Categories: Video, Weird, Humour, Film, Links, Surreal, Amazing
I reach into the shadows behind the screen and retrieve a small, semi-transparent plastic bucket. I dip into the bucket and fish out a human brain. I have no idea to whom the brain belonged. I can't tell if it's male or female, black or white, or, with and reliability, its age. I may even have passed this person on the street. In its natural state, encased within the skull, brain matter is gelatinous. This brain, fixed in formalin, has a solid, rubbery feel and would carve like a very tender tuna steak......When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon and brought back pictures of our planet of oceans and clouds hanging over a grey moonscape in the middle of a black nowhere, it changed the way we saw ourselves. We knew already that we inhabited the surface of a small, spinning sphere that rolled around an ordinary star, at the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, just one of indeterminate billions in a vast, indifferent cosmos. But now, occupying a few degrees of retinal space, comfortably absorbed in the folds of the visual cortex, a mere portion of the visual field, we saw our home in its true colours. It was precious and vulnerable, a small fragile object, a thing we should take care of. It was, indeed, our home. We might have extrapolated these sentiments from the knowledge we already possessed, but the images set off an interplay of intellect and imagination that made the new perspective irresistible.
Something similar happens when you see the brain. Imagination infiltrates intellect. You get a sense of location and venerability. Our home...
...Like the surface of the Earth, the brain is pretty much mapped. There are no secret compartments inaccessible to the surgeon's knife or the magnetic gaze of the brain scanner; no mysterious humours pervading the cerebral ventricles, no soul in the pineal gland, no vital spark, no spirits in the tangled wood. There is nothing you can't touch or squeeze, weigh and measure, as we might the physical properties of other objects. So you will search in vain for any semblance of a self within the structures of the brain: there is no ghost in the machine. It is time to grow up and accept this fact. But, somehow, we are the product of the operation of this machinery and its progress through the physical and social world.
Minds emerge from process and interaction, no substance. In a sense, we inhabit the spaces between things. We subsist in emptiness. A beautiful, liberating, thought and nothing to be afraid of. The notion of a tethered soul is crude by comparison.Extract from Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks
Categories: Science, Consciousness, Quotes, Books, Links, Psychology, Philosophy, Reality, Human, Perception, Ideas, On the Nature of
Labels: On the Nature of
"…this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable… the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language." ~ Roland Barthes, S/ZIn S/Z Barthes develops his own codification system by which the text can be pluralized, thereby increasing its definition. The 'I' of readership becomes involved in the writerly process, aware from the outset of its own characterisation as a "plurality of other texts" (Barthes, S/Z). For Barthes "literature itself is never anything but a single text" (Barthes, S/Z), and each individual text becomes an entrance into the "galaxy"; into "a network with a thousand entrances" (Barthes, S/Z). To define creative works, therefore, I have devised my own system of code. Applying this code to a text, I hope, allows the infinite dimensions of definition to expand out from each fulcrum of interpretation. The codes and the texts collide, forging an Ouroboros of definition; becoming each other in their writerly interplay. The codes outlined below differ greatly from Barthes', but can each be seen as singular and/or interrelated hermeneutic definition systems. Each code is intended to increase exponentially the curvature of any definition. Since true "meaning goes to infinite depths" (David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning) only an infinitely expanding multiplicity of different curvatures should be employed in the process of definition.
"He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world… To think is to forge differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence." ~ Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the MemoriousIf we could place ourselves in the mind of Jorge Luis Borges' mnemonist character Funes we would experience a vast universe without perspective. That there is an eye to which "the vanishing point of infinity" (Berger) converges allows consciousness to claim an iota of individuality; allows a tightening of the "reducing valve" of consciousness (Huxley, Doors). This aspect of art (of text, music, poetry etc.) is the location from which one naturally views, or from which one is forced or manipulated to view. The transformation of perspective allows plurality to develop; a multiplicity of perspectives encourages wider variants of definition.
"The universe is not subject to our will. Essentially, it follows its own autopoietic operations. What humans perceive as harmonious, mathematically precise, and quantifiably ordered is our own interpretation and an exception to the normal state." ~ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke ZarathustraThe cacophony of possibilities extending throughout art incites a kind of white noise which tends to un-define consciousness. As interpretation extends in multiplicity this chaos is mediated; is energised by consciousness into a semblance of order. Reducing or increasing noise both from within and/or from without an art effects definition.
