Mot Juste in Fauxetry

I went down to the studio today (my third place as the textbooks would call it now) to do some mental health improv shredding in the key of A and found this while leafing through a notebook of music I've been working on for an upcoming album over the last few months.

Still working on further actual posts in re of whole brain thinking, priming, mental clarity, and the new concepts subprogramming and the fallacy of (mis)scaling. Keep an eye out, but don't hold your breath either.

Enjoy my rambling poetry (or as I call it, fauxetry).

cheers.

Mot Juste

Eldritch ether of my childhood waking dreams

On the outer lip of sleep’s spiral-funnel-abyss

Of non-, un-, meta-, sub-, supra-consciousness

Of the ages since the dawn of man

Of my life since my conception

Of the reality of my day since daybreak

To this point

To this now

To this ever present, everlasting moment

Which is always here

In this bed

Underneath these blankets

The intimate warmth of superficial safety

Guarded from the suicidal tendencies

Lurking beyond my mattress

Haunting my halls

Stalking this eldritch ether of mind and experiences

Isolated

Apart

As

All

Any

One

Two

Infinite

Unable

To consummate as all

As us, them, me, you

Perfection is striven for

The closer I get the further I am from you all

Raising awareness and pints…and expectations

…And falling short, flat, face down

The pitiful chakras in the soles of those whom

I lay beneath, trampled and tread upon

I will always see you for more than what you are

I will paint you as a rose-

Colored

With my infatuation; delusional

Only to end with distance in time and geography

Hopeless Utopian romantic dreamers

Will forever grasp for coals too hot to handle

Never waiting until they have cooled

And then it’s too late

Sucker

Again you shall starve, writing a recipe to die for

And a song to forget

And a song to forget you by

Forgettable as any

Who said ‘Alchemists should stick to the laboratory’?

Stop venturing about young Fool

Lest the Devil take you back to the Tower

Initiation never ends, just youth, just chance, just this life

Mere opportunities

Sheer logic

Would tell you

Give up, turn inward, the outside is too much effort

They don’t want you and they don’t believe you anyway

Helpless quixotic debutant: go fuck yourself

And stick to what you know

Go eat out the Muse and drink from her font

She’ll at least pat you on your head afterwards

Give and give and give and give

Never take

And blame them afterward

Born under certain stars

It rains…in perpetuity

A solemn cloud to match a solemn shadow

Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi;

And I never get it right; silence when communication is apropos

And the other way ‘round

Wending abysmally down wrong-ways

Ah, but consistency is a virtue!

And the Greeks have their crowbars and Preparation-H

Platonic

Ha! And I use to be Aristotelian

And now the Neoplatonists want me

Born under certain stars

23 of them to be exact

And the Universe’s synchronous sense of humor…

…Yes, and there is that

And you can only achieve T.A.Z. with an instrument in your hand

Goose eggs!

And George Washington wrote: ‘No wife, no horse, no mustache’

No girl, no money, no style.

Mot juste.

Harnessing the Irrational

Been away for awhile, if anyone noticed. Yeah, didn't think so. Either way, I've been busy doing more concept formulation and active discussion and less composition, but I did want to throw up a quick post for the purpose of keeping myself focused on Alchememetic Illusionectomy, if only in the back of my mind.

Anyway, I've been working on the idea of using reason to harness our irrational side of the brain so as to use it in rational ways; i.e. using reason to take advantage of irrationality. This seems to be on the face of it the basis for systems such as alchemy and goes along with the concept of the yin and the yang. Basically, I'm talking about the marriage of the rational and irrational and understanding the equally worthy aspects of both.

We employ reason everyday in our lives as I've often spoke of before. But we also employ emotion and intuition as well and this can be tricky. Pure emotion often will lead us in the 'wrong' direction and we tend to make 'mistakes' when we go along merely with our emotional responses to circumstances.

When we have an emotional response to something, but before acting upon it we employ reason we can head off a lot of misery by seeing the long-term effects that our strictly emotional responses could have led to if we had acted solely in accordance with them. We become reactionary and inconsistent.

I'm especially looking into how this can be applied to creativity and quotidian life, but until I have the time to fully and more articulately go on further I hope that you may have your on thoughts and feel free to share them.

No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache...Ewige Blumenkraft, vol. XXIII

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.

Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man.

More older stuff...
23 September 2007
Pico, quoting from the Hermetica, states the same thing as modern day existentialism, Objectivism, and even LaVey's version of Satanism, that man is free to make his own choices and fashion himself as he pleases. What remains is for man to gather the knowledge and resources to make the optimal decisions and fashion himself in the best way possible for himself - requiring the development of purpose - which is not inherent in him at birth. Man is not born with purpose, he may choose to develop one for himself...or not.

