30.EPILOGUE.73: December 23, 2003
-- INFINITY.
"*30*."
PART FIVE: "The Nausea Years."
Lady, people aren't chocolates. Do you know what they
are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard
filling. But I don't find them half as annoying as I do naïve,
bubble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine.
-- Dr. Perry Cox.
RANK, FILE, WANTS
i i i i i i i i i but but but zinesters listening to furnaceface w/goatees
and ravers shaving their heads dancing in circles prattling about the coolness
of things that are so fucking cool just because they are because there
is no such thing are realistic quantification and goths painting their
lips black pretending to be vampires because sadness is sexy because giving
up is sexy because the cold dead void is sexy and profs who only listen
to Tchaikovsky because real music died out in the 19th Century and highschool
dropouts strung out on their own ignorance and arrogance and decrepitude
living on the streets because life with mom and dad affords way too many
comforts to allow them to be taken seriously as rebels and perpetual students
and the enlightened and the grunting and top bottom left right up down
it/s all the same
SAY THE SECRET WORD, WIN THE PRIZE
She's standing there, looking
pissed off, arms crossed, tapping her foot.
"Are you through?"
"For now," I say.
She shakes her head and
sighs.
TENDER CURRENTS
and people who don/t get this are just scared wrapped up in their own egos
and have a very fragile sense of themselves can/t stand the idea of someone
else contradicting them or thinking something they didn't think of first
it/s like the intellectual/spiritual version of Short Guy Syndrome where
the shortest guy in the room is always the loudest and most angry and most
arrogant and the RIGHTEST DAMMIT!!! and all because everyone else grew
taller but him and he/s afraid of being jostled and stepped on afraid of
being belittled and so has to try to take everybody down before they take
him down has to show them all that even though he/s physically diminutive
he/s still better than all of them so he subscribes to dogmas that don/t
make any sense but claims that they do and when someone believes something
he doesn/t believe or likes something he doesn/t like he screams RELATIVISM
at the top of his lungs pointing fingers accusing the world of RELATIVISM
as if relativism is somehow bad and fake or bellows A = A as if that means
anything or he admires fascists because they/re able to bend the will of
the world to their own use or he invents transcendental theories that while
being applicable only to him are universalized and then he laments that
if everybody just did what he did in order to see the light the world would
be a better place because then we/d all be like him and then he could tell
us all what to do and we/d agree with him because we would all be like
him or maybe we wouldn/t even need to be told what to do we/d just do it
all anyway and be in complete agreement with our leader who won his battle
against us and our diversity without even lifting a finger and Ezra Pound
was unable to finish his Cantos and he went insane and Dave Sim
was able to finish Cerebus and he went insane and what does this
signify other than Dave Sim and Ezra Pound both went insane
CHINESE FINGER TRAP
And, wow, you're still reading
this stuff. Congratulations. Not much father to go. And
because you're still reading this stuff, I am still in control. I
am making you think what you think. And as I write these words, you're
thinking them, because you're reading them. I am making you think
these words right here. And now I am making you think about all the
stuff you've just read. And I'm making you consider it on some level.
And now, I am making you think: "Holy shit, is this what I
am really like?"
UNINTENTIONAL COLOURS
And it's Grade 10 and I'm in a record
store and I'm looking at Tangerine Dream records and there's this one called
Zeit
which is a 2 record set, but priced really cheap. And the thing is,
each side of each record is one part of Zeit. And I've never
seen anything like that at all before. And the cover of the album
is a painting of this cold, dark, burntout looking moon. And the
back cover has a painting of a solar eclipse seen from deep space.
And so I buy Zeit.
And when I take it home and put it on my cheap record player, I'm transported
to that burntout moon. The music is so cold, and slow, and mysterious
and menacing, that my skin starts to crawl. Deep, low synthesizers
and violins playing eternal frozen screaming notes. Burbles and drones
freezing time.
And years earlier I'm reading
a comic by Matt Howarth and there's reference to this band called Tangerine
Dream, and I decide then and there that-- even without never having heard
any of their music, that I like them already because a poster Howarth drew
in the back of a panel describes them as "music that melts." And
I have little or no use for any of the music on the radio because it's
so bland and boring and uninspired.
And about a month later
Alex makes me a copy of one of his dad's Tangerine Dream albums.
It's called Stratosfear and it sounds like nothing I'd ever head
before in my life. Even the technopop on the radio at that time couldn't
touch it for deep weird mystery. But, then again, technopop has never
wanted to be weird, mysterious, or deep. Just catchy and somewhat
vacant. Maybe sometimes unintentionally sad.
