Wednesday, May 11, 2016

The Information Age:

I miss you.

Your insanity and lack of self-entitlement are a warm glow in a bleak castle. The only thing better than Solitude that I have found.

I was playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons today with several friends. One I had first met in the fourth grade. He has not changed since. Cannabis helped. An other I first met in High School. His belle I met last winter, quite by fortune. Albeit was in Rancho Bernardo, so not unlikely in such a small town. The Dungeon Master I only met today. I guessed immediately he was a Leo. The guess was correct.

This was my first game, but I took it by storm. I played under the name of Radagast. You should recognise that name. The Brown Wizard. It was not long ere I felt alienated from my "peers" whence they mentioned some thing about a man who had ostensibly cracked a Nazi code long ago. I felt a pang of skepticism that I could not first place. At first I thought it might be guilt for having criticised homosexuals when last I met with Andrew. But it was by the time that Blake and I went out for pizzas at the local Costco (one that I had not visited before, to my delight upon that beautiful sunlit day in Poway) that I realised, standing with the pizzas in my hand ere Blake re-fillt his gasoline, that I had felt neither moral indignation nor anomie, but simply DOUBT. How Had They Known that the genius was homosexual? They admitted that he had had sociopathic tendencies, but homosexuality had not fallen under their umbrella, all though of course it was deemed unacceptable at that time. But how did they know? If they never bothered to investigate beyond what they had read, or only prolongued their research, and settled on the notion that he was a victim of his "time" (that they presumed, in a manner that Foucault would have found ironically repugnant, to have been "worse")  then how did they KNOW that he partook in those acts? Did he ever actually sodomise any one? Or was it psycho-analytically PRESUMED that he had INTENDED to? And if he was simply a "victim of his time", then why are there still statistics that purport that homosexuals are often sociopaths, even in these new and "enlightened" times of progress and development?

My crisis was not one of ethic but of fact. Not Should he have participated in an act of social deviance that his society had nothing to gain from and condemned, (and not much removed from many heterosexual acts in a common vein) nor Should he have Intended to, but DID he? Did he do it? Did he even intend?

There was a time when people were more skeptical, and it was not very long ago. To make a claim one had to tell a story. The scar all ways showed the evidence; the story was its meaning. And to learn about a writer. Why did he write? How? One had to visit the guy. Or woman. Obviously. And people DID! And not only rich people! Just ones who got out a bit and found out For Their Selves.

And how quick they were to call me a Luddite! Of course, they did not conjure the word immediately. And of course one who does not know etymology or who only Scans and does not READ would be hesitant to recall it. But earlier that same day I had thought of the Luddites, for whom we have named the word Sabotage. And I had not identified with them, but I would never have dreamt to condemn them! They simply were a product of THEIR society. And how do I know this? Because I read it in a book! And it accords with my research on the Internet. But it goes deeper than that. I have seen first-hand the conditions of retail, and they remind me of what I read about in my old books. It is not as though I suffered any cruel injuries. But seeing how people behave in the factory system, and knowing that this system endures to this day, I can totally believe that people would rebel against its encroaching industrialisation! In fact: I have no doubt of it. For there is no reason to doubt any thing that has so long been known. But when people condemn "Luddites" they do not condemn the System. They Side with the system and -- to use a millenial adage -- Blame the Victim!

So you can imagine an other pang I felt ere Blake said Tolkien was a poor author. And ultimately we settled it that that was simply Blake's preference. But just as he had sided with the corporations in condemning Luddism he sided with the critics in condemning Tolkien! Just because he was bored by the introduction. As though all books don't have a steady start. Well. All old books. Enduring books. Great ones.

And you know as a life-long reader I have read many prophesies of this time. Several had been as early on as in Tolkien's time, or Jung's, or even Nietzsche's! But millenials are a load of junk. Even Whearty. Rafael and I could tell that he did not READ for the love of the word! Only the information.

And I have to tell you. You are the first person in my generation next to my sister with whom I can conduct an intelligent controversation. Because you DOUBT. And not collectively. MOST people our age (and the ones who usually berate millenials are in their midst, though only a millenial would not be able to distinguish me from them) only Doubt until the corporatised scientific community that they so piously depend upon, as upon a clergy in a younger day, gives them the most recent "up-date". But where does it all come from? An earlier people would see science for what it is: merely philosophic common sense super-imposed over a set of privileged data. MILLENIALS take it to be Truth! And it does not seem to even Bother them, much less to strike fear in their hearts, that the information that they cling to NOW is so Unstable that within mere years it might be useless.

