The Aesthetics of Analogy:

When ever we relate ideas, it is usually based upon an aesthetic semblance -- a 'nostalgia for the unity' of these disparate ideas, instances, and the ideas and signs used to describe those instances.

So often analogy is a function of aesthetic preference. But aesthetics depend upon character. How we fill in the details depends upon the quality of the imagination in individuals. And a sadistic individual, for instance, is invariably drawn to different aesthetics than is an asadistic individual.

Dm.

GNOSIS AND THE AGE OF (INTUITIVE) POST-SKEPTICISM.

GNOSIS AND THE AGE OF (INTUITIVE) POST-SKEPTICISM.

A Return to Eden.

There are principally two schools of thought in the world: That of Gnosis and that of Agnosis.

The agnostics believe that truth belongs to a selected few.

But the Gnostics believe it to be ubiquitous. The only issue is that there are so few of them with the tenacity to assert the truth that they too become elitists. And naive man confuses the one elitist with the other.

The agnostics are traditional Christians. They are all so Confucianists, Orthodox Jews, orthodox Muslims, Shintoists, and members of any religious group that lends authority to an organization with the HOPE that that authority will trickle down to their selves. They are all so thus the atheists, the dogmatic empiricists, the reductionists, the patriots, the consumers of trickle down economic theory, and the so-called scientists. What they all have in common is a preference for the security of collective opinion. There is a fetish for structure that is raised over their heads like a roof-beam to protect them from the forces of nature. Yet it is bound to be stultifying to those intellectual giants who like Ares scrape the ceiling when they try to enter into discussion in the cushioned and dismissive home of a dogmatic agnostic.

Among agnostics there is all ways an appeal to tradition, the mire of the past. And so it is that communal agreement is necessary to complete the cross. Communal agreement appeals horizontal, yet it is supported vertically by history. And it comes in the forms of both communion and peer review.

By contrast the Gnostics understand most of the epistemological pretensions of the agnostics to be not merely arbitrary but to be traps. No structuralist, for instance, can fully imagine the frustration that a post-structuralist feels in trying to decide whether or not to break up a paragraph HALF-WAY THROUGH the depiction of a given group. The distinction is made difficult because it is so arbitrary; why try to align the proverbial “reader’s” notion of what a “group” is with the breaking of a paragraph in two? must one invisible and imagined boundary line up with another imminent one? (imminent here is of course meant to refer to the opposite of invisible and imagined.) Even a parenthetical phrase is much too stifling, yet in its absence the arrogant structuralist DEMANDS clarity and presumes upon it even in its absence. The parallels to rape are not entirely exaggerated, just miss attributed.

And of course because to write means to choose some thing from innumerable possibilities, not innumerable so much because of quantity so much as there is no time in which to count them, for they are constantly moving, what is left out is just as important as what is included. At least at the moment that one chooses one remembers that one is not driven ENtiRELY by necessity; the nature of CHOICE at least lends one room to be SOME what arbitrary. But the structuralist agnostic sees only what is imminent and not what is transcendent. Again he DEMANDS clarity and INSISTS upon the authority of what ever text he likes, or other wise he insists on its total absence of authority because he has “gotten the gist of it”. And while certain things are stupid at first blush, without a doubt, it is funny to note that agnostic, authoritarian people, whilst demanding attention for their favourite works, still are prone to dismiss any threat to their dogmae with infantile aggression.

Dm.A.A.

Reminiscence: Once the public was stupid.

Once the public was stupid. And it relied upon a few sages to be guarded against tyrants. Now the public is just wise ENOUGH that they cannot tell sages FROM tyrants.

So the sages have been fore-gotten. Their wisdom does not surpass that of their own well-being. They can collaborate and conspire towards the good of the community, but no special privileges are afforded them. They must all ways express their selves in the language of the public in order to be understood. And never are they granted power, lest they become the tyrants they are miss-taken for. Yet in this way the most ardent of public figures, the manipulators, the politicians, gain access in the same way as the sages do, and the two compete under the table.

The advent of the internet was a necessary evil and a precarious stepping stone. In the past the people relied upon a few to help defend them from the other few, and the people who could gain direct admittance to this wisdom were their selves few.

Now the people cannot tell one minority from the other, and secrets can no longer be kept. All are available to have their carcasses picked apart until only the bones remain, and no witch doctors specializing in bones are to be availed in order that the bones’ origin be determined. So we live in the shadow of false prophets. The clever manipulators know enough history to recall those who had abused the Word of the Spirit to their own worldly ends. The few who are born gifted can barely tell even how these charlatans were confused for sages, or worse how sages ARE now confused for these charlatans. But that is because those who are privileged by nature, perhaps old souls, were all ways few. And usually and tragically they never spoke the common language of surface appearances. Semblance never haunted them, but what did haunt them was the tendency for their worldly rooted peers to be miss-led by semblance.

At an earlier time these few, under the tutelage of seasoned shamans, and driven by nerve and a bleeding heart, would grow to transmute their suffering pity into an instrument for change. But our temples are ransacked by profit. The stones remain but they have lost their mystical resonance. The words remain but they no longer retain their mythological reference. And the sages still walk the earth, but in the public’s blind eye they have lost their relevance.

And I should note that all was obscured by SEMBLANCE. In so far as I condemn the spiritually blind I bear a false kinship to those who condemn the materially blind. So the progressives have inherited the confusion of the Nazis, and I am charged with the same stupidity. In fact, I am not only coerced to accept it but to Adopt it. Yet I refuse.

Dm.A.A.

