note -- in hippy-popularized buddhist philosophy, one is admonished to forget the product and focus on the process, that life is a dance -- to get to the other side of the dance floor as soon as possible is completely absurd, admonishes the velvet voiced Alan Watts, reeking with what I'm always sure at the time of hearing must carry the world class wisdom and intelligence it purports to, and then, mesmerized by that voice, I once again delete all I've written against what it professes, so grab it while you can, maybe print it, as the original is the easy prey of that predator with his irresistibly enlightening and uplifting videos from the equally valid, relatively upside down perspective. Right now though I'm standing relatively right side up.
To illustrate the philosophy in the video, trees sway in the breeze, birds are shown soaring gracefully through the air. Oh yeh. Tell those birds that they're just dancing, not trying to get to Florida as fast as possible by the most direct route through the currents, and they will squawk their heads off and purposely poop on yours. Real birds are far more like basketball players, who soar and soar and dip and spin, but whose eye is always on scoring, and in truth, basketball is more graceful than any modern dance that writhes around just to writhe around (not that all or even most modern dances do that, however pretty much all modern theory encourages them to, such that many go to great lengths to pretend to) puritanically eschewing the supposedly superfluous, frothy frills of ballet, as in being against messages in favor of media, it is also against the perniciously goal oriented art of seduction.
But just as to the Chinese, Americans are standing upside down, so also are time's top and bottom reversible depending on your perspective. That is, time runs what we call backwards, as much as what we call forwards (this has been scientifically verified); beautiful products produce the beautiful processes that they produce by winking and whispering come hither from the future, where they wait to be released like, or as, Michelangelo's figures calling him to release them from blocks of stone.
The medium and the message are lovers conjoined, constantly redefining and changing places with one another, while protecting their ongoing, original difference in the unmediated, physically defined reality of a Mobius Strip (see wiki).
PRETTY MUCH ALL OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE, JOURNALISTIC POLEMICS, AND ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY DISPENSES SUMMARILY WITH THIS ONE TRUTH, SUFFICIENTLY NUANCED AND ACCURATE TO HAVE ENCRUSTED INTO A BANAL CLICHE LABELED LOVE LIKE LOVE LOVE LIKE LIKE LOVE LIKE...
--ALL THREE ARE CO-CONSPIRATORS IN THE PERPETRATION OF THIS LOVELESS PURITANICAL PERVERSITY, THEIR OBSESSIVE AND FUTILE HAND WASHING WORTHY OF LADY MACBETH) -- THAT CORRUPTS ALL THEIR CATEGORIES, AND
THE DEEPLY CORROSIVE, GENERATIVE MONGREL DISCOURSE, NOT JUST THEORIZING THAT IT MIGHT BE NICE TO, BUT ACTUALLY SMELLING OF SEMEN AND INSEMINATION, COMPOST AND ROSE PETALS, LANGUISHING IN LAZY LURID LIQUID LOVE GROANING IN LABOR GURGLING AND SQUEALING -- ALL THIS SEETHING UNDER THE PLACID, INCORRUPTIBLY CONSISTENTLY ARGUED SURFACE QUITE POSSIBLY CAPABLE OF INTERMITTENT TRANSUBSTANTIATION TO BECOME IT -- EXISTS TO CORRECT THIS.
All medium no message, art for art's sake cannot be for art's sake because that which lives only for itself forsakes itself and drowns in its own ever blurrier and muddier image.
This journey to a warmer clime and a cooler world at peace with, redeemed, re-integrated, and purified in the full assimilation and confession of its irreparable corruption is a long one that will take months and months and years and years and centuries and millennia -- the modern world is so neurotic, so deeply entrenched in layers upon layers of self-deceptive schemes within schemes within schemes, any savvy psychoanalyst could tell you after the first session that it's a "lifer" who will never graduate from the couch; just to get it to keep its appointments will be a full time job worth all the pay I deserve but am not getting to do this -- and there will be fair weather days to rest as the wind gently nudges forth the vessel that sways like a hammock as you doze in your hammock in the hammock riding the waves, and there will be storms, but we are always going somewhere and we must get there or die, and the way can now have its say for the captain has spoken.
