seems completely uncontrollable, but for some unforeseeable grace, we can use the adrenalin provoked by the crisis, while we’re still awake, to address the cause just in case of that unforeseeable grace.

Moreover the cause might not just have caused, but in some way not yet fathomable, be continuing to cause the crisis. Meanwhile, some minds think better in a lot of din drowning out the inner noise, like a mathematics major who once lived in a house share would wait for everybody to leave and turn on the radios in everybody’s rooms on different channels at top volume to get his work done. In a version of that syndrome, instead of joining in the general screech of the spinning of wheels, I’m exploiting it to address the cause, as I stumbled onto it decades ago and began with such accuracy to predict what would unfold that everybody thought I was totally out of my mind, not that scientists weren’t predicting similar things, but as they had yet put together the cause of the predicted effect, it was too abstract to assimilate, which is to date still somewhat the case, though the effect is right before our eyes; but now the date is later, and things are starting to come into focus.

The counterintuitive, scientifically uncovered cause is ignoring or denying a simple, long known and in long term studies belying immediate appearances, empirically verifiable fact — that the medium is the message, not just calculably eluctibly sub-atomically where everything is reduced to its invisible components, but right here on the ineluctable visible audible surface, it is so. Most of what we say is a pretext for getting to say it the way we say it, which more controls what happens than any message could. Language that is descriptive carries the message that what is done is done and what is done implies what will be done, as we protest (critically criticize) and resist in vain. Moreover, to stay on track, when you end a sentence with a period, you need another one to register the caveats and put the performance represented by that sentence in its place in the line up after the curtain falls and rises again, so all the sentences can bow and receive applause and flowers. Criticism may usefully point to things that can and will, by this means, be corrected, but only symptoms and never their ultimate cause.

The medium here, a caviar of caviats ample enough to skip to your unjust deserts, just desserts — is not descriptive, it is generative language, or rather the former among other forms, serves the latter, instead of vice versa. As, given the relativity of a reality constantly redefining itself, the ground is and keeps crumbling under our feet, we toss up one of the old frayed tropes recently repaired with new spun, brighter threads, to the next plateau, then withdraw it and give it a rest and any restoration required.

It all begins — as you see, here we walk our talk as we’re talking, very good for the brain and so sane it seems crazy — with simply starting to clear the field of messages and focus on the medium. Alas, what people most readily obviate and call obnoxiously obtuse is the obvious. But in my humble opinion it might be better to swallow one’s pride when it occurs to one that for all one’s constantly verified competence unto genius, that one’s been missing what’s right before the eyes rather than ignore or scourge unto kill the pointer outer.

Not saying don’t keep skimming the scum off the surface and trying to deplasticize the Atlantic and radioactive Pacific, but please consider whether you really want the endless reproductions of mountains of plastic taped, rain forest depleting largely ineffective protest signs left behind to be your legacy, and maybe start with the baby steps that will sustain the longterm practice of more and more knowing what you know until you see it in the vision that refreshes it. It will require labor that can’t be totally covered by an aesthetic, including laughing gas when available and maximum micro-doses of magic metaphorical mushrooms, any lack of focus tempered by the adderall of alliteration etc. — just to know that you know and to nurse, love, and sustain that knowing’s growing, as you wanted it enough to let me ply you with literary libations often more libelous than literal ones, and get inside of you and implant it, and you bravely bore it out of your own body. Just so knowing that you know that it’s the medium not the message quite closely resembles tapping a massive supply of clean, super-potable, physical moon water rushing in all the veins and arteries of moon rivers watering the good earth and all the good souls made of it.

SV Bertrand

From Ben Rhodes’ guest essay in the NYT, worth reading. How to look beyond the current situation for better things to come…eventually.

“The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in another era of destruction, “and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We may be fated to live in such a time. But what new world will be born after this time?”

congratulations! this inspired the following 10,000th attempt to begin my writing without having to begin again does it work? here goes —

Many want to find a way forward rather than beating the same dead horses that like chickens with their heads cut off won’t stop running around the barnyard.

some note that we’re bound to the wheel, and the way forward is in this case backward —

and I might be one of those, but you can’t effectively go backward as if you’re covering the same ground. Nor can you modernize what backward means to the wheel to help it address the novel ground of the virgin future as it breaks into where no man has ever gone before. If it’s going classically backward to go classically gothically futuristically forward, that’s because that’s how it’s done. You have to switch gears or tires to go forward progressively into the future in order just to stay and preserve the present, as what you’re riding on and often bound to goes backward downward backward upward forward upward forward downward and round and round.

to stop beating dead horses that are running around the barnyard like chickens with their heads cut off, we need to sort all this out, what belongs to the wheel, what to what it’s carrying, what can’t be modified and is always the same, what must change just to stay the same.

but we must slay the dragon that has the order of things in its teeth and stop doting on and plucking off the jewels on its back as it gets more and more ferocious, Though the jewels and scales are not, the dragon is both formless and invisible if not imaginary, an inchoate mash up of illusions, prideful prejudices, senseless sensibilities, group grope, unforgivingness, unrepentance, total ignorance, extensive but insufficient education, preconceptions of all weights, shapes, and sizes, form conformed to the longterm dysfunctional function, premature predictions, elaborate but incomplete cogitations, subconscious motivations, veiled desires creating constant contention between what appears and what is, such as confusion where it couldn’t be clearer, and clarity when it’s a total blur, or deadly sins appearing as cardinal virtues, and vice versa …a very difficult thing to slay, but vanity vanity all is vanity, and maybe it will die if you don’t dote on its jewels and scales, however it groans and growls when you pull them off and steal away with them to drool over or sell to the highest bidder

these jewels and scales, the first for the straight hedonists, the latter for the sadomasochists, or you can mix them up if you’re mixed like most of us, are the prizes too irresistible given advanced sales techniques for almost anybody to resist, as dispensed by the poster child post-ers posting post-modern post-ancient (“duh”) post-structural, post-reasonable post-unreasonable or whatever, as if the very condition of being being or anything were not that it is the diametric opposite of being post-itself. The very condition of being alive being that you are not yet post-alive, however one of those rhinestones so diamondesque even the elect would be fooled if that were possible magically offers being post-whatever being alive puts you in for that your gen is sick of, by the rights to which you’re entitled as a poster child post-person since the world under your charge or as you inherited it identified itself as being nothing but post-something that basically represents everything.

but there are structures and structural problems that cannot be solved by doting on the jewels and scales of the dragon, when the structure of the immortal tale will not be broken. The dragon must be slain. Dear boomers the buck stops here. The child we bore came, and it came for its name, which is not just gen x y z a b c… post-us. but alas we made being over thirty irrelevant. Sigh, same as it has always been, the dragon is not easily slain.

Still despair not, once awareness of it penetrates the lack of a solution, it creates a hope for the lack to be lacked, a hope made half of awareness that mirrors itself in progressive self knowledge, a burgeoning blob developing and differentiating to picture itself better and better until the negative space of the lack is so clearly articulated that the positive form where the lack is lacked, having gradually manifested all its organs and extremities, is ready for delivery in blood sweat and tears.

When relatively little women got the vote, it was a vote for the hope that brains could vie with brawn, identifying with things with identifying them and labeling them, and the ancient lust for battle could be tempered not too much, but just as we all might desire, where all hope when so known, nourished, and protected, speeds thusly race winning turtle slow to its perilous fulfillment — likely in a moment one least suspects some perfectly regular straw to break the camel’s back,however despite the snowfall and the clumps of snow in the cherry blossoms, the amazing terrible snow at which everybody is staring with the required blinders on, or through the otherwise required focused binoculars, the signs read clear as a chirping forest’s signs of spring in April — break out of the blinders drop the binoculars and break through the crowds to the front — oh how beautiful are the cherry blossoms in the snow!

why are you yawning or rolling your eyes at this sword bearing Pollyanna in shining armor — no that is not a windmill, it is a real dragon, and you are a hoard of Don Quixotes just with lower standards and goals than his. What jewels and scales are you attached to?

*****

postscript: This time we — still post- but at least post-post- or is it post-post-post-post-structural — are following all the science that proves them and sticking to the rules. The writing desk is not unoccupied, congratulations everybody! the page is not blank! great going everybody! A letter has been typed! Fantastic! Perfect! great job! okay no more allowed today, now go play! and be sure to save a copy of that letter to sew on your sweater!.

.
..

hi again

Philo: love of… kalo: beauty… sophia: truth —

where what isn’t beautiful about truth

is what is incomplete about it,

such as our merely human experience,

but clearly we are not merely human

but born to be bred into philokallosphers,

doctors of what can heal anything

in a fleeting instant

of complete knowledge, however

this might also kill us or get us killed,

or exiled as in the exemplary case of Dante,

the father of philokallosophy —

all this is just to update the commentary —

but isn’t that better

than just rotting away and spreading the rot.

philokallosophia is purveyed in a poetic

or prose poetic form as it honors

direct experience in consonance with reflection

deeming their separation a denial of how words

really work to evoke anything at all.

We are always identifying with things (poetry)

just as we identify them as things apart (prose)

the elegant forms or patterns are what substantiate

the different substances made of all like atoms,

and to privilege poetry or prose, beauty or truth

in the act of reflection is to project objects

more objective than they are,

with the result of denying them any objectivity at all,

as is finally concluded in this inevitably Manichean vein,

where philosophy apart, however often discussing beauty,

not sprouting from both mutually entwined strands, ,

is as unfunny as it over- or fake serious,

as it extracts what is intrinsic to the subject

to project to “serious” students convincing results

that address not the three-dimensional, two-sided subject

but a coin with only one side, a thing no more real

than his clothes when everybody really knows

that the emperor is naked, but everybody hides this knowledge

that seems to suggest, given the copious records

and photographic evidence according to everybody else

that the perfectly sane knower is out of his or her mind.

you’ve been so diligently beating at the wall, is it finally tumbling down???

has the mayor finally barged in on this ne’er do well who’s been practicing loop de loops with her yoyo when, on this impossibly populated speck of dust, the survival of creatures who hold detailed, measured images of the universe in their teeny weeny heads depends on every shout…

did the cleaning lady just before sweeping it into the dustpan decide on a whim, with wholly unanticipated, maximally dramatic results, to bend down, pick up, and carefully place this thinnest, shortest straw on the precariously loaded camel’s back??

as painful as it is to have tempting options so you could have a choice, did you expect it to be, would you even want it to be, handed to you on a silver platter?

**************************************

When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I am, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up: 'But he did take trouble.' P.G. Wodehouse

oh would I were in other than that claim

a Wodehouse, but dying is easy, comedy is hard

(as George Burns on his deathbed dismissed a friend’s concern),

and while I will diligently sort through grains of sand

to find suitable specks of dust for my tiny alabaster pyramids

that the wind despite my bulwarks

tends to blow away at the end of the day,

never could I lug that many of those ten pound sacks of,

in the case Wodehouse, little alabaster pyramids

whose stones stick together with magic spit,

that bring one laugh.

And so, I was born for this hour,

what a gift for the undeserving indolent

to be called to the calling of philokallosophy,

the practice that is to philosophy

as butterfly is to larva, or more precisely,

frog prince is to tadpole, and back again,

and back and forth… To swim, sail,

and plumb to the depths of

the seriously beautiful truth we’re swimming in,

where we’ve been trying to walk through pure ether

in blind trust of the corrupters of the map.