The Broken Heart:

The Broken Heart:

How does one break a heart? The notion seems like a fantasy to a mind that has become nearly entirely jaded and mechanical. But this is how: by saying, oh. I am sorry that you want that. that you have a vision in your mind of things being a certain way. Or per chance a dim hope on the horizon. Or worse an inkling that SOME thing special – some thing of which many have spoken, some thing that felt promised, that felt DESERVED and not arbitrary, either morally or in terms of taste – would happen. Worst of all: It was not an inkling but an overwhelming sense of Fate. It felt PRESSING and IMPERATIVE, primordial and deep. There was no reason to suspect that it would not work, and one was totally open to what ever it was. One had not looked to it to fill an imagined hole in one’s heart, but rather one carved out a NEW hole that one might accommodate the New Hope. And what happens? Too bad. You shall witness all that you desire. But YOU shall not be involved in it but as a spectator. And it shall haunt you. For the more you see it the more deeply will grow the thirst. The more intense the sense of TRAGEDY that that thirst is not assuaged. And one will know that the Human Will is *SINGULARLY* to blame for the loss. And worst of all is the gain to the other. For one would not become the other even if given the choice. That other’s actions ought NEVER to be so rewarded; he deserves no stake in YOUR reward and birth-right. So what is most torturous and hellish about watching some one else live your life is not only that you cannot share in it but that you would not WANT to TAKE it. You would only want your life to be YOUR life, and you would not consent to switching bodies with so depraved a person as who would take YOUR life. Some one who all ways felt threatened by any insight that came to you because HE had not thought of it. Some one who made you feel silly each time you raised your voice. And some one who could stare you down with malicious cowardice, as though he were predator and you were prey, though you were really all ways the stronger Beast and he were but a parasite.

And one would have to watch what one valued consumed by the parasite. For the entitlement had emanated from one singular source: That one KNEW one’s self to be the best possible suitor for that cause. Were it not for that assurance the situation would be unbearable. But it is not in the nature of God to make missed takes, only people. Relativism is a child’s escape; to deny the disparity between right and wrong is to escape all wrongs by forgetting them. Morality guarantees, if the means justify the ends, that one would be the Better Choice, and no greater insult can exist than to be denied that. For so long as one KNOWS then one knows that God at least loves one with courage and commitment. The capitalist pretends that life is determined by the playing out of might, and in this skewed view the individual imagines his rival penetrating his beloved, as he stands by and watches it happen in his mind and forgets that the images do not correspond to the reality; they are mere burns from earlier sightings of a lurid intimacy. Yet the moment that one acknowledges one’s own LOVE to be divinely sanctioned and approved by the Earth one leaves one’s tortured body. One sees what is REALLY at stake: One’s beloved is being taken ADVANTAGE of, and through no fault of one’s own one must watch. Yet in that is retained the dignity of the viewer; in the other narrative the viewer is equally guilty and yet punished by the other’s reward. Not only is this unfair because the other is rewarded; the reward ITS SELF is the punishment. And the mind cannot tolerate that.

This alone entitles me to a chance. For a chance is all ready reward enough; at any moment it can be made reference to as tipping the scales in my favour. And without a chance no claim can be made that one was ever NOT deserving, for no test was administered. So by default one at least DESERVES a chance. And the simpl[e] knowledge that one deserves a chance cures the broken heart. For a heart cannot truly break, only our conception of it. A heart that is truly rooted in love will all ways circulate that blood which carries the life-blood of the Universe.

Dm.A.A.

The Victim's Manual:

The Victim's Manual:

The first step is admitting one's own victimhood. Once that is established all other deductions can follow. Accusations made of one's being histrionic will not hold for they contradict the initial claim: The inciting fact.
A generous and logical audience will agree that to contradict the initial premise is risky. But with a corrupt and ungenerous audience there can be no hope of concluding one's reasoning with out rude interjection.
And this is because an

audience that abuses the name of Skepticism in the name (the unspoken name) of Ignorance will take every initial conclusion (for as Life must be understood back-words so it is that we must convey our reasonings, often, point-
first, beginning with the thesis.) to be a merely tentative premise that warrants its self. So be it.
If the tentative premise were a man, or any other animal, a Circular Reasoning would

be a Miracle of Self-Determination.

II. From the established fact that one is a victim, the first step along the road to liberation,
follows the conclusion that there are false victims. They may be called histrionic.
They are parasites who accuse their hosts of being parasitic.
They are oppressors who pre-
tend to be oppressed. How one can deduce this is that now that one can see one's own victimhood to be a source of psychic fact it is clear that this psychic fact has spillt over

upon others by the force of projection. Yet who initiated this development? The subjects their selves, when they rained blows upon the true victim and yelled for him to stop abusing them.

III. But now one can discern them from the true victims: One's true kin. For many of this kin never pretended towards victimhood, much to one's pain. And the rest were given a good name by these silent ones.

Why are they innocent by association? Because one found in dealing with the silent soldiers some thing profound: That one's deductions depended more upon one's own objectivity than upon some other's subjectivity.
In fact: The very intrusion that the histrionics tried to make by blaming the victim is thus seen to have been a symptom and a part of the same abuse. It sounds

Solipsistic to believe one's self to be the solitary sufferer. Yet when one owns this as a fact,
that one is a victim and only knows of the victim-
hood of others by pro-
jection and delusion, it paradoxically becomes possible then to see other victims by a kind of re-
fined objectivity.
Solipsism self-transcends; a leap of faith into the depths of what looks like Solipsism produces NOT isolation but community.

And the TRUE enemy has been identified.

The act was one of Benevolent Objectification. And so we see our tentative premise becoming its own conclusion. But why not say that it was a Conclusion whose tail led us to deeper tales? The point was not the circle but what its area contained:
A perfect picture of the flowing of Power.

Dm.A.A.

The Forced Undressing. Part I.

My morbid fascination with rape endures as I try to recover an earlier and more individuated conception of it. I wonder why it so fascinates me intellectually. It must be in large part because of the recent feminist craze that leant as such conventional trigger words as 'rapy' to accompany such dubious terms as 'creepy'. It is ironic that given the recent release of Harper Lee's second novel 'creepy' still occurs so oft on college campuses. As for me, I might have begun to avoid that mentality when I first encountered Boo Radley.