... a lake of clear water on a bright early spring morning with a bit of a chill in the air. There's only one thing to do -- remain outside of it, or DIVE IN! One two three GO!
okay you're in, now forget that metaphor, performative philosophy fusing word and world is almost nothing like a lake of real water, it's really like nothing else in the world, not even mathematics, except in its accuracy. Like God or if you prefer "God", it only resembles itself. Yet over time, first fleetingly then lastingly -- though even after gathering all the lost scraps, the stitching is never done, and the thread will not stop disappearing behind the fabric -- in swimming in the metaphors that can only point to it, or the descriptions -- like this one -- that can seemingly never touch it, but only analyze or compile the hypothetical attributes of its merely hypothetical nature, there it is! You've arrived at an oasis, or an island to rest for the night (or the day if you're nocturnal), but hearing the drums of cannibals, better dive back in and keep swimming in the monster infested virgin waters -- the water too is a monster -- where no man has ever gone to tell the tale since Odysseus returned to Penelope's arms only to set forth again on the next day or era's similar journey.
note: this emperor is wearing clothes, but you can't yet see them
and all those other emperors, even yours, might well be wearing a few real threads expounded into intricate tapestries that do more to conceal than reveal the actual threads, and when you remove the real threads, the tapestries might well unravel.
The emperor herein has unraveled the illusory threads worn by all the other emperors, stolen off with the real ones in each, and woven his clothes of those.
But where everyone might be pretending so hard to imagine real clothes where there are none and can't afford to stop pretending on pain of losing everything, it's the real clothes that might well appear imaginary.
That is to say, although I'm terribly philosophically inclined and
perfectly capable of becoming a professional philosopher with all the perks, honors, and respect -- and that latter's the thing I want socked most to me,
that's been on the top of my list sent to Santa Claus since I could write the list -- as the youngest of nineteen first cousins of a tight clan,
though smothered with slobbery love, I got no R E S P E C T --
still, I just couldn't go for it in all good conscience. The longer I pondered them, the more it seemed obvious to me that all the R E S P E C Ted tomes of philosophy receive that precious reward only for sounding like they earn it. To me it's pretty much all
a tale of sound and blurry slurry signifying nothing; though as heavy as concrete, it never sets.
It's a self-enclosed system that to be rigorously deconstructive can only calculate what's wrong with all the other ones, rather than what's right about itself.
Out of touch with the world, it is always inaccurate, which is convenient. It's never out of a job correcting itself.
Is that respectable or downright fraudulent?
All wisdom and knowledge inhere, by contrast, in the source and execution of a positive act, an act of creation out of nothing and nowhere, a recreation of the world from inside out, as many a philosopher turned artist or novelist has overtly or effectively suggested and then verified, but this act has NEVER BEFORE been rendered transparent for mass distribution, but heh, until somebody landed on the moon, nobody had ever done that before either --
but then again, as all creators with high ambitions soon discern -- as
one must grab and use what's available and not fuss forever over the imperfections
in even the most world's perfect slab of marble or driftwood or whatever's around to make something out of it, be it a temple to the gods, a toilet, or the not yet named until you stick on a title that marries it to a metaphor --
there's nothing a hundred percent disrespectable or a hundred percent anything under the sun, which itself isn't a hundred percent itself, but is, like the leopard, known by its spots. In truth, if you sort through enough of all that ponderous philosophy, you begin to discern some useful patterns,
and finally must allow that there is actually something there, all that work to avoid work and appear the most respectable and glamorous people in the world, was still work and not in vain. Yes, among all those weeds there appear a few, resilient flowers that form a quite harmonious bouquet with extraordinary fragrance, the super-swooningly sweet sum transcending the swooningly sweet parts.
Here you have the entire history of philosophy from all over the world from the origin of the world of the mind to the present encapsulated in the relative sub-microscopic nutshell. The nutshell, as will gradually unfold, takes the visual form, as will later be painstakingly verified, of a fresco by Giotto, which is also a scroll and score -- as in Bach's there are several spots left blank for the interpreter to improvise in the idiom of the piece -- whose code I cracked and am presently translating
(interpreting, playing) right here and now.
(Don't let the signs and symbols scare you. Giotto's Christianity is fully roamin catholic (all inclusive) capitalized READ MARKSIST -- in the beginning is the word decreeing share and share alike, but by your own free enterprise, multiply what you have to share to keep up with the inflation of the universe and everything. Ritually returning word to world could be Catholicism without the creed, though then you must uproot it. I think there's always a dark spot on the human soul, a stigmata, and we each have to decide where the lie if that's what the spot covers up will lie; to blame it on the other is to burn the bridge.
How did Giotto and I (NOT me and Giotto) do it?
All that will gradually unfold.
The Mongrel Discourse, while intimated and adumbrated by all that comes before, represents a quantum leap
that leaves the status quo in philosophy and maybe everything -- as nothing is but thinking makes it so -- on the other side of an abyss, and you need to rev up your motorcycle and
find your inner Evel Knieval to make it across after lots and lots of practice taking small, then greater and greater quantum leaps,
such that when you come to the big one, it'll be a piece of cake; but you must start practicing NOW on the little ones I've lain before you in the obstacle course ahead.