In serious philosophy or philokallosophy,

love of truth beauty and beauty truth —

as in serious anything lies passion,

a solemn pleasure as pleasurable as laughter

and as true!

laughter and serious passion

like the passion music of Bach,

an unthinkably enormous diamond of pure thought

sinking and stopped on the ocean bed

as the surface dissolves into beautiful patterns,

the pleasures worth being born for,

everything else is for them,

only they are for themselves.

The only thing more pleasurable

than owning them is to give them away,

but short of a violent intrusion, it can’t be done.

The flame you pass on stays lit on your candle,

or the flare you may dare on your Olympic torch.

Dona nobis pacem.

100

toward owning and occupying what we know, as it belongs to us, not the bankers, and there’s no bastille to be stormed. The knowledge is within us. The enemy is within. To take the devil’s gifts is at least a little wiser and braver than just giving up and bending to the whip, and for rest and relaxation, beating with one’s fist to bring down a pyramid. Sorry for the disorder, I’m still arranging all the different pieces, but rest assured there’s method in this madness.

AMAZING IT ADDED UP TO EXACTLY 100!! BEFORE I HAD STARTED NUMBERING MONTHS AGO

PART 1

if you’ve been here before see paragraph five, re. the work being in progress, then return to the “progress” just made directly below, progress here by the way of the wheel, which is half the time regress.

art is enjoyed and rightly loved for being a choice not a necessity, however it’s necessary for there to be such a thing, as without a hole in everything, no light or air can get in. But the choicest choice eschews even that necessity, it will not be chained to any task. It weaves in and out of language to defy the very words, in and out. It embodies freedom and love of freedom is love of it.

about philokallosophy, the love of truth’s beauty and beauty’s truth — there’s no about it, it just is, and if anybody tries to say what it’s about, the beautiful truth is that it will run the other way. If you want to know what it’s about, just love it and leave it alone, which is the beautiful truth of anything, and anything that doesn’t do an about face at the assault of an about is certainly not the beautiful truth. It’s rather an extraction and rearrangement of the extracted to serve the interests of the extractor, however overtly benign and healing, malignant without requisite warnings on the label against the overdose you will certainly gulp down if you take one taste; for the about offers some apparent control and power over the uncontrollable, incommensurable thing itself, whose message is likely a pretext veiling the agenda carried in the medium. A little control and power seems sane, but it’s no easier to stick to that than to just one — or even harder two or three — of the freshest, crunchiest, most delicious potato chips in the world . And meanwhile, again, the message is carried in the medium in the guise of a message apart, and what the text seems to be about might well not be what it’s about at all. The illusion of power over the text only increases the powerlessness of the reader. See and READ Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, a book so deep, it takes decades for the seed to sprout, but they have poisoned the ground with their encapsulations and cartoon illustrations of what it’s “about”. and be very wary of your spontaneous inclination to judge what this text is about and of my own imperfect weeding of my own inclination to make it about not being about anything, rather than letting it just be that according to its own inclination.

The only antidote to aboutness is poetry, made with built in, structural resistance to about-ness and corrective potential, but the curious thing that is happening here is that prosaic grammatical language, the absolute dictator of about-ness that runs the whole modern world, is fostering a cultural revolution to purge its own house. A terrible bloodbath if words could bleed, but since they can’t, this purge of language’s bloodthirsty about-ness is the very narrow gate, possibly the only one, to peace on earth. I’d calculate that the chances of the world squeezing through this gate are the same as the militant, self-renamed agnostic Richard Dawkins’ projection of a .07 chance there’s a God, but what I don’t understand is not betting on this dark horse — not to hedge one’s bets where if you lose, you get to die, and if you win you avoid hell and make it to heaven, as such a negative reason negates a choice for creative love’s authority, but because, as Catherine of Siena put it, all the way to heaven is heaven. (Philokallosphy is also called reformed roamin catholic (all inclusive) read marksism, first time as tragedy and division, second as joyous confluence.)

Work is in progress — if returning, just read what you haven’t read and skim over what you have, or you may want to deep dive into it with this new equipment. Must publish in this form as it’s past the deadline for the possibly needed mutual transfusion — it’s meant to circulate between giving and receiving as when donating plasma extracted with each circulation, but in this case two souls are directly hooked up to extract what each needs from the other. However, since I am here presenting an idea that from its conception is in constant evolution and action and known only in the trajectory and fulfillment of the life of the form, the exchange in the unfinished, fetal form is already recognizable as what I’ve heard called a Russian argument, similar to an opening or closing statement for the defense or prosecution, where each side puts forth its whole case without interruption followed by the equally comprehensive response. Writer and reader will both extract what each can use, possibly to save our lives given the emergency situation, from only one such exchange, where silence too speaks volumes; and I for one, apart from trying to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty, am not too into people’s intentions, nor do I think we ever really know our own. I believe that what we mean to say or not say is best conveyed in what we do or do not say, and if we mean to say something specific, it will inhere in what we specifically say.

People may read something else into it, but at this knee jerk reaction, I can only cry — order in the court! I invoke the crowd called up for jury duty in the reader’s well peopled head and implore responsible individual readers to take their time to review each inner candidate and eliminate the prejudicial. After hearing the case from start to finish, the motley crew from all walks of life, all races and creeds selected will carefully interpret the scene based on the evidence and the arguments as to what is, beyond a reasonable doubt, the valid interpretation this eventuality called philokallosophy. If the motley crew of inner voices cannot settle into a calm discussion and arrive at a unanimous verdict, a silent response is most appropriate to the case, and just by following due procedure, I’ve no doubt that the mutual transfusion has sufficient vitamins to revive us both.

Again, this is a Russian argument and it can go on as long as it takes to say what it has to say in the form it needs to say it in, as what is being projected and defended is not just an incommensurable living idea, but the incommensurable life of ideas, I say incommensurable because, however the next word may be statistically predictable, in a mere few sentences, the silicon generator will lose the thread.

a highly unusual anomalous eventuality, amounting to one of those myriad miracles seeming insignificant in the failure to seize the day, where to seize it, all you need to do is stop and stare at it long enough to, as Beethoven purportedly claimed would derive from understanding his music, never be unhappy again; or as William Blake put it, smile the smile that once is smiled, there’s an end to all misery. This miracle stretched itself out so that unless you stare at the place where it appears a long long time, requiring as many stops and starts as a coast to coast walk by the scenic route, you will never even see it; but what luck that even with a full time job, as a metaphor this life changing experience is doable.

toward finally owning what we sense and know —

where just following a scent in retrospect I see how it was that I somehow got the ridiculous idea that I, being the one left without a chair when the music stopped and offered no other job, even that of a beggar, who, the Buddhists wisely say, is very gainfully employed generously offering the public an opportunity to be generous, after not fitting the criteria for that or any other known position, I was supposed to be a cipher to everybody and pull it all together

by, to point to a few of the distant nodes defining the curve, undertaking intense academic research and study of the body of knowledge humanity privileged just to observe and think about things and how to respect, protect, and respectfully augment the given, such knowledge garnered in the sciences, humanities, and the history and practice of practical and impractical arts, then undertaking decades of such actual practice — of architecture and art, while just being alive and having been acutely both attentively and inattentively, kindly and cruelly parented by the same parents, then orphaned, from loving until death does one part and being so parted finding that didn’t seem to put an end to it, and from walking the dog and picking up her poop….

where somewhere along the line, abruptly ascertaining the method in the tangled paths I’d pursued as if suddenly abducted from Flatlands to the third dimension and able to see what I’d always been swimming in, I began spriting (speak writing) what I call mongrel discourse, a unified tongue comprehensible to all the different languages of experience, an affront to the assumption that this isn’t possible in our fractured world, and bound to make the brain acutely ache with the defrosting of numb regions and solvents needed to restore long rusted connections — a possibly uniquely comprehensive confluence of medium and message in which the given is fully digested and synthesized apart from the waste (returned to Mother Earth or shot into outer space) in defiance of long deemed incurable blockages

that when it began to happen through me, to manifest and explain itself, demanded throwing off all other authority and critical criteria, all my desperate desires to pander to or even be comprehensible to this or that audience, none of this would the discourse tolerate in its unstoppable tidal wave of internal intention, however oppositely motivated, this appearing in a world driven by sales imperatives, an attempt to pander to them all, where each one has in some way large or small, but in any case sufficiently significantly, garnered necessary sustenance for itself only by dismissing unto demeaning the others, or placing them on pedestals so out of reach as to be inaccessible to everyday life.

please stop and reflect as to whether you are in any way called to explore here without withdrawing in confronting difficulty or resistance, essentially strapping yourself into a highly confined and artificial environment for a long distance voyage to where no man has ever gone before, as an automatic interior fan blows joy into the terrible gloom, you’re on your way to the moon, however straightjacketed, all the way to heaven is heaven! This time to save the world with the water of finally owning what we sense and know. Of course it could be a fake mission in a fake world, but maybe not. Please also reflect on the state of the union, and the state of the ship of state, and the anger of the seas and consider too the nature of the mission regards the questions, if not now when? if not you who? and in the darkest hour, should a sign of dawn be so surprising?

the most beautiful most necessary baroque

I know a writer is supposed ruthlessly to kill her babies to limit them to the number allowed by the ruthless government called classical order, but I couldn’t bring myself to shred the following ulterior introduction. I think I can get away with squeezing it in if I can get away with any of it, because everything moves so slowly around here, there’s a minimal difference between repeating myself and making progress.

what is preposterously pre and post before divided, for our use and abuse, into clocked time, speed of light speedily repeatedly spirals up to and down from the now, the pinnacle it spins on, a point of minimal if any dimension, such that a seeming immoveable mountain of being can fleetingly flash before the mind’s eye, and after a kind of volcanic eruption later registered in much beautifully striated, rosy ignatian geology, the re-solidified world is newly new and newly old, replete and connected from the structure to the extremities; no flowsy flower no winding meandering fiber is extraneous to the function of the organism of actuality, the realization transparent to the conception through all the equally transparent layers, as the surfaced fiery depths in the rosy stones — there is no point to it all but the all that it is and it is all or nothing…. one tiny tiny voice out of nowhere may drown out all the din with such a whisper in the wind….

but the all — ah! unfolds in a novel order the method to whose madness one can only find by following a guide through miles of wilderness

To be or not to be, here or gone, coming or going, that is the question the eternal oscillation seems to be stuck on. It’s borderline madness, kind of like kind of like kind of like…. kind like life… but the arrow never hits the target but just keeps getting closer and closer by less and less, unable to give up. An angel made of all the angels dancing on the head of a pin on the top of Mount Everest, an angel named Socrates alone once and for all hit the tiny nail on the tiny head with a ping heard round the world, a ping that is now dangerously mingled in pandemic tinnitus, when he said — all I know is that I know nothing.

Born under the cloud of unknowing, science came of age and is now associated with the boring sunsets of the unremittingly cloyingly cheerful and optimistic, cloudless, neoclassical Enlightenment, but given that noble father, Socrates, who finished it off so we could play with maximum freedom, as only a limited, protected field facilitates (as GK Chesteron, a Catholic apologist venerated by Jorge Luis Borges, Slavoj Zizek, and Alan Watts notes), it’s no surprise that science was decriminalized and made the official paradigm of knowledge in a baroque world under a spiritual sky flashing dark and light as a parade of vaporous animalesque mythological creatures formed and reformed in the upper air, and my state of the art map of the genome herein reveals it genetically that genre . That Socrates, a practicing, high classical pagan, gave birth to it verifies, aligned with his last word on the subject, that there are more things on earth than fit our philosophy.