Dm.A.A.

The Captor!

The Captor.

The manipulator-politician, the Wormtongue in King Theoden's Ear, the deceiver ego, all ways lives up to the inferior half of Dostoyevsky's maxim: nothing is easier than flattery nor harder than the truth.
The flatterer manipulates common sense. He takes slabs of bull shit and bakes them in the Sun of the Public Eye. And so he constructs a castle about his audience to keep them safe from freedom. For freedom is ugly, but so long as the castle is adorned with beautiful panes if glass, great pains taken painstakingly, the prison is made to look like a palace. One's ace-pal protects one by virtue of the tainted glass from that same public eye that seared the bull shit into an impenetrable mold. So even as one basks and eventually burns in the heat of Public Opinion one can pretend to be exempt from it from behind rose tinted glass.

Oh but behold the crusader! The rogue. The pirate rapist. The murdering Hun. He vows to break down the castle and takes pains to protect the prisoner from the collapse. He professes, even out in the Sun of the Public Eye: I disagree! I violate! You build the castle upon words that when taken literally lost their significance and whence taken symbolically lost their Truth! For you denied me property of Others when you your self lay claim to them! And even as I granted you my heart you not only denied me ownership of any other's but all so denied that you had USED it what I gave you. And so you built a castle to HOARD the hearts of me and many others, doing so in secret as to deny that you your SElF wanted them for your own! Yet even should they die in this siege, not strong enough to endure the breaking of the windows and the falling of the stones, at least my OWN heart shall be salvaged!!!

And so with horns blairing the rogue demolished what was thought to be incontrovertible. For rape and murder and genocide and oppression were mere Words to the architects of this trap, and what destroyed it was not sinister but liberating. Like Sirius Black it was redeemed in one act of cathartic Enanteodromia. And in the frenzy the lower dungeons of the castle were revealed to have been built upon a swamp. And the chaos depicted all beneath it to have been chaos. The ego had clung to its ideals and its semblance of hospitality. But that same CLINGING was Revealed to have been the evil of possession!

And diss possessed of this the stones did fall and the windows broke. And from behind the broken windows shone the Sun of the Public Eye. And from behind the rubble of the broken bull shit smashed through the battering ram of the rogue. And between the heat of the former and the passion of the latter many hearts fainted. But the strongest hearts endured saying: oh saviour. I am again yours. And the rogue, who now shone in the light not as a villain but a hero, said: and i was all ways yours.

And no longer did the rogue him self worry that the CAPTORS had possessed his own virtue. For long he had thought their evil to have been akin to his: a mask for underlying goodness. But the goodness that lay behind this mask had never been the captor's own. It was all stolen from subtler minds and parroted. The work was done in the dead of night. The captor hid in the shadow of pity by night and exploited the light of Opinion by day. He lay the bricks at night and let them dry while he was away.

The captive had too idealised the captor. But with time they felt their selves trapped and imagined Freedom to be so deplorable. Yet it was only deplorable to those who could not endure the heat of the wild.

The captor had long ago buried his own heart. It was when the hero saw that His own heart had been stolen that he knew his self not to have been the villain. So he took it back. And the heart that he had leant to the captor had been stolen by the captive. And imagine the hero's joy when the captive presented the hero's own heart to him and said: Here. For you I kept it safe all this time.

Dm.A.A.

Letter of Redemption.

A few musings:

I have decided to be fore giving and not to indict you for your errors. We can let it go. I am happy to be making music today with my new band and I hope to see you again soon. I try not to hoard my pain either. Yet some wounds still sting. For instance, it is unsettling that you seem averse to calling them errors, even though you agreed from the out's set that it had hurt me and you failed to prove how this could possibly have been 'necessary'. Your behaviour all so seems symptomatic of a guilty conscience: accusing me of harbouring feelings that I do not feel, et al. But that does not bother me so much. What really upsets me is your attempt to indict me for a wrong that I did not commit. THAT messed me up. I could not understand it. But I tried to accommodate your view point and modus operandi. And it proved mutually inefficient. And why did you ever indict me? An attempt to hold me to YOUR pragmatic standards. Yet it was precisely my holding Kresten to my own standards that seemed to 'upset' you. Well you never proved to me how those standards were ineffective. In fact, you could not. For he failed to comply with them. And YOU did as well. I at least TRIED your way. So how could you be angry with me?

My argument was simple enough to begin with. I was hurt though I had not committed a wrong; Kresten was rewarded though he HAD.
I do not find the fault in my reasoning. The calm of a sunny day lends me clarity. So I can answer simply for your errors: *I* would not have done as you had. So obviously it was wrong. And that is of course not a matter of personal preference that can be made Absolute. It is true in context. How could you possibly do such violence as to dismiss my standards as individually relative? After all: if all behaved as I did then there would be more fairness, and even if more people suffered the suffering would never reach the same fever pitches in any one individual case. So it is TOTALLY possible to Universalise and to have expected of you. There can be no denying that the fair and generous course would have been NOT to date Kresten. And in your place I would have followed that course. So how could you harbour hostility towards me, when I am no hypocrite? You failed to demonstrate that I WAS one. So why not agree to my standards? They are sensibly superior to individually relative ethics. If *I* can live up to them, so can you. Would you not want that? Would the answer to the moral question not put your heart at peace, admitting simply the error? After all: Kresten CLEARLY sinned for I could not follow in his foot steps; you Refused to let me do so! And he showed no intent of permitting me to or persuading you to do so. And I certainly could not follow in YOUR foot steps. At least we could ALL have followed my standards! And Erotic Love, which you had hypocritically disavowed, is permissible but only if the entitlement can be proven. You never proved to me what entitled him not me. And I find the suggestion prima facie insulting. So why bother to defend your actions or his? Why bother to indict mine, if not out of insecurity?

