(Also interesting to contrast Powers of 10 with Cosmic Voyage - the faint panic, hysteria of the "gee whiz" ["a proton in the nucleus of a carbon atom beneath the skin on the hand of the sleeping man at the picnic"] vs. the impressive and ultimately coddling "wow" [as if the universe needs strings and horns! It begins with a move to avoid getting lost, to domesticate the cosmos - the paramecia like dogs, the quarks like little birds. "The only thing stopping my mind being blown all over the room, was the soothing sound of Morgan Freeman's voice" - this really says it all]. Also contrast Sagan's approach: Incredible how he brings everything back to people - notice the synths of the first approach meld with the orchestra of the second [and notice the music begins with the piano - human sounds - and how the synth fuses with the male chorus] - humans in and with the universe. Another point: Powers' and Sagan's empty universe vs. Cosmic Voyage's full, reassuring universe. "Notice", "think" - what incredibly powerful words!
Hell I could do a whole article on this. Everything is so fucking infinitely dense with information I can't take it! How do I know when to stop, and where!? Everything overflows with exceptions, intricacies - I'm stuck on infinite zoom.)
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Regarding depth as in depth psychology, depth of understanding, hidden depths, intellectual depth, depths as opposed to surfaces:
Not a framework of depths and surfaces but degrees of zoom, and scale. Not "more or less true" but "differently true" - different perspectives on the same thing. Recognising you can miss the forest for the trees - taking in the forest, the trees, the bark, the cellulose, molecules, atoms at your option. Zoom out and zoom in - refocus. Examine the leaves, the woodlice, the birds' nest, the roots and the soil. See how different they are. Zoom out til you can see them interacting, then til they become indistinct. Zoom in til everything breaks apart, becomes the medium for the next smallest thing. Dissolve and combine.
Zoom reveals the complexity of surfaces - uniform white painted walls reveal an infinity of brushstrokes. Zoom further in, you can see the action of each bristle, arm hairs trapped in the paint, semi-visible dents, cracks and blemishes. You lose awareness of the wall as "Wall" - it becomes taken for granted, loses its environment and so becomes an environment - the invisible condition of seeing. Depth rips away the surface and discards it, asserts the bare wall is truer than the paint, the poster. Depth asserts the skeleton is truer than the flesh.
Zoom favours interweaving, contingency, co-evolution - nothing is privileged. Depth favours layering, hierarchy, transcendence - chain of command. Zoom is plural, bottomless, occurring from infinite angles - Depth is singular, presenting a consistent object to be gotten to the bottom of. Zoom moves around, in, through - Depth dives, excavates - Depth underlies its surface, which conceals it always.
Depth is up and down, Zoom is in and out. Depth is thought for an Earthbound culture, Zoom is thought for globes.
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"18. The Kino-Eye, then, can be understood as a cyborg combination of human and movie camera, which both creates and depends upon multiple perspectives for its interpretation and communication. In taking the spectator from the position of passive consumer to active producer of cinematic meaning, the Kino-Eye functions as a contagious "virus," contained in the film text. Once infected by it the viewer becomes Kino-Eye, "challenging the human eye's visual representation of the world and offering its own 'I see"
mid-15c., perhaps frequentative of romen "to walk, go" (see roam), perhaps via romblen (late 14c.) "to ramble." The vowel change perhaps by influence of Middle Dutch rammelen, a derivative of rammen "copulate," "used of the night wanderings of the amorous cat" [Weekley]. Meaning "to talk or write incoherently" is from 1630s. Related: Rambled; rambling.
It's idiotic to put off writing because I don't know what I'm going to write - writing is thinking (beautiful interview with Don DeLillo here - first question), an extension of thought - cramming it into the sentence, the paragraph, etc. - grammar - an extension - that is to say, transformation! - extension to theretofore (!) undreamed of fields of possibility, new angles, new dimensions - infinite articulations of energy, élan vital - synergetic potentials, recombinations - and so on.