And I got into Eno around
the same time. There was a record store that burned down-- it was
maybe the Christmas of Grade 9 or 10, and I found a copy of Music For
Airports on cassette for a dollar and I bought it because the album
was divided into four tracks and each track was simply numbered and this
appealed to my sense of the weird. And besides, I'd had a lot of
success with Zeit, which was also pretty weird looking.
And when I first heard it--
God, I remember now the tape smelled like woodsmoke, too. But it
was a good smell. Just a little woodsmoke. And when I played
it it was so boring. I couldn't stand it. But then, later for
some reason I played it again and it was amazing.
It seemed to be tape loops
of pianos and human voices, but the loops were all out of synch and because
of that the music was totally static but changed, too.
And it's slow, and still,
but unlike Zeit it's extremely sad. Kinda haunting and wistful,
not just sorta haunting and cold.
And I used to listen to
it and sip tea and look out my bedroom window at the trees. And in
the fall it was perfect, or late at night when I was feeling depressed,
but mellow. The piano repeats, a synthesizer drones and shimmers,
eventually human voices sing in unison. It's kind of like a soundtrack
for the afterlife. Apparently it was actually played in airports
in London, once, but they took it off because too many people complained
that it made them think about death. Which is sort of what Eno intended
because he figured that everybody who flies should think about the afterlife
a little bit.
And then I got into other
Eno, after that. And, a lot of it was kind of like painting.
It made me think of colours, like I was listening to a painting.
And the way the music repeated
and drifted was like a series of images, abstract colours.
Or sometimes it conjured
images of places in my mind. Worlds. And sometimes the worlds
were extremely abstract. Like I was looking at other universes where
the laws of physics behaved differently, or life worked in different ways.
God, I remember all this
now, just lying in my room with the headphones listening to Eno.
And then there's the vocal stuff and he only recorded a few vocal albums
but they're all so cool and surreal-- the lyrics are surreal, sort of dark
and light at the same time. Like there's always other meanings lurking
under the surfaces of his words. And the music is all over the place
from rock to funk to weird alien ambiance.
And again, everybody was
listening to rap shitty hair metal and I was listening to this stuff and
everybody called me a freak but I didn't care because I had Eno to come
home to at the end of the day and then I'd just drift away into infinity
whole I worked on my homework-- which I didn't really do because I was
too busy creating weird narrative paintings in my mind to match the music.
PUNCTUATION MARKS
and I can/t do anything about it so I/m just waiting for science to kick
in to be able to do all those things it/s supposed to be able to do in
the coolest of the cutting edge science fiction books waiting for transcendence
because if we can program matter we can achieve transcendence if we can
upload ourselves into computers we can achieve transcendence and I mean
upload not make a copy I MEAN TRANSFER MY MIND INTO A COMPUTER TOTALLY
AND UTTERLY BECOMING THE COMPUTER BECOMING DATA STORED FOREVER waiting
for immortality and the ability to control the universe and so if science
pays off we will become gods the religious and the materialistic will fuse
and we will be able to manipulate the fabric of reality first with big
machines then with smaller machines then even smaller machines then with
our minds and FIRST I WILL BECOME THE COMPUTER, THEN I WILL BECOME THE
UNIVERSE
be HUMAN
Of course some of you will say
no and some of you will say maybe and some will even go "I guess so, yeah.
I guess I am like this deep down inside." And some of you will just
ignore me, dismiss me and forget me and go back to your basic lives giving
me very little thought.
Regardless of what you do,
I win.
NEW EDITION
but right now this isn/t happening right now it/s still in the beginning
stages and right now sex is fusing with computers the internet is sexy
and cold and distant and all the porn in the newsgroups and all the porn
in the mailboxes and spam and porn and spam soon it won/t be possible to
come near a computer without feeling aroused and all computers will be
used for is sex but we/ll be working on them and with them and in them
so our work will fuse with sex and we'll be making love sweet sweet love
sweet music with our computers all alone jerking off alone with our computers
just masturbating and masturbating alone alone alone jerking off to our
computers trying to delve inside to get inside to sink into that warm cracking
ozoneated digital flesh as we merge with our computers and then sex will
be exposed as the masturbatory lie it is sex will no longer needed to replicate
the species because we won/t be needed any more and we can all sink into
nothingness alone drowning in pleasure and knowing that we are all loved
by our computers
WHY I WANT TO DESTROY THE HUMAN RACE (reason #695)
--in bed before sleep--dark--feeling drunk even though I haven't been drinking
--lights pulsing behind my eyes--phosphene
--thinking about people being beheaded overseas:
--the feeling of terror and helplessness as they're held being tied
down
--that japanese guy who was crying and begging on camera for his government
to rescue him because he didn't want to die
--but of course no government will come to his aid because governments
(like people) are only there for the helpless whenever it's cheap and convenient
--the numb expressions on their faces before their throats are cut
--the gasping bubbling sounds and then screams that become shrill burbling
whistles as the knife sinks deeper
--thinking about what that must feel like, the knowledge that in a
few seconds you are going to have your head slowly sawed off while you
are still alive. And then it happens and you feel it all. Conscious
of the whole thing. And even when your head is off, you're still
conscious for a few minutes. You have time to really realize what
they've done to you, even if you can't feel your body any more. Unless
of course the pain centre in your brain gets confused and you still can
feel your body. A phantom body burning with feedback pain.