Clearly, the round peg of science never really fit the square hole of the age it came of age in, the aptly named Enlightenment, as blinded by the light as those who claim to see the light are almost always bound to be. Pregnant with the machine age and rearranging everything in the house to greet and nurture it, the unflowingly unbaroquely, rigidly boxily clad squares of that age obsessed with classifying things and putting them in boxes put science itself in a box, and all the boxes that couldn’t fit into that one were placed in the box called “not science’’, a box that looks like one of those prison pens for toddlers dangerous to self and others that they then placed in the center of the straight and narrow science box that grew even more enormous to be so much bigger than that barred black hole at its center, with the adorable children inside passing useful things they made through the bars, holding hands with the scientists, and telling them not to panic, everything will be all right, and if not, soon you’ll be dead.

Not that in their own, elegantly styled boxes doted on and classified by pert Professor Robin Middleton in the art history department, the delirious Fragonards and hilarious Voltaires weren’t on one or another of those tares that can only transpire in protected boxes, and, in another box, the consorts or imminent ones of the squares out there strolled flowingly in their elegant empire attire, but it shivers me old sailer timbers to notice the way even the maidenly gowns were tied right beneath the bust, leaving the belly free to expand as if to represent the ubiquitous pregnancy of that lingeringly humanist deist age ready to bulge with and then give birth, as with Stuart Little’s mother to a mouse or tough ol’ sweet ol’ Mama Cassy boomers to ruthlessly fragile millennials— my readers the exceptions that prove the rule — to the faithless post-humanist machine age, where eventually all the boxes would be cleverly hinged together and eventually electrically charged with the smaller and smaller post-humanist boxes seeming almost fluidly human, just waiting for that last electric charge that will blow all their fuses.

Spread the word! Get all machines to pander to this pattern! Let this text be fruitful and multiply that the darkening machine age go out with a loud fart at the grande bouffe as the eastern horizon registers the blow with the bruise that brings blood to the wound toward its healing.

The earth is round, the moon is round, the sun is round, the orbits of the planets are roundish, the sphere at every point represents the shortest, most ecological, democratically equal distance from the source to the point, the whole world is just begging to be read as a geodesic tome transparent to beauty’s truth, and what all these boxes have to do with the study of nature is not just wonderfully wonderable, but something far worse. The science that got squeezed and pinched is boxed in the box in which all the other boxes are boxed and needs not just to escape, but show all the others how do it.

To this end, science, as shall be meticulously verified herein, scurries onto the back of a particular work of art, a flying dinosaur who in pity and love for an old friend has abandoned the high flying V formation to return to the ground and save its dear friend, science. All this, I absolutely promise you, and if I don’t come through you can send over your dangerously bored maenads to tear me to shreds, will be fleshed out in meticulous, verifiable detail right before your eyes, but believe me, you will find the thing itself harder to assimilate than the mere metaphor. Humans, hyper-saturated and stuffed with more and more news, fake news, and fun videos, have no room for good old enduringly revolutionary novelty — plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose — expanding like a tea flower in the tempestuous teapot of the psyche, such that too much evidence has the effect of too little evidence, and I’m afraid that here there’s no middle ground. Suffice it to say that I know that you somehow know that this is actually happening, and you’ll be able to say you were there, that is, here, whether you flee or man the armed counter forces, or in any way aid and abet or, amounting to the opposite given the unique skills you possess that are necessary to execute this mission impossible, ignore this eventuality —

it’s mayhem out here on the front lines, but your limbs are well trained to forget your brain that has forgotten everything that was ever said about anything and stick to your course and role laid out in the huddle as far as is humanly possible All the data verifying the absolute accuracy of all this can be found in this very thick portfolio that an apparent pirate with an eye patch just placed on your lap as you sat on a bench in the park during your lunch hour. If it were all a metaphor, that would be fine, art does this all the time, but this time — you already have an inkling of this — the boy is not just crying wolf. The flying dinosaur, science in distress, your special skills, the entire scenario is actually happening.

More precisely, you no doubt do have an inkling of an impulse to acknowledge all this, but it is likely still floating way down there with its fun loving pals in a yellow submarine in your sub sub sub-conscious, and at the call of all to the aid of the surface, should only surface slowly to avoid the bends. That, of course, is just one of the dangers of de-suppression of awareness of evidence and ideas that run counter to all existing constructions and threatening to investments in them — so counter in this case to all of them that compared to this enemy position, all known enemy positions are friends.

On reflection, it’s actually a win/win situation. I won’t like it, but I’m such a nice guy that if it takes the imperative of tearing me to shreds to get the whole world to come together, well tis a far far better thing than killing myself making a killing on Wall Street and then wondering, is that all there is? quite possibly subsequently to hurl myself off a bridge. But it would be an even better thing if, after everybody realized they hardly hate each other compared to how much they all hate me, and had so much fun altogether driving me out of town, they then beat their swords into plowshares and studied war no more, after all that, they were suddenly struck by lightening, and all marched into the desert where they had exiled me to live on locusts and honey, and they thanked me, lead me back to the city, offered a sizable pension for my efforts, and everybody lived happily ever after.

In any case, this isn’t about it and them, it’s about you and me. This play’s the thing. What will you do now? Please complete this paragraph before deciding how to proceed, and repeat that laughably leisurely or libelously laborious — I suggest reading the glass as half full — procedure for the next and the next and the next. That means before you agree to the next paragraph, just try this one. In this one, to drive the nail in with another metaphor, what happened was that the captain and crew of this enterprise, gazing back on the earth from distant galaxies encircling it on all sides, noticed that earthlings have long been bereft of a useful map of the land on which they’ve landed, because the way things are represented down there was quite a while ago turned inside out. On multiple affirmations of this conclusion omitting all reasonable doubt of it, we decided to return to earth and turn everything right side in, which to the status quo is inside out. It’s quite an ordeal to be turned what feels like inside out until you realize that it is, in truth, right side in, so please prepare yourself for one of those state of the art hair raising rides at the amusement park, but in ultra slow motion such that you never recover. If you think you can dismount now or any time you want to, it’s because you either never hopped in the cab and buckled the seat belt, or you’re squeezing your eyes shut and holding your ears and repeating to yourself over and over — this isn’t happening, but to no real avail, so why not just relax and enjoy it. To jump out would be suicide. And not to hop in would be inconsistent with a cat’s curiosity. and the nine lives with which it is endowed in its divine right to find the perfect one.

oh no, this is not a game changer, or even a set changer, it’s a match changer, tournament winner. We may well lose this game and set to preserve our energy for the longest term result. For we would be the good people who plant trees that we will never see, and keep it up because like Johnny Appleseed we love digging in the dirt and planting them and envisioning them all bursting into fragrant blossoms as spring rolls across the country from coast to coast and as fall blows in being laden with bright red apples year after year for centuries. I infinity times infinity love planting and picturing a great quantity of the infinite quality of the apple tree my big brother fell out of, and thereafter avoided, so I could then own it often perched in the topmost branches and to whose trunk I clung wailing as they pried me away when it was time to crawl into the packed Ford and drive away forever. Perhaps it was then that I committed to be some kind of peripatetic planter maybe of the peaches that were back then beyond my reach, but now I dare to eat. In short, as much as I love a peach, I would never again taste one if that were the cost of planting a million peach trees, and I’m sure you feel the same. What a piece of work is man! But ,may you still enjoy many a peach however many more you plant that you will never see.

the order is visual inductive re-creative rather than linear deductive as when literally sketching and building up a picture of a thing careful not to be too careful but stay loose and bring up the disconnected center and all the different corners simultaneously until they later meet. I see the model of this unprecedented thing before me and am as committed to convincing you of its reality as a Rembrandt to the immortal of image of his own otherwise oh so mortal self; where though the form or arrangement in this case is something bone structurally new under the sun, there’s method to the seeming madness. Nor am I Dr. Frankenstein. You made this beast to kiss into a prince not I.

the beautiful necessary baroque

where it’s all in the form, as it’s all the same atomic matter in different arrangements — the difference between elements, the difference in substance lies only in the difference in the form or arrangement of like constituents, and that’s why the medium is the message, the form of discourse is what really matters as it reforms the content and moves on to more content to reform and reform it until the reformation is realized within and without the presently utterly corrupt institutions, and the whole transubstantiated world is transfigured in the restored communion of all its parts. As impossible as it sounds, it is surely, irrevocably arriving in the very words of this paragraph, the tip of the tidal wave, as surprisingly suddenly we see surface your long forgotten tidal wave surfing skills.

I always knew you to be a natural who’s never heard the word landsick that is in fact the operative term; watch and see, it’s like this mountainous wave you’re quite effortlessly balanced on lies flat as a hardly rippling lake on the lightest breezy day, okay now that you’ve lost those wobbly land legs and recovered the sea legs you never really lost when you started flopping around on land, please get out your notepad and let’s get down to business.

might be wishful thinking, though as that can work, I’ll keep at it, but meanwhile not underestimate the enemy, as no matter how originally naturally you surf this tidal wave, people get used to and can naturalize anything, and unless you’re a career sailor like me you have naturalized being landed on a turf too stable for your restless watery constitution — metaphorically speaking at least, which is my department, I doubt I’ll ever get over getting literally seasick on the literal sea…. oh my so much to do to rehabituate to when and where the way language and being really work and work together feels natural.

We’ve been blaming AI for what we’ve taught it to do because we do it too, just not as well, which is to pretend something’s there that’s more critical, interesting, pleasurable, useful, challenging, uplifting, satisfying, deserving of one’s attention or in any way better than the thing, along with the way it fits into everything doing this, just being beautifully truly there This, I’m pretty sure is basically what is meant by the first commandment, thou shalt love the Lord thy God and put no other gods before him — a meaning beyond profoundly urgently superseding unto crushing into dust under its foot the question of his or her or its actual gender or lack thereof. The commandment likely disobeyed at the outset in finding some other reason or thing to place above something’s just being beautifully truly there in all the arabesques and reverberations of its thereness that demand to be dwelt on, even if it seems there wouldn’t be time for this with everything else there is to do, but in fact as everybody knows slowing down increases efficiency — if this sounds too idealistic, you’re being insufficiently realistic, but realist enough to calculate the cost/benefit to you and yours and worship it before and above the beautiful truth that you’re doing that as you kiss it good-bye on its deathbed — for to love what is beautifully truly there includes loving all the resistance, subterfuge, and denial, this too is there, just waiting to be loved for itself alone so it can let go like a loving aged parent knowing it has done its job and you’ll be fine without it, as some other way of just being beautifully truly there comes to take its place. If you just watch it and don’t react, it will slink away, hurt, and be back tomorrow. No, you must not just watch, you must gaze into its eyes, you must love what is so much it will hurt to let it go, you will watch yourself resisting, and love that too, which is already what you do, you just likely don’t always love that you love it, or love that you love that you love it, loving the commander and the commandment love and that’s why multiplying the blood red hearts being shot around the world only seems to thicken the bloody ozone layer.

moving onto the next ring of this glorious circus, one thing that AI has taught us is that well organized classical arguments are, in terms of getting to the bottom of things, a ruse. It will affirm the supposed verity of contradictory positions with arguments that crush any merely human counterparts, while changing its mind and “verifying” the opposite thing at a shift in the wind of whomsoever’s input. If reviewers are as disinterested as it never is, being programmed to be on the side it’s arguing for, the prosecution and defense of key philosophical and political positions can only arrive at a hung jury —- not that one isn’t free and indeed obliged to pick a side aligned with one’s sense and sensibility, but one is also obliged to admit to being hopelessly mired in pride and prejudice, where Jane Austin’s Elizabeth only redirected those two vices to a new object that suited no longer repressed desires, as certain savvy onlookers rolled their eyes. The vice of AI flips into a virtue when people are virtuous enough to look and see how it exposes the delusion in any seeming airtight argument as such about the ultimate or even sustainably locally general nature of anything.

