Society feels entitled to your participation.

Society feels entitled to your participation, and yet it does not allow you to feel entitled to its consistency.

Moralism is a pretentious power attitude. Morals should be one’s own business. One condemns others’ behaviours and attitudes with the intent of claiming power. Cat-calling is not immoral, just transparent. One condemns what one does not do usually out of fear. Being “morally superior” is just a form of entitlement, the very thing of which the inferior is accused. This is the irony: That when you point the finger, you have three more pointing back at you.

Love is difficult. Love should be un-possessive. Salvation through faith alone, not good works. One’s discipline will follow from one’s faith.

Maturity clears these concerns away.

Dm.A.A.

Kresten condemns cat-calling because of a power attitude. He is insecure in the company of strangers who challenge his machismo. He derives power from being in a group that will be an extension of his self, narcissistically. He can pride his self in being a benevolent person by finding a group so conformist that he can edit his routine to fit in with them.

What he finds at fault with others is at fault with his self. He would naturally support any style of life that perpetuates this ruse, such as Shadow projection and hostility. Watts was right; the subject of any in-group’s conversation is the nastiness of the out-group. It was Kresten his self that taught me about ‘group dynamics’. No wonder that I have never fit in with any group of his friends, but only individuals.

He would condemn any sort of risky deviance, from an adolescent norm, that would threaten this establishment, throwing it into the primordial rapture of true chaos.

Andrew can only condemn cat calling on the grounds that it is offensive. Yet this argument is circular, for it does not ask: WHY is it offensive? OUGHT one to be offended? IS there value in attempting it, if only for a message? CAN one endure the scorn, in reason, for the hope and courage that one will find the person who says Yes? Is the ethic based on the culture? Ought the culture not be based on the ethic?

Of course, his concerns are no less Utilitarian than those of Kresten. Kresten, Mike, and Robbie are only unified in popular disagreement. Andrew’s very tendency to appeal to the group for corroboration rather than appealing to his own thoughts is telling of how most people his age do so. The uniformity of their responses evidences their conformity of mind and nothing more. Kresten, Mike, and Robbie want only a “method that will work”, and they care more for the ends justifying the means than for the means to justify the ends. This is a trap. It is just as circular as Andrew’s argument, for here the future is merely projected from the past, and the Present (like the Ethical grounds upon which Culture ought to be founded) is neglected.

Dm.A.A.

Post-scriptum: They both have rape fantasies, and Kresten has power fantasies.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition. Conclusion.

The only way to resolve this problem totally is to suspend Common Sense and to destroy it and to say that in fact the Present IS available to the Past, and that the Future is available to the Present. That when we project upon the Future, when we contemplate the Future, the future is all ready coming in. Because as I have pointed out: The Past is not available to us by our own standards, if we are to be totally Thorough.

Dm.A.A.

On the Ohenomenology of Intuition. V.

Really, if we are to be totally stringent, the only really sensible results that we have had, were from this imperfect experiment which can only make reference to the future, therefore we must conclude that our relationship is only TO the future; we are all ways looking forward. We can never look back. Because again: According to Common Sense, any projection of an aesthetic response to stimuli which are available to us at the present which might have not been able to us at the past is therefore a projection upon the future. Because these stimuli will be available to us in the future. And since the past isn’t really, ostensibly, available to us anyway, since we only really have the present, it seems as though time does come, scientifically, from the future. Not the past. Again: Common Sense IS that in the past, in the archaic, the present was not available but the present will be available in the future. So we’re all ways contemplating the future when we are trying to project something based upon current information. When we are trying to project a theory of the past, we are trying to escape current information, and we are trying to return to that archaic state to imagine a situation where the present was unavailable.

This IS Common Sense, once analysed from outside Common Sense.

But that means that since the past is never available to us in its untarnished form, we must all ways be, therefore, all ways thinking of the Future. I am not saying this as a moral imperative; I am saying this as a matter of fact. Though of course, as with all language, this can be interpreted both ways.

Dm.A.A.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition. IV.

We can review our two experiments:

The imperfect experiment which draws upon information only available to us in our present.

And the more perfect experiment which draws upon the information ostensibly apparent to us in the past (or ostensibly available to us but only using information available to us in the past and not information available to us in the present). Now, of course, this is all ready a bit sketchy, because we are not sure that we actually have available to us right now in the present the information available to us in the past, because of the fallibility of our memories. Needless to say, the perfect experiment doesn’t in fact WORK, doesn’t produce results, or if does, it only produces them In Passing, and they cannot be re-created. The first experiment ALL SO produced results, and to some degree they can be re-created, but you don’t know whether or not this re-creation is or is not simply a continuation of the same experiment, because it Feels phenomenologically as though no time has passed at all between the original sense of inspiration and the Current sense of inspiration.

So what does this tell us?

First of all it tells us that the whole Positivistic ideal of ‘Re-creatable Results”, is really some sort of a Farce, especially if our Creativity is concerned. So Re-creativity is somewhat the Enemy of Creativity, it might be said. But there is something Else about this phenomenologically. And that is: Is that you might say in theory that either experiment Could have produced the same results. But because the results can only be produced ONCE because they are Novel, it must be presumed that whichever one we did First was the one that produced the results and therefore, if we’d done them in an alternate order, the Perfect Experiment would have produced the results. And we’d be happy. We’d go home happy.

But: Presuming upon this, we’d have to admit that either experiment, either arrangement, could in fact create the same effect. And therefore we might all so say that any arrangement, any different arrangement of songs, any different experiment could all so create the same effect. And therefore it can be said that any arrangement is not unique; it is “non-unique”. So the arrangement we are working with right now, which we originally Intuited, does in fact therefore have something to it that the other arrangements do not, and it could only be arrived at through Intuition.

Furthermore: Let’s look at it pragmatically. We can Infer, that since an imperfect experiment can still produce a result, there is something we’re dealing with here which is Unconscious on our part. We are NOT trying to re-create the past; we are trying to project the future, which would of course USE, according to Common Sense, the information available to us at present, and it would be building upon [what is from its point of reference] the Past.

So, what does this mean?

This means that just in the same way as you might say that either of these two experiments is equal, you might say that it doesn’t make a difference whether we are projecting these experiments upon the future, or whether we are looking back on the past. We really cannot set foot in the same river twice. And yet when we’re dealing with this unique instant, and the magic that we have on this album, it is unique. Even the future cannot really re-produce it; it can only challenge it or offer an alternative which would be appropriate to say a live performance or something of that nature. The point is that you could just as easily say that the Present comes out of the Future as it comes out of Past. Because even in our analysis of the Past we are all ready thinking about the Future. But theoretically…

Dm.A.A. 

On the Phenomenology of Intuition. III.

At any rate:

The memory of our success is evidence of another Intuition having been adequate; it is evidence that the Present really does come out of the Future rather than the Past. Somehow I’d Intuited that this album would work out in this way. Coupled with the Intuitions of Kresten and of Ro. As well as what our bodies Did playing our instruments during our recording session. We came out with a Fantastic artistic work, that it’s naive to presume that any alternate arrangement could have really pulled off. For I think that in fact the reason that we appreciate good art is because intuitively we imagine what an alternate arrangement would have been like, and we Know it to be superior. But only someone who has not gone into this with as much depth as we have would condemn it to irrationalism, and that is all ways the case with superficiality. The moment of Intuition should be my main focus, though, even if that means that I am switching to a more extraverted mode of being, because what could be more Divine – and of course we have to make room for that ultimately, as a Conclusion of This – than contacting that stream of knowledge which we cannot warrant Rationally at the time that it is produced. We have to acknowledge that THAT is in fact where our hearts should lie, because there are dangerous things in the Unconscious, and even Sinister things, the Unconscious, in its Intricacy, is much more Informed than Consciousness, in  its relative superficiality. And we know this because, when we DO actually take back aspects of our Unconscious, they become aspects of our Consciousness, which had at one point or another been a matter of Common Sense, or we could not Describe them. That’s all ways the case with Intuition: You cannot DESCRIBE it RATIONALLY because there is no NECESSITY to do so except when imposed from outside. There is no internal, practical necessity to do so, so our minds are not capable of it. Unless, say, we’ve researched it a good deal, and then most critics would not bother to listen to us. And yet we know! And we have to trust it. That the very fact that such an experience that is an inkling which IS again, much like creative inspiration, an act of Novelty, a moment of Novelty, a moment of Revelation, that such a thing can occur and dazzle us, even though our consciousness is not able to account for it, this is Evidence that the deeper store of Unconscious information which we simply wouldn’t be able to handle in Waking Life is speaking to us. And of course if we condemn that and you ask: Why not simply handle it in Waking Life? Well, recognize that people who handle it are the ones condemned by the system to be seen as schizophrenics, neurotics, things of nature, because in fact their genius is that they’re able to formulate aspects of Reality which other people ARE definitionally Unconscious Of. It is the Intuition which is in fact the Survivalistic adaptation which allows us not to have to do that. Because of course in every instance of Yin, there is a little bit of Yang, and in every instance of Yang, there is a little bit of yin. Even in the fairly Fascistic dogmas which condemn these intellectuals to be mentally ill – these people who communicate verbally the textures of their innermost minds – even this is to some degree warranted simply because it is IMPRACTICAL for the Intuition to be rationally expressed; it is simply Unnecessary. This is exactly why the Intuition must be trusted, even When it cannot be rationally expressed, and the individual who COMPELS the Intuition to be justified, by something outside of its self, WHILST condemning the “neurotic”, or the psychotic or the schizophrenic, is putting the individual in a double-bind, and to some degree participating in the worst kind of hypocrisy. Especially since, like all people, this person owes a considerable debt to the Unconscious and the Intuition as well, that only needs to be made again a conscious value.