And slowly everything just goes out and you know that the blood and oxygen
is draining from your brain and you are really and truly dying.
--lying in bed, feeling sick and terrified, unable to sleep
THE MILLENNIALS
Supposedly, there is a new generation
markedly different from all the older generations that came before it--
those generations that are collectively known as Generation X, but which
were once Generation X and Generation Y, or Generation Why, or whatever--
but they all ended up consolidated into one thing because they were all
way too similar. I read about this new generation in a magazine or
a newspaper, or on the Internet, so it must be true.
These people were born somewhere
around 1982-3. Or maybe, now, after 1986. Because far too many
people born around the 82-83 mark are still too much like Generation X.
This new generation, they're
called "The Millennials."
They grew up on Rainbow
Brite and My Little Pony and Barney The Dinosaur.
And because of this, they are hopeful. They've been protected from
negative ideas, so they're optimistic about themselves and the future,
and they're curious about life and believe in positive change and rewards
for hard work. They are Citizens.
Because of this, teen suicide
rates are actually dropping. Because The Millennials have been sheltered
from negativity, they aren't killing themselves like Gen X was.
They also prefer "science
over spiritualism," whatever that means. I think it has something
to do with getting results-- actions and effects that can be measured.
A belief in the concrete-- that causes have effects and that effects can
be used. Probably in order to change the world for (what they believe
to be) the better.
This is all fairly interesting.
Here we have a bunch of young people that have been nourished on pabulum
and vacuity, and they're happy, and well-adjusted, and optimistic.
And I remember how everyone was lamenting the state of children's programming
when I was in my 20s. I remember how everyone was saying that shit
like Barney and Carebears would turn the youth of tomorrow
into a culture of zombies that would be unable to cope with the realities
of life-- and all the while, while we were saying this, we were drinking
and drugging and slacking ourselves into deeper and deeper pits of ennui
and gloom. And it turns out this new batch is okey-dokey.
They're happy. They
care. They're go-getters.
(I don't quite get the "science
over spiritualism" thing though because Gen X is nothing if not cynical--
and that cynicism runs the gamut from government to organized religion
and I've noticed a much more developed tendency in the "Millennials" I've
met to be far more inclined to believe in something "spiritual"-- possibly
because the idea of God usually goes hand-in-hand with the empty, faux-hopeful
rhetoric of Barney The Dinosaur.)
Happy and hopeful, citizens
waiting to Do Their Parts.
And they won't be able to
see the forest for the trees.
They will try to
change the world. They will try to care. But they are
all way to concerned with being optimistic go-getters, and making their
marks to ever really do anything. They will find their niches, and
there they will stay. Ultimately contented, but living futile lives.
But they'll be happy.
Because they will think they matter.
They will also-- because
they are a culture of "believers"-- be easily manipulated by whatever mainstreamed
underground they choose to nestle within. Or, whatever mainstream
mainstream they prefer. And this is because they are unquestioning,
they believe the world isn't that bad a place, and so they will instinctively
support the status quo. Whatever that status quo may be in the future.
(Either that or they'll
all protest the status quo en masse and in a very predictable way-- which,
of course amounts to the same thing as supporting the status quo.)
And, probably, their dreams
won't come true because everyone's dreams can't come true. If everybody's
dreams came true, well, then we'd all be celebrities. Or the Earth
would be a smoking cinder.
And so they will have a
good time, a happy youth-- something lots of GenXes didn't have-- or didn't
believe they were having-- but when it comes time to settle down and actually
do something meaningful, it'll be too late. They will be in their
20s and thus be too old to make an impact on the world in any substantial
way. Except for the 0.000000001% of them that maybe became happy
peppy prefab teeny pop stars like Raven Symone or Drake Bell.
And then, with any luck,
they will see the world for what it is: cold and impersonal, filled with
people who don't care about them at all.
And then the despair will
finally hit.