Of course there's nothing new under the sun, it's just a new kind of arrangement of the same old stuff,
but that's the difference between apples and oranges or anything. They're just different arrangements of the same particles. But if the atoms of an apple were to rearrange themselves to form an orange, that indeed would be quantum leap, as when amino acids arrange themselves into a DNA molecule. How like life to take such an elegant form.
Though a visual order translated into words at first sounds quite chaotic and haphazard -- like a box of puzzle pieces dumped on the table, and together we have to put it together because, as science (as well as art, they fortuitously intersect here) or shared knowledge, it's the very essence of togetherness, and the way there is the endless end of it, like or as a Mobius Strip (see wiki) -- it will turn out that the incredibly well, visually organized Mongrel Discourse is to moribund philosophy as life is to mere, relatively haphazardly arranged minerals.
You will eventually see under the microscope the image of the extraordinary molecules that comprise the nuclei of all its cells.
An issue that confronts one here is that philosophy, however lucid, is still difficult, and without institutional support and the perks offered by the institution to those willing to get into it, nobody is probably going to bother to study the most lucid, clear philosophy in the world. Luckily many highly improbable things happen every day. All these improbable things are cast aside by contemporary science as insignificant. For contemporary science based on statistics, what is probable is everything, the improbable is untouchable, yet it's everywhere, carrying the probable on a rickshaw, dragging the probable up the mountain, as the probable sits smoking its cigar under the rule of science luxuriating in its exclusive claim to authorized existence ever more rendering the improbable not just untouchable, but invisible. FORGET WINNING THE PHILOSOPHICAL OR WHATEVER RAT RACE YOU'RE WINNING OR LOSING, WHO CARES????!!! REMOVE THOSE BLINDERS! YOU'LL SEE THAT THE IMPROBABLE IS NOT ONLY APPEARING IN THE CORNER OF YOUR EYE RIGHT NOW, BUT IS DRESSED FOR THE OCCASION!
Okay, if you don't want to lose your rat race, don't tell anybody you come here and manage to throw off your blinders for a magic spell, leaving them by the door to retrieve when you leave. We can always use some spies whom no-one would suspect of being on our side. Contact me by email (below) for further instructions,
why when I describe the whole, does it sound like I'm pointing to a hole? Because there is no whole, it is taught to the cognoscenti in arcane theories, the whole is an illusion. Then this theory is distributed to the masses in, say, songs like the ubiquitous, beautiful "Imagine". Imagine a whole-free world, fleeting images like scarves drifting through the air, like Sylvia Plath tossing her garments to the wind, and it's not depressing anymore, because nobody aches for the loss of the whole. Everybody agrees finally, there is no dissent. The whole is dead.
How odd to say that there are whole arms whole legs whole eyes whole hands etc. but there is no whole person there? Or there are whole persons, but no whole peoples. Or there are whole peoples but no whole human race. Or there is a whole human race, but no whole inter-species race, and on and on until one can say that the world is full of wholes, there is whole food and holistic medicine, and of every species of thing there exist whole members of that species, and of every whole species, there is a larger whole species of which that species is s a subset, but the largest species containing them all is more elusive than the smallest particle, possibly the god particle, the bozon, because that bozo has been a very bad boy, and from now on he can be the smallest thing in the world, but not the largest -- as if it were up to us to determine whether two and two should be allowed to add up to four, and prohibit it because somebody is going to use it to build a bomb. It shouldn't work, people should see through all this madness, and yet, when I point to the sum of it all, it seems even to me by now that I'm just pointing to a hole, not a presence but an absence. Truly in this case, clearly there's a blind spot, a blind spot obscuring the sum of all the parts. Or the faculty required to resolve the image or crystallize the concept has atrophied in the constant denial of the existence of the sum of all sums, with everyone encouraged and given extremely helpful helps in imagining an irrevocably fragmented world united only in the shared perception of its fragmentation -- each whole present moment, each whole object including the whole of nature as we know it -- the largest whole we puny humans can fathom, one little universe in all the multiverses in the big one, could not possibly represent the whole of everything that ever was is and could be -- an ephemeral, finite condition, perceived marooned in space and time, a scarf thrown to the wind -- as if this lie alone can save the whole world, and maybe it could were I not about to destroy the whole world by debunking the lie. But maybe I'll save the world instead. You can't do one without risking the other. But in an un-wholesome world, a person recognizing and communing with the whole whole, identifying with the whole whole more than with her species of whole, with the atoms she shares with everything more than with the cells she shares with herself alone and empowered in this communion to play a cipher, a prophet, one who owns the responsibility that crashes down on the human head at birth, just for facing the truth as logic constructs it is considered a deluded megalomaniac. Or just playing with words and getting carried away before she flips over to Zappo's to hunt down a pair of discounted designer boots. Or both. You have to break the mold to make a cipher or prophet aligned with the times, always an unprecedented phenomenon. To seem the least likely candidate appearing in the least likely place is a very good sign.