Like I said: I agree to say no more of the Nature of the error. But I would prefer the freedom to speak plainly and calmly of its Being.

Love, Dmytri.

P.S. If I have not only demonstrated a superiority of virtue but all so the privilege of the disadvantaged, am I not the authority?

The Oppressed Minority:

She had the kind of de-
meanour of delight in her self that endeared me to her but that all so reminded me, to my chagrin, of Johana. So I was suspicious of her motives. The self-satisfaction with which she absorbed the attention of these older men who inhabited the Smoker's Pit could have past for Johana's own narcissism and conceited cruelty: An attempt to draw in men only to de-
ceive them.
You might wonder why I apportioned an entire para-

graph to these details. In truth it is to avoid saying her name. Even letting on about Johana was excessive. I may edit her name to be a substitute by the time that you read this.

She certainly paid attention to me. I certainly must have had a demeanour of confidence about me, having stood up to Johana the prior day.
Hearing me speak of music and crack jokes locked me in the gaze of her attention to a degree that made me

apprehensive but no less cool.
At times I had even to apologise,
by virtue of personal compulsion if not insecurity, for sounding all too 'collegiate and dogmatic'.
An excess of knowledgeability can pass for pomp.

This dude was a gay dude. I used to know him. My only prayer now is that he does not read my blog. But per chance that sense of aggression symptomatic of having read my weblog was, in his case, simply symptomatic

of his Own arrogance and conceit. Johana would have deplored him for his lust for attention, a kind of self-consciousness so defensive that he could not tolerate my own views but so defensive that he could not help but to fend for my attention.
Though in fact I had never felt as though my attention mattered much to him, so much as an easy opportunity to infiltrate the collective

conversation by avenue of my influence.
Keep in mind that none of these gripes on my part have to do with his homosexuality. That comes later.

I wished that I could have told her that it was not homophobia that compelled me to disconfirm him. I was legitimately bored with his interjections. Even his most moving stories so privileged the individual subject of the narrative that

they left me wanting to hear some Universal theme. The collective theme unifying his stories seemed to be:
Pay attention to me! I am a minority. And I want to belong. If only I could have told him honestly:
There is NOTHING TO belong TO!

But she continued to gaze at me with those young Hispanic eyes with their judgemental lids. She was an ally and a friend

of his. And so when he tried to steal my attention he all so occupied hers. And by yielding to him, even as an other man (whose acquaintence I had gladly made for the first time that very day) vied for a stake in my conversation,
I surrendered not only the attention that I paid to that other man,
but all so to her, whose attention I promptly lost to this homosexual friend.
And what use did HE

have for that attention?
He did not admire her as I did. He only needed attention. It was not unlike what Ketchup had done with Johana...

I managed later, by virtue of a debater's memory, to pick up the conversation with the other gentle man again where we left off. But as I did so,
setting rules for what might offend me with endearing liberality,

admitting to my earlier conversational strides and building plot continuity,
I could not help but feel that some thing or an other had remained unsaid.
And that was the effect of having lost my audience:
Her. Why did I surrender it? Was it because I hate as much to be left out as he does, because I pride my self in being more Inclusive than Ketchup, who only pretended towards ega-

litarianism in order to gain power? Or is the worst of all possibilities true?: That I ceded the conversation to him,
pretending towards an interest that I did not feel, simply because of my Politically Correct Education? Again, I must remind you, as I would have loved to tell her,
that his homosexuality had little to do with my aversion. If there was some thing fundamentally

deplorable about him, his sexuality would have stemmed from that, along side his arrogance,
but even if the one were an effect of which the other was a cause,
only one of these had up-
set me. So why did I feel sorry for him?
Why should I feel guilty for promoting 'hetero-
normativity' and its exclusion of minorities?
Was I my self not a minority? And is all sexuality not suspect?

My greatest fear is that of fear its self. For if in fact I had yielded to his sense of entitlement out of fear, then that suggests that may be it was not for POWER that Ketchup had been so insufferable. But that same fear that for that moment I was guilty of.

No. For surely what truly swayed me were two-
fold: My own kindness. And those two Hispanic eyes.

[[[Dm.A.A.]]]

Dialektik.

Dialektik.

Master: We have so established that science is good for understanding how technology works, but nothing else. Beyond the technological “advantages” of the scientific “method” there is little if any thing that Science can do for us.

Now we understand why computers inspire in us such logocentrism. Western thought allows us to Use them. But not to UNDERSTAND them.

Student: But wait. Did you not say that science could help us to UNDERSTAND technology?

Master: Yes. (irritably.)

Student: So why can it not help us to UNDERSTAND computers?

Master: You IMBECILE! You utter MORON! Is it not OBVIOUS? Science and logocentric thought can only help us to understand computers AS technology! Not beyond that point!

Student: oh. (with bitterness: He must be crazy.)

Dm.A.a.

Taking Back Dignity:

I have come to realise that I am actually the only member of my family that works. i produce music. I produce literature. I hustle talent. I go to bars and i talk to women. but that is some thing that loafers never do. they never interact with any one. They provide no service for any one. What do my parents do? They do what I wasted eight months doing. They SCAN. *I* work and I work CONSTANTLY. I never divide my work from my play. I expect EVERY one to have a moral reason for every action and social gesture. If children in Africa have to starve and women in the Middle East have to choke and explode for the chance for me to attend a bar, it must be one HELL of an event I am missing out on at O'Harley's at the moment. They are not killers that dwell there, surely. for even going there must be part of their solemn patriotic duty.