THE "GIFT" OF DEATH
Subject: Derrida
dead
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:00:13
-0600
From: Alex <PRIVATE
ADDRESS WITHHELD>
To: 'B COTTS' <PRIVATE
ADDRESS WITHHELD>
I don't know if you heard this
or not, but Jacques Derrida died on Oct. 8. I found out through Wikipedia
of all things; it appears to have missed the general media who were more
concerned about Rodney Dangerfield kicking it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida
Chee
Alex
JARGON WATCH
"The Sandwich Generation":
The growing numbers of 30/40-somethings
who are stuck with looking after both kids and aging parents.
Yet another term for Generation
X.
ULTIMATELY, I KNOW I'LL NEVER REALLY DESTROY THE UNIVERSE AND THAT THE BEST I CAN HOPE FOR IS TO SIT AND WRITE AND DESCRIBE MYSELF STANDING OUTSIDE, STARING AT THE COLD BLACK SKY, LOOKING AT THE STARS, AND WISHING THEM OUT OF EXISTENCE ONE BY ONE. HA. HA. HA.
and and and George Kantor also died insane and he was trying to nail down
infinity thinking about the infinite the transcendent and infinite set
theory he was a mathematician and he died insane and some people claim
that it was the infinite that killed him because he developed a theory
of infinite numbers because there is infinity everywhere in number systems
from the infinitely small to the infinitely large I mean there's an infinite
number of fractions between 1 and 2 and an infinite number of fractions
between 2 and 3 so that implies that there are twice as many fractions
between 1 and 3 than there are between 1 and 2 and there are an infinite
number of prime numbers but there are more whole numbers than prime numbers
so how can there be more whole numbers than there are prime numbers and
so he devised a theory of infinite numbers and the first infinity is called
alef-null and then second alef-one and so on and it/s very complex and
strange and I can/t really get into it here but then he realized there
still had to be something he called ABSOLUTE INFINITY which was a number
that there simply could not be any bigger number than this thing and it
takes the place of the old school infinity that existed before because
well we/ve seen very easily that there have to be different kinds of infinity
and how can there be infinitely small and infinitely large without there
being things that are infinitely in the middle I mean even I.M. WEASEL
very easily proved that 1+1= INFINITY in only a few brief steps and so
George Kantor died insane and but well and his theory lives on and it/s
logically consistent but not absolutely provable because well hey they
can/t even really prove 1+1=2 so that leap of faith aside Kantor/s infinite
set theory is a stable mathematical construction and that/s all you need
in math to make something real on an abstract plane anyway all you need
is stability
I'M STILL THE SAME AS I WAS IN HIGHSCHOOL SAYS HE
In Ye Goode Olde Dayes we had
magic. Magic explained everything, and spells were seen as real and
they "worked." And by "worked" I don't mean they really worked,
but there were relationships drawn between natural phenomena and something
that a magician or healer did. So, for example, you're sick and then
you go to the healer. You say some words, and you drink some sort
of swill made out of boiled roots and assorted guts spiked with alcohol,
and if you lived, the spell "worked." Thus magic worked. It
was the explanation for everything, but only properly trained experts could
read the signs of the world, and cast the spells that shift reality.
Later, science took over
this role, and it explained everything, and scientific theories were seen
as real and they "worked." And by "worked" I don't mean it
really
worked, but there were relationships drawn between natural phenomena and
something that a scientist sees or does. So, for example, you're
sick and then you go to the doctor. He straps you to a machine only
he knows how to read, looks at some squiggly lines, and gives you a bunch
of pills that you take with water. And if you live, the medicine
"works." Or, in an extreme case, you get put to sleep and he cuts
some stuff out of you, and attaches some other stuff to some other stuff,
and if you wake up, and if you live, you're fixed. Thus science works.
It's the explanation for everything, but only properly trained experts
can read the signs of the world, and cause the biotechnological effects
that shift reality.
Both magic and science also
generate repeatable effects. The problem is in many cases you need
these effects to be interpreted by a scientist or a magician in order to
see them. But, currently, science seems to be working better than
magic.
And, in the world of science,
we view the world of magic as primitive superstitions.
However-- this is my prediction--
in a few years (maybe a hundred, maybe less) we will discover some other
principles through the use of science (much scientific principles were
discovered through the use of magic) that make science look like the primitive
system of superstition that we now view magic to be. However, I must
stress, these will not be scientific principles-- much in the same way
that science is not a set of magical principles. Whatever this new
thing will be (and I have no idea what it could entail because I'm trapped
in the milieu of science-- much in the same was as someone from the 11th
Century could not hope to really understand, let alone fathom, the principles
of, say, Gravity or entropy), it will not be anything we can define as
"science" and it will make what we believe now to be true-- it will make
those principles seem like the gobbledygook witch doctors and medicine
men spout.
And the people of the future
will look back at us and see that we were aiming towards something that
they now understand, but they'll see that we really didn't get the principles
behind it. Much like we understand why certain "medicines" that are
mostly alcohol or opium appear to "cure" patients (at least temporarily),
or why a doctor washing his hands and saw helps keep patients alive.
Not because you're anointing your hands and saw with the water of life
that flows through the soul of the earth spirit thereby helping your devices
chase away the evil phantoms that are tormenting your patient, but simply
because water is pretty good at getting rid of microscopic bits of crap.
They will look at us and
think: They were onto something, pity they were all so obsessed with superstitions.
And then, of course, in
a few centuries something will happen that makes their ideas look like
the puerile nonsense they are.
VOMITING UP MY OWN SPINE
Scene: Weeeellll.....
BRIAN: On September 17, 2004 I read something where they discovered
it.
BOB: What?
BRIAN: The "God Gene." The gene that makes people more
or less inclined towards religion.
BOB: Really.
BRIAN: At least that's what Dr. Dean Hamer claims. It's
strongest in females, and it governs the transcendental experience.
People who have it a "strong" God Gene tend to view the world more as a
whole.
BOB: So that, what, proves that human beings are wired for religion?
BRIAN: Not really. The God Gene seems to have something
to do with the experience of transcendence. So the human being is
wired for transcendence-- a desire to see beyond ourselves and towards
larger things. Religion is a part of this, and that's why they're
calling gene VMAT2 The God Gene.
BOB: Huh.
BRIAN: Of course, one again, because language is so crucial in
pointing towards the transcendent, being the only real thing we can use
to encapsulate what we perceive to be infinity, it must also somehow be
in some way connected to language, too. Maybe. Also, in order
to have a feeling of transcendence one must first have feeling of the self--
in order to transcend the self one must have a self to begin with.
And so, the God Gene must in some way be connected to this, as well
Language-- self-- transcendence-- the God Gene. Infinity or at least
glimpses of infinity-- in some way.
BOB: If it's true then it does give a bit of credence to the
idea that language, and God, is a viral entity. It has genetic backing
and thus can be, in theory transferred from entity to entity in a physical
way-- even if its effects are partially aphysical. If this is true
it's interesting because while it points to the evolution of transcendence
(and hence language), it also points to a time before transcendence (and
language). It does point to a kind of "state of nature" and "tabula
rassa"-- and oddly in a sort of Rousseauian sense-- except a little bit
different because Rousseau posited primitive man as fully formed, but blank.
BRIAN: But Rousseau was smart enough to know that this probably
wasn't the case.
BOB: That's true, so he admitted that he was mangling reality,
a little bit, in his Discourse On Language.
BRIAN: Recommended reading, along with Jacques Derrida's Of
Grammatology which deals with the Discourse On Language and
other sundry subjects.
BOB: Anyway, in Rousseau, first there was no language, and then
there was. It was a cataclysm that created ideas of self, time, culture,
memory, society, and God. It was, in effect a transcendent moment.
Of course, it seemed like an instantaneous time to those within the cataclysm
because their sense of time was being developed-- but to people outside
of the cataclysm the change could possibly be seen as taking years.
And so, if the God Gene is real, it could be easy enough to define this
cataclysm as the evolution of the God Gene over time. It takes hundreds
of thousands of years, but to people with slowly developing language and
self-transcending structures it may seem instant.
BRIAN: This, of course, assumes that the God Gene and the development
of language are in some way connected. They might not be. Who
knows. But, since transcendence and language seem to be somehow interrelated
(even if the final stage of transcendence is to escape language), there's
no harm in assuming that they might be connected. For the time being,
anyway. While entertaining my little fantasies.
BOB: And, of course, this also assumes that the God Gene is in
fact real.
JACQUES DERRIDA
Jacques Derrida is maybe the
one good thing that University ever really did for me. The first
time round, anyway.
I had to sit through all
these classes, and put up with all this boring reading, and then in my
3rd year I took a critical theory class and was introduced to the writing
of Jacques Derrida and my head was spun round in circles in ways that even
Robert Anton Wilson couldn't've prepared me for. Wilson was cool
and funny and filled with goodness (he still is) but he was still, ultimately,
a prankster. But Derrida was a serious philosopher. He was
also funny and a kind of prankster, too-- but he had a more solid, more
sophisticated philosophical background. While Wilson was more of
a brilliant hippy-- easily the best and smartest of all the so-called "counterculture"
"drug gurus" of the '70s. But Derrida was a respected world-class
philosopher. The hippy-ness made Wilson easy to dismiss to straight-laced,
"normal" people-- and it also made him much easier to understand-- but
Derrida had a kind of intellectual, ivory tower street-cred.