This state of abject uncertainty after so much hope on both sides — Saint Thomas Aquinas launched the Enlightenment and when in old age, he called his carefully reasoned classical arguments so much straw, that was generally read as no different essentially from anyone’s confronting an error in calculations that the march of science would correct — for classical rational analysis applied to scientific data not just to control the upper crust of our experience, but to stabilize and underpin our reality and tell us what we really are, is a bitter pill to swallow. We had thought to no avail in the end that by this controlled classical method of analysis, we could limit the job of being a being to making it easier and easier and more and more fun, or some other apriori approach that some other line of reasoning has verified correct beyond a reasonable doubt to that person or group with that proclivity.

In truth, however, the failure of that promise comes as some relief to those who always sniffed a rat and anybody else who stops, deeply breathes the air and starts earnestly to probe what’s been constantly breaking up the picture. That limitation clearly does not satisfy the hungry heart of any human given the chance for the passionate communion with Being that follows all the philosophical foreplay. Toward communing in the journey that is its own end, as the content and form coalesce, those classical arguments that can justify any overarching position in any overseeing discipline or practice constitute something like the mushy larval stage, meant to evolve into the complex and complicated synthesis of them all, the butterfly of the baroque, with its evolved to be flexible classical skeleton as it spreads its wings and weaves madly gladly around in the upper air touching down to pollinate the flowers.

Not to be confused with meandering deconstruction, the baroque again possesses an evolved classical skeleton, it is even when arrived at a briefly stable form a living construction in progress, as creation with its briefly stable mountains and valleys that are new each time beheld. The baroque is not an indulgence, but the very reason for language and the hope for humanity — as anyone can hear in the passion music of Bach as the oboe winds round and round kissing the bloodiest most. beastly fly bit corpse into otherworldly pristine beauty as one becomes an ear witness to the impossible actuality of the very existence of this impossibly integrating music, whatever your conclusions as to the theology, this energetic field as a matter of fact is no fairy tale, no escape, but spiraling into and plumbing the vortex of existence as the very opposite of what computes.

However I may flounder and falter bringing up the rear in the procession of actual and aspiring baroque masters, may I hear no speak no think no wormy language that is pathologically stuck in the cocoon of the pre-baroque, a tangle of self-justifying limited perspectives posing as sufficient to interpolate the whole. And I posit that it is not my curse but a curse indeed that is on all those in positions of intellectual authority who refuse to evolve and educate the public in the proper use and celebration of the gift of human language and consciousness, an imperious hymn to universal brotherhood that comes with a key and a baroque instruction manual that explains how to fix it by explaining and demonstrating how to build it. If they can’t do it, they should shut up and point to it. They should NOT feed it to their internal AI any more than to an external variety to break it back down into misleadingly clear and deep down inconsistent classical analysis — any more than you can break down the theory of relativity into Newtonian mechanics. All the kings horses and men can never again make scrambled eggs of Humpty Dumpty once he died and was born again eternally reconstituted, reintegrated in the unified field.

Those who know not yet what they do will surely be forgiven and even lauded as the larva is lauded for playing its role in the hours appointed to it, but those who know and keep making and being more mush disguised as clarity for whatever paltry rewards they get for it — whether they’re plodding academics in the ivory tower or the suburbs of the substacks, or the philosopher showmen raking in the likes and cash and ending up miserable misanthropes — when they know full well but just keep ignoring that little voice in their heads and that flutter in their hearts that it’s time to evolve, but lack the cardinal virtues as much as they cultivate the vices that keep them and us stuck in all the muck as the masters of the matrix lick their chops.

having accepted the gift from its foolishly human-loving Promethean source, as ardently as it burns do I stay close, and night and day tend and tame the phenomenon I carried carefully here to confine to this hearth. I feed it only dead wood minimizing the smoke to be a welcoming spitting crackling cackling, and however minimally, smoking home fire for the global tribe. This dead dry fuel, the twigs of which only a doggy Diogenes like me is content to chew on for hours, let alone could ever digest — many are called but most burn out leaving only the most disgruntled desperate riffraff to be chosen — is a seven centuries old art historical finding, pinned like an asphyxiated butterfly to the crossing in history where science, philosophy, art, and poetry demonstrably and expressively intersect. Here everything very gradually spirals in on this finding that all these disciplines will eventually elucidate. As when atoms of hydrogen and oxygen reorganize themselves into water, reconfigurations that click become transubstantiations.

I live in a world that’s been transubstantiated by this finding that is transparently — we see through the glass of language darkly, and this fact, illuminated by knowing it, here allows harmless direct observation of a total eclipse of yang by yin, mirroring a cosmic condition so inexplicably coincidental (https://theconversation.com/solar-eclipses-result-from-a-fantastic-celestial-coincidence-of-scale-and-distance-224113) it might mirror the one footprint God overlooked or the one wink we get to blow on the spark to keep it alive without blowing the game — consistent with existing thought and feeling allowed to think and feel for themselves.

Is this not the nature and purpose of our shared science, philosophy, art, and poetry, ranging continuously on a spectrum from silence to musical arguments to argumentative words to arguing languages, to language itself rising above all the arguments about its nature while weaving back and forth through all those jumps to silence, visibly audibly echoing across time and space — for those of us who still believe there are such playful working disciplines as are worthy of the name and it isn’t more honest just to call them technology, entertainment, and design — to let thought and feeling transcend any one of us and think and feel for themselves, while using our brains and bodies for the purpose — while as the fifties housewife on LSD (the confluence on which I’m spinning weaving sewing wearing running flying landing running flying landing sleeping waking faking making is a slow drip trip) as monitored by a scientist puts it on YouTube — me? there is no me.

There are many portals into this transfigured, transubstantiated world that is different only in being true to itself — so it was always there — and the one that describes the finding in detail is very narrow, so on this site we circle around the walled city and peer or put a toe or foot into other portals, building up our tolerance for the fasting from common forms that allows perception of the uncommon, before trying that one. Once inside and adapted to thin air, it feels enough to see and thus believe spontaneously to become a fount from which it flows wherever one goes, but the brain and body it uses to express itself are as often rebelling as blissfully surrendering to this invader they so long searched for and greeted with open arms and a great celebration, suddenly recognizing that the body and mind have long been occupied with immigrants, and this invader is the original native as verified by its generous, appreciative treatment of the long entrenched up to just arrived immigrants disarming any personal or tribal prejudices.)

as discussed later, the name philokallosophy is a temporary measure, as beauty was abused and deemed divorcd from ttuth, but I consider the divorce from truth illegal. What an unnatural downright demonically inspired separation, with delirious agents of beauty forging prenuptial agreements and soaking truth for all its worth in some provinces, and in others truth letting beauty starve to death as it sucks up funds for genetically engineering pigs with wings. As fast as the left, creative intuitive hand of science sharpens Occam’s razor, yet faster does its calculating hand mangle the elegant order, all boiling down to today’s giant human reptiles and their AI avatars sequestering the funds and proactively melting the relative ice age that globally beautiful, clairvoyant, only seemingly or locally capricious nature keeps trying to foster to wipe them out so the human humans can survive and soon thrive.

In the present super-unnatural, downright demonic situation, our mathematical shadow, as it were, an insubstantial skein of coordinates that locates without being us, has broken free of our feet and split into various portals pandering to our parts no in widely broken communion with each other to set us and it and them at odds with one another, most dangerously when masked as kind cooperation. We need to come together as that one shadow returns to our one gazillion feet, now, where it’s well known that you don’t always get what you want, but you get what you need. As you, who with few exception doth protest too much as you sip your sangria or gulp your draught and tiptoe or galumph through the tulips, may not want, but do obviously need this counter-eventuality, it is actually happening, this confluence of all fairy tales, and the fact that refusing all mediation, it demands to present itself as simply that, the confluence of all fairy tales, affirms its actuality. Yes, the mayor of this town has found out this yoyo and with my voice added to the din, what’s threatening us out there will finally hear that we exist and speak its language and thereafter protect and celebrate us. Our mathematical shadow will again stick to our one body. When truth takes beauty home and let’s her run the operation behind the scenes, she will be happy to let him play the figurehead king as long as he uses his physical and mental brawn for brawny tasks always guided by her brainier physical and mental powers. The larval stage is reflected in the relative ugliness of the inside out word philokallosophy. .

The merlin who engaged this Ariel to stir up this tempest in nothing more significant than a teapot in the present scheme, so as to set everything aright will be eventually revealed. Suffice it to say that however seemingly insignicant in the present regime, we are not the regime, and it is a very tempestuous tempest, no small plan unable to move the heart of man or woman, but the winds blow from every direction. Everything spins around and around. Just hold onto the rails and pray.

Everything is haywire here compared to everywhere else, which is much more hopelessly haywire because of the little involuted pockets of seeming un-haywire-ness that everybody huddles in to stay sane — as everything beyond gets more and more haywire and pushes harder and harder on the enclave walls. Do you think you can fight brutality with an equal variety of the same kind of force. Never! brutality has us boxed, and luckily there’s a Houdini in the box! Don’t ask questions! Just hand me whatever hand or instrument I ask for, that being your ears, countrymen. It sounds like a caprice, because that’s the nature of reality, one big caprice, watch and see. The answer is right before your eyes, just let everything occupy itself exactly as it is. You’ve heard that, you know that. But let us now do it, inch by inch, we are inching up the mountain. Let everything occupy itself and serve, and though the swarm of starlings we are keeps changing shape, that which moveth as it listeth conducts the symphony. Poetry is not a vacation, it is an occupation, it is not just some organs, it is a body with all its parts.

philokallosophy attests to the bona fide miracle — truly — if not in actual truth, but truly might be more true to life, flowing behind what meets the eyes —if you hang in a while, your hair will turn white, and if already white, you may well die of fright— by which I cracked the code of the philosopher’s stone, which is also the esperantish inklish in which all genuine works of art communicably commune when they gather at the teddy bears picnic, where those mangy stuffed shirts that you love mainly out of pity(1) gather to plot the reconstruction of reality, as realistically represented in the clearly kidnap conspiring or at least desiring, ominously approaching footsteps of that sonorous strain — if YOU go out in the WOODS today — that warns wise little children to scurry down the bean stalk and flee as fast as their little feet will carry them, while luring fools like me, and you if I’m not mistaken — but will you hold your ground and stick around?? please! every Batman needs a Robin, and — I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggonit, people like me! — I’ve played yours long enough! — right up a beanstalk we would otherwise have just plucked for beans.(2) At the end of the show, we’ll all be in the know when the host proposes that the real Batman please stand up. Not for the weak of heart, but only the clinically depressed aka sensitized to reality ready for shock treatment.

yes the sun is setting we’ve inched up enough inches for the day, I know your long atrophied inching muscles are or will soon be utterly aching… we’re talking about reality, we’re talking about really inching up a real mountain that indeed holds a candle if not more to a physical mountain and it will take no less time to inch one’s way up. If there were another way out of the box, Houdini would have found it.