"If you see things differently that is a matter of indifference for Merz, but MERZ, and only Merz, is capable of sometime, in a yet unforeseeable future, transforming the whole world into a massive work of art… What is important in the work of art is only that all parts relate to each other, and are given a value in relation to each other. And even unknown quantities can be given a value. The great secret of Merz consists in the giving of a value to unknown quantities. Thus Merz controls that over which one can have no control. And thus Merz is larger than Merz." ~ Kurt Schwitters, The Merz JournalKurt Schwitters' art form 'Merz' was a collage of all other arts, all materials, all forms. Its reintegration caused context to become decimated and meaning to become a holism. On a Schwitters' canvas multiplicity/plurality are the only constants: definition is extended, as though the canvas was a cross-section of a larger, multidimensional whole. Via these languages, expressions and forms - and their subversion - art can achieve similar 'Merzian' results.
"…content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction; the understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it." ~ Denise Levertov, Postmodern American Poetry
That which is aware of itself and/or draws attention to itself via a meta-plane can loosen the restrictions of form. The Metadimensional capabilities of expression, once acknowledged, can define what is both on the page/is part of the piece and what spans off the page/out of the piece, like spokes on a wheel, supporting a larger superstructure beyond. The superstructure and the hub of a wheel are interdependent: that is, once connected one may not exist without the other."…poetry is a form cut in time as sculpture is a form cut in space." ~ Robert Creeley, Postmodern American Poetry
The space around an entity draws its boundaries; contains the entity's definable substance. The creation of one piece of art is the non-creation of an infinity of non-arts. Thus, as Barthes sees literature itself as the one text, art is that which is all arts. To network a discrete piece of art into the artistic 'all' one must be aware of The Negative of an art. The Negative is purveyor of form; is the space into which metadimensions arise; is the Merz of 'all' from which the art is Merzed; is the void from where noise erupts; is the realm from where a perspective defines.Categories: Art, Perception, Consciousness, Literature, Human, Reality, Culture, Philosophy, Psychology, Simulacrum, Quotes, Ideas
Sumptuous words, winding their cacophonic symphony down a symmetrical pair of ear canals - a surging rush of compressed air incites its violent pressure upon your ear drums. Here is where the symbols of language begin their emergence, feeling with sensual fingers of sound a passage to your brain. These poems are a record of these events, carved here in the stonelike skin of an internet entity for minds to meddle with. Click each and await indulgence:Categories: Fun, Weird, Humour, Poetry, Writing, Art, Ideas, Cool
Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity.
~ John Berger, Ways of Seeing
The perceiver's position in an architectural, or merely physical space, determines the dimensional imperatives of that person's mental qualia. It is interesting to note that each viewer of a rainbow stands at the centre of their very own optical illusion; that light, once split into its component colours, streams - within the constraints of nature - upon a mathematically defined axis, of no more or less than 42° relative to each perceiver's location. There is no definitive rainbow, indeed no absolute dimension from which one could view a rainbow, a horizon or simply a piece of architectural design. The ethereal qualities of light juxtaposed upon an infinity of possible perspectives extends interpretation into the realm of chaos. Throw into consciousness the essence of 'what it is like to be' (known in philosophy of mind as 'qualia'), and human caprice may very well define the clarification of any meaning as a pure impossibility.
That the human universe can be defined at all is ultimately a consequence of consciousness. To 'give reality greater clarity' is merely to multiply the 'what it is like to be' or the 'beingness' of any entity or concept. The more these kinds of being are multiplied, the more ways there are to perceive the universe and since the universe itself is nothing but perception, consciousness (in all its forms) may very well take credit as the creator of 'the real'. Just as a greater number of pixels gives an image a higher definition, so any multiplication of 'being' within the universe brings a higher definition to what has 'become'* . That which is perceived may be thought to be a minor segment of a text, a play of light on a skyscraper or a wavelength of colour in a rainbow – what in fact consciousness perceives is a universe being given better clarity in the very act of its perception. An exponential autopoiesis of 'becoming': A poem should not be but become.