Good and evil are not axiomatic. These concepts can only exist via self-referential consciousness. The lack of good and evil's existence as fundamental axioms does not negate the possibility for a code of ethics and morality; indeed, our survival requires it.
Strive for intellectual honesty, intellectual integrity, and intellectual courage. This is the only way in which you can fully develop your personal philosophy in such a way that it will (to the fullest extent possible) be developed logically and clearly.

How Far Have I Really Come?

Found this sitting on the hd the other day. Hmm...I don't know if I really agree with all of it, but I was reading a lot of wierd shit at the time. Enjoy.

6 December 2004

Man has no intrinsic, inborn, fate-determined destiny or purpose. You make your own purpose. All existence is one (as above, so below; micro/macrocosm); we are only different because our self-reference allows us to negate and realize our being, our subjectivity. Increase awareness and understanding. Gain knowledge and learn to properly connect it and conciliate it. Tap into your divinity. There is no supernatural, just aspects of nature which are not widely understood. God is the infinite, the nameless – that which cannot be understood given the holistic nature of God – everything is ‘God’, being is ‘God’, infinity is ‘God’. We are just different patterns of the same energy as everything else. These patterns create systems, subsystems, and metasystems. Look at the similarities of the physical patterns against information patterns. Dreaming as reorganization of memes (or ‘filing away’) and the mind coming up with stories to explain why you are thinking what you are thinking (compare with the plasticity of the brain). Transform negative experiences into something that furthers you, makes you grow. Altruism breeds victimology.

Appreciate your challenges. Transform yourself: Extropian Alchemy.

Mind expansion!

Higher awareness – being aware of life and of living!

Realizing your subjectivity, and even more profound, realizing you are the unknown Other to everyone else, or more specifically in everyone else’s subjective perceptions. Other people have their interesting views of you that you are unaware of. They see you as something you are not. You are what you do, your actions, and what you have done. But the majority of people have no idea who you are, let alone what you have done which makes you who you are, and furthermore, you to yourself are something different than what you do.

Sartre, by saying that you are who you are through your actions (I presume) is implying that that is who you are to everyone else. Quite on the contrary, you have the intimate knowledge of your thoughts (whether acted upon or not) and also your unique subjective perception of the world and thusly, are a much different person to yourself than you are to others. And on top of this, every other individual has their own unique perception of you whether it be from different shared experiences with you, hearing different stories about you, meeting you at different times of your life (or day for that matter). This, to an extent, references to the question of who we are: the ‘every changing “I”’.

Are we really the same ‘I’ that we were ten years ago? Firstly, our cells regenerate every seven years (or so), so technically our bodies are not the same, but our minds, though having taken on many more memes are along the continuity/continuum (as far as an autobiographical ‘narrative’ of experiences, et cetera). But I pretty much believe that our minds are the product of our brains (bodies/soma) and so henceforth, discounting the mind/body duality. So, are memories/memes somehow made physical when ‘recorded’ in our brains? If this is so, then our memories must be copied to newer cells (check on the factuality behind this as in neurons and neuronal connections) before the cells are replaced. [Sounding a bit too much like Dianetics (engrams and such)> find out how much more physiology/neuropsychology has discovered; ‘electric patterns/neuron-firing patterns’].

If all you do is self-directed, how can you feel like you are living? One action can change how people think of you completely. Up until you do a particular action people may say that they ‘Didn’t think you were “capable” of doing it.’ Of course, this can have positive or negative connotations. So who are you really? You are many people; you are many possibilities. On a daily basis, most people tend to act according to probabilities, but that in turn is more often than not a form of laziness; continuing along patterns of mere existence and fortifying the status quo.

I am not here trying to proselytize the reader into chaos or anarchy, but saying rather to find positive purpose in ones life so that one may move towards something better – to improve as opposed to just staying the same way, which is never as optimal as it could be (tautological? – is it possible to be more optimal?)

Experiences can create memes because they replicate the situation in objective reality into a mental state in the brain. This mentalization can then be conferred to another brain i.e., replicated.

What is the relation between experiential memes and fundamental memes? Experiential memes can possibly be viewed as a combination between memes and qualia. Fundamental memes are irreducible, and are the foundations on which more complex memes are based upon, or at least enabled by.

Y2K As A Cultural Benchmark Pt. II

Just as sociocultural currents influenced the technological implications of the 19th-Century, so too did the sweeping sociocultural tidal waves of the 20th-Century affect the evolution of the technology we employ everyday now in our quotidian lives. And just as art influences life and vice versa, technology too influenced life and vice versa.