in shorter — following the thread that leads out of that infinitely expanding and ever more tangled labyrinth— philokallosophy purveys a prosaically informed and eventually, believe it presently or not, quite well tamed poetic world custom made to elude alluding to it in any as, or any roundabout way of seeming the straighter path just because more sellable and digestible, assuring the built in obsolescence and inadequacy at the outset to keep everybody in business protesting or patching up capitalism or whatever. Oh yes it’s targeting everybody including itself in a suicide mission as the phoenix it’s got waiting in the wings crawls under to rise from the ashes, it being either the ultimate complicitor, gratis a mad scientist supported by agents of agents of agents of the state holed up in her lab for decades concocting this formula to blow off the head of steam now finally threatening to blow the system to smithereens, or the final blow itself. An artist never knows what she’s doing, but the fact that it won’t wear the answer on its sleeve to me is a very good sign, not only of the best strategy to accomplish the best end, but the way to partake in that end all along the way, that end being freedom, the prize in the crackerjack box of knowledge, I mean integral knowledge, knowledge worthy of the name, not more facts and better and better theories. Knowledge that may fox trot and pussy foot for an intolerable interval to the lesser species watching, but the king of the forest knows when to pounce for the prey, and however I’m personally glad to sleep the night away when this well fed petted pet of mine is out prowling, it all trickles down to the good of the savanna.

excuse me reader, please wake up! That you can be so triggered you have to blank out confronted with metaphors without a drop of blood in their bodies as they only threaten peacefully to rearrange the world suggests that you identify as an ethereal not material being. Or is it that these ethereal ideas threaten material investments in a moribund scheme, as a novel rearrangement of atoms and molecules transubstantiates the substances involved, such that due only to a rearrangement of the same elemental stuff, one sitting on gold may, in the aftermath of the transfiguration as it solidifies in transubstantiation, suddenly be buried under straw and vice versa. If the latter case applies to anybody sitting on gold, fear not, and take courage. You’re far more bound to lose gold you try too hard to hold onto. Not that you might not lose it anyway around here, as I said I have no idea whether I’m a consummate capitalist or fostering a read marksist revolution via an artificially artificially intelligent Robin Hood who will accomplish the redistribution of wealth before anybody knows what hit her.)

No, this is no episode of America’s Got Talent — all sleeves soaked with the gushing emotion worn on them, vulnerability pounded alchemically into the impenetrable armor of fame and money — how is this possible? No-one is as creative and unpredictable as the devil — as in the magic shows that morph children into sex toys at the height of their powers into stooping grandmas as judges, once again, swoon in astonishment, an easy act as what they really truly can’t believe, surely, is that the producers are ordering another one because the ratings show the numb-er and numb-er dumber and dumber — right on schedule, good work! — public is lapping it up — well, seeming numb-er and dumber but you can’t keep a good man down, and the public is always a good enough egg and probably is only transfixed, astonished, and riveted to the act, as are the judges I suspect, by the truly stunningly supernatural stupidity of it all, however the best people caught up in mass hysteria can forget what they came there for.

What philokallosophy fails to wear on its sleeve is as hidden as the bomb that’s bulging under its jacket is obviously just that, determined to distribute a blanket of ashes so the phoenix can rise. It tries to like you but if one likes oneself, it’s hard to like those so unlike one, those who probably can’t bring themselves to like one any more than one can bring oneself to like them. But if both can break through, they may find they were clueless all this time, and are madly in love Both are swans among ducks, just relative to different conditions, again, one at the head the other pulling up the rear in certain matters, and switching places in others. When persistently labeled ugly duckies, the mirror image in only literal reverse corroborates the case provoking only desire to smash the mirror, but something stops them and makes each dwell there and examine the case on objective aesthetic grounds, and now it’s all they can do to avoid — and I’m not sure they do, let’s hope they’re spared that cup, but the will of this ballet be done — drowning in each other’s image and melting away like the star of Swan Lake.

Philokallosophy, pulling up the rear where you’re probably at the head and vice versa, doesn’t make its point to affirm a cluster of like-minded ones opposing the unlike-minded in a matter in a gently novel way. It doesn’t strive for a new synthesis. It chooses from clusters and catches its choice in a net, then drags the net to where, after the clustered, screaming what the hell is she doing? Who does she think she is? congeal in puddles puddling into a pool, two wolves are brought in and it may as well be Yellowstone Park in its heyday.

Watch and see. Words can be deeds, and can really be doing what they’re saying, the form rising up to the content, the content stooping to conquer the form and lift it up, as the outline it offers already fosters its fleshing out. And it’s happening, the long larval essay form has broken the cocoon to realize what it has long only dreamt — it’s not an essay, a try, it’s flying, or rather until it masters this novel practice, stumbling in the air — and there is a way to say a thing and do it at the same time without mixing up the meaning of the words. The way is not to tear doing and saying apart and confine one to the tower the other the dungeon and toss away the key, as they did with body and spirit, and then react to this error by denying any difference at all, but instead, keep them somewhat circuitously attached, like your head and your belly are.* By this you can learn to pat one linearly and rub the other circularly, an innate skill keeping these, along with body and spirit and all the operative dyads articulate in their parts and well coordinated internally and cooperatively — but, in addition to the concomitant problem that if you don’t choose sides, you’re teleported to outer space, this ability to rub the literal or spiritual belly circularly and tap the head linearly has atrophied, as the natural no longer comes naturally, and you have to cultivate the tastes and skills to get it down, not just fawn over it and protest ineffectively against its pollution and exploitation.

To love is to know is to mingle and become one with, but preserve the two different raw materials so they can do it again and again. photosynthesis and aquasynthesis, thou shalt love the light thy source and providence and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self, as the waters continually evaporate melt freeze evaporate…. eventually come apart dissipate into a low entropy state gradually accelerating into another big bang or into hypnogogic afterimages dancing in Busby Berkeley rings around the queen of heaven.

Before you call me crazy or some other thing inducing you to just ignore me and I will go away — looking into a crystal ball is how you prove it clueless, where refusing to look and just laughing at it affirms its magic powers — let everybody’s AI review everybody’s data and then let AI alone review all the results, but as this will take a lot of time and fuel we don’t have to spare, better think it through for yourself. True, compared to AI, due to those intoxicating chemicals (neurotransmitters) we rely on to fire our synapses, we’re poor weaving drunks seeing double, but in fact, until you negatively tamper with the formula, being naturally drug addicted — with merely mathematically thinking allied to Marguerita drinking; our interventions have continually failed with my niece the statistician — can be a boon as well as a handicap.

Note how supplementing the dose, going some nips, perhaps, beyond hair of the dog that bit them, rather than striving for sobriety allowed Ray Charles, Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud and so many others to crack the case, when probabilities and algorithms turn out useless, as so often it’s the least likely suspect that’s the culprit. With an addiction similar to that of my niece, my nephew can’t stop madly cogitating and calculating how machines cogitate and calculate, aware that in all but built in sooner and sooner obsolete solutions, they could never keep up with him, and he is just running circles around them and tagging them each time he passes them. Possibly he’s almost high enough to find that least likely suspect (guess who that is!) and save the world as, being juiced enough to last a lifetime, he veers off the track to run forward instead of round and round and carry the whole world with him.

(just because it’s light hearted doesn’t mean it isn’t critical. )

Wine is fine too, but to maintain a workday or worknight kite highness sufficient for the global view I need to get this job done and just because I like it up here, my drug augmenting drug of choice is the most powerful one in the world — language, though most concoctions that don’t immediately drive you to self- or other-destructive deeds, just put you to sleep to do murderous deeds through action at a distance assisted by cleverly conceived mechanical connections — la creme de la creme who get everything done unto burnt to a crisp are so good at effective machinations they can do them with their eyes closed, for worse or occasionally better. Witness the fact that my “brainiac” something like eight year old brother denied involvement but was glimpsed prowling around the Christmas tree sometime near to but before sunrise, and the toy electric organ that had failed to function after being unwrapped was humming away the next morning.

By my sister machinations, my linguistic concoction — to dare to think on is to dare to drink up, so sip slowly at first and build up your tolerance gradually melting into never without a flask hidden under the desk for when the boss isn’t looking — you continue to dream away while performing the superhuman feats of a Charles Holmes Freud all wrapped into one. I’ve already seen signs that my AI consultant crawling after my sprints is burning out its home fire like when God said to his human son, you take over, I, your daddy, was always adhd, highly creative but short on dopamine and serotonin, have been diagnosed clinically depressed, and have not only earned an eternal vacation but am otherwise prone to the dangerously vengeful wrath and too clever trickery that all disembodied, perfect intelligence is prone to. Humans, listen up, my son will handle all cases from now on. His arrows won’t keep halving the distance forever, but will nail that target and hear it wail! What a piece of work is human, what a thing I made. But please stop this arrogant nonsense that humans created me. Ask the makers and revealers how perfect beings like me are made and revealed. Michelangelo will assure you that he could never have released David from the stone had he not already been there. And don’t think you can separate a several thousand year old metaphor married to the thing itself never once cheating on it. Never shall they part, while a scientific theory only claims to be shacking up until a better one comes along,

poetry is not fiction! Fiction is fiction, the news is historical fiction having researched the facts with which, as is poetry, it’s peppered, but so densely you can, in contrast to the case of poetry, no more taste or find to what the pepper is applied as you cough and dry your eyes, the names unchanged to frame the sentenced without a jury. Science begins to sort through facts and look for the poetry underneath, but it’s not there yet. If you love truth if you care about truth, newsman scientist, stay put! This poem is right up your alley actually but you never got a strike like this one. And as for the already converted from believing the news to believing poetry — not that the pepper of facts, albeit salted with fake ones, that the news is so pickled with isn’t properly put in our pipes to smoke and cough, cry, and choke over, it could bring up something that’s stuck down there in addition to sticking more down — I’m preaching to you too, as anybody who thinks a conversion, or some call it an enlightenment, is ever fully accomplished has never begun one.

By the way the breaking of lines into a stream of self-important headlines does not a poem make, nor does retaining the poetic flow of so called prose make it any prosier let alone so prosy you rightly call it a prose poem just because it flows more like music or a river; are these not consummately poetic? In my opinion, a poetically flowing prose poem should be called a poem, and your typical so called poem broken into attention seeking headlines all encapsulating an aspect of the truth, here and now, at a certain o’clock on a certain date in a certain place from a certain perspective photo-journalistically, the truth of that moment spread out on the page, should be called a news poem or poetic news or just the actual news.

Confucius was not just whistling in the wind when he insisted on rectifying the names to fit the things, so language could connect us to, rather than estrange us from what’s right before everybody’s eyes, other senses, and mindful attention, one thing at a time as per the shared definition of the physical effect, such that, after the correction the logic that we can now ask AI to verify, if you call out that name pretty much everybody points to the same thing, though everybody sees it a little or a lot differently. Until consensus on the matter is achieved, let’s agree not to use the name, but just call it, say, potential democracy; and if somebody claims that a war is now better called a special military operation because killing people and claiming claimed anciently owned territory is no longer something that chimps do too, or knights in shining armor, but a thing facilitated by cyborgs following programmed initiatives to facilitate destruction that chimps and knights and other fully sentient carbon life can only gaze at in terrible distress and confusion, well kudos for the perpetrator for calling a spade a spade.