*****
a telling fragment --
the world is a zebra
...as elsewhere noted, people never trained to see stripes, having no idea of their existence, never acknowledged when pointing to them as toddlers, would by the age of three or so, see all zebras as black or white. If this were to happen, the society would attend to this obvious fault in perception and finally correct it by discovering the existence of stripes. The first scientist to discover stripes, though, would likely be shamed, mocked, and scourged, or swatted like a fly, or terribly pitied, or summarily ignored. Haven't you been there done that enough times, society?
I hope so, for I have discovered, and provide ample empirical evidence and impeccably logical argumentation toward the inevitable conclusion that everything in the world and in the mind is striped. Such stripes are not just ideas, they exist, they can be materially analyzed in their fluctuating vibrations, in the alternating current, in the pulsing light, on and off, as particulate as it is wavelike, the stripes are intuited and felt as well as visible and knowable to the eye and mind not in denial of them -- meanwhile just as every perceptible thing -- the macrocosm a mirror of the microcosm, the whole world read in every grain of sand, each cell holding the whole body's plan -- is by all accounts divided into stripes, all perceivers and all their feelings and thoughts once divided (striped) come together to perceive the singularity, in the solidarity of scientific consensus when a theory is verified beyond a reasonable doubt, of the truth of stripes; all that of which we are the least conscious is striped; there is no contradiction, there are just stripes, everything is as beautiful and mysteriously striped as the zebra, who, thus camouflaged, disappears into everything.
This was long known, the words of ancient language sing of it when singing of themselves, as will gradually unfold here, but with every repetition any code is degraded, so that now by our everyday language in its common, degraded usage, all the stripes have faded, such that even as art and science, both of one stripe in fact, have already sussed out so many, and we all catch many direct glimmerings and glimpses of the stripes, they soon melt into black or white as we speak and use the common language that washes them away. Therefore we must follow the method of the Jews arriving in Israel, still cooperating with Palestinians well before establishing the state; when passing by a kinsman speaking Yiddish, say, in the street, they would give him a gentle fist punch in the arm and cry -- speak Hebrew Jew! If you know they're there -- and I know you already do, and if you don't yet know you know, even though you do know, whose fault is that? -- speak Stripe-ish kinsman! Don't be shy, kinsmen, we're all novices making a butchery of this sacred language, but it forgives us, for the beautiful true language of stripe-ish is itching to rise from the dead and re-unite us all, Israelis, Palestinians and all the divided, one and all, as it restores division to what is intrinsically divided. Speak Stripe-ish, first one, then ten, then a hundred words you will know by heart, and you will soon begin even to understand me as I babble away in this foreign tongue, as the stripes begin to etch themselves into everything before your very eyes as if painted just yesterday by the master's hand! Soon Stripe-ish will be on everybody's tongue, and everybody will achieve fluency; it is sacred Stripe-ish, the language of what's out there, the unfathomable other, the perception of which we can only integrate with some falsifying ideology. The zebra is the embodiment of resistance.
Oh they have many means to suck you into their labyrinthine video games, and make you pay pay pay to achieve the next level and the next, and shine among all the players on your side, for your own and everybody's good; peace will collapse the global economy, so be prepared for sacrifice.
UNLESS A TERMINAL TACKLE HAS FORCED ME TO RELEASE IT, PROGRAMMED THEN TO EXPAND TO FIT THE SHOES OF THE THING ITSELF*....
*the thing itself being quite essential to science (work),
and meanwhile it's the most fortuitous form
of diversion (art, play) to fling your arrows
forth freely and happen to hit the bull's eye,
also the only way to verify scientific results,
as data is always filtered and therefore biased
by the rationalized system that studies it --
thus when science bumps into data
that undermines its own methods,
as well it has done --
relativity undermining the supposedly objective
tools used to discover it --
it should throw itself at the feet of any art
that happens to bump into the same result --
a thing that pings just where science sees it.
Divinely inspired free play, shooting off arrows in all directions --
watch out! duck! -- is the only way to the bull's eye,
however you soon see the direct path before you
from here to there as the crow flies.
To pave that road, though, and take you that way,
you'd think the road just creates the illusion of the thing
because the lines it draws converge there.
So even as, when out in the field fumbling around in a free for all,
that path cannot but almost immediately appear to you
and would spontaneously suck any seeker into its straits,
don't go there, but also, don't try to erase it
or erase the temptation.
Then you won't be on the way.
Where not to go:
