An Argument for Parapsychology.

Parapsychology is not a pseudoscience; it is a necessity. To withdraw from it is to take a medieval attitude towards a possibly more sophisticated development in science. That is contrary to the principles underlying science. The course of human history has seemed to be a reverse evolution, after a certain point, of what is called the Soul. The development of and increasingly exponential dependency upon the faculties of intellect, reason, and the scientific method have left the average human being feeling dead, confused, and marginalised in a society that seems governed by principles that only computers can comprehend. What is sacred is not rational; what is powerful must be analysed. This is a disaster, and every individual repeats this tapering of the personality which was the recent history of mankind in his or her life. Until one wakes up. Parapsychology seeks to reunite the ego with those predominantly subconscious factors that made life Glorious, Novel, and Informed not only in the infancy of the individual but in that of the race. One need not use the rational faculties to understand it; they are included as a small speck within an incontrovertible sense that the Universe is All Right; it makes sense, so one needs not make sense of it. Imagine what happens to all those poor, gifted children that wind up in the mental hospital diagnosed as schizophrenic for having perceptions requiring immensely intricate patterns of thought to begin to explain. What of the people who are misdiagnosed as bipolar simply for being so empathic as to feel "possessed" by other people's emotions all of a sudden? Without guidance, these kids will continue to believe that they are maladapted to a society that is maladapted to them. So many sensitive young people turn to drugs because society does not facilitate mysticism, but it is better to be a drug addict than to be condemned as crazy. Our attitude towards the "mentally ill" has hardly improved since the dark ages; it is still as villainous and cruel. Life at a merely rational standard that is content with the satisfaction of only the most banal impulses can naturally allow these villainies to happen: Forced medication is a method of forced drugging, and we have the pharmaceutical companies to thank for heroin and Xanax. With the advent of parapsychology and other alternative sciences, man makes another breakthrough through the wall of patriarchy, dogma, and one-sidedness. Yet this time it is not at the expense of another aspect of the personality to be ignored; it is in favour of it. dm.A.A.

Cooperation and Empathy.

If one segregates people, compelling them to operate in an impersonal form of isolation (as opposed to a sacred introversion), one draws and quarters the human body. Every individual has a large set of faculties for empathy. One's mind cannot be cleared of problems when their origin is resolved within oneself. Naturally, when a friend feels a problem, or even a stranger does, one's reaction is to feel it as well. The neurotic who is convinced that he or she is a rugged individual with no sense of responsibility towards one's fellow man is in for a good deal of neurosis. Problems that occur second-hand, by empathy with another, will be mistaken for one's own, and one will use one's own methods to resolve the problem, As Though It Were Internal. With no impetus in the personal unconscious to merit this action, a neurosis worsens. You can't swat the fly. That is because the fly is on the other side of the glass. You can only instruct your friend as how to find the fly and swat it.

Dmitry.

Rocky Horror and The Quest.

Last night, or, more specifically, this morning, I went to a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with my dear friends of several years, whose names I will spare in this instance. This was a tradition that the older of the two friends was quite fond of for the sheer hilarity of it: A large group of enthusiasts of this old cult film, almost unanimously theatre students, crowding about to watch the film for maybe the fiftieth time and to watch some of their best prance about the stage of the playhouse in lingerie, mimicking the film as it played on the screen behind them.

 

The theatre was in Encinitas, which is right beside the Pacific Ocean. The city was Alive, markedly more so than the pacified, hungover suburbs of Rancho Bernardo. Stepping onto the street felt like experiencing something for the first time for the first time in ten years, as though just waking up after ten years of being asleep. The ocean seemed to wash onto the streets and into the minds of all the young patrons pacing it unapologetically. A light that seemed to have no past lent a flicker with no foreseeable future to every lamp and every set of tables behind every window, and each shop was like a child in its own right, a sibling of its neighbors but its own tenant, and an orphan with no regrets.

 

Yet there was a strange hangover from Rancho Bernardo, that old retirement community that cropped up like a fungus in the midst of the sixties counterculture, in all the young actors, boyfriends and girlfriends, and degenerate twenty-year-old children that stood like a scattered guard outside the playhouse. I got the impression that each costume that I saw, the group of them together an ornate cornucopia, paled in the eyes of those who wore them. Something in the face of every patron seemed to glaze over the very Fact of each face present with a kind of almost hostile self-righteousness, as though to admit the fact that they were Alive, be they happy or sad, more so than anyone I had seen in Rancho Bernardo, was embarrassing.

 

I looked upon each face, head, and body with reverence. At moments, I attempted to catch a glimpse of recognition from these novel strangers, or even familiar ones I had met during my brief and interrupted stint at Palomar College, but to no avail.