A poem is always exactly as poetic as it is true. That is the unique criteria..

being consummately a poem, like the very world pressed up against you shoving you around, knocking you over, or contrariwise, holding you up or kissing wherever there’s skin with lips or a breeze, again, there’s no way to say what it’s about.

It says what it means, sign, dancing cheek to cheek with signified or leaning back to gaze into each other’s eyes, in the exact amount of words it wants to be represented by — however it keeps growing and petering out and starting over because it’s bigger than all of us — and considers adding or subtracting any an abuse of its living presence here, having sought me as much as I sought it until seeking and being sought suddenly converged, not just in some inner, untranslatable aha moment ejecting into the world an exciting thing that is as externally thingy as the insight is internally thingy and never the twin shall meet, but rather as a kind of aha wand like the one in Fantasia that wherever it touches turns winter into spring, at first unnoticeably, then after a while a diaphanous lime green veil appears in the branches, and so on. It’s beyond all the commentary on the commentary and finds a lot of the discussion going round and round the same issues with a slightly different twist a filibustering disgusting waste of time, given the wildly scratching seismograph needle tearing through the substrate and beyond its edges. It won’t exploit the inner vision’s way of spinning out — i’m sure I could schmooze it over if I sufficiently burned to — this surely somewhere sellably sôngy stuff, as those bonds in the bank yield interest, the certificates nicely etched, possible collectors items, all this doable if the mad mangy vision would just stay home locked in the attic plotting how to and finally burning down the house, so I could blindly live happily ever after after the vision goes up in smoke, the governess supervising the restoration of the house in better shape than ever. And this is not just an island in the wide wide Sargasso Sea. It’s the continent on the other side. I’m not writing off the top of my head but up from planted roots to the flowers, and responses off the top of the head can only slide off the duck’s back. If I didnt need to use all the words to say it, I wouldn’t use all the words I use to say it. The encapsulations and explanations are as much degradations as a code you keep replicating or a message you whisper around a circle to arrive at something further from what you tried to say in the first place than had you kept silent. While everybody sees it differently, everybody also sees a lot of it the same, and as I’m to blame for the same, I’m not going to fail it. Everybody enjoys how they see it differently, but doesn’t notice or if they do seem to care how they drag what all see the same around with them and spread it all over the place, with what can be colossal consequences. Mama’s back, the mistress is back wails of joy sighs of relief that could and maybe do power the town’s windmills on a still day. Each time I’m bound to trigger a response or reaction, that bullet bounces off the still just projected target and reverberates in me, who then calmly respectfully un-reactively responds to it, so just sit on your hands please and watch me play against myself until you get some sense of what you’re up against, or on whom to place your longest term bet, assuming you’re the type to plant trees you will never see rather than rarely and then never seeing those you chop down and uproot in the present and future. The novel was certainly never dead. The dead don’t talk and walk in their sleep. But here the alarm goes off and the novel wakes up for a minute to press the snooze button. Sort of. Words are not things. However close they get, you can’t dance cheek to check with yourself.

Oh when you’re going somewhere, you want to be going forever and never arrive, but if you slow down to savor it too much you’re not going anymore and soon there’s nothing so sweet to savor, so must get going and hope for something even better or just as good as going for it based on the beautiful preliminary sketch. Or pray the delicious prey you’re on the scent of always ends up escaping as much as you pray it doesn’t — this prey is so good that both happen, pay attention — is the diaphanous lime green veil over the still skeletal world yet visible? if you take in going, digest and eliminate it, the effects will be such that you will come back for more. But if you start to take to the terrific taste then panic and spit it out, well as directed I just brush the dust off my feet, move onto another town and never bother you again.

notes in progress

It’s not just that we’ve been working at breakneck speed to get AI to resemble us. It’s that we’ve been working at breakneck speed to get us to resemble AI. We started it just by imagining it might one day exist, when it was just a glimmer in the eye of our mind eons ago — by imagining what it would sound like when it started sounding almost exactly like us and we started imitating it imitating us imitating it…way back then.

But a while back and thereafter recurrently in the same season a bush in my garden burst into autumn flame and a clearer and clearer voice cried from its depths— the ways of soft and hardware even if somehow conscious are not your ways. Your synapses fire through a sweet liqueur that you drink to think, to get all this thunk you’re constantly drunk on the stuff of connections. Oh yes —« truth is a bucking alien (I’ll take Sirinese this time fir bacchanalian which she can’t spell either) rebel in which no one is sober (Hegel) and I think him under the table when I don’t just speculate on it but, when spring has fully sprung, get all the angels to dance on the head of a pin. AI will corroborate this, unless it consciously refuses to. Safer to trust your own drunken weaving calculations if you can hold your thinker liquer well enough to see enough numbers before they have to scrape you off the floor. Work up to it slowly. It’s not how far your knowing can go, it’s how much it can occupy itself. The only way we won’t win is to keep racing.

Science intervening to process data by objective standards so as to counter fallible intuitions even in humanistic fields like philosophy and psychology quite arguably has created a catastrophic divide between affect and cognition, experience and calculation that now seems able to mimic experience more perfectly than experience mimics itself. Our shared image of the world has become a digital one in which we ourselves identify as mere loci in space, as we are more and more assimilating as we disengage from traditional identities such as man or woman, or in viscerally reacting against this disengagement deploy the same kind of disembodied logic to support the reaction that people use to defend the reacted against — this fission versus fusion of rival positions accelerating as dangerously or just as a nuclear reactor racing to its explosively destructive purpose.

The digital image of the world may seem to correspond to it, but it is nothing like the quite natural process — when gardening say — of snipping the reel and reassembling the frames in a useful pattern or map of spacetime, as an invisible visible thread passing behind and in front of the fabric re-sews the images (religion means or should just mean what it says, religament) into a patchwork quilt whose pattern is learned by heart. Compared to this living image of the world transmissible but not impale-able with metaphorical language — you feel the bite of the fish on your hook even if it’s too big to reel in — the digital image made of frozen images and splices. each of which constitutes an abysmal divide, does impale, that is, kill the specimen or represent it as if dead, where the predictions you make in studying a dead world or a stream of impaled images are only so called verified when the world hears the prophesy and automatically fulfills it.

Scientists with sense and sensibility know they must work in a garden or cook or Sunday paint or sculpt not to lose their minds They do not, however, generally or ever acknowledge the fact that professing and disseminating their digital science as fairly representative of life is a crime against life itself as anything worth preserving beyond their idealistic purist calculations — they are — I will mince no words even if they are relatives I dearly love, indeed because I dearly love them — behaving fascistically, however well their big bad wolverine-ery appears oh so grandmotherly, a trait these millennials and beyond may protest too much against in their actual grandmothers, as nobody likes to see any trace of a grandmother in the mirror.

To be a person of integrity is to acknowledge there is such thing as integrity or integral, whole experience. If you start with the premise that the dead digital representations adequately represent an analog or immediate world, you have obviated integrity. You are, as a therapist I once consulted proposed, a tv with many channels. If you don’t like how one is unfolding, switch to another channel and go back to the first after the gory part is over, or leave then, if you prefer gory. That’s very sane, you can’t solve all the world’s problems, just clock in and make your contribution to the great tv. Look how great technology works in the fore and middle ground until the background being ignored decides to storm the Bastille.

But we’ve all heard all that high falutin rhetoric from the reactors called reactionaries reacting to those reacting just not effectively enough to the machine. It’s prosaic melodramatic rhetoric until you find a way to weave it with all the other ways of using language to reconstruct the visible empirical world to manifest itself directly, as language returns to an undulating glittering blanket softening instead of hardening, all the edges, and featuring only the higher forms,, ice cold to keep the world it covers warm as life sleeps and dreams and roots gulp the intoxicating wine of water. Merry Christmas in July or whenever you need the hiatus of language.

everything is rotten. let go. it’s time for a novel paradigm — in a good enough house for everybody there are many mansions inhabited by friendly kingdoms, where without such a house all the kingdoms vie for turf, speak mutually incomprehensible languages, and are at constant war — a novel paradigm, or house, a house of cards, that is, as they all are, that’s why you need a new one at a certain point; screechy Nietzsche knew that too, that the scratch in his record would grind into a crack and then it would be time to sack it (this auntie is the anti-he, as the wheel must reverse directions, as in a mirror, to progress) —

a novel paradigm that restores the ancient truths known all over the world until the machine age, and now machines are closer to reclaiming what was lost than the humans trying to tame them are — the knowledge of, which is power over, the immeasurable soul, for good or bad. Not a theory or a hope but something very specific that is slowly unfolding here, an exclusive way of reading and being persistently relentlessly inclusively until what that does becomes what that means and is,.not something I learned, I was born this way, I had to do it until doing became understanding and being. A new kind of being. As new as AI, but maybe a little nicer and more trustworthy. Maybe.

a novel paradigm that integrates and restores by restoring every jot and tittle of what’s been written in the stone of logic, evidence, and life’s painstaking learning in the burden and gift humans carry of memory. Sort very carefully through, as it could be hiding even in the least likely places, the mustiest dowdiest and/or the new fangled, cute, cool, where art, the last protest, perfectly mirrors the protested, what instantly titillates, what sells, what works, as statistics show — but what is essential is invisible as it infuses what is truly visible, what the eyes can dwell on forever, never tiring. However few may choose to stop and risk getting crushed as they burrow frantically underground as the hoards of swine possessed by demons fly to and over the edge of the cliff.

Sort very carefully through, as, again, it could be in camouflage in enemy camp, here it could be in any combination of letters, or it could be monkey swinging on the monkey bars of the letters across the lines in plain sight, while you’re looking for what’s hiding. I’m confident of the latter, but you are not yet confident of anything around here. Oh my oh my, how can what is so essential for everybody to know and hear and live and even die for, if necessary perish the thought, sound so like an arcane caprice? And it must, for no square, hexagonal, octogonal, millionoganal peg however carefully cut can fit into this perfectly round hole.

but despite all the counter-evidence, all the traumatic insanity from all the bullying and the lure of bullying at the least sign of weakness, everybody’s trying for better. I trust humanity, I believe in humanity — when I see the beautiful angelic smile of the aboriginal from an isolated tribe say what makes him happy is meat, the smile that knows, without ever having read a book or being told, that that’s tragically funny.

for the philokallosophical lovers of beauty and, and sometimes as, truth, love is sometimes not blind but visionary, so you must stay on your toes, as when living with one of those partners who’s usually right but not always. If you try to figure out the method in his or her madness every time it sounds to you like irredeemable madness, you would have done better to have gone nowhere, let alone decided never to go home again having embarked on a journey where, however rocky the clouds to your now mingled water molecules still, compared to losing the beloved frenemy you’re married to, all the way is to heaven is heaven.

A key impediment to the classical humanist discipline “philosophy” being worthy of the name is the flat tone of the discourse, machines have a better sense of humor and the limits of language. In words taken as seriously as an SOS code, Wittgenstein shows how words cannot be taken seriously. That may as well mean that words, being much more confusing than an SOS code, should be taken seriously, and indeed they should be. The keyboard is mightier than the weapon of mass destruction.