~ Charles Bernstein, Rough Trades
That kinds of being can multiply is nothing special. Nature itself has blindly found, over the past few billion years of evolution, many new ways in which to 'become' itself. The application of amoeba 'being' lends a different definition to reality than bat 'being'. A bat, in turn, has a sonar 'beingness' utterly distinct from any human, and thus must experience a very different universe from ourselves. Where human consciousness wins out over other types of ‘being’ is in its application of language. Language, in this sense, can be understood as a virus: From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word...
~ William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded
...and like any parasitic virus, language, and its forms, multiply and subsume their host – hijacking its nervous system for their own ends. Consciousness is subsumed by language, therefore the human universe is defined through language, just as part of a bat's universe might be said to be defined through sonar (or sound). To aid in the multiplication of language forms; to bring greater clarity to a universe, humans must apply their language 'being' within reality. Art can be seen as language in a broad sense, but in this essay I will concentrate on those modes of language which apply most fervently to the art of poetry: writing, reading and becoming.
In his 1977 essay 'The Death of the Author' Roland Barthes argues that writing destroys all traces of the writer. This classic post-modern position assumes ownership of a text to be that of culture itself, finally labeling the writer as an instance of language. "Life" says Barthes, "never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.". The multiplicity of emergent meanings for a text allows readership to become the ultimate act of understanding, thus finally, giving the reader a broader, more holistic power over a text's meaning:Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.
~ Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
According to Barthes, the clarification (or 'becoming') of a text involves acknowledging dimensions beyond the plane of the text as expedited by its writer. The topology of writing suddenly loses its Cartesian dimensionality: the constituents of meaning have exploded:For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate enfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite – that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.* (Of course this means that any absolutely defined digital camera image would have to be made up of an infinite resolution of pixels – "I'd like a camera with at least ∞ megapixels please" – true 'becoming' would have to be plotted on an exponentially divergent curve. All infinitesimal steps in clarification are worthy of acknowledgment simply because true definition is infinite.)
~ David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning
Categories: Art, Perception, Consciousness, Literature, Human, Reality, Culture, Philosophy, Psychology, Simulacrum, Quotes, Ideas
The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms... life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
~ Virginia Woolf - Modern Fiction [UK/US]
Intending to subvert the intricate subtleties of the narrative form, Mr. Smith takes a box full of newspapers, magazines, cereal packaging, leaflets, letters, books and more, and begins a lonely ceremony.
The human form itself is pure narrative and nothing more:Human consciousness... can be best understood as the operation of a... virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which is runs.
~ Daniel Dennet - Consciousness Explained [UK/US]
All meaning is narrative. The awesome arcs of religious myth, the interplay of ideas emerging from conspiracy theories; from urban legends; from the life story of a single human within the context of a chaotic world. Each form is dependant on an evolutionary anomaly, inbred over time into the substructures of the human brain. The tale, the novel, the poem and the play expose little in their meanderings, but the architecture of consciousness. That within a 3 pound lump of matter, encased in a cavern of bone and flesh, all manner of universes are woven an existence.
Mr. Smith lays down his glue, his scissors and ponders for a moment all that is narration in his own crumb of reality. An infinity of worlds expand to bloom inside him; each bubble, when popped, gives birth a trillion more. Stories, endless stories, and nothing, nothing more... 
No text offers values or meanings that exist as essential features of itself. Shakespeare's plays are not essentially this or essentially that, or essentially anything. They are, to take up Wittgenstein's metaphor, far more like natural phenomena, mountain ranges, pieces of scenery out of which we make truth, value, greatness, this or that, in accordance with our various purposes.
~ Terence Hawkes - Meaning by Shakespeare [UK/US]
Categories: Art, Language, Maths, Weird, Humour, Literature, Writing, Fiction, Consciousness, Nonsense, Ideas, Quotes, Reality, Human
On The Solar Anus:It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form... all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth... They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.On The Big Toe:
[...]
The planetary systems that turn in space like rigid disks, and whose centres also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return to it, completing their rotation. Movement is the figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another. But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.