I don't know if the World has been around for six thousand years or longer. What I DO know is that a hundred years is not at all a long time. Nothing has changed. Philip K Dick honestly thought towards the end of his life that we were all living in the year 23 A.D. (Roughly), that the Roman Empire had never fallen, ("The Empire Never Fell!") and that Germany had won the War. Well. It could happen. I knew an old janitor at Palomar named Tyrone who had said that there was nothing new under the Sun. You can guess his religious leanings. This Nigger had gone to CAL! (i am not embarassed to use that word around you [not CAL obviously. Pardon my irony.] because MY progressive thought is all for liberating language rather than repressing it, and "fear of a name breeds fear of the thing its self.")

Nothing really substantially changes. Shawn is still Shawn. Blake is still Blake. I am still Dmytri. (Though before I was Dmitry.) Science and Religion still operate in hidden conspiracy, as do Liberals and Conservatives, but only a few like Nietzsche think to condemn them, and the rest Follow The Herd!!

And this does not intimidate me because it is new. It intimidates me because it is quite ironically Old! All this stuff Kresten and his faggot psychiatrist friend (I would with-hold the slur, were he not a psychiatrist) had parroted to me ages ago. Of course those ages were mere years ago. But that's my point exactly. I have grown over these years. The society has only festered. Nothing new under the Sun. All of it I've heard before, in some other permutation. Why does it intimidate me? Because Deleuze was right: information is control. And Fascism is pretty damned intimidating. They have all ready dampened our generation's interest in the records of the past. When I first encountered Jung, I was hesitant, as Watts had been, of his insistence upon a connection with the past. But I was only hesitant. Not skeptical. I wonder how many millenials use those words inter-changingly.

And Jung was the mystik who HEALED me! The anecdotal evidence in this witch doctor's favour was Miraculous! And what did that cock-sucking faggot that Kresten hung out with say about Jung?? That the man's theories were "disproven!" It's like: how does one DISPROVE a LIFE???

What finally ticked me off today (though most of it had gone so smoothly that it does not pain me much to reflect upon it presently) was when Blake, in a last and third and final trial, busted out his phone to "settle a dispute". You know. As though he were busting out a pistol. Fitting since I want to shoot some one each time that one does this. And I NEVER want to shoot ANY one!

Of course I Knew that scorpions were arthropods and not insects, but that insects were arthropods. I had studied paleontology in childhood and even taken a third place metal (okay okay: Medal.) in it in the sixth grade. I still have my field guide. And I had spent entire evenings re-scribing these onerous but much-beloved lists, so I would not have foregotten some thing so BASIC (not every one knows what an echinoderm is, and many might mistake a "sand dollar" in language for Middle Eastern currency, but most know what Scorpions and Crabs are, as astrology evidences) nor would I have pretended towards such knowledge and betrayed my self as a scholar. I even recall that later I would learn that Anurag Kashyap, who would go on to become the National Spelling Bee champion (and, by virtue of those coincidences I have told you about, my class-mate) had in fact stood beside me that day, and how he would brag with such charm when in high school he informed me that the "future spelling bee champion" had beaten me at my most shining pre-adolescent moment by one place. Not that it bothered me more then than it had that same day of the award ceremony, for I had been grateful then and nearly just as grateful for Anurag's fortune years later.
But I digress.

Have you ever seen this meme? It's a photo of a keyboard, I think with keys missing. It's a demotivational. Caption: Post-modernism. Sub-caption: Because your four years of education is just as good as some thing I read on wikipedia.

I thought they were only kidding. Imagine!!

It was not that Blake "wanted to know" that bothered me, but that he did not trust ME. So what if the state wanted to say that 2+2='d 5? Would they believe it.

I suppose if Science proves it.

But this shocks a man like me. Because when some bitch (humour me please) put me in a box (quite literally) and said that I had "bipolar disorder" (as if!) my Mother did not hesitate to seize the excuse. And neither did any of my family. But to this day my sister has to calm my Dad down from his angry out-bursts, my Mother randomly rages at whoever's closest to her in proximity (for she has bones to pick with all of us) and my sister broods and moods. Why would my Mother ever condemn her own son to marginalisation?

Because she read about it on the internet. Because she found a list of traits for bipolar, and quite glossing over the fact that EVERY BODY HAS THEM (at least at one point or an other) she was prone to project them Onto Me! And Kresten! Wasn't even there for me then, and yet he claims that I can't hold his behaviour against him since he knew Alexandra first. As though she were any thing like you! And as though he had even been LOYAL to me then! No. He simply sided with the gossip. And if it occurred to him as CRUEL to say he "saw more evidence" for the genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia than against it, then he was more guilty for having done so knowingly to try to impress you. He had once heard my dad hit me over the head with a remote! He was in the next room over. I had company over and my dad got mad at me for some thing. Why? I don't know. But Kresten tells ME that mental illness isn't the product of Conditioning? He was STUNNED that day when he had heard the crack on my head! Ostensibly his mother had never treated him that way, and obviously never his father, absentee as he was, f.b.o.f.w.