Of course I soon found out
that there were lots (and still are lots) of people who brush Derrida off
just as easy as the CISCOP people ignore Wilson. But, that's their
loss. And in fact they brush Derrida off because they're threatened
by him. He dismantles their authority. Much like Wilson dismantles
the authority of "professional skeptics." But never of course to
the satisfaction of the 'skeptics" because one thing that's for certain
is that "skeptics" are very sure of themselves.
DEGREES OF MAGNITUDE
and georg kantor died insane and I discovered infinity through rudy rucker
and his novel white light in grade 8 I read it and it blew me away totally
turned my brain inside out and it deals with a trip up an infinite mountain
there/s this mathematician who has a dream like in the old novels where
like you can/t just have an environment it has to be a dream or something
and the mathematician is wrestling with the idea of infinite sets and he
discovers this mountain and the mountain is the afterlife and and he travels
up the mountain and eventually merges with god or the point where zero
and the absolute infinite meet because kantor presupposed three orders
of infinity there/s physical infinity like space is infinitely divisible
and then there/s mathematical infinity a more abstract kind because numbers
are infinitely divisible and also grow infinitely large and then there/s
the absolute infinite the number slash thing that is so large it cannot
be surpassed and this kantor associated with god and rucker also associates
this last order of infinity with god but in a characteristically transcendental
move he also says that this point is where absolute zero and absolute infinity
meet meaning it/s both everything and nothing at the same time and we/re
back in the realm of something so big its all things even contradictions
like the answer to the question can god make a rock so big he can/t lift
it the answer is simultaneously yes and no because a dichotomy like being
able to and being unable to or even yes and no or being and nothingness
is a human thing and has no bearing on questions involving a so called
'being' of that magnitude even if this being doesn/t exist unless it does
and then we/re back in the realm of is and isn/t are irrelevant and mathematicians
tend to get religious like that cuz aside from the whole 1+1=2 issue (or
maybe because of it) they tend to believe in a pure mathematical world
that this world is only a fragment of and they describe it in pure terms
and then have to mess it up so it applies to reality so
WHAT THIS EPILOGUE WOULD BE LIKE IF IT HAD BEEN WRITTEN IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE BOTH *30* AND I WERE MUCH COOLER THAN WE REALLY ARE AND MAYBE WE DESPERATELY WANTED TO BE LIKE GODZILLA OR SOMETHING BECAUSE EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT KAIJU BIG BATTEL IS REALLY WHERE IT'S AT
Announcer: "My god it's,
it's awful, it's, he's huge and it's-- oh God he's destroying the city.
Behind me. Dear listeners it's, oh God I can't--"
Sounds of mangled screams,
car crashes, sirens, explosions.
Announcer: "Too hideous--
it's-- all the buildings all the people all--"
Screams, crunching sounds.
Announcer: "How could
this happen, oh the humanity, the humanity, we never should have meddled--
never should have meddled with things larger than us, oh God it's awful."
More crunching, a belch
Announcer: "God no,
not the-- oh God, it's terrible, so terrible. More terrible than
words--"
Godzilla sounds.
Screams.
An explosion.
Static.
THE TRACE OF THE TRACE
Of course the word on the street is that now Derrida's dead we'll get back
into something more "sensible." My thesis supervisor even said that.
That now that "these guys are all croaking" we might be able to "get back
to something sensible." Why don't people understand that the "sensible"
is boring and empty. It's the "sensible" that's keeping us back.
That the "sensible" doesn't actually make society go forward. And
that the world and art and thought isn't "sensible?" That the "sensible"
is the refuge of people without imaginations. That large doses of
pragmatism are self-defeating and bad.
-- But if nobody was
"pragmatic" everyone would just sit around staring at their navels and
society would collapse.
-- No it wouldn't
because you can have it both ways: you can accept that the universe is
ultimately unknowable, and that everything we know about the universe comes
through our own subjectivities, and that even objective fact is something
that's filtered through subjectivity... but you can also recognize that
in certain situations certain things do seem to work, but they only seem
to work, and the way their work may not continue forever. And also
that there may be different ways to achieve the same effects. You
can have a shifting focus. You can look at the mid-range where things
like logic and causality seem to apply, and then you can look at the big
picture which, ultimately, is mostly blank because we don't have enough
information to fill in the gaps... because it's mostly gaps and will continue
to be gaps... because we don't know anything beyond what our own faulty
perceptions tell us. You can see a machine like a car working, and
yet you can still see the uncertainties of quantum physics. You can
read a novel and fall in love with the characters, and yet look at the
way the words work in relation to each other and find that there's really
no fixed meaning in any of them. You can think all kinds of lofty
thoughts and live your lives by these thoughts, and yet be aware that they're
all-- all of them-- bullshit opinions that are at best only "true" because
you believe they're true.