My God! The letter - what an incredible piece of technology! Letter in terms of alphabet that is - an engine for the transformation of thought. Letter as alien parasite sucking the thoughts from our heads and transforming them*, shitting them out, re-presenting them to us as if it were us all along - puppeting us at our selves. Letter as symbiote - what am I but symbiotes? I'm a tenuous treaty, a pact - or a Mexican standoff! And so are they, all the way down. I'm invisible. "Mutualism", "parasitism" - an archetype for relations - a difference in degree - take a little, leave a little. Alphabet is an extension-mutation of glyph, painting - My God! But it's got DNA from all over - everything does.
* "Sucking the thoughts from our heads and transforming them" vs. "Sucking the thought from our heads and transforming it" - a plurality of singulars (which are themselves multiplicities - pluralities? Have to do research into the difference between the Latin Pluralis and Multus) vs. a single multiplicity - a single undifferentiated flow of Thought. Both interesting ways to consider it, opted for "thoughts" for the sense of a one-by-one - plop, plop, plop - different every time. It moves more - has sequentiality the other doesn't.
Like how wings evolved I think - between wings and not wings, there's a bunch of useful things that aren't capable of flight - evolution being like climbing out of a volcano, looking for handholds, lava rising gradually - but instead of taking one path you take every path - an infinity scrambling up the same cliff. You take a time lapse, multiple exposure photograph, it looks like brachiation. Fuck brachiation! There's acrobats leaping across the inside of the volcano, tunneling into the rock, building homes, cafes, scaffolding, carving new handholds, eroding others, people climbing on each other, piggybacking to infinity. Good strategy: Establish a correspondence in metaphor, then fuck it up, break it open, add bits that don't make any sense to you - it'll work itself out, I promise (the brain wants to find patterns) - you'll discover new things. Like a synchrotron (2, 3): get it all up to speed, then smash it into something.
Fun thing to do related to this (a general case to its specific case): Include the urge to symmetry ("symmetry" meaning pattern) in everything you do and queer it - leave things missing, make them fail to line up clearly - walk the line between boring chaos and boring structure - ie. maximise information content ("information is difference that makes a difference"), incompleteness, implied (enfolded) content. Information = Implication.
Almost entirely boring* chaos: i58938457f49857so4w5osw94857nso4985ls4n895s475ls
Almost entirely boring* structure: If A, then B. If B, then C. Therefore, if A, then
* When considered without reference to anything external to the statements past the colon - but still that is a really really difficult thing to do because the use of language, alphabet, capitalisation, letter, number, etc. implies an infinity of things - but you get the gist of what I'm demonstrating here! 1) That in both of these cases very little can be gained by looking for patterns - ie. there is very little to unfold, to explicate 2) That nothing is boring if you think about it.
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The difference between painting on and carving in. The difference between carving in wood, carving in stone - very telling that love hearts tend to be carved into trees and not rocks (but everything's telling - a screaming cacophony, constantly! Difficult to shut it out - but who'd want to?). They're alive! Can't you see!? They're living things birthed from us and a knife and a tree and a love heart and names and ah!!!! Screaming - generating meaning, vital, jittering, shimmering, straining - the image of the heart on the tree straining, convulsing, urging itself off the tree into our heads, or onto the TV, onto film, into data and onto screens, into conversation, words, song and all that I haven't mentioned and all variations thereon everything. Everything is alive, everything wants to do things (you could call those urges "affects" if the language is useful to you) - it has environments it finds hospitable - or bearable - it is changed by its environment (is an environment) like any other thing, mutates, grows, spreads, expands, mutates! - ie. tech (I call it tekhne ["TEK-NEE" - that's how I like to pronounce it] mostly to differentiate it from tech's worn out, conventionalised, baggaged self - Ancient Greek has become a great reserve of alienation, defamiliarisation-effects - it has its afterlife, its character [to be less obscure: certain things we can do easier with dead languages than with live ones] - this all goes back to the ethos of "don't fight forces - use them!", "exaptation", "Style it!", "détournement", "repurposing", "pollution's just resources we don't know how to use yet" - there is nothing you can't put to some use) - tekhne is the delineation of matter-energy by brains + the thought how to interact with it, ie. the use-value idea, one of any infinite number of phyla of thought (I have come up with around 6, I will post them one day).