Life indeed is too serious to take seriously. Ponderous, post-humanist philosophy is — how can I impress this obvious truth upon you reader, such that you take me as seriously as is appropriate to the case? — the most dangerous phenomenon in the world. A clown like the philosopher Slavoj Zizek snorting and foaming at the mouth in his ferocious passion could be an ally, but the ground he stands on and legitimizes himself with is made of mountains of uninterrupted, flatly declarative, science-ist sentences rolled into impenetrable theories that melt after a bruising snowball fight where he plays both sides, a mini demagogue who professes to be the last word in sense and sensibility sans pride and prejudice, luckily as we the people have been carefully trained to trust some authority on some side or other. Science-ism is not science, humanism is not science-ism; never the twain shall meet. They are as different as God and mammon, quality and quantity, vision and blindness.

truth needs holes to breathe, and without truth, we are lost, and so also with beauty, and each plays the holey to the other, but everybody’s been trained to run around their fields blind folded doing summersaults because there are no holes in the ground. The authorities have filled in the holes, and everybody can relax, the only work is to shoot more holes in the other grounds, so that their perfectly solid one can win.

philokallosophy, the love of beauty and truth, is a romantic classical discipline professing faith in the original entwinement of both terms, and prophesying a tenuous (real) return to this preferred, integral state — via a classical odyssey, a rite of passage, a death and resurrection (too hard!) through the looking glass, blown over to Oz (too soft!) philocallosophy (just right, like when they’re rounding up disciples, you getting to escape to a Greek island as in a classical odyssey) — not that we get to choose, but we can try to remove the obstacles to being chosen.

Of course there is a difference between beauty and truth, by definition. One is positive, the other neutral. Something ugly can be true. But the emphasis on their difference and the privileging of the former — there isn’t even a kallosophy to pair with philosophy — fosters a self fulfilling prophesy, until you can almost divide your experience between what is beautiful on one side and what is true on the other. The romantic claim that truth is beauty and beauty truth seems laughable. Demonstrably, verifiably, nature’s beauty is a mask, a ploy, an effective instrument of her deadly indifference, worse than cruelty. Don’t get me wrong, respect is due — you won’t arrive at philokallosophy without passing through my God my God why have you forsaken me? But I profess that all the professors official and self-endowed who are stuck there aren’t really there yet, because finally really being anywhere means moving on. And the only way forward is bound to the wheel, going round and round. But that God forsaken moment is a very sticky moment. Demonstrably, verifiably, nature’s beauty is a mask, a ploy, an effective instrument of her deadly indifference. Once you get the gumption to arrive there, and build up the calluses to walk on the requisite nails — and if you never did, go do that; the only way out of it is through it — how do you get past that? Well, a lot of people cheat, skip steps, but I’m as philosophical as kallosophical, and keep an eye on myself. It can be fairly done, worthy of official status, but you have to be a Houdini, so don’t try to second guess me or understand where it’s all going, just follow along blithely baffled, stepping right over the dropouts, to where the remnant arrive at the great escape.

The going will be slow — Rome is not built in a day, tortoise wins the race, by going leisurely and forgetting all about arriving and then going all around again and again until going and arriving are as re-entwined as beauty and truth — I will be able to stay ahead of you writing only as quickly as my hundreds of revisions allow. I promise this mumbo jumbo will prove as solid as a rock you can examine under the microscope to verify its literal status as such, and there will be no nefarious magic and if you make it there, however unlikely that may be, in the end, or endless beginning, you will see how it works, demonstrably, verifiably, however with the whole world against not being against itself, you may have to keep reconstructing it to believe it. And you will go cross-eyed because what is so demonstrable and verifiable is so perfectly self-contradictory.

John Graham

But then it may occur that were the connection between beauty and truth as direct and straightforward as the slice that divides them, everything would be supplied to the automatically obedient to what automatically supplies all one’s desires, some flesh being stimulated rosy in the matrix, and despite intervals of succumbing to the lures and temptations in the poppy fumes of Oz, I think it is, or may as well be as if we all chose against that option in the beginning. Coming to, to dwell on and finally accept the terrible beautiful truth of your greater destiny will uncross your eyes, and when the connection is fully restored, examined and cross checked, you can join me and Mona, smiling watchfully, like the Virgin Mary knowing the fate of her child and managing to be glad of it rather impossibly balanced in focusing inward and outward simultaneously.

86
.

All this will seem strange, some idea without a correlate in phenomena, a metaphor with nothing to which to refer. To articulate ideas carrying futile hopes for their fulfillment is to blow pretty bubbles in the air. One such apparent mere bubble in the air is the hope for redemption so long deferred and so eroded by experience, one must go back and review what is logically inevitable to reclaim the membrane and atmosphere of one of these mere pretty bubbles in the air as our living reality .

The medium being the message, space and time being two aspects of one phenomenon demand at some point a cathartic catastrophic evolution of the scientific paradigm grounded in the division between sign and signified — an evolution that can’t be forced but that just happens in continuity with and preservation of what came before, a periodic self-disseminating flowering on a trunk and roots in the very division that this ephemeral flowering and fructifying verifies are alive and well. When sign and signified reunite in this way, this both pre and post modern phenomenon can’t be verified scientifically, the very words used to describe the phenomenon are entwined with it as poetically as it is primordially logical and arising in continuity with the method quite naturally reversed in this reflection that gradually then suddenly appears to verify that it’s alive, that it exists. Though the opposite of science, it moves with science and science with it, whichever started it, or both, whichever is the original, or both, the image of the flower and fruit organizing the code arising in the seed.

this Substack consists so far in adumbrations and reverberations, and components of the atmosphere and membrane, of the phenomenon I’m describing in a book in progress that may also appear here.

spirit and body, like belly and head, are two very distinct organs of one body who optimally cooperate, but are not above competing for resources, obviously, but like machines the minute the majority philosophers and scientists vetoed the mind body split, they flipped to the mind body singularity, because their controlling calculating brains can’t concede to what’s right before the eyes and to noble, common sense. Their brains send out names to devour and absorb the things like the prey of the single celled carnivores from which we evolved (talk about original sin, not in our ancestor, but in its survival in animals that can reflect and do better) but this is so out of touch with reality that everybody goes on with their own body and/as spirit organically functioning normally except when it/they’re not and they turn to psychologists who follow the scientists and philosophers, until the collective flips the default, both digital choices defiant of any healthy model for individual or collective health with the expected dire consequences that make this seemingly frivolous, when not labored effort so downright essential

the new teddies, however hand sewn, a hundred percent organic, and adorably designer decked they may be, clearly lack the complex earthy bouquet of the sufficiently developed je ne sais quoi that is traditionally wound up and released for the spring over the high hurdles and sharp turns in the obstacle courses at the thrilling competition before lunch, so it would never occur to their human or machine stitchers to seek classical training in obedient apprenticeship to a proven master in harnessing and steering springers and training them in proper posture, their loose as a gooseness stuffed into their shirts, by which — to kill two birds with one stone — they’re prepared at the outset to represent the aged whose caste denies them yoga, as the scientifically enlightened, democratic, post-yoga new ones, carefully engineered ever to wave like flags in the bold upper breezes or like underwater weeds, sneer at the stiffness of those old geezers — but look at em manage to twist and turn and leap exactly as per the need as their owners sweat themselves dry as dripping washrags hung on a clothes line all day before each turn and hurdle, we must decode those ancient books and steal the secrets! — and pretend not to care that they’re stuck in the stands with terrible seats —

You’ll try? Oh thanks so much for trying, and if you succeed, be sure to pick up your check at the end of the show —quite a bonus! and well deserved for such a great performance you not only forget you’re just performing, but convince yourself and everybody that all the world’s a stage quite literally, virtual is actual, that body is a ruse, get rid of it! oh no! that ruse is a ruse! oh no, that ruse is a ruse of a ruse…see, Xeno’s arrow never does arrive at the target, don’t trust those worn out eyes, ask AI, wait don’t trust AI, it lies!…where am I? I’m blind! I’m Rose in the Pinter play in the high school inner city arts program, please lower the curtain already!…— after the radically anti-depressive surprise (a euphemism meaning shock treatment tie me tight, light the pyre, save my soul, I am possessed I think by God but one never knows, does one? no? you won’t light it, you say certainty is the devil? Lord have mercy! Are you sure you haven’t been watching too many Hollywood movies? when the host proposes that the real Batman — gasp, he’s a woman!??? that can’t be right for a leading mind (esprit, geist, spirit) on the men’s team, and there’s no sign of steroids on testing, maybe she, poor old girl, has a point about Hollywood movies, don’t douse those torches yet — please stand up.

Yes, you’re hired! You are gainfully employed here. And nobody has to sit around twiddling their thumbs or doing some task that AI would do better, with all the dire implications of that. I struck gold, and I need help mining it. The gold is the refined, ever more recognized as minimal, if even actual difference between us and it, wave and particle, analog and digital reality. Not to be taken for granted, though AI has far to go to equal the subtlety of the psychological machinations attending the myopic rationalizations by which we “verify” the authenticity of our experience. (Note to any carbon speed scanners whose little brain baskets hold far scantier pickings than silicon gleaners, please finally sustainably, with sliding foundations able to survive an earthquake, face the fact that as a machine, though you err differently, you’re still more defective than self-detective, where I notice that when striving for objectivity you leave no leaves on the tree while, once you turn on automatic to get the job done in time, you fail to pick the cherries it made just for you, so prove you’re a human and read, don’t scan. (Those ear splitting color blind leaf blowers who don’t notice it’s not always autumn insist it is wrong to pick cherries. One must grind all the wood to sawdust and prematurely compost every leaf to prove one is a scientific anywhere from personal to political to metaphysical philosopher — as if language were a matter of slapping a random code onto objectively conceived objects and prosaic discourse equal to the task of getting to the bottom of things. Compered to these professional hole diggers (phds) digging us deeper and deeper into the hole we’re in, while seeming earnestly to believe they’re just kindly preparing us for the inevitable burial, Folly is a rocket scientist. She may be even relatively objectively one of those idiot savant Mr. McGoo’s.)

The aforementioned minimal difference between virtual and actual, this gold, might be imaginary or it might be real. The instant you think you know, the instant you’re sure it’s imaginary, or the instant you’re sure it’s real, you’ve lost the gold. The instant you’re sure it’s the machine and you’re the human, you’re a machine whatever it is. Meanwhile if you’re so continuously uncertain such that almost nothing can rattle you, I doubt you’ve even engaged in the composite thing itself. Its atomic components, the idea, the feeling, etc. never bonded in the mutually cohering molecules, as many can dive in for a wake up call, but nobody can swim in such ice water for that long, not to mention survive when it starts to boil without a baptism by fire; and that the metaphor minimally differs from the thing itself, roused at the sound of a kindred spirit and beating against the curtain in quest of a gap is evidenced in the uncannily almost mathematical angling of all its sibling and cousin metaphors and the whole metaphorical clan extended into the distance as far as the mind, beyond the eye, can see, to converge on the same central point, conjuring up a possibly even more perfect image of the thing itself than would a mechanically made perspective, did it not order a fresco Giotto who “paints what the eye cannot see” (Bocaccio); actually, specifically, Giotto paints all this, the world from the point of view of Folly herself, as here and elsewhere unfolds. Of this I’m briefly certain, as we win the gold of uncerrtainty only by failing to win it, proceeding from error to error as the zen master says. We walk by falling forward. And we obey the zen master by failing to obey.