Ý It's not all or nothing, or either/or,
or neither/nor. The world is not a dichotomy between hard and fast
categories. And that's why things like Derrida's writing aren't "sensible"
or even sometimes "intelligible." Because they break down the processes
of language and show how language is an ever-shifting mass that contains
both everything and nothing. And if language is like this, then so
are we-- because we, everything that human beings are, are language.
But I've said this before. Time and time again.
And even if we're not language,
we are still so wrapped up in it and so dependent upon it that may as well
be so. Because we see everything through language, and create the
world through what we see.
(Derrida is useful in showing
how we can point beyond language, as well. He works within language
because "there is nothing outside of the text," or "there is no outside-text"
[two possible readings of a very famous line in Of Grammatology]
but he also uses language against itself to try to move beyond of language,
to get at what "we" "really' "are.")
And also, if everything
was intelligible, if everything was "sensible," life would be dull as dishwater.
It's easy to make up some shit that "makes sense" of the world. All
you have to do is ignore reality.
Making sense is easy and
boring. A $2 calculator can do that.
Thinking about the unthinkable,
and making the impossible possible-- that's the real work.
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
This just in: there is sugar
in space. The "12 Meter Telescope" in Arizona discovered an enormous
cloud of sugar molecules, glycolaldehyde in fact, a type of sugar that's
related to just basic baking sugar. Don't ask me how a radio telescope
does this-- I just (only with a little questioning) trust that it does.
It has something to do with signals and numbers.
Somehow, numbers become
sugar molecules.
And, sugar molecules imply
organic processes. They are one of the building blocks of life.
This doesn't mean that there's
any other life out there right now, but it makes it seem a little more
likely. Either that or:
The molecules are the result
of life that already was, and is over, and is breaking down. Or:
They are the beginnings
of the potentiality for more life, at some point, arising.
And, because of this, for
some reason right now the universe seems a little less lonely.
And so, this is math.
And so, even though the idea of proof is shaky, even though there's no
guarantee that 1+1 will always = 2, math can still do things like this:
generate numbers that become codes that allow us to discover sugar in space,
plot trajectories for rockets, invent cures and compact discs, store all
the worlds libraries in one tiny laptop, and make graphs plotting the evolution
of mankind and the rise of artificial intelligence, predict tomorrow, make
it seem as if we really do live in a real world filled with miracles....
BLUE LIGHT
And so:
Transcendence is illogical.
There is a gene for transcendence.
Beauty is illogical.
There is a gene for beauty.
Next they will find a "Truth"
gene. And the notion of "Truth" is also illogical.
It makes sense, that all
these things are genetically governed. It is logical.
Therefore, there is a logical
basics for the illogical. Suck on that, whoever you are.
MY KNEES! MY KNEES!
BOB: Of course if there is a God Gene, that means it would
have had to evolve.
BRIAN: Yeah.
BOB: So our sense of the transcendent and our sense of God evolved.
But what practical use would it have?
BRIAN: All the cavemen with weak God Genes probably just got
depressed and killed themselves.
BOB: While the ones with the god Genes had a hope for a better
tomorrow.
BRIAN: Or at least the mushrooms they took worked better and
that kept them more entertained.
BOB: So natural selection created religion.
BRIAN: Yeah, funny. Evolution paved the way for creationism.
THE WORK OF MOURNING
Jacques Derrida's dead (1930-2004).
Jean-François Lyotard's dead (1925-1998). Paul Ricoeur (1913-___)
is really, really old. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). Gilles
Deleuze is dead (1925-1995). Ditto Felix Guattari (1930-1992).
Baudrillard's getting up there (born 1929). Burroughs is dead (1914-1997).
John Cage, too (1919-1992). Robert Anton Wilson is really old (born
1932). And so on.
All the poststructuralists
are dying. All the ones that question everything are dying off.
And what are we left with? People-- theorists and thinkers-- that
blindly believe their own theories, that posit an old fashioned cause and
effect because they got mad at the old guard (who is still light years
beyond them) because the old guard made them think too hard, the old guard
wrote books that had big words in them, the old guard realized that either/or
is a sham.
And that's a hard concept
to take.
They were the real spirit
of the age, and now they're dying off and there's nothing, NOTHING on the
horizon that's coming to replace them.
No one wants to question
anything.
No one wants to go to the
extremes of thought any more.
They all just want to repeat
the same hackneyed, safe behaviour.
VEERING OFF
BOB: So this signals the fusion of the physical and the for lack
of a better word "spiritual."
BRIAN: Of course there are other factors to transcendence than
just this particular gene.
BOB: And that makes sense.