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When writing: The difficult process of determining a thing's relative importance to another thing (as determined by my gut), what in the first place to constitute as a thing, establishing a threshold of importance below which things are excluded from consideration, which of course means the model can never be a picture of what is - all my work is already perfectly compromised - all I can do is have fun. No point questing after the truth and all that bullshit - it's all true - quest after a better working model - update it as new information presents itself, then die eventually. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't fun - what I offer is not the truth but the product of a mania - one that I hope is contagious.
All reason ultimately goes back to the body, to that which isn't thought.*
* Frankly I don't even know if half of what I write makes sense (least of all to me) but the fact that it can be written and I can read it without feeling like I've been punched in the gut suggests something. Honestly it's like sandpaper on the inside of my skull when I get it wrong.
I can't get to truth - in making a model - I think it was an economist name starting with 'L' - something like "Lucas" - said that any model which can't explain-anticipate its own effects on what it describes is incomplete. Same reason we can't simulate (model) a glass of water really - to simulate the glass you have to simulate the room, the house, the planet, the universe in its entirety including the simulation, including the simulation of the simulation, and so on to infinity. The future is unknowable. Everything is unknowable - anything's possible! Brilliant! But of course the fact is some things tend to happen more often than others, models are useful, practical - you can build trains, cars, skyscrapers with the right models.
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Every statement I make screams exceptions at me, implications begging to be explicated*. Everything spills out, spills over, and shades into everything else - into violently flickering-glimmering rainbow infinity. Definition past a certain point is like an infestation - you define the thing, the words you use to define it demand definition, and so on to infinity. The dictionary was its first victim - chestburster to definition's facehugger (Kane perhaps being language?). Everything is exploding continually, metonymically - through contagion
* This is what happens when I forget I am building on sand - that something can be untrue, inconsistent and still have an effect. I am not giving you theory - never mistake what I give you for theory. Never mistake it or anything else for the only truth - everything's true, all at once. My trick is walking the line between making what I say obscure enough I can't tell if it's right or wrong - obscure enough to be flexible, malleable, lively - and not so obscure it's useless: Between boring structure and chaos.
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Something I do while I'm writing when I can't figure out what to write next but I have it in me but it's not coming - clap three times in front of me - while no one's around, of course! Funny thing - the evolution of the language centers of the brain is paralleled in the etymology of "diction", which explains why we gesticulate (ie. "to speak" grows out of "to point" - proliferate [←adjective - pronounce to rhyme with:] infinite word-hands, concept-limbs flying from mouth, pointing, falling away, building, shaping, sculpting arguments floating in front of me. I was told that the brain kind of hijacked the bits responsible for the hands when it was growing language*. And of course this all goes back to Cronenberg's Videodrome - 200,000 years of TV, music, poetry and film - all media - and we'll have centers for all of them too, made from our hacked jury-rigged language centers, our sensorium, and whatever else the brain finds lying around. Videodrome argues McLuhan (as Brian O'Blivion) mutated the TV brain ahead of schedule as it were (if you want to talk about a schedule) ("Marshall McLuhan’s brain was fuelled by fresh blood from the heart through not one but two arteries at the base of his skull, a trait in the mammalian world found mostly in cats and rarely in human beings." - Lord knows the significance of that but it's interesting as all fuck, I tell you). My point is this - you too can mutate in your own lifetime! The economy is really the greatest friend evolution ever had (What a proliferation of selection pressures! A machine for transforming anything into a selection pressure via money [which I will elaborate on in another article {and here when I say "evolution" I mean "my idea of evolution", which has its own desires, tendencies distinct from the conventional idea - it wants!}])
* Other interesting thing - the throat and the hands and conceptual thought are linked in the 3rd Circuit of Tim Leary's old 8-circuit Consciousness model (page 100).
Excerpt from an email to someone:
"Everything mutates everything else - exploring for instance the cyborg idea in my book in the context of speech, word, club, drug, etc. (pretty much everything) as technology, body reconfigured as most efficient machine for production of song, form perfectly devised to exist in a particular room - setting bodies to maximum malleability and environments to stasis. Like looking at the consequences of billions of years of human evolution taking place inside a single room, unchanging. Interesting to consider bodies as incredibly slow-moving fluids, gradually conforming to their environments, responding to various forces. Also interested in the evolution of technology, and ideas about technology (which I consider basically the same processes, evolutionary processes, operating under different constraints. For instance, I am writing a story about how a woman's relationship with her camera changes over an extended period of time in the wilderness. A single body is a totally different environment-ecosystem to a group-culture, to a body of shared ideas about a thing.) I am tracing the evolution of ideas about technology in single bodies, carrying them to their limits and beyond. Several stories in mind tracing the integration and transformation of various technologies."