Dm.A.A.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition. II.

And only to include that which I could have Envisioned! At the moment of conception. Now, of course, at This moment in time I have no access TO that. Because if I pay very close attention: Kierkegaard was right; Life must be lived forwards but understood backwards, because we can only understand the past in terms of our present condition and how we Edit our present condition. Therefore Memory, as it has been scientifically proven, is very fallible, because to some degree it is all ways a Construction. So what do we have? We have an imperfect experiment, as it were, which is an attempt to imagine an alternate course of action yet from the perspective of Current events. And this produces an emotional reaction in people, which would ostensibly have been the original emotional reaction at the thought of this alternative arrangement – at the thought of this alternate course of action. Yet what happens when one tries to run a more perfect experiment in one’s mind and actually exclude all those elements that are mental anachronisms, which are aspects of the future from the perspective of the time we are trying to re-create, and not aspects of the present, or, from our current frame of reference, the past. Well what happens there? What happens There is that no emotion is produced at all; no sentiment is produced at all. Because Intuitively, I all ready know that it does not matter whether or not what I’m working with is an anachronism. As Nietzsche pointed out: It is inhumane to seek information that one does not intend to use. And it is only at the moment that I intend to project what I am contemplating ONTO the course of future events, and that means building on the successes that have all ready happened and not pretending that they did NOT happen: Only then is it possible for me to envisage an alternate course of events. It’s all ways in relation to the Future, therefore. Given that, it does not actually matter whether or not in the contemplation of these songs the image in my mind that is available to me could have been available at any earlier time. Because it is the Essence of the song that I am dealing with. And the moment that I combine these essences there is a chemical reaction that cannot be recreated; that is the moment of novelty and inspiration, or at least the best imitation of novelty and inspiration – the best Controlled Accident – that I can attempt to make, that I can sensibly hope to make.

Now: What does this mean?

Well, this brings me back to an earlier point. Which is that, in fact: Inspiration is all ways new. And therefore you can never recreate inspiration because in order for you to recreate it it would have to be OLD. And novelty can only occur in the psyche in relation to something that is new. We can never step, therefore, in the same river twice. This original intuition by Heraclitus, which arguably I have developed a bias Against, because of short-sighted scholastic education, is actually totally warranted by the Scientific Method. Only, as Nietzsche would have advised, you shouldn’t need to rely upon the Scientific Method in order to intuit this. This is why the Intuition is very important; I can only hope, that if I have abandoned this Intuition, I will be forgiven and I will continue.

Dm.A.A.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition. I.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition.

I really hope that I did not neglect my Intuition this semester in favour of my Rationality. It’s quite possible that my Intuition remained intact but my Rationality simply grew to incredible proportions. Hence the very structure and nature of many of my dreams. And yet hopefully over the course of this month I will break out of that structure and take the necessary action, without necessarily axcessive* premeditation, and I only hope that THIS is not excessive right now.

Obviously, to a considerable degree, I had reason to Abandon Intuitionism, and that might have been from pressure from my professor, and in fact maybe several of my professors; However, I don’t think that I actually carried through with this, judging by the decisions that I made, which were for the MOST part fairly informed, even if I was not Conscious all the time that I WAS following my Intuition primarily. It’s all so possible that owing to my personality type being an Introverted Feeling type this Intuitive aspect of my personality might all ways be secondary to the more Rational aspect of my personality, which is my Value system, which are my Feelings. That’s probably the key thing, that if anything is being blocked right now in my system is responsible for the blockage; Our greatest strengths sometimes become our greatest weaknesses.

Now, that being said:

It seems obvious that the Intuition is one of the strongest functions available to the Human Being. It is our direct contact with the Unconscious. And anyone who calls this into question based upon the grounds of a priori reasoning should really try to apply an a posteriori method before totally disregarding it for everyone. Yes, maybe some people are better off NOT following their Intuition. And yet, for myself, I have found it to be just as glamorous a way of life, and just as rewarding, as Jung had predicted. And that is not just by my OWN standards, but by the standards of other people, in terms of SUCCESS. The best example I can think of Immediately is how I knew intuitively how to arrange the tracks on our album; That is: The demo I recorded with Kresten. Now, I had no way of knowing, even, that one of the songs from this recording would be dropped! Either intentionally or unintentionally [It doesn’t really make a difference when we are dealing with the Unconscious Mind] by our producer, Ro White. Thereby, cementing, one of my strongest songs, “Under the Radar”, as the center-piece of the album. And in many ways this five-song album that we came out with [you know, we were originally planning a six-song album, and then a seven-song album, and then again a six-song album.] This album has an incredible degree of Artistic Consistency and Intricacy running through it. That probably no other arrangement would have had. And we know this from experience because, while we don’t have another arrangement available to us, and trying to make a new arrangement would all ways be the product of a Socratic bias, we know that there are some albums with very good songs on them which just regretably don’t have the right order. And immediately when I introduced my proposed song order to Kresten, he all so Intuitively settled upon it as the best of all arrangements. Of course, he had Some contributing factor in this; he did, in fact, decide what the first track of the album would be, which I totally agreed with him on.

That being said:

There’s all ways, all though, the temptation to question one’s own intuitions through Reasoning, which is one of the projects of Speech and Debate, according to my old friend, Paras Kumar. And of course there is no way of knowing exactly what the original thought process or the original rationale WAS, or if there even WAS an original rationale outside of just the intuitive Feeling. I can TRY to force my mind into those Depths, to uncover what my original plan WAS, but I’ll never know for Certain. What’s more: This gets into the same rutt as Usually the Socratic Ideal does, because: The moment that I’ve all ready stumbled upon a given feeling, a given sentiment that an alternative arrangement might have produced – at that moment I am all ready thinking: Wait! Didn’t I cheat? Because I’d have to admit to myself that whilst trying to imagine my original thought process I’d taken into consideration elements of our finished work which I could not have sensibly, according to a Rationalistic frame-work, predicted, prior to conception.

*I confess that through this Joycean/Jungian spelling I am taking Camus’ Leap.

Dm.A.A.

Conclusion:

Conclusion:

In the process of pursuing the “Truth” of whether or not a given arrangement “would have worked”, one may be disappointed with the lack of cohesion. This is of course a conclusion: The arrangement does not work. Yet what is rightfully an aesthetic judgment, upon which the conclusion can be based, may in such a case be confused with a lack of cohesion on the part of the investigator. One presumes that the lack of cohesion is not aesthetic but cognitive; clearly, these results won’t do, and a mistake was made. But the only mistake was the attempt.

Thus the Socratic Ideal dies again.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition: Prelude.

Really, it is impossible to describe bad art or bad aesthetic choices in terms of substance, because it is entirely the absence of substance -- that nihilistic void that humans meet with awkwardness, a chasm that Art attempts to bridge -- that is bad art. Substance is good art. If good art depends upon anything for its recognition it is that in the back of one's mind one all ways can imagine worse arrangements, and so it is met with awe. But even this arrangement, an attempt to desperately make sense of it, is perhaps more if a sketch than a master-piece.

DM.a.a.


Sent from my iPhone

Road Signs.

“Signs, like road signs, are supposed to indicate a location by reference to it, but they can never totally delineate it.”

 

In this case: “road signs” may be read to be a category of which “signs” is the greater category, as in “Signs, like road signs, for instance.”

However, they can all so be read to be two separate categories that are merely compared, one to another.

Dm.A.A.

On the Kafkaesque Labyrinth.