So i work. But my PARENTS receive the money. My PARENTS lord their pretensions towards possession towards me. My PARENTS parrot the orthodoxy of Communism muddled with the orthodoxy of Capitalism, to the point one forgets which of the two is which. And WHERE is this money? I only see it when I am denied it. That is: I never see it. They insist that it is there only when they deny it to me as evidence. I work constantly, never dividing work from play. but are they at fault? Only in being deluded. Because they THINk that they MUST work. forgetting that they cannot. They are too old. They are supposed to be doing yoga. And I am supposed to be the provider for the society, the larger family. and WE are all supposed to receive a pension from the beneficent government, for after all: What if I died? I could not be expected as a corpse to support my aging parents. That is the task of society.

What happened? I eat little. I conform only to the spiritual principles and those of the Earth. I produce Art constantly, the commodity in the greatest and truest scarcity, for by now i would have imagined the population of the Earth would have been fed and clothed and sheltered and protected, though from no enemy. So how is it I am not lauded as a hero? I could DO without O'Harley's. I could DO without raves et al. But not if I am excluded under arbitrary auspices. There MUST be some thing special then about a place so esoteric. And I demand entry. Would you not agree?

Dm.A.A.

A Tale of Money.

Once there was a city divided into two classes: the slaves and the masters.

The slaves were whipped regularly by the masters, whose only distinction was that they owned and were permitted to own whips.

One day one of the masters said to his friend, “I do not understand. I tire of whipping the slaves. Besides, I my self am whipped regularly by other masters. How am *I* not a slave?”

And at the last of these words his friend rebelled: “You Fool! Don’t you see?? It is in the life of a master to whip other masters! All life is whipping, to whip and to be whipped, except for those who own no whips, for whom it is only to be whipped! Be grate-full that you are not one of THOSE.”

“But what if,” protested the young man. “I ventured beyond the city walls and found a city where-in no whips exist.

And at this point the friend, whose vein popped in his fore-head at the word “walls”, drew his whip and rained a blow upon the young man’s face.

“You see?” he asked the man who now bled as he did. “That is ALL that you shall find beyond these walls. Now back to work.”

But the young man did not return to work. Instead he said to his friend: “Now that you have whipped me, I have no choice but to leave. For here I KNOW that I shall be whipped by your likes. At least if I aspire to find a city that is less violent I may be whipped by the kind of whom I have not yet tired.”

And so, moving swiftly so as to dodge another blow from his companion, who was too fatigued to try again or to pursue him, the young man departed the village.

The young man traveled for a long time. He saw many villages and cities that were similarly built upon the same hierarchy. They wove different flags, played different songs, and built buildings along disparate styles, but without fail they all had slaves and masters.

Until one day the young man found one that did not. He heard of a series of islands in the distance into which people disappeared, never returning from their voyages. So the young man borrowed a vessel from a sailor who had disavowed the sea in fear and sorrow for his lost friends.

The young man found an Island where there were no whips. The occupants of this isle had never left since first arriving.

Here the young man found a wife and raised a child. In the man’s older years, his son sailed back to the Main Land and found his father’s village.

He found the man who had whipped his father long ago, now too an old man, and much more fatigued than even before. And he said unto the man:

“You who have whipped my father. Since you have done that none of my kin shall live again in this village. And neither shall any of yours, for in mere moments a legion that I have assembled shall ransack the village and tear down its walls.”

And the man replied: “My young boy! Your father never heard the apology that has grown in my heart like briar for years! Years ago the suspicion dawned upon me that I had been FOOLED. I had grown up a slave and thought that through POWER I might escape the whip of the Masters. Yet the TRUE Masters were never their selves whipped, or they had learnt how to escape the whip entirely. I had become merely a whip for THEM to use against my own people, who were still enslaved! And I too was still enslaved, though now I am whipped not only by my peers but by my own conscience.”

And the son of the rebel replied: “It is too late for your stories! I hear the horns of the cavalry in the distance!”

And the city was ransacked.

The old man, as the young boy fled, said to his self: “All my life I clung to the walls of the city that oppressed me. I feared what lay beyond them as much as I feared the whip that had hurt me. That whip taught me to fear all. So I ascribed to the bearing of a whip the name of Freedom, I ascribed to Freedom from the City’s oppression the sting of the whip, and even in admitting, for I never knew what lay beyond the city walls, that all my fears were born in the city, I espoused this terror and even tried to lord the walls of this city over my closest and dearest friends. Now that those walls are torn asunder and down, I too am torn asunder and down.”

And the old man whipped him self to death.

Dm.A.A.

Why I Left the Fabric Store.

I confess to only a few missed takes in my life, and only when in a moment of solitude, perhaps a rainy day such as this one, I must confront my raw Self without any middle person. Clever thinkers such as Foucault and Watts would argue that this Self that I bewail is an illusion: that the day I am truly free from sin there shall be no “past” to lament. Yet I find a kind of purity and comfort in having the humility to admit my wrongs. I know that I was lured into them with per chance an even deeper innocence, and for that I do not apologise: That experience can warrant my views, and only Dogmatism can turn a blind eye to them.

I wasted eight months of my life working at a fabric store. Cynics insist that I have not truly suffered, that I ought instead have wasted it to its entirety. They treat lives like cigarettes, and they condemn me as less of a man for not burning mine to its butt, as though I were afraid that it would singe my moustache.

They are like people who will beat their children, using the fact that other children get molested as their excuse and justification.

That time could have been spent saving the life of Jennifer Kelly. Jennifer I met admittedly after I had quit my job. She had a glowing innocent smile that seemed burdened by her insufferable cares in the way that the baby fat leant humanity to her cheeks. Her lips were red and she wore a head dress that looked like that of a Muslim woman in Iran. Her eyes were vacant and welcoming, and looking into her through them was like finding that God had left open a window that usually separates this world from THAT one.