My point is really that I think the clapping is a kind of abracadabra, something from nothing, but also brain clearing-resetting manoeuvre - a dismissal. Clap on, clap off! As I saw it said by this Daniel Coffeen guy: "Of course I move my fucking hands as I speak! I'm making the world here." I have always said that magic is the process of changing yourself by changing the world, and vice-versa.
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Thought is the shadows of future brain - what we'll grow into. Lord knows what I mean by this! Maybe I'm saying the thoughts are the scaffolding til we grow the hardware. To be less teleological (that is to stop assuming an "end" - a "til"): if a thing exists long enough, things tend to grow into it, out of it, etc. (but lord knows if anything's going to stick around that long - this is more me desperately, feverishly wanting it because it's so interesting. The thing to understand is that I'm absolutely wrong - all my work is a product of grievous continual misunderstanding of everything.)
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I'm in perpetual cocaine monologue. I have thoughts so fast I can't write them on paper they look like they've been sucked through a jet engine when I try. Of course faster is not better - faster is different, ie. better for different things - there's no "better" apart from a "for". This is no boast! Idiocy at lightspeed is still idiocy - or is it? Some things make sense at some speeds and not others - go slow enough and nothing makes sense. As horses transition from walk through to trot through to canter to gallop - as ice melts, turns to vapor - I am aiming to achieve plasmatic thought, to set my brain on fire. When I talk I am moving my hands, my body, my everything constantly. One day I will vibrate fast enough to explode my atoms and burn holes through to infinite different realities.
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Taking pride in something you're not involved with is the most fucked up thing.
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Computer, internet is post-media. It brings us closer to that which all art aspires to: The direct engineering of human experience, and by extension reality. Its art - its canvas and brush - is all art. And all history, all everything, data. The idea of a medium, a movement or whatever being "alive" or "dead" is TV-age thought - all history coexists. Technology approaches the state of all time and space coexisting - the mystic moment.
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Other interesting idea, following McLuhan - the satellite is the human body extended to envelop the Earth; the laptop is Earth shrunk so a human body can surround it. The former was necessary for the latter.
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We're ecosystems, ecosystems are organisms - a difference in degree, degrees of freedom - your lungs can't just pack up and leave. Everything is continuous, everything's everything else, you just have to find the right paths. There is a parth from any thing to any other thing - this is metaphor. Everything runs, lines dissolve, overflow, everything becomes line and not line, everything becomes centre and circumference. All experience is all other experience. Everything is present in everything else and not reducible to any of it; multipliable to all of it - totally different - everything's a little bit of what it's made of and a little bit of something else - its synergetics, drift - greater than the sum of its parts (or very precisely the sum of its parts, depending on how you look at it).
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Metaphor is a straight-talking about the thing which is both. Metaphor is the most literal way of speaking. All we really do is compare two (or more) things then name the space between (funny thing I tell everyone is the Venn diagram is also an ancient holy shape [!] called the "vesica piscis" which is supposed to be a birth canal ie. "the girly parts" - this is also where you get the Jesus fish [piscis = fish] - there's an interesting point about Jesus' femininity in there somewhere. For more on the intersection between Jesus, creativity and the birth metaphor, check out The Man From Utopiaby Rick Griffin [you can read it with this or by opening it as a .rar file and extracting the images]).
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Dumb to believe the world's here for us - dumb as anything else, clever as anything else - maybe it's here for grass, sheep, governments, money, art, plastic, sewage, loud noises, fire, birds, optimising for flightspeed (One funny thing I made from the idea of Manuel DeLanda is the idea of graphing time against [funny word - means "in opposition to" and "in contact with" - same as how drawing lines separates in connecting] all sorts of quantities - highest heat, projectile speed achieved on Earth; quantity of light, plastic, cows, electricity, etc. And the idea of viewing the planet from space [or from anywhere else] with magic goggles which filter everything but financial flows, or speech, or slavery-relations, or heat). All we can say is believing it has its effects.