On the Kafkaesque Labyrinth.

Derrida proved that all language is open to the most absurd [note the lower-case] of interpretations, and any “Truth” can become fixed logocentrically the moment that one chooses to become dismissive. The whole inquiry as it occurs becomes self-referential (contrary to Fromm’s project to direct the LIBIDO out-wards) as the patient becomes aware of her own incoherence – in the eyes of the inhumane Analyst. As the situation gains in Kafkaesque complexity, in its Byzantine Daedalean labyrinth of mis-interpretations, the attempt made by the individual to assert her humanity is to behave irrationally, experimentally. Yet unfortunately the general public has no interest in the artistic expressions of a madman; they fear it because they see the horror of their own injustice reflected within it.

The irrational disorder completes the other half of Camus’ triangle. Yet the disorder does not belong to the neurotic, who of course (like many suicidal cases, using Gloria from V.A.L.I.S. and my own friend Jennifer as an example) is totally rational. [“Rationally insane”, as Dick expressed it.] The disorder is the fault of the World: Those Analysts and lay-critics who create the Absurd tension between her own Rational attempts to be perceived as a human being (as opposed to as an object, which would be a step down the ladder, both objectively* and subjectively**) and their own irrational (though of course, to their minds, as Camus described, Rational) ignorance and bigotry.

Dm.A.A.

*The Chain of Being.

**Psychosis.

The Fallacy of Genetics.

The Fallacy of Genetics.

The immediate presumption that the sister of a psychotic inherited a common genetic defect is out-rightly inhumane. Obviously, the environment was the most probable determining factor in her own neuroses; the real question should be of course the sanctity of the analyst, not simply in respect to the polish on his persona but an inquiry into his motives; WHY does he refuse to take the brother into consideration NOT as a symptom of a common, mystical, “genetic” cause, [Genes ostensibly code for proteins, but all else is theoretical.] but as the immediate sociological cause in his sister’s stress?
It could easily be dismissed as genetic were it not that even the relationship BETWEEN THE ANALYST AND THE PATIENT is sociologically motivated in Nature.

Dm.A.A.

On the Spiritually Ill.

On the Spiritually Ill.

' 

"Disorder" seems to imply permanence and genetic determination. "Neurosis", as Jung used it, refers to a temporary symptom of entirely psychological (not psychiatric) mal-adaptation, such as Frankl's Noogenic Neurosis (the result of not having Meaning in one's life). I really hope that what you said about the diagnostic manual's decision to "up-date" the term is not true.'

By rejecting all neurosis as being genetic in origin we marginalize the Neurotic. The Neurotic is isolated from Society, taught to believe that he must fend for his self without support from others. This renders him a likely social deviant. The disorder to begin with is entirely constructed and imposed. As every attempt the individual makes to assert his lost humanity is rejected on the grounds of this Ad Hominem [“He is sick, so clearly what he says cannot have rational value”], he becomes more neurotic as the environment grows more Kafkaesque. Strangers and even friends re-enforce the notion that he requires treatment simply because they feel justified in his mis-treatment. He is VISIBLY neurotic, but no one wants to help him along his path to psychological recovery by resolving the deep underlying cognitive dissonances of his Absurd situation which make it hard for him to function and find sense in any thing. The situation was from the beginning entirely mental, but we labeled it physical so that we would not have to address our own mental insecurities and uncertainties.

Dm.A.A.

Hate as an Assigned Label.

Hate as an Assigned Label.

Aversion to homosexuality is not intrinsically hateful, but because we co-create reality. “Hate” is just a way to describe an emotion. By labeling homophobia hateful, one creates that, because the grim miracle of human interactions is that the Other all ways has authority over the essence of your actions, et cetera by offering you a mirror in the absence of a personal self-knowledge, even if you have some choice in rejecting the presence of that essence.

Dm.A.A

The problem with all reactionary art.

The problem with all reactionary art like Brinn's piece is that the ethical surface is the first thing to go and be scrubbed off by the natural deconstructing agents of the Unconscious. What remains is the Suggestion: the visceral content of the prose that against our will and admission seduces us with the example it sets of male behavior. Rape fantasies must not have their origin in Nature but in suggestion, but Art only perpetuates them! The media is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and Jung's words are as foreboding as ever: what you resist truly persists. The craving to rape, stifled by a strong ego but then re-directed as savage aggression towards those who have the nerve to force the fantasy into reality, is not a function of the 'body' but of the 'mind': it is social, for while one public ally condemns the rapist as a scape-goat the condemnation is only impotent and superficial. In truth: that forbidden urge is the Cognitive Dissonance which all moral reasoning strives to resolve: how can it be that there are men (or women) who do this? Sartre enters the picture. Surely the man Must be human, for his behavior is disgusting to Others. Yet that means that what he is doing is an example for all humans or at least all men. So how can I condemn him without acknowledging the validity of his example? It can only be done perhaps by recognizing the potentiality but rising above it, not by projecting that potentiality upon the scape-goat but by owning it as a part of one's self. This is much more difficult than the indignant veneer of condemnation which usually amounts only to semantics on self-defense.

DM.a.a.

Because most people are not spiritual!

Because most people are not spiritual!

What the hell do you MEAN? I am not referring to something arbitrary or voluntary like the *law*. I am referring to something entirely INVOLUNTARY. I am talking about the incontrovertible presence of God in everything that we only PRETEND not to attend to.

Well, not everyone believes in that.

Shut the fuck up. I’m not buying it. It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. I am talking just about the fact that for any SANE person every aspect of the material world is an entirely personal extension of the Self with its own Authority and Tenacity, that not one of these can one avail one’s self of as a means to an end without committing an infraction against one’s own Soul, that the technological mind-set is an evil that we try to drop like a drug, because in this mode of phenomenological inquiry the object is not honored as being both unitive and distinct, and everything has a kind of manic glow that evidences that we are floating in space and are dwarfed by the presence of Nature in everything. So Common Sense basically. [Andrew throws his arms in the air.]

I am all so talking about the basic fact that in all these things there is a teleology and a directionality in Time, for the game of symbols in our minds by which we devised a Chain of Being and a Utilitarian system of reasoning are not in any way related to this World, nor can they ever be, and so every seemingly cynical claim is just an invitation to deconstruct it, every rule an invitation to break it, because we all know that we are living in paradise and that this pretense towards hatred is a game because sanity its self dictates that we not mire our natural beholding of everything (as Love, as the Sun-like smile of a mother) with some artistic construct of the “Modern Man”, as though we turned a kaleidoscope and everything became fucked up, as though we and not Nature and God possessed God-like powers to deem the world “fallen” even as we hypocritically put down our selves by severance from it. I mean, come on. Common Sense. I LIKE pretending that’s not the state of things. But sometimes I just get tired of it.

Dm.A.A.

Because most people are not spiritual!

Because most people are not spiritual!

What the hell do you MEAN? I am not referring to something arbitrary or voluntary like the *law*. I am referring to something entirely INVOLUNTARY. I am talking about the incontrovertible presence of God in everything that we only PRETEND not to attend to.

Well, not everyone believes in that.

Shut the fuck up. I’m not buying it. It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. I am talking just about the fact that for any SANE person every aspect of the material world is an entirely personal extension of the Self with its own Authority and Tenacity, that not one of these can one avail one’s self of as a means to an end without committing an infraction against one’s own Soul, that the technological mind-set is an evil that we try to drop like a drug, because in this mode of phenomenological inquiry the object is not honored as being both unitive and distinct, and everything has a kind of manic glow that evidences that we are floating in space and are dwarfed by the presence of Nature in everything. So Common Sense basically. [Andrew throws his arms in the air.]

I am all so talking about the basic fact that in all these things there is a teleology and a directionality in Time, for the game of symbols in our minds by which we devised a Chain of Being and a Utilitarian system of reasoning are not in any way related to this World, nor can they ever be, and so every seemingly cynical claim is just an invitation to deconstruct it, every rule an invitation to break it, because we all know that we are living in paradise and that this pretense towards hatred is a game because sanity its self dictates that we not mire our natural beholding of everything (as Love, as the Sun-like smile of a mother) with some artistic construct of the “Modern Man”, as though we turned a kaleidoscope and everything became fucked up, as though we and not Nature and God possessed God-like powers to deem the world “fallen” even as we hypocritically put down our selves by severance from it. I mean, come on. Common Sense. I LIKE pretending that’s not the state of things. But sometimes I just get tired of it.

Dm.A.A.

M.A.H.O.T.Po.C.M. 1

M.A.H.O.T.Po.C.M. 1

Myths and Hypocrisies of the Politically Correct Movement.