The practical applications of technological developments direct the way in which they are designed. These practical applications may be different from user to user, i.e. the government, the military will use certain technologies many times in much different ways than civilians will in their daily lives; businesses may use certain technologies in different ways than NASA, etc.

The 1990s with the 'Tech Boom', or the birth of the Information Age, saw the beginnings of the fruition of many, many technologies trickling down to the lay person. No longer was it necessary to educate oneself to a staggering degree in order to fully immerse oneself into the realm of personal computers and the burgeoning internet. Gone were the days where only the wealthy and electronically-inclined were able to build hi-def home stereos and theatres. Just as the Industrial Revolution brought high-speed travel, electricity and long-distance auditory, telephonic communications to the masses, the Information Age brought PCs, video games and satellite television to the luddites - technology used and embraced by everyone from retired seniors to elementary school children.

So how did this new state of affairs affect and infect culture? The technology boom of the 20th-Century was by no means instant or universal, but you can find Toyotas and Michael Jackson cassette tapes in Third World villages the world over. The Cold War's military forces brought plenty of technology to these remote regions and so did the growing phenomenon of globalization.

In the smoldering ashes of the fallen Soviet Union, the door was opened for the West and its investment capital to move into previously verboten territory making new strides in the increased availability of cheap labor and the subsequent lower production costs.

As with anything viewed as change, whether the particular point of view deems it as good or bad, there are those who see more negative than positive aspects in the new state of affairs. Not that their fears are totally unwarranted every time: nuclear warfare threatens us to this day, new diseases arise with stronger immunity to our medicinal countermeasures, global finance is at the whim of a growing international market affecting all corners of the world, terrorist backlashes (sometimes referred to as blowback) from groups ranging from suicidal fundamentalist Muslims to jaded fundamentalist 'pro-life' Christians to crazed, homegrown activist-zealots (be they of the animal-rights, racial supremacist or other ilk).

One such fear stemming from the unique situation we have become accustomed to as a result of our modern-day digital world was the so-called 'Y2K' scare. This particular circumstance involved the date change at the beginning of the new millennium when the dates of computer software would traditionally have rotated on a two character year format from '99' to '00'. As you can see, this problem would have resulted from computers representing the year 2000 as the year 1900 by default - as all computers (electronic at least) up to this point had all existed in one century, the 20th.

I will take for granted here that everyone reading this will remember vividly all of the possible apocalyptic scenarios peddled on all of the nightly news programs(and by that time the twenty-four hour news channels as well for that matter).

As the urgency to change code in all possibly affected software increased, businesses large and small from banking conglomerates to independent business owners, and government agencies and offices hurried to update all their software and operating systems to show the four digit year and thus avoid any possible breakdown in the immense system of res digitalis on which we had all come to depend.

Even with the lumbering bureaucracies of the US government, the updates were completed in time and the earth did not crumble even as we clinked glasses over the familiar melody of Auld Lang Syne. Yet another Eschaton had failed to be immanentized. Sorry, Nostradamus...I guess.

In the wake of this largely non-event, a subconscious affirmation of our abilities to avoid Frankenstein-like self destruction by way of our own technological developments arose. We had dodged a bullet which we had accidentally, or unknowingly, fired at more vital organs than our feet. As the decade wore on the first generation to be totally immersed in internet culture started to grow up. In a few short years cell phones became as prolific as blue jeans once had, and quicker nonetheless.

Everything from instant messaging to instant bill payments became a way of life for more and more. Harddrives became more capacitous and processors quickened at an incredible rate (and continue to). And size decreased making it feasible to hold 2 gigabytes of information on your keychain for a few hours' wages. The ability to carry thousands and thousands of high-quality audio tracks in your pocket, to check your myspace page and take pictures with your phone.

As we said before, life influences technology and technology influences life and hence, culture in general. It seems that our successfully overcoming the Y2K dilemma has renewed our confidence in mankind's ability to overcome both problems in nature with our technology and our technolgical problems with our intelligence and increased awareness. We now live in an age where the generation is living which doesn't know life without complete digital immersion, just as our parents were the first to lack the ability to understand life without television.

The implications of this fact are numerous, but specific cultural tremors are already being felt: the total marketization of all Western sub-cultures. A phenomenon which was already moving in full force starting in the '80s with rock and pop music continuing to partition further down the rabbithole of subgenera and subsubgenera and the increase in them to steal more and more market share from the broader more sterile powerhouse acts. The '80s saw the last of the true giant hit makers such as Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen. Underground music in all broader genera of rock and pop (and the rise of rap/hip-hop) served as alternatives to the sterile, formulaic corporate rock and pop.