The interest of philosophy resides in the fact that, in opposition to science or common sense, it must positively envisage the waste products of intellectual; appropriation. Nevertheless, it most often envisages these waste products only in abstract forms of totality (nothingness, infinity, the absolute), to which it itself cannot give a positive content; it can thus freely proceed in speculations that more or less have as a goal, all things considered, the sufficient identification of an endless world with a finite world, and unknowable (noumenal) world with the known world.... God rapidly and almost entirely loses his terrifying features, his appearance as a decomposing cadaver, in order to become, at the final stages of degradation, the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity.
On The Labyrinth:MEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation (conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach... Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want – outside of me. It is a clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the me. Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be divine, which has at its base the immensity of the simplest matter... Being attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its fullest impact on being at the moment when, in the fall it unleashes, a representation of death is cynically recognised. It is not only the composition of elements that constitutes the incandescence of being, but its decomposition in its mortal form.On The Sacred Conspiracy:
Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for, the universe. To the extent that it becomes this head and this reason, to the extent that it becomes empty or neutral and, if it is free, it is in play.
Categories: History, Art, Language, Weird, Culture, Literature, Books, Reality, Human, Consciousness, People, Quotes, On the nature of...
Labels: On the Nature of
"Look! Look at boxes. There is ten. Ten boxes. I count them easy. Neat like I like. Not like mess inside them!"My favourite kind of box is a box file. The name of a box file gives away the function of all boxes, which is to file things. The distasteful mess that lies behind the shelved, alphebetised, face of any office, when tucked into a box, is tucked out of existence. Box upon box upon box. That's just three boxes - again, easily stacked, easily counted. From my desk , I can see approximately one hundred boxes. On reflection, I know that there are many more behind me. But the careful positioning of my chair - which gets the back of my head in between my eyes and some necessary but ugly administrative guts - has created a kind of virtual box, in which many actual boxes are stored away from my consciousness, their untidy contents another layer from my intellect.
Sylvester Stallone
A box, put simply, is an approximation - a low-resolution representation of its ultimate contents. Knowing this we can see that there are many conceptual boxes in play all around us all the time. Take these many molecules. Some groups of them I call 'nuts', some I call 'bolts'. However, not only are the little molecules thus boxed out of my mind, but even the nuts and bolts are packed away. As a casual, unquestioning cyclist, the nuts and bolts - along with 'spokes', 'gears', 'bearings', 'levers', 'cables' and 'tyres' - are packed clumsily in my head as a 'bicycle'. That concept - that neat entity in which I put my faith as I whirl down the hills - I can know all at once. That's why I trust it. I ignore the contents of that understood box, eliminating what it represents in favour of a sleek, manageable simulacrum.Thou blind fool, Box, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
Sonnet 137a, 'Thou blind fool, Box', William Shakespeare
It's been a while since I wrote anything here: I just seem to be too busy. But then I know Danieru is too, and he still manages to post post after post. Following his lead, I have a piece about boxes nearly done, and one about novels. They're unfinished, and on my mind. They have been for a while.
drunk poem22.53 070321.txt
The drunkenness revealing what's set into his mind,
he flinches his password onto the keys.
This is what I've become?
A beast with computers on its fingers,
narrating simple detail as if it's great fiction in the making?
It's an engrossing story,
but nature is no creative.
You heard about a book. Intrigue darkened in its normal consistency and gripped you. Something about the book’s ability to project the reader into the world of another mind. A world with characters leading implausible lives between a chapter, a page, a paragraph; sometimes merely within the rhythmic pentameter of one sentence. The writer is unknown to you, yet through the patterns of perspective weaved into you can clearly be made out a new colour, never before realised. Perhaps the book will be a let down, many are. Some wished-for vistas dull to grey, their sky-piercing peaks devolving, eroding to a single extended dimension over time. Perhaps, after some musing, you’ll be less alive in the book’s pages than in your own mind, and which reader seeks for that existence? The one they think they already know; the one they comfort awake each morning and rotate within their minds, is less whole than the world of the book. You ponder this, pausing for a moment to let the idea sink in. Is every book more real than an existence? Surely you’ll only discover by reading more. That’s what books are for.