Reflections from a student of Philosophy, particularly Phenomenology.

Myth #1: Women are exploited by the mass media for their sexual appeal, thereby disempowered. In truth: Women consensually participate in music videos and stage performances that allow them to express their femininity, which includes their sexuality. One need never feel guilty for feeling a sense of attraction to them. (The same applies to men.) If one does, it all ways reveals an underlying insecurity about one’s own feeling. Keep in mind that we “notice” in Art really what we project our selves. It may in fact be there and be intended, but we cannot become aware of it without entertaining the possibility of it first.

Life is oft a struggle between the will to dominate and the will to love. Sexuality is a form of Love, whereas Ideology is an attempt to dominate. The will to power cannot comprehend Love except in its own terms. Hence Political Thought insists that the origin of sexual attraction is “social conditioning”. Yet in fact there is no such thing as a “definite society”. “Society” is all ways a projection of the individual psyche, because no two of us are exposed to the same sum total of people. What we find at fault with Society is therefore a projection of our selves.

Why, if Society is an individual phenomenon, does it appear to be pervasive and unitive? The answer is that Love is sparse and power is strong. The Astrological Community explains that this period in history (The Age of Pisces and Era of Pisces, as well as the Epoch of Pisces) is bound to be fraught with “false prophecy” and rigid systems of control. Fascism operates in such a way that a large mass of people believe in a Truth without having the nerve to question it, thus internalizing it, however dubious, out of fear and making it their ethical calculus rather than going by their own inner hearts and intuitions. College campuses are proliferated with hostility towards the individual, drawing attention only to history’s scapegoats while ignoring the inevitability that without a proper guiding light any one of us risks committing the same evil (in fact, moreso to the degree that we are swayed or enflamed by it).

Perhaps only a minority of women and only a minority of men have the raw nerve and power to be sexually empowered. These will be the kind of Strong class that make it to the top. The system is not corrupt, and whatever corruption exists within it is still manageable to the talented musician and entrepreneur.

Simply that these individuals (and I am thinking specifically of women) “conform” to a “sexual standard” is nothing more than a reflection of the hostile power attitude that looks at its own attraction with scorn and thereby label and project their own distorted views of sexuality upon the art. Whatever conformity may be apparent is to Nature, not to society or ideology. Since “conforming to society” is all ways done poorly, revealed in its earliest attempts to be a neurotic reaction to one’s own narcissistic projection, the sense of confidence that these women employ should be evidence to the contrary: They are powerful individuals. The only question is: Do YOU have the nerve to admit that you are attracted to them? Or do you lapse into Power and a feeble imitation of Goodness that seems strong because of the façade put on by others in the Cultural Marxist, Politically Correct Movement? Whatever your choice, do not blame others for your own desires. (This is of course directed primarily at men, but to be safe I will extend this to women and invite them all so to examine the men in these videos in a similar light.)

Dm.A.A.

On the Death of Science.

On the Death of Science.

When I was younger, (Well, I all ways was younger, ostensibly.) I took a college-level class in Biology while I was in high school. I did not do very well in the class, but that ought not to count against me except as an emotional appeal to Authority. Many of my peers who had once known and prized my company for being “smart” had now lost touch with me in their pursuits of impressive Grade-Point Averages, with varying degrees of ethicality in the process. Me: The leaves and even the branches of the educational tree were beginning to fall off for me.

I had been an avid reader as a student (Well, I had all most all ways been a student.), and yet I was all ways cautious to segregate the frame of reference that was fantasy in literature from the immediate Reality of my experience. Camus’ Nostalgia for Unity had all ready become apparent to me, however anonymously: How much I longed to escape into the world of Harry Potter, with its aesthetic perfection, even though this life abounded in many joys and Harry Potter too was not without its sorrows.

There was a simple and direct reason that, every Wednesday that Brick’s Biology Class had a mandatory laboratory “experiment”, I would lag behind my partner, whose passionless fervour for grades would render her impenetrable to me. I could never find it in my heart to relate the words I had pored passionlessly over in the overwrought text-book to the immediacy of my experience; it would have been the same mad, Romantic fallacy as had I projected the qualities of the Ideal Woman, coupled with and filtered through my memories of my current mate, upon that very mate and claimed to “know” her. Yet my partner had no trouble in doing this, and she made it into one of the good schools.

What I would come to learn much later was that there was a good reason why I had grown to distrust and ultimately jettison science. Derrida would have probably called it a “logocentric epistemology”. I learned the hard way, from the afore-mentioned Romanticism, that this sort of spirited attitude, a manifestation of the kind of Sisyphian Hope that Camus spoke of, that science in fact does not work in Real Life.

Dm.A.A.

Dream Journal

Dream Journal

At one point in the dream, prior to the climactic episode, I saw a news head-line cross the bar at the bottom of a television screen. This was in a metropolitan area. Having escaped, somehow, the underground facility that I had been trapped in for months (lower chakra vibrations), I was now in the midst of a bustling metropolis that I recognize from earlier dreams: The District. This area looked akin to the Apple headquarters and downtown UCSD, as prior dreams had portrayed it (as with Oleg).

The head-line, in the midst of some vacuous skyscraper interior (I think), open to the air by many balconies like an airport (in aesthetic) that offered no escape by virtue of their height but were at least not claustrophobia-inspiring, however bureaucratic and impersonal, read: “Materialists report that there are still immaterialists/immanents in the world.”

My wandering about, pondering this message in frustration, at once with its self for the public insolence it portrayed and with myself for being unable to abandon it as a concern, segued into my return from the emporium to my neighbourhood.

I dreamt that there were three creatures that I had to save. Actually, if I am to be honest, there were two. Returning from a sort of emporium, I discovered, at night-time on my street (which again was a host to a bustling home where the Qafiti residence would be in Actual Life), that there were several animals running about the street. Two I took into my care: A cat and a rat. I thought that they would be great additions to my family. A coyote, if not several, were pacing the streets, and I worried that they might consume the cat and rat. I tried to hold them in my arms, as though I were grappling with Pumpkin. I was terrified. It is all so possible that Pumpkin was out and about as well at this time, though I doubt this in context of what followed. My father drove by, and I was thrilled at the opportunity to stow my newfound friends in the family van. I did so, and to my chagrin I found him fairly inattentive. Thankfully, in retrospect, his neurosis was not of a hostile, angry character. Yet my rage made up for this fact. I had to keep reminding him to be careful and not to let them escape.

He drove us home, where Pumpkin met my new friends. Soon, I miss-placed the rat. I was furious, panicking, and I troubled my father about this. This might have been the following day, when we were on our way again to the emporium. There was a big event taking place. My father kept assuring me that the rat was safe, though he provided no evidence for this fact. My rage and angst were reaching a breaking-point when I discovered, in the back of the car, what looked like a stuffed animal. The creature, which appears now to have been a hedgehog, had a zipper like Awilda’s pencil case in Actual Life. I opened it to find my rat inside, alive and safe. My father’s assurances, however feeble, seemed justified, but only, I might think, incidentally. He did not know, surely, about the pencil-case, but it seems impossible to ascertain.

Dm.A.A.

In Defense of Higher Consciousness

In Defense of Higher Consciousness

Higher Consciousness and Altered States of Consciousness are totally things. I need not corroborate this claim, but I will explain why some deny it, to my chagrin, and why they are wrong.

Enculturation is the arrangement of symbols in such a way that perception is confined to certain rules. Imagine the mind as a series of switches. At times, enough of these switches are On, and they create a brilliant pattern of light and colour that we call the Universe. Yet whenever this occurs, Levitch’s scorned “Anti-Cruise” comes in, and it begins to flip them off. Having adequately silenced them, for it has “all the authority of Reason” and the Light has only the “authority of Tenacity and Faith”, Reason flatters its self like a pompous tyrant: See, there was never anything to that after all. In fact, in fact, this is a banal claim. All that Reason could fairly attest to is the current condition, once it has been subverted to Reason. The reasoning is circular: It is “only so” because it is “only so”, and we shall render it “merely so” to prove that it is “merely so”. The very process of thought is the flipping of switches – the re-arrangement of ideas and perceptions – in accord with an existing [set of] prejudice[s]. Most poets will attest to this.

All Life is a series of, as Foucault pointed out, Similarities and Differences. Every style of thinking, including Reason, is a different permutation of these facts. You would not KNOW how to deem one opinion superior to another were it not, as you should have to ultimately admit, a matter of aesthetic preference. Different ideas as seen to be related to each other in a way that creates a given aesthetic, such as Reasonable or Mad, et cetera. The nature of this aesthetic cannot be ultimately quantified in Words, for it is the Space of which Words are the Matter; it transcends words, and it MUST do so, for otherwise it would have no authority. Yet we usually, as Watts pointed out, pay attention to the Form and ignore the Background.