Just as punk had sought to rebel against the overproduced, over-indulgent arena rockers of thh '70s, the New Wavers and alternative, college radio bands of the '80s on into the '90s flew largely under the radar - but not necessarily without any success or attention.

The '90s saw recording technology become available which was both affordable and easy to operate with which musicians could record themselves and feasibly distribute their do-it-yourself recordings on a wider scale through tape trading and thankless touring. In turn, a sort of fetishization with low quality but seemingly more genuine recordings set in and soon the alternative became the norm, much as it usually does.

The moral of the story, of course, is not who got big or who sold out, but rather the way in which technological growth allowed for a new dynamic to take hold of an industry and bring us closer to the unique situation we experience today.

And where we are today is a total commodification of every tappable subculture from dance-rock to violent, mysogenistic hard-core rap, from Swedish black metal to 1001 subgenera of techno. That which was risque just in the Reagan adminstration now will not raise an eyebrow. The free-wheeling flower children of the '60s are now becoming grandparents and the freaks who dressed in all manner of bizarre regalia for Cure shows are now sending many of their children to college (and more Cure shows).

A cultural benchmark has definitely been set and has it served a real purpose insofar as the cultural evolution of society as a whole is concerned? Have we made progress as a result or are our standards for a modicum of 'decency' merely watered down due to oversaturation of 'offensive' behavior and media products?

The '60s's cultural revolution is now trivialized (if it wasn't then) and the adament please for universal LSD usage didn't really do much to change the overall consensus reality outside of certain isolated echo chambers. This naive beseeching for a tuned in, dropped out world may have been responsible for some actual, progressive change, but many aspects have merely morphed into casual facets to the normalities of bourgeois humdrum.

It must be noted however that many in the '60s revolution did, after the fact, turn inward to further their personal growth journey and reformulate their approach to changing the world. These individuals who retained an ability to continue their maturation have effectively promoted actual paradigm shifts in an array of sociopolitical aspects. Everything from medicine, politics and academia to the subtle overall views on all things previously underground.

The groundswell in changing perspectives has slowly, but definitely, affected the shift in what is thought to be 'normal'. The forward momentum with which erstwhile avant garde memes have taken hold in the cultural vocabulary and the whole constellation of accepted behaviors and style is definitely a legacy of those subcultures and countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s.

Recap of the Last 2.5 Days of My Life...Not A Live Journal (Calm Down)

We are all time-travellers insofar as we all progress with time. It is always the eternal now. We always have the past with us in our present in terms of recall.

Self-analysis's usefulness is limited by our understanding of the fundamentals of our philosophy. If our premises are false, our logic is not in line with reality...hence, wrong decisions; poor judgment.

The more accurate our understanding of our fundamental, basic philosophical keystones are, the closer in line with reality our value judgments may be. Otherwise we risk false equifinality which leads, or can lead to, future poor judgment due to faulty implementation of reason / logic.

When we can (through, oftentimes painful, journeys through the fires of Chapel Perilous) face our demons and conquer them, only then can we start to understand and implement the art of living. We cannot conquer our demons without first facing them. All too often we decide to give in to their 'will' and 'run with the devil' as opposed to standing up to them and knocking them down so that they can no longer hinder our progression and our evolution as individuals. This act of standing our own ground will usually be rather difficult as it is foreign to us and uncomfortable as hell (terminology meant literally), but there really is (in my experience) no other way to reduce these (formidable in actuality) 'demons' which hinder our everyday lives and every subsequent value judgment (i.e. every decision we make) and, hence, how we live our lives.

This may not have the intellectual impact on the reader that it should, so please go back and re-read this last paragraph because every decision, and hence, every act one performs, is based on your philosophy. The problem tends to be that most peoples' philosophy is not delineated nor is it clarified or articulated to an extent that said individual's understanding of oneself is sufficient for actual understanding of overall reality, specifically the reality one finds oneself in.

Y2K As A Cultural Benchmark Pt. I

What would humanity do without the differing degrees of apprehension felt concerning the next apocalyptic lunch date with the Eschaton? How would we survive without the vague possibility of not surviving looming on the flip-side of the desktop calendar?

When we run out of specific time frames for the fruition of our myriad existential risks, what then shall we have to fret about as a species? Specificity is the key distinction regarding this phenomenon as we shall always retain plenty of factors which threaten our race. The lurking fears will always haunt us pacing just outside our door: nuclear destruction (mutually assured), epidemic, extraterrestrial invasion (via life-forms or supersonic projectile matter), supernatural reckoning per prophecy or otherwise, etc.