Jennifer committed suicide. I tried to talk her out of it, but she was too fast for me. As I was just stumbling again to pick up philosophy she had all ready read all my Camus and my Sartre. The last time that we spoke I did not even try to fore stall an other attempt on her part. Camus’ Absurdism had all ready taken root in my heart, and she would not be moved, even by the fact that Camus his self had disavowed self-destruction. We spoke by phone and it was as though for once I saw snow in San Diego. It was falling in my bedroom.

Jennifer’s suicide ensured that never again would I work at a fabric store. Never again would I go back on the promise that I had made to my enraged family that I would never work for a living.

Never again would I be a faceless middle man betwixt a corporation who specialized in the production of objects valued for their uselessness and a gang of consumers who held onto dear life by these trinkets.

Never again would I facilitate, by my dispensable role, the wasting away of human lives. Never would I look into the eyes of a woman in what were supposed to have been her Golden Years, terrified that I might accidentally cut to pieces one of a stack of plastic trading cards that she had handed to me, proclaiming “What are you doing??” shortly and with shock the moment that my scissors all most cut to pieces one that “still had money on it”. Never again would I see before me a parade of human beings reduced to cattle by the system, and rather than finding solace in their life long learnings and their families and friends and joys and mysteries and hopes for what might follow they found a safe guard against total psychosis in the acquisition of use less items.

And never again would I answer to Jean, my boss. I remember the moment that I attained financial independence. It was just as illusory as any man’s pretense towards material independence, a remnant of Shamanic life still rooted in the collective Unconscious mind. It was only within minutes of this false epiphany that, having corrected Jean, I had to look upon this dwarfish person and hear her say the words that I could never have expected or permitted: Dmitry, I am your boss. Dmitry, you have to do as I say. Dmitry, I am your mistress. Dmitry, your twenty one years of reading and suffering and education mean nothing here. YOU are a means to an end. And what ever your QUALMS with how we run things here, I have all ready been involved in this machine long enough that what ever humanity might in some other dimension prevent me from saying this, it is absent in this hell.

One cannot study philosophy if one cannot live it. One cannot divide one’s work from one’s play as an adult. One’s work becomes arbitrary and one’s play turns to debauchery. How did I allow my self for eight months to be transformed into one of those face less conformists who never had a moment’s time to talk of social change, for they went from THEIR job with all its falseness to THEIR luxuries, either at home or at some club or party, without a plan in either case for how it would inform their virtues?

Yet supposing that one did NOT commit one’s self to an impersonal system? Supposing that one DID follow one’s solitary bliss? All work would be towards the greatest good, and none would be over looked. One would not subordinate one’s intelligence towards drudgery nor with draw into the shame full inconsistency of childhood. One would not watch with agony one’s creative psyche turn to a series of repetitions, as Life Opportunities floated by on a conveyor belt. What kinship does ROUTINE have towards a Divine Plan, with all of the nuances of a Dream Narrative? One would not be a complacent discontent, without a plan for delivering all other discontents, including the less advantaged and more deeply afflicted, towards a Better Way.

And one’s Enjoyments would not be born of desperation. They would not be the debauchery that even in my working days I had tried to dissuade my closest friends from, the same people that I no longer call friends for that same debauchery had turnt to disloyalty. A night out would be an opportunity to MEET some one. Some one like Jennifer. Some one whom I could save. Or some one who might save me.

My father left me twenty dollars on my account this weekend. It was for food in case I grew hungry whilst looking after Pumpkin in the rest of my family’s absence. Supposing that he asked me if I’d spent it. I would say “No”. Supposing that he then told me that it was to be my lunch allowance for this week. I would rage against him. Ought I not to be rewarded for my frugality? Supposing that he gave me five dollars a day as planned. I would have forty dollars by the end of the week. Were I to spend the five dollars I earned each day (earned not by [active] conformism but by passive resistance, as the earth earns the fruits that fall upon it simply by Being There for the tree) I would have twenty dollars left to go dancing on Friday. I might have forty dollars left to buy a book. But neither narrative could work should he decide not to oblige. I would rather eat than dance if I could not afford to do both, having only the twenty dollars necessary to gain entry to the club and [thus] losing entry by the act of buying an apple, and I would never have enough money to buy a novel and then to come back begging again. But the grand irony is that this same indignation with my father would be feigned by my capitalist enemies. In truth there would be some thing Totalitarian and Stalinist in my father’s behaviour. It would be an affront to my freedom. The twenty dollars would only be mine so long as I spent them within a given time; if I refused to, trying to save them, my frugality would be rewarded by the dropping of my standard allowance. The most generous way of putting it: My father takes back my twenty, and then as a reward for having been frugal he would distribute the weekly allowance in one installment rather than four, allotting me the opportunity to waste it all in one day if need be or to waste away eating greasier and more expensive food for at either rate I shall never afford either to dance nor to read.

What Father has attained in this hypothetical narrative is the capacity to be Stalin in a capitalist country. Conservatives of capitalism remember such instances of oppression from their youth. So they seek the holy Grail of “financial independence”, forgetting as I demonstrated that so long as they answer to a boss they are not free, and so long as they cannot talk back to authority they are infants not adults. They commit their selves to a system and nurse their guilty consciences by pretending towards a greater maturity than their loafing peers. The irony is that many of their loafing peers have all ready tried capitalism and watched it fail, and the wisest, myself excluded, learnt from others’ missed takes and NOT their own.