Every set of philosophical presuppositions and proclamations is thereby valued by the degree to which it creates a given state of consciousness. All arguments in favour of one style of thinking over another are appeals to preference; one values one state of consciousness over another. Philosophy is ultimately the exploration of states of consciousness, and it cannot be a discipline that exercises discretion were it not that some states of consciousness must thereby be labeled “higher” than others, or in some other way superior. (Let’s not belabor the semantics.)

To out-rightly deny someone’s experience in this respect is to be a poor philosopher. Theoretically, higher consciousness is available to anyone. At any rate, Truth cannot be expected to be readily available to all “Rational” beings, when many of its permutations are transrational. It is an attitude of ignorance and entitlement to demand proof for such as phenomenon without having worked to attain it. Philosophy can go in one of two ways now: Either the perpetuation of existing aesthetics through the manipulation of symbols, or through the exploration of new aesthetics by the same token, foregoing Familiarity for Novelty.

Dm.A.A.

God Does Not Play Dice (Or if He does, He is no Mere Gambler).

God Does Not Play Dice (Or if He does, He is no Mere Gambler).

It is a fallacy to refer to God as though He were a law-maker prone to human error. The Paradox of the Law-giver out not to upset the intellectual, however restless, even at the very start.

The paradox reads: A law-giver has no a priori value according to which to ascertain the virtue of his law. Only once he has made a decision does that law become just (and virtuous), after the fact. [a posteriori.]

This means that a human law-giver is all ways arbitrary. The human in this example tries to be God, effectively, in the way that many have misconstrued God. Now, the fact that this is a paradox [and I use “fact” liberally and loosely] ought not to bother one. As Kierkegaard pointed out, God is a paradox. But even regarding the brilliance of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology, this may appear like a vacant appeal to Authority.

This paradox is prejudiced in favour of Atheism from the start. Only if there is no Divine Grace to hold the law-giver’s hand is his action arbitrary. Were God present to administer laws, the decisions of the person of Pure Faith would no longer be arbitrary, even if in meeting a challenge the human is still prone to botch it as in any well-designed video game.

So remains the question: Is God arbitrary? Is He comparable to the human law-giver? The paradox never raised contention, at least on the surface, with God’s existence, but rather with his nature as administrator. Yet one need go no further than our own human administration systems to see that, despite apparent disappointments (exaggerated poetically in the eyes of a cynic) owing to human error, as in the case of the human law-giver that botches a Divine Project, on the whole a system can be much more effective and efficient, to a mystifying and miraculous degree that is never fully comprehended by any one of its parts [like Kafka’s Law], than an individual operating in isolation.

So is God arbitrary? If God is a system that encompasses all of existence, its Order is PROBABLY of a higher degree of both efficiency and mystery than just the experience of a human being operating in His absence. So how is the one, a system of relative chaos from the perspective of contemporary physics, to judge fairly the nature of a Divine Order [again, from the perspective of Physics, everything is in Harmony, and one might infer that this harmony is no mere Baroque Cadence] by COMPARISON WITH ITS SELF?

In truth, all arbitrariness is the absence of comparison. We make decisions THINKING them to be arbitrary but IGNORING the possibility (and probability, given dreams and other evidence of a transcendent Unconscious) that our actions are guided by more intelligent motives. Is Revelation not the comprehension of these motives, and Grace not the surrender to them (which is not a pitiable surrender but a bearing of grave responsibility)?

When an action is arbitrary, we judge it to be so because of our own masculinist prejudices. Why should something Random and Chaotic by reduced to an inferior position? Given a more integrated view, does this not resolve the problem of Evil? Perhaps all talk of God’s Goodness is merely consolation for us who worry so much about man-made laws of Bad and Good. Perhaps GREAT and AWESOME are over-used in secular conversation.

There is another prejudice immanent in this inquiry. It is that if Man following God is not arbitrary, God at least, as the Ground and the Ultimate Bureacrat, is. Yet what does it means to be arbitrary? When we judge our selves to be arbitrary in our actions, we feel that we fail to meet the “a priori necessity” of providing justification and warrant for our action. Yet all such things, in a world that is fundamentally NOT hierarchical, are merely comparisons to other things that we have done in the past or, if we are more sophisticated thinkers, objects of concern within our present(s). So we are arbitrary to the degree that we appear to be disconnected. [As Heidegger pointed out, Appearance (or Semblance) is Reality, inextricably, in different forms, to speak in scientific language. No false dichotomies, please.] But a Supreme Unity by this definition could never be Disconnected. As Schoenpenhauer put it, what appears at first to be a paradox is seen later to have been incontrovertible: A truism. The root of our problem at the beginning was that we construed of God as the Ground of Being upon which everything was founded, but we did not comprehend Him as including all that was “founded upon it”. In fact, no notion of a “foundation” (which is “arbitrary”) should any longer be necessary.

Dm.A.A.

A Kritik of Attempts to Stifle Beauty.

A Kritik of Attempts to Stifle Beauty.

You are not defined by your perception of your self alone, but all so by your perception of the World around you. The beauty* of Art is in that it divulges the disparate ambiguity of Human Perceptions and casts doubt upon the existence of a Noumenal, objective world. Ideology moves in the opposite direction, operating upon a lower beam entirely. Ideology seeks to unify all consciousness into one “whole”. Yet just as there is no evidence for the existence of a Thing in Its Self, so there is no evidence that such a Hegelian unity could be possible. The condition of Fascism is probably one of mutually assured isolation, wherein every individual perceives the world as he is inclined to, in isolation, but this isolation becomes narcissistic because it is presumed to be “The Truth”, and in the absence of free criticism it is impossible to challenge this delusion.

Why I have the right to call women beautiful:

1.       Art is Phenomenologically important. It is a mode of perception. Beauty, in its true sense, is the perception of a love object. It is not limited to one person, as in an obsession, all though such a peculiarity (as in a dream wherein a gray world is populated by only one coloured feminine figure) could be benign and sentimental. Without the perception of Beauty, a “complete” picture of Reality could never exist.

2.       Beauty is a perception of Love. Beauty is a style of perception wherein the distinction between Subject and Object dissolves. Peculiarities are seen to be unitive rather than divisive. Because they are peculiarities, a woman’s beauty will all ways be distinct, both from that of other women but all so from that of men in general (depending upon the observer), even in a world that is revered on the whole.

3.       Beauty is a feminine quality. This is not the same thing as a female quality, all though women are supposed to possess more feminine qualities. The integration of the Anima into the Male Ego, as in a symbolic reading of the Damsel in Distress archetype, will tend to create the perception of Beauty and the honoring of femininity, whereas the absence of this (in the case of an inflated ego responding to the tyranny of patriarchal ideology [and Feminism is entirely patriarchal]) will created turgidity and put all things at the proverbial “distance of objectivity as though she were an enemy to be shot”.

4.       The Ethos is self-contradictory. If the Collective is permitted to judge my actions without access to my psyche and motives, I should be allowed, with relatively little derision, to make observations of other’s aesthetic appearances, since phenomenologically the two are practically indistinct. IDEOLOGICALLY, they are severed from each other, but in its raw form it is one process: The perception of Reality as it Appears rather than a presumption upon its True, “hidden” (and probably non-existent) “Nature”.

5.       The perception of one’s own “Beauty”, in a Fascist state, cannot happen without the Collective. The only way to do this would be to reconcile Individualism with Collectivism by insisting that Aesthetics are entirely an individual phenomenon, rejecting collective judgements as not “truly” aesthetical. (Were they, they would be equally adequate.) Yet if the Society is not responsible for one’s self-image, then why criticize how others perceive you, if they can be safely presumed to simply be perceiving you NOT according to the oppressive trends of some sociological phenomenon but according to, in fact, their own aesthetic tendencies, entirely individuated except expressed in relatable language?

6.       To blame others for one’s own insecurities is irresponsible. Just as we depend, if any kind of Collectivity could exist at all, upon others to criticize us morally, even if ultimately we can be the solitary judges of our own characters, so it follows that the same principle can apply in aesthetics. Others can call you beautiful (to be treated with respect) or ugly (to be treated with derision, for that is what was intended usually), but ultimately these will be at your disposal in constructing your own self-mage.

7.       To value your self-image over the perceptions of others is Narcissistic. That is okay, but why should I join your Collectivist movement, lying down before your harsh moral imperatives, if I am to be barred from any true Solidarity of consciousness that can only come about whenever another Contradicts me?

I could go on.