 

I looked over to the older of my friends, and he told me, grinning with grim resolution, that a letter “V” would be inscribed on my face with a washable marker. The “V”, I presumed correctly, stood for Virgin. It was a joke. I was among a crowd of people who would be thus marked for never having gone to see this production at this playhouse before. A young man with the sarcastic demeanour of a slighted joker came about and leant the best friend of every Virgin his red marker. My friend wrote two “V’s”, one on each cheek, and the words “Cum Dumpster” on my forehead, for good measure.

 

There would be a brief ceremony to honor the Virgins. Once in the safety of the theatre, the crowd of us were prompted to stand in a line that almost encircled the rows of chairs in the middle of the theatre. A faction of the troupe would then run about in a line, as we stood facing away from them, and slap us from behind to riotous applause and, with luck, chuckles of good sport from the slapped.

 

 

My sister will be going to high school next year. At the dawn of the summer, after watching cartoons, we strode to the pharmacy to buy some of the pizza that we could prepare in a microwave. The moment that we set foot outside and a car whizzed by us, I was possessed of an inexplicable anxiety. I asked her, fumbling not to say anything about the World, if she was afraid of being innocent. She told me that she was not. She then said, with only a moment’s hesitation to think, that she was afraid of being naive.

 

As we ambled back up the hill, having bought what we wanted, she pointed something out to me. She told me about a girl at her school who would pretend to watch the show “Adventure Time”, an animated program reputed for its oddity, which I loved for its fable-like quality. This was done with the girl’s intent to appear “weird”. Maria said that she herself and her friends were weird, but that people who were not Actually weird pretended to be because strangeness had become popular.

 

About a month prior, I had gone to an audition, with a group of friends, for a television program. I had never hung out with these friends before. I only met two of them the night before. They were my friend’s boyfriend and brother. The next morning, we set out for Los Angeles. She admitted, as we sat in a Denny’s diner, killing time before our audition, that she felt the strange, paranoid and overbearing aggression, like an epidemic in the city, that I did.

 

The audition was for a show called “The Quest”. It was produced by the young college graduates who had created “The Amazing Race”. One was a short girl with a clipboard and an angry glare who looked pregnant. The other was a young man who looked like he was still calling the shots in a community college film crew.

 

The premise of the game show was that it was a competition for “nerds” (i.e. intellectual, socially awkward enthusiasts) that pitted them against one another, or in teams, in a simulation of a Tolkienesque Hero’s Journey.

 

My group of friends, comprised of a Wiccan, a Christian, an Atheist, and an amateur Zen man, were the biggest nerds in the crowd. Predominantly, our adversaries were Los Angeles locals hoping to begin their acting career. Everyone in the room was instructed, by the short girl with the clipboard, to present a brief life story to the other contestants. People went up in groups, although a few went up alone. At one point, their bios seemed to settle into a kind of stew. One girl presumed that almost everyone else there was from Los Angeles. She was wrong, but she spoke with conviction nonetheless. Another man, who seemed to have known better, said that he was a local and that he worked two jobs, but qualified that everyone in Los Angeles worked at least three jobs.

 

We did not make the audition. We were the most socially awkward people there. My friend had been caught off guard, and the rest of us had to console her a bit afterwards. She had not been prepared to present in front of a large group of people pretending to be nerds.

 

Dm.A.A.

Poem two.

The Temptress.

Eventually you'll meet a woman
With your open arms
Who'll threaten
To consume you in
Her apathetic charms.

Go Beyond It
Don't accept her offer
Or her gift
of guilt

Lest you wilt
Like a flower
in her power.

That is Not how Life is built.

Poem one.

She can't admit she's crazy
She needs some sad excuse
And mired in her lazy days
She secretly desires no use.

... Strangely she attempts to change me
Like a mother goose
I look at her strangely
She tells me, Don't look at me
Like I'm crazy
What's the use

She knows that she's not crazy
Absolutely sure

She welcomes every baby like
she sees it crawling through the door

Over the counter, each encounter
Makes her envy babies more.

"I don't have to do anything" but be lazy

she says

Life is but a chore.

ii.

She knows she isn't crazy
She's taken all the steps
Making it seem perfectly
content to all the outside world

She's God's little girl
In a godless universe
Riding a tilt-a-whirl that has been

has been.

Perfectly rehearsed.

She knows she isn't crazy
And frankly she's insulted
She never even bothered

to thank me

Leaving me unconsulted.

I know I'm not crazy

But what can I do?

If I am sane, it must be plain
That she is quite sane,
too.

Dmitry.