So you get my point. I could go on but I won't weigh upon you. I'll only cite some closing konklusions (again: pardon my macabre humour.).

First of all: none of this is new. Kierkegaard warned against it in the eighteen hundreds. Jung warned against it in the nineteen forties or whatever. Huxley warned against control by drugs, which I have borne personal witness to, both in the sense of recreationals and pharmaceuticals, for the mentality is not far removed. And he all so warnt of control by "technological devices". So am I the Luddite? No. I see technology as an organism. We can co-exist with it. But as Heidegger warned it is prone to use us. Let's not let it be a parasitic relationship. I compose electronic music and I use a phone. What Fascist bastards thought to condemn critics as hypocrites? We are the ones who struck a balance that they had not!

Secondly: as some one who has been hospitalised (and I am assured you are of a common spirit here) I can guarantee this as a ticket to the lunatic asylum: believing every thing you read. Buddha told us to question, and that probably saved my life. You'll rarely find it as an internet meme. You really have to dig to do so. There is, as a friend of mine named Lee said (who was quite a character and had apparently been involved in the development of e-mail), a hierarchical trichotomy (my words) betwixt information, knowledge, and Wisdom. If books are as good a source as internet articles, then I would all ways prefer some one who went straight to the printed text rather than one who took the short cut. And unlike Blake insists my skepticism is fact; one can conclude from skepticism alone, if "skepticism" is simply a polite way of calling bull shit but not having the patience nor the welcome to elaborate.

Last thing: (or "one more thing" as Jackie Chan's fictional sensei would have quoth) Knowledge and Wisdom are archetypal journeys. They do not change; only an unattended and neurotic ego obscures this. Who am I to say this? Here's a thought: I would value this Truth over my Friends Them Selves, for invariably those who had opposed me in What I Knew would join my oppressors, and I had learnt these facts from my oppressors themselves, in spite and rebellion against them. I am not a neurotic who crusades against the world. I am every bit as disadvantaged by the Machine as my Luddite brethren were. But I am not a Luddite. Like I said: my indignation is one of fact. Not affect. It is simply not an apt comparison, that is all. Only I am qualified to make such a comparison. For I have lived through it. And even so the distinction is in many ways remote.

So my concern is this. If Jung knew. If Buddha knew. If Huxley knew. If Plath knew. If Dr Englund knew. If Tom the portly guy who frequents Starbucks knew. If Lee knew. Then why don't WE know?

Because Fascism all ways severs ties with the past and re-writes history to its own liking. However cleverly gilded, it does not fool me. Now librarians use the internet as sources of Authority. So what? The moment I am to be judged by some thing you look up on your phone, I have been marginalised. You were right. Using one's phone is withdrawal. For genuine conversation is rare. I go now mainly to older folks for it. For they Listen. And they do not condemn me for talking to younger folks (usually), though the latter condemn me for appealing to the authority of the former. But I am simply literate enough to know a Genuine conversation once I've had it. And I'm old enough, in body as in spirit, to not be impressed with "new" ideas that do not FEEL new. And that fall into so many familiar traps.

What worries me most is what worried Jung most. What about the generation gap? Yes: we must re-write society to rebel against tradition. But what Truths lie beyond mere tradition? Surely old people who were once young have found some of them? They certainly seem more generous with their wisdom, and it looks more rare and precious. Do they throw these pearls before swine or men?

There are treasures in the ravine that separates the old from the young. And if we cannot bridge THAT gap, what connection can we find?

What I seek will not be found by Google. Google is but a tool. If it thinks for its self, I question its motives. I won't allow it to think for me.

I hope you have enjoyed this drunken rant. I assure you: I saved it just for you. Fitting since you have more direct influence over Google apparently.

I was the life of the party today by the way. Couldn't you tell? I'll recount my fictional adventures later. Have you noticed I am using the Singular Personal more so now than the Plural Personal? It is a mark of health surely. Not to call you Shirley. Surely is an all too common word.

You should be able to tell from my confidence that I was very enthusiastic, even if I felt a bit hazed. So be it. That habit too had never gone away. And I still got my skeptic's independence, an excuse to defy my friends. You understand. I am feeling very ENFP presently.

All my love. Dmytri.

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