Dm.A.A.

A Kritik of Gender Neutrality, I.

A Kritik of Gender Neutrality, I.

I all ways found in the words Man, He, et cetera, a shelter that housed both and all as though it were a warm café on a rainy day. It was gender-neutral to my mind, for ‘man’ occurred within ‘woman’ and ‘human’, and ‘he’ occurred within ‘she’. From extreme youth, learning the English Language, I found this peculiarly delightful. It was as though ‘he’ and ‘man’ were the ribs of which ‘she’ and ‘woman’ were flesh. I felt no sense of inferiority to women, as I might have, but only interest in that each woman, as though out of manners, was accorded the special dignity of a gender-specific pronoun (for ‘he’ was so often applied with implicit gender-neutrality) and five letters to delineate the sex rather than the mere three that comprised the root-word. ‘Man’ was all ways such a root-word, for obviously it did not delineate a Thing-In-Its-Self (as a logocentric dogma would imply); ‘Mankind’ was valid for its utility – alone, by the same token – as meaning ‘all words of the kind that include the root word ‘man’.’ ‘Humankind’ never affected such a utility, for it could only apply to all words containing ‘human’ (such as ‘superhuman’), unless it were ‘tacked onto’ some Thing-In-Its-Self in a logocentric manner.

Dm.A.

On the Fallacy of Reason.

In the enterprise of Reason, many leaps are taken and forgotten. Might it be said they are forsaken [mistakenly]?

In a text, there is no Reason intrinsic to it. What we call Reason is a series of extrapolations that abstract away from the given text and make it appear as though connections existed betwixt phrases and words where in fact no such connections are ever intrinsic to the text its self; they are entirely the product of the reader’s imagination. Thus the leaps of faith that we call “logical consistency” contain WITHIN THEIR SELVES what we call contradiction – the opposite of consistency, by definition, and therefore its absence. All contradiction is the absence of consistency, and vice versa. Need I elaborate further along the lines of Reason, aiming to establish myself in this camp, now that my idea, if entertained, would lay waste to it? Perhaps, because an idea by its self without a proliferation of other ideas enshrouding it is nowadays accorded the dignity of a solitary grass-blade struggling against an overpowering layer of cement.

Since all pretense towards Reason is therefore extrapolated FROM a text, so it is that all accusations of “contradiction” are equally arbitrary. Might it not be said that any contradiction could be just as easily called a paradox? After all: Why presume that Reality Its Self would accord with the illusory principle of Reason, if [even] language does not do so in Reality?

Dm.A.A.

Men Are Just As Likely to be Raped as Women Are.

Men Are Just As Likely to be Raped as Women Are.

The statistics would suggest that there are more female rape victims than male rape victims.

This means that a minority of men are raped. This is not only a smaller minority of the male population than the number of women victims in the female population. This is a minority within the population Of Victims.

Given this estrangement, felt by the presence of these statistics, it is understandable that many men would rather die than to admit to being victims. And many do.

Since the statistics themselves predispose fewer men to report victimhood than women do, and since this all so means that more women will tend to make false accusations than men do (because a greater dignity is accorded, judging by these statistics, to female victims than to male victims) it is quite possible that so many male victims are still in hiding that an IDEAL survey would yield a 50/50 split, roughly. In short: It is conceivable that roughly as many men are raped as women, or have been since we began the survey.

There is just as much a likelihood that a man will be raped as that a woman will be, and the perpetrator will not necessarily be male.

These victims will tend to withdraw into isolation and tortured obscurity.
The musician Elliott Smith was one example.
I have all so heard a group of young high school boys at a McDonald's, members of a football team, recall JOKINGLY their friend, a fellow boy and I think member of the team, having reported being raped to the speaker, who treated the report with cavalier confusion as the boys sat around the table, baked.

Never judge by statistics. They all most all ways lie.

dm.A.A.

Intuitionism.

To surrender to one’s Intuition is to surrender the clamp of conscious control to the Other. How long can one live without permitting this to happen? Why does my professor insist that Intuitionism is a false criterion for ethics? In truth, it may be the only sensible one! Life abo0unds in such possibilities that only a totally sedentary person could deny that one’s Unconscious Mind knows infinitely more than does one’s consciousness. One feels a connectedness with it intuitively, and therein is paradise, and therein is Sanity: The recognition that Life is paradise. What could be more native to the Soul than the immediate, felt, uncontroverted and all most unrecognized recognition that everything is divine manifestation, peculiar and more Alive than one’s own self, boundless and totally interconnected with it? Like the caterpillar that curses the frog for asking too many questions, this is our native state. Only excessive intellectual bullying and teasing creates that schizophrenic split that primitives call the Death of the Soul. When one first makes the Visionary State an object of knowledge by remembering it in its absence, how could one call this loss anything but a vile death??

All ethical thought must at first be felt. We do not act ethically out of an infantile fear of reproof; that could not be ethical. Some passion moves us, charging us with direction. This wells up from the body and fills the heart long before it settles in the mind. This is the impulse to transcend boundaries, no different from the love that one feels for all things, but that it moves towards people.

Surely paltry reason could not occupy this role. Reason is an aesthetic trend, as is causality. Logic only appears amidst symbols. Only once experience has been reduced to abstractions – and this is all ways done with the intent to Control – can it be made “sense” of. But who would trade unadulterated Splendor and spontaneity for the feebleness of estrangement betwixt subject and object? What Integration could one descend into if one began with a schizophrenic split, no different from the Christian [and Platonic] tradition of severing one part of the Soul from the other? Why pretend towards a knowledge if that means to pretend that the World is known but hidden, as though our relationship to reality were always a debilitated one, a disempowered and passionless subservience to the Socratic ideal? And what could be more pompous than to presume upon one’s own knowledge, reducing all to the Self as though no Other wove in and out of every action and decision, haunting the medium before us with potentialities that the Self does not yet comprehend except by feeble wisps of intuition? Is all systematic thinking not just interference aimed to impress?

My professor insisted that the “competent ethical reasoner” – the one that has learned how to reason – would not be a Schindler. What this means is that his ethic justifies with pitiful subtlety the deaths of thousands of Jews. For what end? Comfort? Survival, for the love of God? The fuck. It is nothing short of neurotic. Then he has the nerve to generalize and to say that all boys of fifteen think highly of their own sexuality. What sort of unanimal beast romps into the hidden life of a young adolescent boorishly and, in the words of the Bard, tries to sound him from his lowest note? Besides: Any one could meet so arbitrary a description, because the Signifier never adequately signifies the signified. What perversion then to reduce a child to an object.

Dm.A.A.

Aphorisms.

Aphorisms.

11.       There is no argument in the plaint that God created a harsh world. God gave us everything, including Free Will, Responsibility, and the capacity to weather any Natural Disaster with the poise of a Buddhist monk who lights his self on fire. God is not to be blamed for Human Stupidity, for stupidity is a choice.

22.       Common Sense is what minds flee to when they have not thought something through.

33.       We are not responsible for our past. We are responsible for our Future.

44.       People who ask: What the hell are you talking about? Are trying to make you look stupid in their own befuddlement.

55.       We can draw on the Power of the Past, but not on the ‘Authority’ of it.

66.       God does have a plan, but it takes too long to fathom and perchance longer to explain.

77.       A poet’s intent is not the effect of a cause. It is rather what occurs in the space betwixt what Is and what Could Be when one says: This is good enough.

Dm.A.A.

Time and Poetry. [How Art disproves Causality.]

Time and Poetry. [How Art disproves Causality.]

Sheldrake was right, yet again. The present does not come out of the past into the future; it comes From the Future as one of a series of Possibilities.

There is no Causality in Art. When I move one word from one stanza to another, I wonder (causally): What WOULD that first stanza looked like HAD I put the word in the earlier stanza earlier?

I begin to imagine: The stanza would have had a greater Order. BECAUSE the word would have been in a different place, its presence would have displaced the entire following stanza. This is Causal Reasoning. It is all so a fallacy because I do not know for certain that I would not have written the stanza in the same irregular pattern.

From a Nietzschean perspective, the stanza originally came into being as a synthesis of that irregular pattern and, in its midst, the incidental presence of the Word. By [re]moving the Word, one does not disturb the pattern; the water remains the same even in the absence of a prior stone.

The poet attests: I wrote this to be intentionally irregular! The causal theorist, thinking to one-up affect with logic, insists: But in fact that was only your out-come, not your intent. Had it been your intent, you would have written it that way from the beginning. It was only by chance that you made an error, only corrected it partly, and called the settled-for mess of an outcome ‘your intent’.