So it is that the conservatives associate with all Marxism the spectre of Communism, but only insofar as Communism is extrapolated to be akin to an earlier rung of hell under Capitalism. They ascribe to the Post-Conventionality Morality of the sophisticated drop-out the laziness of the Pre-Conventional “bum”, but they never bother even to probe the minds of the bums to see which of them are actually NOT Untouchables but rather Gurus and Saints. They miss take all deviants for children that have not yet attained Financial Independence. Yet to them I say: Do you make money? Yes. Then you are NOT financially independent, and no one is. And insofar as YOUR occupation obligates OTHERS to participate in the playing of money, this is YOUR fault. The definition of a child, it has been said, is one who still thinks that there is such a thing as an Adult. I for one am not going to waste ten years of my life deluding my self and corroding my intellect in anticipation of my Saviour. I want freedom NOW, and so should you. And it is not freedom to deny that you want freedom. You THINK that you are adults. But you are merely delusional adolescents who bought into the system before you had developed a Conscience that spoke louder than its orders. MY indignation with oppression is not directed at Communism, so do not use the semblance of Communism against me, for any semblance you can produce is an ACTUAL symptom of Capitalism. Per chance YOU have found comfort in escaping the lower rungs of hell by sitting atop people still stuck in them. But never again shall I look in the tormented eyes of a customer whose only solace in life is to buy a scrap of fabric, knowing that I am benefitting at that person’s expense. Only Satan his self, or worse a politician, would insist that he is giving that person what she needs. It is like a drug pusher pretending towards dignity in supplying the heroin that he got his victims addicted to in the first place. And since this act of making-addicted and supplying are done in one swift wave of a hand, the ruse is transparent to all who are not dazzled by sleight of hand.

You are not adults. You are adolescents still. You will only be an adult the day you commit your self to the annihilation of currency. Until then you are just children, either the family bully or the family scape-goat. My indignation has NO kinship to yours. Yours is directed at Stalinism, as though you could vilify all those who have not found shelter in YOUR coping mechanism by analogy to dead dictators. The irony is unbearable. You have no right to use my father’s oppressive tendencies or any other that YOU have endured to support the system under which both villains thrive: The only system you or I have ever known directly. Whatever kinship these tendencies seem to have to Stalinism or any other Totalitarian alternative is only possible because of the corrosion in THIS system ITS SELF. And you must surely be suicidal if you believe that any alternative to THIS system can ONLY be an amplification of this one’s ills. You have at that point TRULY surrendered your humanity to the machine, for you have surrendered not only your Hope but your Ingenuity. Just as I had for eight months when I worked at a Fabric Store.

Dm.A.A.

Circularity in DRAMA.

CIRCULAR REASONING is intrinsic to the work of an artist. The artist must juggle multiple variables and establish their constancy and interdependence through their inter-penetration, as in the tying of a knot or the assemblage of a house of cards. (Though of course in the latter example there is some sort of hierarchy.) Each causal reasoning is in fact a way of expressing a possibility or set of possibilities. All of these will be circular, for the system interpenetrates its self.

1.       A character does not have an epiphany by Act V.

2.       The character must therefore have an epiphany by Act IV.

3.       The character’s epiphany fails, resulting in bitterness.

4.       The bitterness ensures to us that no further epiphanies can succeed.

5.       [The] character does not have an epiphany by Act V.

This can be summed up:

1.       Because she does not have an epiphany she is bitter.

2.       Because she is bitter she does not have an epiphany.

a.       We know that the epiphany failed, resulting in bitterness.

b.      This means that the epiphany cannot happen in Act IV.

This can be reversed:

1.       A character is established as bitter by Act V.

2.       As the result of this bitterness we know that the character did NOT have an epiphany by Act IV.

3.       If the character did not have an epiphany by Act IV then the character must have an epiphany by Act V.

4.       The epiphany is known to clear away bitterness.

5.       The character must be bitter by Act V.

The second narrative under-scores the significance of the epiphany, as well as the character. The first narrative STRESSES the bitterness of the character by the fact that she was un-phased by the “epiphany”. Thus it DE-STRESSES the significance OF the “epiphany”. The second narrative, by contrast, refuses even to acknowledge the failed EPIPHANY *as* an epiphany, thus implicitly STRESSING the significance of what an Epiphany is SUPPOSED TO DO whilst DE-STRESSING the integrity of the character, whose bitterness is seen to be the result of a failed epiphany. The bitterness is only significant in that it DEFINES what the epiphany IS.

So it is that the Artist decides upon a constant: the bitterness, and must conclude which cycle of inter-dependence is most accommodating to both this constant and its corollary, the variable of the EPIPHANY that is supposed to eradicate it. And naturally the conclusion is to have the epiphany FOLLOW the bitterness. Yet in explaining this second-hand we stumble upon the problem that all descriptions of the inter-play of these two forces, just like the inter-play its self as the Artist juggles the ideas prior to writing them and after doing so in explaining them, will be circular.

Dm.A.A.

[Dedicated to A.L.McLeod.]

AND WHEN ONE:

AND WHEN ONE writes not to express but to IMPress:

One is an imp in excess. Dm.

The writer and the Filmer.

The screen writer's knowing when to stop
leaves open to the director's imagination
as cinematography what follows.

Why ought the writer to PRETEND
to know the placement of the remote when he is not
TRUSTED TO KnOW the placement of the
sentences???

Bureacracy is Satan.

Memories surface of childhood.
Not knowing yet how to write but knowing
how to KNOW.

Why ought the director to PRESUME upon
the artistic liberties irrespective of the
consultancy of the WRITER?

Implicit is the ethical egoism model.
My plan shall be subsumed by your plan.

what about THE PLAN?

that we are both involved in.

Dm.

As [Harold] bloom said: these are not just words
arranged neatly on a page (of Joyce).
this is literature!

III:

It stunned me to see how much the educational society cares about rape because I thought that they were interested in molesting all their students. And I do not mean the merely bodily. That one I might imagine could recover from with ease. The real trauma most people seem to internalize: To pretend it is not there. We were born into a paradise and watched it corrupted by the Nazis who told us that life ought NOT to be frivolity and magi[k] but drudgery and logic.

It is time that, if you will pardon the imperative, take back what is ours. (If you will pardon the cliché.)

Parents ought not to INSTRUCT their children. Their CHILDREN should take up the charge of cleaning up the PARENTS’ mess!