The book rests in your hands now. You probably purchased it from a high street store, traipsing to its counter, clutching hours of your future experience in a sweaty palm. Several pound coins exchanged for a ticket of sustenance; a feeder of mental schema; a self deliberation machine. Some say this book is capable of bridging the present to the future - as if there were any difference between them. You overhear two teenagers bantering amongst themselves on the bus. Their knowledge of the book soothes you, leaves you grasping at coincidental narratives in your life; playing with conspiracy theories reverberating inside you. ("Things tend to happen in bundles.") And they crease up double in excitement, one claiming that a time portal projected the book from a thousand years in the future. Its magical elements, its speculative qualities arising not from shear force of the writer’s imagination, but by retrospective temporal chance. That any book written in the future, sent backwards in time, will instantly become science-fiction.
Your laughter surprises you. The old man aside you, smelling of a musk brewed deep into the age of his skin; the quaintness of his clothes, gives you a sidelong glance. Perhaps he has been listening too, and understands nothing. You have the book, but does he? You glance around at the bus passengers. Woolen hatted, hip-hop hooded, hairspray styled, permed and protected. Which head has this book made its way into already? What’s the head got that the book hasn’t? Is the book or the perception of the book the true virus? What is the book? What is mind? How can one bridge the two? You suddenly feel queasy as the bus jerks along the busy road and notice, in turning, a colour which reminds. Across and left of you another passenger clutches a copy of the book in their hands; pages half open. Peering lovingly at collections of symbols, arranged into semblamatic order and printed into the grain of the page. Black ink on an infinite canvas, building a world with each sweep of the reader’s eye.
Then there is the reading. The final hour when you lurch through time towards the moment, merely a moment, when the book falls open. Skip the contents page, rush through the dedication, straight into the first chapter. You wonder whether you’ll end up bordering another world. Perhaps the writer stares back at you; each ink blot tunnelling a black-hole towards them; every mind which reads it swirls off the page, twixt another universe to meet together; minds merging eternally. A writer, a tribe of readers, an infinity of worlds combine as one. The protagonist is drawn, looking out, up and over your shoulder back around and into the book you now hold. An infinite ouroboros swallowing its eternal tale. The first word comes up to meet you. It envelopes your entire being: who owns this moment?Categories: Fiction, Literature, Sci-Fi, Weird, Writing, Perception, Reality, Philosophy, Simulacrum, Consciousness, Time
I am a box.
I don’t like being a regular, fibreboard cuboid of 103cm along each side. I’d rather be a dodecahedron, or a hypercube. A dodecahedron is any polyhedron with twelve faces. Salvador Dali painted his version of The Last Supper as taking place inside a dodecahedron. A hypercube which exists in 4 dimensions of space, rather than the usual 3, is called a ‘tesseract’. Dali painted the crucifixion of Jesus as taking place on an unfurled tesseract. Dali is my hero because he painted a hypercube. I’d like to be one of them more than anything else in the universe, although I doubt a tesseract made out of medium density fibreboard could ever exist.
This is true regardless of whether a human invents it or not. Humans invent ‘things’ and manipulate representations of ‘things’ in their minds, but mathematics has always been around. Does that make me more real than you? I am a concept expressed in the language of nature. I would exist abstractly whether your mind understood me or not. Whereas you, well, you’re just a chaotic bundle of matter, perceptions and nothing more. There’s no function for being human, at least, not one that can be expressed mathematically. Are you as highly variable as a box?Categories: Maths, Nonsense?, Weird, Humour, Fiction, Links, Reality, Perception, Art
Jonathan Miller's A Rough History of Disbelief explores the development of atheism as a singular mode of being, clarifying quite spectacularly the emergence of secular thought over the past 500 years. Featuring interviews with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Arthur Miller, Colin McGinn and other secular luminaries, it is a MUST see.Categories: Science, History, Religion, Video, Links, Christianity, God, Ideas, Culture
Controversial French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, known for his fierce criticism of consumerism and excess, has died in Paris after a long illness at the age of 77.
He first attracted worldwide attention in 1991 with his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He argued that neither side could claim victory, and the conflict had changed little on the ground in Iraq.
He caused even bigger controversy with his views on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. He wrote the attacks were an expression of triumphant globalization battling against itself.
Born in Rheims west of Paris in 1929, Baudrillard taught high school students the German language. After receiving a doctorate in sociology, he taught at the University of Paris.
~ Read full news at VOA or BBC
Categories: News, People, Simulacrum, Philosophy, Culture, Reality
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