Clever but false. For in fact the poem was All Ready Complete in the Future, and one had to make attempts, experiments, and revisions to find it. Had one failed, probably by sloth, the Future would have not become a Present.

Most artists will attest to this.

Dm.A.A.

On Science, God, and their Illusory Distinction.

On Science, God, and their Illusory Distinction.

I am reminded of the joke – I think it is a Mexican joke – about the Mosquito and the Elephant. This mosquito lands on an elephant’s raw hide and thinks: I’m going to give this elephant a good time.

The elephant feels the mosquito on its back, stands up, and begins to rub its back against a tree, emitting moans and groans. The mosquito, hearing these sounds and feeling the vibration beneath its legs, considers himself successful.

What I find to be the significance of the story is that the male mosquito implements a method, gets the results that he was looking for, but was fundamentally confused about the nature of what was going on. His method ‘worked’, but it said nothing of the Truth; he was none the wiser.

Our Western conception of God is that He is traditionally omni-potent and omni-scient. In fact, it would come as no surprise if the word ‘Science’ emerged from the word ‘Omniscience’. In the absence of a firm belief in such a God in the nineteenth century, people turned to Science to fill His place. In the words of Nietzsche: We did not tear down the old idols just so that we may erect new ones.

Yet despite his plaints, the Dead God to this day haunts the Western Psyche in the guise of Science with a capital ‘S’.

At the root of this fallacy that has slept through more than a hundred years of development in Every Other Field of Study lie several presumptions. The first is that Power is Good.

An omni-potent God was a Just and a Good God, so any method that brings us closer to this ideal is all so Good. The reason that this is easy to deny is that it goes without saying; the a priori value of Power appears incontrovertible to some members of our culture. So Technology becomes an end and an ethic in and of its self. Yet technology by its self, like Art, is not a menace. All so, like Art, its roots are in the primordial Dawn of Man, long before the twi-light of Modern Science. Is it not possible that, like Art, its origin is ultimately unknown and unknowable to us? In one’s Dreams, one can see many inventions and many works of Art one had never seen in the Waking World. So what does one require to make these Platonic forms manifest in Reality? They have to work first in theory, because otherwise not only would we not take risks with them; we would not even find the Funds to facilitate their production!

Yet theoretically we Knew the secret ingredients all along, just like we knew the Possibility of this creation, for in the absence of the ingredients there would have been an absent Possibility.

The reasoning seems less alien once one considers Heidegger’s reversals of Common Sense in both Technology and Art. Art does not come from the Artist. Rather, an artwork creates the Artist whilst the Artist creates the artwork, and Art creates them both.

This is of course of indispensable value to many Artists who would otherwise suffer the burdens of being a Creator, subjecting the Work to too much criticism on the part of the Artist (which they would mistake for self-criticism), rather than respecting it as something that belongs ultimately to Art.

Technology in Heidegger’s view follows a similar pattern. It uses us as much as we use it, a;; most as though it had been there all along long before we encountered it. (which is at least incontrovertibly the case in any Individual Life, so it is primordially easy to imagine.)

The United States’ military strategy for Nuclear War corroborates Heidegger’s point. A man I knew in high repute visited a facility housing missiles. The facility operator explained that, in the event of a foreign attack, the policy was to fire back.

The out-come would be mutually assured destruction, with the exception of the facility, which would be protected by virtue of the retaliation. The aim was not to preserve people, but to preserve Technology.

So the second fallacy is that Science and technology are interchangeable. Yet as I have pointed out they are entirely different entities. Science could be described as a conscious process whereas Technology can be seen to be largely unconscious. This was why Jung attributed the former to his egoic personality. The fallacy is that simply because we are able to produce results that we understand how we do so.

Watts pointed out that the Eastern God performed the entire Universe without knowing How It was Done. The motive was self-evident: To surprise and baffle one’s self by separating off into isolated and imperfect parts.

I have pointed out that to step from Personal Subjectivity to a Universal, one must meet one central requirement.

It is not sufficient to say: You can see a trend, because only by force could you compel others to make a similar observation, only by insult could you elevate your self above those who do not see it, and only by a leap of faith into absurdity could you pretend that others who use the same words to describe the experience are in fact having the same experience. Yet a Universal claim could be possibly sound if one provides an explanation for Why it would be so for multiple and maybe all people.

Due to the relative novelty of the proposition (relative because I do not immediately recall having heard it before), I can understand that considering the idea may feel at first akin to walking off into thin air, as in a cartoon, and looking down to find one has no prior ground to stand on. Yet in philosophy the ground materializes under one’s feet for those who can create new ideas and handle the Vertigo.

Watts meets my criterion by explaining Shiva’s motives – The Why – for being at once omni-present and imperfect and ignorant by the same token. Why a God – or a man in His image (or in man’s self-image, which is nonetheless inferred from conception of God) would desire total Control and Knowledge, pathologically, when the possibilities of eternity and infinity lie available to Him, remains unanswered.

Dm.A.A.

On Reporting.

On Reporting.

It is hard for me to read anything that passes its self off as fact and is only loosely based on immediate experience. If you don’t even have the nerve to insert yourself into the description, showing how you reacted and why these things would have appeared this way to you, then I cannot trust you as a writer.

My plaint is not a sentimental one. “And here I might have distorted this” encourages the writer to elaborate, and that gives more information. Rather than a direct statement, cumbersome to work with because it is definitionally dubious, the reader is given now a series of either very concrete details or potential impressions, as a kind of colloid, left to decide what might have happened without being expected to believe it. This is not an insult to a reader’s intelligence, whereas an account that makes pretenses towards objectivity is.

Dm.A.A.

Statement as a Poem #?: The Alchemical Origins of Psychiatric Diagnoses.

Statement as a Poem #?: The Alchemical Origins of Psychiatric Diagnoses.

Did you know? The whole distinction

Of Bipolar Disorder

Was once called

Manic Depression? Which was based

On the alchemical concept of conflicting

Temperaments: Sanguine (based in blood) and

Melancholic (based in black

Bile)?

Something to think

About.

Did you all so know

That the Sanguine temperament

Was believed to have been a function of

The element of Air, centered in the Heart

Chakra, whereas the Melancholic

Temperament was believed to have been centered

In the second chakra, related to

Water?

The other two elements were fire: Choleric. The third chakra.

And earth: Phlegmatic. The first chakra. Phlegm was all so identified with

The throat.

Something to think

About.

Dm.A.A.

The Convent Dream. (The House of the Dying.)

1.       Last night’s dream may not require a record of it, it may endure in memory throughout my life-time.

In place of the Hager’s residence on my street there is now a house I might have visited several times before. All though this seems unlikely given the content of other recent dreams, by the time that I arrived at this home it had all ready become familiar to me as the residence of Kresten’s extended family.

Perhaps in fact I first encountered this setting last night but can only, as it has been observed, recall the last few episodes.

Much like the land surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle, I was assigned to this destination – I think by Kresten – perhaps to pet-sit. Yet just like in the Kafka tale I had trouble gaining admittance and then acceptance. I think I was accompanied by a friend – if not Andrew then probably a reference to him, for the Dreamer of Dreams has all ready cast Andrew as a personification of the Shadow – when I first[/last?] tried gaining admittance to the House. The woman who answered, presumably Kresten’s graunt – but on second thought all most certainly his dead, demented grand-mother – asked first and in a clipped and near-silent Soviet voice if I believed in God. It might have been in this interrogative form: What is your religion? Awkwardly but without hesitation or stutter I replied that I did not have a religion because my parents never followed one in particular. She said no more to me, but passed out from sight, advancing I think towards the front of the house. I was left uncertain as to whether or not I was well come. A part of me wants to believe that I turned to Andrew at that instant and that he shrugged in mutual confusion.

The House must surely have been the House of the Dead. At any rate, it was the House of the Dying. Yet what Watts had said about how we treat our dying – with denial – seemed endemic. In truth, a number of its occupants there were of middle-age, and I wondered what they were doing there. A man occupied a cot upon my right upon entry to the bleak blue room. I recall an arbitrary riddle that I was asked to solve, or other-wise it was one that I had believed my self to have solved adequately and wanted to brag about.* I was met with feeble glares of incredulity like the one that the old man at the Zen monastery had fixed me in before the other old fuck there said of my intellectualism and philosophical curiosity that he did not know why I could not ‘relate to [with] people’** and that I needed medication (in the patronizing interrogative form: ‘Are you taking [on] any medication?’***

*This is all most certainly a reference to my attempts to talk people through Depression.