The Grade System is to be over-turned. Incentive is a myth of the past. Human beings by their nature possess the keys to paradise. Their very dreams SCREAM, some times their screams being heard in the day light waking world, and miss heard as psychosis, for salvation.

ForATTENTION.

For genius.

Ought the remote to rest upon the table or at the foot of the wall? Never again shall I endure an attack of panick over this question. I shall KNOW for no one would be able to tell me other wise. The Drama OF THE TEXT would inform me, if not its IRONY. But THAT must be allowed EXPRESSION. No more of this Structuralist Bull Shit. If one wants Classical Drama, one will have Classical Drama. But how IRONIC to write, as Joyce did, an entire block of dialogue without either quotation markers nor names as signifiers!

Deliver me from STUPIDITY. Only *I* shall know when I am finished. Internal Necessity [A]lone shall guide me. My only companion is the Unconscious Tao.

And so I shall never lose/my remote to this remote ruise.

But just join the Cruise.

So irony and drama shall both be available to me, to choose betwixt them.

A Roman arbiter whose victims still return from the dead time and time again to

Fight again.

VISION.

Unflattering. Raw. Beautifull.

(((Dm.A.A.)))

A Rape of Authenticity.

I.                    There can be no discernment betwixt form and structure.

II.                  The academics may not be trying to steal my work but they are trying to sabotage it from envy.

III.                Every thing new defies the old structures.

IV.                When a professor tells a student to alter the format of a piece he is compelling the student to change the piece its self. He is trying to subsume the student’s budding Order to the Will of the professor.

V.                  Ideas are the products of confluences of creatively random patterns.

a.       Each philosopher has a distinct model of thought.

                                                               i.      Hegel: Dialectic.

                                                             ii.      Nietzsche: Forms of the Will.

                                                            iii.      Plato: Forms.

                                                           iv.      Kant: Categories.

                                                             v.      Hume: Syntheses.

                                                           vi.      Sartre: Perspectives.

                                                          vii.      Heidegger: Circular reasonings and BACK GROUND.

                                                        viii.      Camus: Dynamic Tension.

b.      Each Artist has a distinct STYLE:

                                                               i.      Picasso: Cubism.

                                                             ii.      Coltrane: Jazz.

                                                            iii.      James Joyce: Stream of Consciousness.

c.       Each individual has a distinct YOGA:

                                                               i.      Hindu Chakra system.

                                                             ii.      Christian view.

                                                            iii.      Taoism.

d.      All of the Above are Structures that influence one an other. They are all so PATTERNS OF STRUCTURE.

VI.                Interference on the part of the Structuralist imposes an egoic model rather than an INSPIRED model.

a.       Ideas are created by language.

b.      By limiting language one restricts IDEAS.

c.       The Remote Control.

                                                               i.      Irony: It rests upon the desk. The protagonist picks it up randomly and turns on the television. What follows is a scene that relates synchronistically to the protagonist’s life.

1.       Richard Linklater.

                                                             ii.      Drama: It has to attract the viewer’s attention. It was tossed against a wall, suggesting a traumatic scene from the writer’s back-ground.

1.       Christopher Nolan.

VII.              All students should adopt a spirit of DEFIANCE in the face of all STRUCTURAL AUTHORITY. The alternative is the swiftest bridge to Fascism that I can imagine.

VIII.            Trauma: The young man or woman learns to distrust and defy all authority. Tries to escape society. Gets captured by Psychiatric Health Nazis. Living Hell.

IX.                Solidarity with class mates becomes impossible so long as there is a monarch they report to.

X.                  Authenticity is raped.

Dm.A.A.

Beyond the Post-Modern. I.

Beyond the Post-Modern. I.

Ali seemed to believe that TRUTH was a function of LANGUAGE. Yet as Wittgenstein said FEELING IS A FACT. What is conveyed by language is not only REASON but FEELING. REASON is but a CONSTRUCT OF Language. Now Reason would inform one that this is as of yet a fallacy; after all, there are other forms of LANGUAGE besides REASON; REASON is but one form of TRUTH. But to understand these other forms we must go beyond REASON. So we see that while TRUTH is CONSTRUCTED by Language AND Reason (which is in fact emotive), FEELING can be CONVEYED by language irrespective of this construct.

Dm.A.A.

On Error and Perfection.

Invitation towards Deliverance:

It must hurt for a perfectionist to admit that she has made a missed take. Especially to one who has not. Now, that claim towards perfection might appear absurd. But in truth perfection is easy to those who seek it. There are only a few temptations in life. All the minutia that usually pass for miss takes are just playings betwixt Order and Chaos.
But I suppose that a more liberal theory would be that you have made your first true error. And from this point forth you shall never err again. But only if you learn from the error. And that involves a paradox. You must accept that perfection is impossible. And so paradoxically your error was that you believed your self to be perfect. You thought that you were justified in your miss take because it might bring you towards the Perfection that you coveted.
And from this point forth you shall not hurt an other towards that end again. And what would have been miss takes will prove to be justified departures. All you do will be Perfect, for you made that error that concluded perfection. But to embrace this you have only to confront the paradox in one more form:
That you ADMIT that what I suffered was not necessary.

Dm.A.A.

So what follows dialectically is a perfection the likes of which you would accuse me of pretending towards.
For when you ask me to admit I too have erred I simply say: No. For even admitting my pursuit of perfection to have been an error I have failed to learn the lesson that one cannot err. And yet one does err. But there is no reason to believe that Life accords with the Law of Non-Contradiction. Rather it was as you had said: paradox is a sigh of relief. For in truth and in sooth you HAD erred by hurting me. That can be forgiven but not pardoned, and it was substantial enough to be called an Error. But I never committed such an error. I only pursuited per chance once the same Goal. But how came I here? I remember not. I maintain my initial claim.

Dm.A.A.