The date 1 January 2000 stood to play this role of possible global disaster and waited impatiently to wreak havoc upon our power grids and digital fiat money stores (i.e., our bank accounts). As we approached this milestone, turn-of-the-century event, we raced against time to update our operating systems and governmental databases to ensure that massive cybernetic haywire did not ensue thus rending useless the technological achievements of the entire 20th-Century and triggering the distress that having to adapt to a lifestyle known all so well to our quite recent forebears would lead to.

Indeed when the proverbial clock struck midnight, the celebrated ball dropped much less clumsily than our collective jaws as we exhaled a great sigh of relief, albeit in amazement, wary though it may have been. And on into the 21st-Century we headed full of apprehensive hope as a resurgence in our possible capabilities to technologically survive ourselves was reawakened after our Space Age, Promethean dreams had been slowly sobered due to the natural course of events playing out according to a different script than the sci-fi writers had envisioned (with notable exceptions such as William Gibson coming to mind).

The accrued time-binding of human knowledge logically led to the Industrial Age, and furthermore, had led to sociopolitical restructuring as an offshoot of the cultural ramifications thusly resultant thereof. The previous governmental dichotomies of the Eastern and Western world of the Enlightenment had been totally reworked both due to imperial colonization of the former and the uprising of democratic, humanistic, individualistic revolutions in the latter.

Philosophically, the Lockean movements for individual freedom had led to the classical liberalism, which in one form or another, affected much of the Occident and America as well. In the United States especially, this libertarian, though specifically Calvinistic, push for 'the American Dream' coupled perfectly with scientific, technological breakthroughs which ushered in industrialism. This state of affairs led to gigantic corporate entities wielding power previously unseen by nongovernmental organizations (the addition of a phenomenon known as corporate personhood further complicated this matter).

Immanuel Kant gave way to Hegel and before you knew it, Marxism is born. The Marxist ideology was picked up by disenfranchised, yet-to-be-unionized American dreamers of the Industrial Revolution giving birth to the union.

In Russia, the Axis shipped a sealed boxcar containing a 'plague bacillus...more deadly than any bomb' (Churchill's words), Lenin, who promised 'bread, land and peace' to the war-weary, disenchanted people and communism had a breeding ground ripe for the taking. An Oktober Revolution later, the Czar was unthroned, a dictatorial authoritarianism was instituted and the Soviet Union erected itself. By the 1940s a treaty signed in another German train was broken and the major powers of the world were in heated worldwide conflict again.

This time around, of course, the Russians did not accede to their Teutonic neighbors and Stalin teamed up with Roosevelt and Churchill to fight a multi-theatre full-scale war against the Nazis leading to the ultimate victory in Europe thanks to Hitler's decision to pull a Napoleon qua Operation Barbarossa. The ensuing political and geographical dynamic turned into a geopolitical chess game the likes of which Great Britain's eternal sunshine had never known.

The ideological differences once swept under the carpet for the purpose of defeating Hitler were now no longer confined to academic debate. The US arose with peerless hegemony in the realms of financ, production, and hence political, not to mention military power. The Soviet Union on the other hand with their own ideas of national sovereignty and individual liberties (or lack thereof) began jockeying for position as the benefactor of the world.

It took until the Berlin airlift and multiple violent national takeovers until the US realized the new state of affiars - they were now th leading proponent of 'democracy' and their erstwhile allies, the Soviets, were now trying to outbid them for the future of this new world.

Compounding this issue was the fact that the European empires were now in shambles all over the world. The race for hegemony now became a bit of a bidding war, cold though it may have been - usually, over which newly independent countries would choose to side with whom: puppet states of either the democractic ruling power or the socialists.

This led to scores of engagements over hitherto unknown nations and innumerable amounds of covert operations by the CIA and the KGB and their allies' counterparts. Every possible measure was employed by both sides, and the technology boom which the Second World War had launched did nothing but gain momentum as the competition heated up on both sides.

Global hegemony in a nuclear age called for further and further capability to strike first and have as much intellignece on the other side as possible. Von Braun's rocket program in Nazi Germany evolved into the Space Race, ushering in the new age, and with it new possibilities.

Von Neumann and Shannon et al. brought us number and information theory, eventually the personal computer as well as communication theory leading to that crowning achievement, the World Wide Web.

It must be noted that the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about was not the sole progenitor of Western technological revolution as Stuart Brand of the Merry Pranksters and the whole '60s movements in hallucinogenic, antiwar fuelled cultural backlash were and are heavily responsible for the direction so many of those technologies took once in civilian hands. This is not to mention the influence of the sometimes utopian visionaries like R Buckminster Fuller and the science fiction and underground writers of the '50s, '60s and '70s.