All we can say is it has its effects, and we can decide for ourselves whether these effects are desirable or otherwise, and that this decision has its effects - and we might decide that our desires, our decisions are effects, and that really what we're doing is just the incredibly complex unfolding of all these effects - but this itself is a belief-act with its own effects, and there are places we can get by believing it that we can't get otherwise, and places barred to us - it is a transformation, a thing which enters into relation with the rest of our body*, the universe. It might be reasonable to acknowledge this as fact (that is as true within a framework, contingent on certain assumptions) or a certainty and disbelieve it - which of course is a third thing with its own effects - disbelieving, contingent on acknowledgement, as opposed to a not-believing which is identified with a lack of awareness, [which isn't itself a lack to the person who isn't aware but I don't know what else to call it. If you do please comment!])
* "Body" constituted as object, as thing, which has its own effects - is not taken for granted.
Mutually extending, enhancing, limiting - focusing. I'm just a bunch of friends taking each other for granted. Friends settled into arrangements so long they've forgotten it ever was otherwise, ever could be otherwise - human pyramid. All just a matter of figuring out what you're made of, taking it apart, blowing out the dust, putting it all back together - everyone's there out of choice now - total Yes, yes a total affirmative, known multiplicity. Habit is death - shake it up!
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Fuck writing in one dimension (the line) - there's so much more I could achieve with two*. But how?
* Footnotes grope at 2D writing (brackets too [sometimes]). Best understood as fractal dimensions, ie. 1.155432345245D! hahahaha
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Mask-umbilical, gestating pod - the umbilical as figure (image, metaphor) for relations.
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A thing's products fed back into it, becoming its environment. eg. A musician's imitators, a bird's nest, a parent's child, a painter's artwork.
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There is no such thing as redundancy.
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There is no such thing as a synonym - only degrees of synonymy, distances at which things blur into one.
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Verbs are nouns are adjectives.
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Plurals are singulars.
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Sculpture idea: 26 screens (in a 2 by 13) alphabet algorithm which calculates letters' degree of resemblance to oneanother, transforms this number into a probability, enters it into a pool and rolls dice, transforms letters slow enough that you can make out what the letter is before it transforms and no slower (? - sure you could optimise rate of change to produce an effect of afterimages-memories blurring into oneanother ie. by the time your brain registers what the last letter was there's a new letter. Really a matter of relative speed - is the image outrunning your brain or keeping pace with it?). "FUCK YOU" scrawled across screens in red lipstick (25 degrees clockwise from horizontal? You know the angle I mean - scrawled).
This idea was simple enough that it was trivially (not in a boastful sense!) easy to describe - what is the point at which it would be easier to build a sculpture than to describe it? Presumably there is a threshold (of a quantity which is the product of any number of factors) past which transforming it into words becomes grotesquely inefficient - words digest it poorly, you get diarrhoea - a torrent of watery bullshit. Difficulty of expression in matter - written sculpture can achieve things sculpture can't (And vice-versa. Remember - everything is different, everything is good for different things - a described sculpture is not a shadow of "sculpture" as is typically understood - it is its own medium. In every case, there is a set of relations which can be cross-applied to any experience - this is metaphor). And of course, physical sculpture offers its own inputs, rhythms - takes part in a dialogue-dance with yourself, your ideas, mood, hands, eyes, etc. - thinking with clay, thinking with wires, thinking with action figures, metal, plants, sentences, characters - all matter-energy, everything. Art is transforming the world into prosthetic thought - the world becomes an extended brain. It always is if we're honest, so I suppose art is doing it deliberately, intensively - and of course I am echoing Truth and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense here: only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. Self-consciousness annihilated in the expanded self - the World-Body - you become the world - thinking-perceiving and being become indistinct - Dhyana, Samadhi; I-Thou. And I do not care if this contradicts anything else in his essay - to worry about that is to miss the point. I am puppeting Nietzsche, speaking my words through his mouth. Reason, rationality, consistency are tools to be engaged as appropriate - nothing is taken for granted - not even nothing! And there is no such thing as an interesting misreading - if it's interesting, it's not a misreading. I'll even get my serious, authoritative '.' to tell you so! My mobile army - the '.' is a metaphor too, you know.