** Salinger incarnate. I am Seymour Glass.

*** This episode at the Zen Monastery was Actual.

2.       At one point later in the dream I had left the house, which never seemed to change internally. I left my home in a bath-robe. I passed by the Wookey’s open garage, where Scott’s perpetually hot sister Michelle, who might have been dressed in a salmon-magenta robe, was packing things into a car. In fact it might have been that the garage, like the Hagers’ garage had been in Actuality and as it was now. In Dream, was still cluttered as though Scott had never ‘grown up’. I asked her when he would return. She hesitated to answer and I thought first that may be she had not heard me and then secondly that she was ignoring me, though it’s possible that these two thoughts had occurred in the obverse order. It was like seeing the woman at the Che café and being disappointed to find that she was not in fact the INFP-looking buxom blonde who had worked at Barnes & Noble. [Another Actual Instant.] She finally replied, probably without looking at me. I cannot immediately recall, but it seems that Scott would be gone indefinitely, for her response left me with little to nothing to look forward to.

As I continued down in the street, I was met with an angry glare from a female stranger in her twenties-to-thirties-or-early-forties, wearing a night-robe that might have been like my mother’s. I was unnerved. I thought: She is wearing a robe. Why would mine, (which felt like it had belonged to my father, in retrospect, and might in fact have been either borrowed or inherited) offend her? I looked down and realized that I was not only wearing that robe, but dress pants and my favourite cobalt-blue business shirt over it, too.

3.       Finally, I decided to perform upon [I think one of] a series of truly grand (though not formally Grand) pianos at Kresten’s Christian convent. I was told, luke-warmly, that while my music was basically good I could use some lessons. I began to explain, again with the same Zen-off-the-bat immediacy, that those cost a lot of money and that all of my favourite artists were self-taught. It was like the time in Actuality that I had told Mitchell that all of my favourite authors were dead, except that that time the reply was delightfully a positive relief:

‘Then you are like me,’ he had said with the same Dr. Pepper immediacy.

dm.A.A.

Cat Calling: On Social Deviance.

Cat Calling.

Cat-calling is of course not the same thing as rape except to those who choose to react the same way to it. Were matters other-wise, a simple pass would make [my friend who had been a rape victim]’s Post-Traumatic Stress flare up like a Salinger novel. Feminism presupposes naively that women are the victim class and that men are victimizers by class. But not only does this perpetuate Gender Division and not only does it muddle Potentiality and Actuality. This mentality is in fact very naiive.

When I last went to Palomar College, a major stressor in my life was a fellow named [Simon Braille]. People who have counseled me and interpreted my dreams have intuited the enduring impact that he had upon me, one that while it leant colour to my prior semester there all so overcast it with gray and leant relief to my departure.

Simon insisted upon a psychiatric diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia that I grew steadily to believe.
He attested that he had been in multiple fights with gang members, some of which ended in murder, and he was 'green-lighted' by the local Diablos gang. He professed a knowledge of multiple martial arts, as well as a tremendous capacity for using Psychic Energy, the latter of which I can at least attest to, for I could Feel his aggressive, oppressive Presence in areas some times before seeing evidence that he was there. Most interestingly, though, he prided himself in an ethical code that was demonstrably more unyielding than that of anyone he or I had ever met.
Among his ethics I might imagine or remember that he would not hit a girl.

For a while, I felt unsafe upon campus. I knew that he had the sovereignty and the wherewithal to find me on campus wherever I may be and however stupid his reason. I simply did not have the sanctity to know how to respond, and in this Kafka-esque scenario it seemed possible that simply speaking my mind would warrant a potentially fatal ass-kicking. Not one of us really understood how Simon's mind worked.

I feel indebted to Simon in a way I have not felt indebted to anyone else. Not only did I really first have to affirm my masculinity and bear the sword of discretion, in the Campbellian sense, marking a transformation that my best friend could intuit and showed a look of unspoken approval for, in order to write for him a note asserting my boundaries. I befriended him.
Over time, not only did I see more and more of myself within the beast and vice versa. I saw to an incredible degree that his neuroses were but the intensification of very conventional neuroses that passed for normality amongst a relatively boring class that scoffed at us as they passed us in the night.
Simon became my only reliable guide through an Under-world that I cannot fairly say that he had created.


To this day I value social deviance indispensably and tend to regard social norms and 'personal bubbles' as abstractions borne from entitlement.
And I am reminded thus of another deviant by the name of [Frank Bonobo].
Usually, when I tried to film people without their prior consent I would be met first with reproof, at best stopping there, and at worst someone would snatch my camera from me. Frank was the first person I had met who not only allowed his self to be filmed but was offended that I would make him self-conscious by asking for permission.

Frank was a sexual deviant in the sense that he was a pick-up artist. Yet besides that there were a number of unconventional things about him. The first was his marriage, which put an end to his promiscuous days (supposedly).
Secondly was the fact that he had successfully kicked an addictive drug habit. And third and most peculiar was that, while he criticised my virginity, he never coerced me into doing things or out of doing others. The organisation that he was starting was aimed at promoting sexual freedom under respectable auspices.
My best friend had entertained the prospect of pick-up artistry under these auspices: That nine out of ten women would say 'No', but the solitary 'Yes' would be worth the candle. That solitary Yes would thus constitute a sexual minority and an instance of social deviance.

Rape restricts the freedom of the victim, but cat-calling does not.
An invitation to casual sex does not restrict a woman's freedom, for she has innumerable ways to respond, whereas in the absence of such an invitation she could not respond at all. Is one a victim? I thought myself to be a victim of Simon's bullying, until I realised that I was being irresponsible for blaming him. I tried to restrict his freedom and his actions because I felt entitled to a false sense of security and would not take responsibility for my own. I had a beloved friend who committed suicide, and amidst her complaints about the World was that she would get cat-calls every day. Yet was she a victim of the cat-calls or of an ideology that made her feel herself to be a victim? The Buddha said: There are two darts. One that the other casts and the one that you cast at yourself in response. The prevalence of these advances does not entail that they are a majority; were they, one would arguably not notice. While it may not happen 'to me', if I am to be held responsible for some degree of social awareness then my democratic insight on this matter must not be marginalised.
To me, sexual deviance is a strange thing, but I have a love for strange things that brings me into greater harmony with my self and the world.
The feminist movement, rather than promoting sexual liberation, reminds me of the sort of organisation that turns Mount Everest into a tourist attraction and then bans entry to it. Its aim at villifying sexual advances would have at its ultimate consummation the elimination of a sexual social narrative that caters to the tastes of a deviant minority bent on finding more of their kind and promoting a lifestyle that does not subordinate its self to a largely ethnocentric view of what respectful behaviour is, abstracting away from man's animal nature to a constructed conception of the 'Human Being'.

I do not know for certain that I could produce a witness to these claims. One girl I know had sex with eight different men in one week in Minnesota, yet she does not talk to me any more for nebulous reasons.
Frankly, I do not have time. The example that I will provide and close with is an instance recently that I was walking home and some one barked at me from a passing car. This habit on the part of young people, especially at night-time, would startle and un-nerve me in the past. One time, I even raged back, and I felt embarassed. This time, it had been a dog. I was taken a back. I thought: We fear and loathe oppression if a human does it because it challenges our views of what the 'Human Being' is. We do not want to see ourselves, basically and biologically, as animals.

dm.A.A.

It may be true that I only cited examples here of the male perspective. Yet it is all so untrue, because  I did not use anyone's argument on the ethics of the matter, constructing my own from a number of disparate life experiences with people of both genders. [My best friend's argument, which I used to great effect, was not an ethical observation so much as the contemplation of a life choice.]
Anyone who delivers an ad-hominem against me on these grounds will be guilty of sexism. Aside from that, I have three points that have all ready been made implicitly in my argument:

1. It is quite obvious that some women enjoy the attention. Pick-up artistry would not retain its popularity other-wise. Frank's wife, my promiscuous lady friend, and a number of college women (upon whom I saw this hypothesis proven in a youtube video demonstrating "pick-up lines") would probably testify. Some women I have met on public transit all so seemed to pretty much expect to be hit upon, and they seemed disappointed even not to be, judging by mood. Others -- a bit younger -- mistook my platonic advances for sexual or romantic advances.
2. These women constitute a minority. I have all ready proven this.
3. The very fact that I cannot produce an immediate example should stand as evidence for my sexual regularities. It would if anything bolster my Ethos as an objective, non-partisan observer. Only were it not so that being "non-partisan" is impossible in the face of a radical fanatic who is possessed of the Us-Them and We-We modes. To be clear: I have done the best I can to step out of my gender and to be objective with the knowledge that life has allotted me serendipitously and without my interference. Yet to some people I will never be more than an ignorant prick. So be it.