BRIAN: Yeah, there's also a good deal of serotonin involved,
and probably at least 50 other genes and of course environment.
BOB: But, on the whole, this is interesting. And it does
point towards a genetic basis for the conceptualization of Infinity.
BRIAN: If this gene is even real and not bullshit because this
hasn't been proven. This is just a theory discovered by the same
guy who claims to find a gay gene which I don't really have a problem with
because all sexual activity is controlled by genes, right? But some
people do have a problem with the Gay Gene because they think that means
homosexuality could be seen as a disease, or could be "curable."
And I don't think that homosexuality is a disease-- but it still is a type
of mammalian behaviour, and behaviour (especially something like sexual
behaviour) is primarily instinctual, which means that it does have a genetic
bases. At least in part, because there can be conditioning.
However, people still like to think that sexuality is something divorced
from mammalian behaviour which it isn't. And if it all does have
a physical basis and if you can make people gay by manipulating their genetics
so what. Ditto if we can make them straight. So what.
The idea of a value judgment being placed on sexual behaviour is absurd
and primitive. So what if homosexuality is genetic, heterosexuality
is genetic, too. In fact, the Gay Gene makes homosexuality and heterosexuality
exactly the same, just more mammalian behaviour created by protein strings.
And yeah, maybe that's why people (both gay and straight who have biased,
exclusionistic political agendas based upon shaky ideas of the importance
of "otherness" and "proper" sexual behaviour) have a problem with the Gay
Gene theory. They don't want to admit that gays and straights are
the same because that breaks down their fragile little egos. Get
over it....
TRACE
I have always wanted to be God.
NOSE BALOGNA
And so the little white mouse
finally got fed up with all this shit and walked up to the Eagle (standing
tall and majestic, seemingly made of some alien substance resembling rubbery
stone, surveying his Kingdom, representing all the learning and intelligence
and-- yes-- corruption that has been passed on down from university to
university from the time of Plato's academy till now) and whipped out his
trusty Kalashnikoff and said:
"Hey, dumbfuck, over here."
And the Eagle turned and:
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And when the smoke cleared,
the Eagle just looked down at the mouse and said:
"Is that the best you've
got, you pissy little shit? You've got to be able do better than
that."
WHAT THIS EPILOGUE WOULD BE LIKE IF IT HAD BEEN WRITTEN IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE BOTH *30* AND I WERE MUCH COOLER THAN WE REALLY ARE
"Lock and load," I said.
I held the gun in my hands,
felt its weight. Maybe got even a little bit excited at the prospect
of what we were about to do. I loaded the gun. I pulled back
on the thing that goes KACHANK. I heard it go KACHANK.
The gun itself didn't exist.
Not in any strict definition of the word "exist," anyway. At least
not in the way that you would commonly think of something as "existing."
It was a "gun," after a fashion, and it was "real," after a fashion-- but
only after a fashion. Reality is in the eye of the beholder, of course.
Despite what you might have
been told by scientific professionals, and priests.
I was standing with her
on the balcony of a 5-star hotel. It is always good to have someone
like her with you when you undertake a task as vital as mine. She
always makes the madness easier to bear.
The world beneath me was
in a state of constant flux. Reality had long since broken down into
discreet units of "focus." Places were things were, at least temporarily
stable. Little bubbles of continuity.
The sky smelt like burnt
metal. And then it smelled like flowers.
The air itself smelled like
something else entirely. Like the colour blue.
Synesthesia is the order
of the day.
The hotel was made of coral
and twisted up into the sky like some kind of weird spire. The insides
of the rooms were smooth, shaped by centuries of water filtering through.
Somewhere deep inside the hotel was a living being. Some kind of
core intelligence. It kept the place warm and fresh. Occasionally,
I thought maybe the intelligence inside the hotel had spilled out into
the real world, was effecting my mind in some way. Causing me to
break down, either that or building me up. Forcing me to see the
"truth," for what it was-- simple little bubbles of "focus" generated by
wish fulfillment and a drive to power. Shifting bubbles that quickly
moved into something else.
"Locked and loaded," she
said. She giggled.
The plan was to stand here,
on the balcony of this 5-star hotel, and shoot out the sun. Fire
our "nonexistent" rifles at the sun, until the sun shattered. And
then, once the sun was destroyed, the stars would be in clear view forever.
And that would be when we would start in on the stars. One at a time,
our "rifles" would focus and discharge putting out each star in due course.
And then, when all light was quenched, we would start in on the darkness.
That would take longer, but once that was done, we would clean up whatever
was left.
Holy work takes patience
and discipline, but it can be done.
Every thing must reach its
final state.
30.EPILOGUE.73: December 23, 2003
-- INFINITY.