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Fun thing: say "of course" and "obviously" when things aren't really obvious at all. Tell people to "remember", that you are "reiterating" when in fact you have never said it before. Say you have "always believed" something when you've never believed it til that moment - wind up with one hand and jab with the other. Truth is an afterthought - one effect among many. My writing is complex machines for effecting brain-change. But of course I am telling the truth! It is a greater, poetic truth which encompasses falsehood! (hahahahaha)
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Writing like this is a matter of surfing the great whirlpool of thought leading up my own asshole and trying my best not to fall in.
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Everything is true sometimes - everything offers a framework of relations which can be applied through a process of metaphor as appropriate. Nothing about a thing's usefulness in this respect is determined by the things it's associated with (eg. Nothing about some words' usefulness is determined by the words they find themselves next to, nor from whose mouth-hands they came) - influenced, yes, but not determined.
(I have never really set out-brought together my thoughts on metaphor - I suppose I'll have to! Actually, could I? There's always more than can be brought together and in bringing together more is generated - and so on.)
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multi-plex, many-fold
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P.S. I heard this lately and it was good:
No wonder I love Ariel Pink - the proliferation of voices, the ecstasy of influence, the privileging of effect over "sense-making" (in the narrowest, poverty-strickenest sense - but really effect is the sense which encompasses everything) - all apotheosised in him singing "Elevators" as Bowie. Ariel's another prototype, McLuhan - channel-surfing TV junk brain. Two good quotes from McLuhan on this:
"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation."
"The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race’. Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression."
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Funny how the process of finishing this was really a process of skimming across what I'd written, weaving terms together - the writing implied in the word processor - this article is written to be read with the find bar (ctrl+f). Emergent though - vomiting everything out and surfing the correspondences that announce themselves to me, are implicit in my body, etc.
Why did I start this blog, man? What's the significance of my referring to you as "man" there?? What does it suggest that I was able to consider that appropriate?? What does this augur for the future of the blog? Its character? The nature of its output? Its character! Even now my blog has a character - this post in conjunction with its name, its layout, its background image - its choosing to have a background image. My considering blog posts as "output" rather than "content", attributing autonomy to it - that the blog can produce rather than be considered a vessel, a "platform for content" (why take these metaphors for granted? Bullshit! Anything can be anything - ask yourself always, "What is the most productive-pleasurable way to consider this?") Everything seems like an earth-shattering decision til I realise this is the only way it could unfold - the first stroke on the canvas. Every stroke is a first stroke. The canvas was a stroke. Things being earth-shattering decisions is a perspective-approach (metaphor) I can drop when it stops being fun. Everything is playing dressups. How do you consider yourself? Try approaching the world as a childish dandy - delicacy, fashion, tantrums and sweets. Proliferate your approaches - assume every position. What would Jesus do? What would a paranoid do? What would the King of England do? Part of the blog will be written from childish dandy position - flippant, flitting, tittering skipping singing - brimming! Overfull. Always overfull - overflowing.
I keep thinking the existence of the blog will prompt me to autogenerate content, kind of suck it out of me, rewire my brain to a machine for the production of food for it. I have had two blogs before and they've both died - they couldn't ask loud enough for what they wanted and so they starved, or they asked for it in languages I didn't know, or asked for things I couldn't give them - no difference. This blog will shape my brain as I shape it - everything does. I usually only write emails - I have no idea how to work stuff that's good and engaging without a specific person in mind - but there is another approach which says I make the stuff and people whose minds it engages will find it and meld with it and take it into themselves and develop again a relationship with it, which changes it and in turn changes me changing it changes them in a great singing shimmering feedback loop into which I'm plugged and which I hope will take on life, exceed control and evade understanding. Voluminous emails! Real voluptuous. Thousands of words! "We fill pre-existing forms and in filling them we change them and are changed" I am in eternal dialogue polylogue-cacophony with everything. A million mouths. All mine!
I don't know what this blog is about, and I'll never know, and that's brilliant.