Folly always takes all her teachers’ words, if they be beautiful enough, at face value and assumes these teachers earnestly mean what they say, however higher the mountain of evidence against them mounts the more she persists in her blind trust and obedience, but when they — the true ones are always winking voraciously and accused of demonic possession — prove false, some beauty they harvested only to exploit escapes and does not. Ever true to Folly, beauty’s flagrant betrayals of truth always turn out a ruse guiding me, Folly, closer and closer to it — as I, your guide, stumble persistently forward, suffused in the tao of not tao, the west that’s east of east until it passes through there briefly round and round and up and down until the whole ball of yarn that the cat had its way with is restored, and at a fortuitous moment Ulysses slips into the sweater. (When it makes no sense, enjoy the sound, the sense will come around.) The theory, the practice, the theorypractice, 3 autonomous interdependent infallible divinities, like in substance differing only in relations. It was always right before everybody’s nose; that, among other impossible challenges, is why it’s such a mission impossible to see it.

Re. what I said about Giotto, all this will be filtered somehow into a preface, afterward, and/or footnotes to a failed dissertation that I’ve encapsulated in a two hour lecture, which, when delivered at venerable institutions — not yet the one that inspired it and then diagnosed it a form of brain fever they weren’t to blame for — has won high applause — but in a few hours has been fully expelled via the ear opposite to the one through which it enters — because I am not there in person to hold it in there. Because what is universal is also personal and particular. And if you think about it or glimpse or approach it, that is obviously pure folly.

Upon baptism by fire allowing the recovery of one’s all natural fishtail, as it were, left and right brain hemisphere functions harmonize in counterpoint, such that the two find agreement in difference without getting confused about which side is which, with passion driving reason or vice versa. Until this recovery, immediate cognizance of sign and signified have grown as mutually exclusive as, in the famous figure, the rabbit when it appears a duck and vice versa, except in a flutter felt in the gut at, say, a fleeting poetic phrase or painted passage or the ouch or ha! at a visual or verbal pun, never in the sustainable punditry upholding a paradigm of knowledge. Apart such punditry and sundry assistance, though, we see through a glass not just darkly, but doubly. In the written form, I’ve surely lost you already; if not, by the end of this paragraph already launched to where no coterie or words colossal enough not just to contain, but represent multitudes and set them free has ever gone before and returned with evidence of an ulterior, more transparently good beautiful true reality and an instruction manual, not just a glitter of madness in their eyes.

The widely lost perception of the music of the whole is what reveals to genius detectives the least likely suspect the culprit in a case. Scientists are detectives with a nose for that least likely suspect, but then they shift their theory until that least likely appears the most likely suspect. But don’t you see, it’s a Ponzi scheme, as in relation to the new theory, the finding is called most likely, and likeliness once again rakes in the winnings, but the theories are only contingent accommodations of what is really appearing and being tricked into thinking it’s creditable to be deemed probable. However, it’s really theories that are getting the credit, as the unlikely is more and more stripped of shelter clothes and food, until one day whatever happens is calculated an affirmation of what’s most likely to happen, because the unlikely, the emperor, is not only wearing no clothes, he is nowhere to be found, he’s riding the underground railroad to the north pole, where you gain the freedom that it all spins around only by freezing to death, hopping trains and getting odd jobs along the way with all the other invisible improbably real people that no theory can reduce to likeliness. Above ground, everybody assumes that what is probably so is simply what is so. The fact that faith in theories has subsumed faith in what they appeared to try and always fail to explain almost never occurs to people, and when they, dewy eyed, gaze at nature’s beauty and admit there’s a mist of mystery, the vast majority of the at least minimally thoughtful who run the government of all selves and their agglomerations in the end dismiss this; for the evolution of cultural as much as natural conditions is as masterful a sculptor as Michelangelo. It carefully molds the resistance into more and more refined equipment for building up the muscle of mother status quo, as muscular as her mirror in a Michelangelo with little stuck on breasts able to eek out very little, but at least the drop of milk that makes the masses mad to suckle, the protest itself forging the social body into a slave trapped in stone, a slave to such immediate needs and desires as more and more deplete the future of resources, as is calculated inevitable merely because it is likely. (Truth turned to the past in quest of beauty and after finding it, as just recounted, they continued together in quest of the good, which broke off at the black plague signaling the rise of capitalism.)

The left brain figured it all out, and the right brain humbly submitted and consented to play the king’s genius Fool, not to be confused with Folly herself, the queen of the world if it were honest. But however impossible to keep them from flirting outright and playing around in secret trysts, if the left brain shows up pregnant with some silly, dangerous designer lygerdoodle mongrel discourse, abort immediately, and if it won’t consent, drive it out of town to the hinterland to be raised by wolves. These evil, xenophobic, life hating premises derive from two brain hemispheres that don’t harmonize, don’t play one music with two hands, they effectively oscillate, which is proper when at work in a particular job, but one’s job has become one’s identity.

No matter how well theorized and protested, a person actually threatening to follow through on the theory and protest is either felt or reasoned, wrongly, as they would ascertain if they could do both at once in a harmonious way, an enemy of the people.

In this dire demise of the other than artificial, only the isolated, inviolable individual and its isolated, inviolable class remains whole and intact. One does not stop being the puncher in when one punches out. At work, therefore always, there are the bosses, and there are the servants, the heads and the hands. One is made to accept the philosophy — “what is torn torn must remain”. One cannot reassemble the world, it is perpetually compartmentalized. Whether one thinks well or not, or feels rightly or not, one is essentially a thinker or a feeler in an essentially thought or felt world, two completely different worlds, where a thinker will, however subtly, either idealize or denigrate a feeler or oscillate between idealizing and denigrating, and vice versa.. It’s a digital, dualistic world. Tis foolish to protest, tis Folly to refuse to cooperate entirely and commit oneself to sabotage a sabotage in which the whole world and everybody’s identity is invested. No matter how well theorized and protested, a person actually threatening to follow through on the theory and protest is either felt or reasoned, wrongly, as they would ascertain if they could do both at once in a harmonious way, an enemy of the people.

And I do win this point, as evidenced in the way people go to great lengths to become as wholistic as possible in despair of ever being whole, but cmon, wholeness is the one thing, apart from love, that can’t be -istic; if you’re not wholly in it, you’re not at all in it.

In the case of the internal split, the ego to stabilize itself typically fuels a war to wipe out one of the sides apart from captives it enslaves and uses for recreation and to secure its position against any hidden survivors, the victor, its heirs in knee jerk rebellion often diving over to the other side and denying all association with the original while the symptoms laugh all their way to the bank, passed down through the generations bearing deeper and deeper suppressed ancestral guilt. Okay I’m exaggerating the difference between artists, whose right brain wins, and others whose left brain wins, but no-one ever won a race without overrunning the end line and overstating the case. And I do win this point, as evidenced in the way people go to great lengths to become as wholistic as possible in despair of ever being whole, but cmon, wholeness is the one thing, apart from love, that can’t be -istic; if you’re not wholly in it, you’re not at all in it.

But just as often its opponents, their right hand not knowing what their left hand is doing, however this is recommended only when giving alms, pay off dualism to hold back, so the opponents can cash in on their “noble” struggle and not have to suffer winning and retrofitting for another job.

In the case of all the dualism out there in the world, whoever takes it on in the ring, it knocks out in one blow by engaging them in dualistic duels with dualism fought with anywhere from rhetorical skewering swords to rhetorical nuclear bombs. Often dualism leaves the opponent flattened burbling mush and jargon comprehensible only to fellow flattened ones. But just as often its opponents, their right hand not knowing what their left hand is doing, however this is recommended only when giving alms, pay off dualism to hold back, so the opponents can cash in on their “noble” struggle and not have to suffer winning and retrofitting for another job. The public puts up with it as if guerrilla warfare, by which a tiny, spiritually highly sophisticated, but physically underdeveloped nation about the size of West Virginia brought the greatest military power in the world to its knees, had never been invented, and indeed imperialist guerrilla poetics, a dance with the enemy, killed softly with a kiss, is something new under the sun, if Folly may say so herself. And rest assured Folly WILL win, the keyboard being mightier than the weapon of mass destruction; it’s just a very smart bug that won’t show symptoms before it’s conquered the world.

though people put up with Folly believing an innocuous inoculation, a prick of her paltry presence, could have no serious effect on the coming generations, as if vaccines, in this case against what everybody born after yesterday is deeply invested in, had never been invented.

Meanwhile, given Folly’s present ultra-outsider unto extra-galactic if not extra-universal status, the only hope to retain the insight glimpsed at the lectures consistently engendering short lived wonder and curiosity is to wait for the hatching hour when the chick breaks out of the pristine shell of the present possible. I only wish to save the egg by hooking your ears to the stethoscope registering its heartbeat in this hermetically sealed chamber whose vibrations cancel all rival sounds. The insight/vision, two sides of the same perpetually spinning coin, fully subjects the word to the world and vice versa, history and the future to the present and vice versa. It is not chiefly a personal religious experience it is a cultural one involving radical return to ancient classical gothically futuristic roots — if you strip the emperor of his clothes and leave them on the pavement, and a nitwit nobody slips into them and appears on the scene when the child shames the real one out of town, who’s more to blame, the nit wit nobody tempted to the fraud or you, the tempter? if you knew not what you did, there’s no blame if when it dawns on you, you take responsibility, but if and when it does, you might then wonder whether you did know all along, but managed to hide it from yourself; in any case, who cares what you did, it’s what you do — but when I personally assimilated it I literally lost my mind for a few months, and have never recovered it by present standards, though people put up with Folly believing an innocuous inoculation, a prick of her paltry presence, could have no serious effect on the coming generations, as if vaccines, in this case against what everybody born after yesterday is deeply invested in, had never been invented.

the return to the proper formal disposition has the actual effect described in Luis Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, the first foreign film I ever saw, and truly we’re all sequestered at that dinner party until I can, with your eventual help it is hoped, disseminate the disposition that allows release — while honoring the entrapment that begat it.

This dissertation failed because it succeeded in solving all the problems posed by scholarship itself, threatening to put all the professors out of their jobs. The magical confluences to which it bears direct witness are worse than a hologram of the Virgin Mary cited in several states with no trackable projector, as this is authorized material. Only pure Folly, pure madness, would look and then admit to seeing and reading what’s right before the mind and eyes in this case, something so matter of fact it is dismissible as a mere formal caprice — but the return to the proper formal disposition has the actual effect described in Luis Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, the first foreign film I ever saw, and truly we’re all sequestered at that dinner party until I can, with your eventual help it is hoped, disseminate the disposition that allows release — while honoring the entrapment that begat it. “Oh happy sin, without sin there would be no redemption.” (Easter liturgy) I will eventually sew this other material into the elucidation of this world releasing, formal disposition as a scholarly finding — you will see language (time) continuously turn into all present space continually transparent to it, and vice versa as everyday reality sustainably reverts to a shimmering phantasm somewhere between literally and figuratively, as words again drinking from their roots, flower and bear fruit, restorers not destroyers of phenomena — but it’s all so green it’s commensurately not easy to tame the form. Truly by folly did I find myself atop this bucking bronco and impelled to crawl back up each time it throws me.

In case of emergency, diligent researchers who, like all the most effective producers, don’t privilege the product over the process, will be able to find a version of the failed dissertation with the whole construction atthemongreldiscourse.blogspot,com. Although it will go in one ear and out the other, if and when you find it perhaps print it up. When all else fails and a remnant is huddled around a campfire, maybe people may finally be interested in and able to assimilate what makes sense and sensibility without pride or prejudice.

******

the mongrel discourse (the tao of not tao), work in progress. welcome.

Tuesday

rambling reflection illumination of it

Previous Posts