THE DAILY JOKER

Issue 3 : At A Loss 4 Werds....

       To think , speak or move is "active". To feel , sense and sleep is "passive".
Love is both active and passive and none of these.
Dreaming is both and none of these.

   Our thinking, speaking and moving are weak; they are weakened by passivity.
We passively follow the well-worn paths. Thinking becomes something that happens to us, speaking a mere parotting of what's already been said or is the thing to say (eg talking about the weather, or this and that, or anything that is not too difficult to talk about), moving is often a drag because we passively learned that we are not our bodies...

   Equally, our feeling , sensing and sleep are hindered by activity. There is just no time , there is always something going on or needing to be troubled over to distract us. Relaxation is never enough. We are as if caught between two forces pulling in opposite directions, a double bind. Our love is often frightening, our dreaming reduced to dissociated fragments, due to us being unable to balance activity and passivity, or polarity in general. Our language in thought, speech , and writing is usually a denial or misrepresentation of the feeling , sensing body and likewise not reflective of love and dream.

   For most of us our perception of who we are at any "given moment" (what a joke!) revolves almost entirely around language; stories concocted by me and others on the basis of permitted relations and defined boundaries between entities -be they physical or verbal/ mental- as permitted and defined by the rules of grammar, syntax and logic (note the connection between "grammar" and "grimoire" , a magic spell book). We are tricked into reality tunnels by the limitations of the language we use to describe life to ourselves, constantly mishearing and separating and confusing the language of the heart and the language of the mind, a looping chinese whispers. The language of dream remains a mystery.

    Our concepts of coherence and continuity appear not primitive - for the peoples we call primitive evidently were not so impaired by body disconnection - but robotic, mechanical , boringly linear like our houses . We want art that "means" something, we want to follow a linear storyline in our movies. We want to be immortalised, objectified. Hence we arrive at indoor tropical beach simulations. And hence we arrive at such body-denying (fearful of Death) theories as physical immortality or the uploading of "consciousness" into computer networks, by otherwise intelligent people who regard computer networks as models of (their) mind-reality. 1 and 0, either/or. How can i be my body AND not be my body? Indeed... These primitive ideas of immortality are betrayed by their linear concept of continuity of consciousness.

    Natural (in)coherence and (dis)continuity appears to the right eyes a lot more intelligent, sophisticated and advanced than the artificially imposed versions. Great art in any medium inspires and is inspired by natural and supernatural (in)coherence and (dis)continuity patterns . Bad art resembles a fake of artificially imposed (in)coherence and (dis)continuity, a simulation . ( To deliberately fake bad art is now passe , and almost equivalent to watching soap operas in cynical hyper-conformism).

    In this context , modern technology is often bad art, not only because it is the product and cause of earth rape, but also because its creations are mostly crude offenses against the natural aesthetic, attempts at wholesale simulation, for mass manufacturing and marketing. Instead of using and abusing all these fat and fast computers creatively to explore new realms of artistic novelty , the mainstream seems obsessed with accurate reproduction and simulation of their cardboard "real world" ("interactive" of course). The image of the evolutionarily advanced human being as prescribed by Hollywood seems to differ little from the image of the nazi superman, or from a virtual reality synthetic droid.

    The root of life/consciousness appears to me supernatural, and not rational or definable by a grand theory of everything . Yet it is possible to describe the perceived phenomena of life, or consciousness, using language, currently a mechanical process , as very complex but ultimately definable, mechanical processes. Selfish genes? Shellfish jeans, i'd rather have, thank you very much.

   The language conceals -and reveals- the possibility of the magical life:
Things are things , genes are genes after all , and art is not life.
Live is the opposite of evil.
Spirit is not matter (mother?)
Stairs do not stare and chickens come out of eggs.
And technology is not magic...
Interestingly , technology comes from the greek "technologia" which comes from "techne" (art, craft) and the suffix "-logia" ( the science , or dialectics of -whatever it's attached to). So technologia is like the science of the arts and crafts ?
     Anyway , i'm sure that biotechnology is a fake and not the real Science of the Art of Life-but watch out for all that "junk" DNA ! Unknown somethings doing we don't know what , again and again, as Camden Benares wrote. Does evolution proceed through error?

"The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace. " (William Gibson)

     Yet, and so, there must be a place for the straight line, the robotic , the fake, the small minded, the zombi-fied, in the general scheme of "things" (another joke) or else why do they appear on the scene? Are they a reflection of some grand , cosmic even, failure of human beings? Or are they proof that we (or some of us) are indeed :

a) the genetically engineered spawn of alien beings who delight in creating 24hour supermarkets on virgin planets?
and/or
b) the slaves and/or even
c) food (cultured) for such beings?

      Is linearity, mechanism and limitation - reflected/created by language- the straight iron bars of our square prison cells? These questions have already been asked a lot. I don't know if i can say anything that hasn't been said already. Its all wrotten down somewhere, and better worded, I'm sure. But i'll proceed anyway to naively propose, or recall, that perhaps we are looking at a failure that is actually not that dreadfully heavy but more like a simple linguistic error that then acquires cosmic proportions via a process like the chaotic butterfly effect, or via our infinite power as absolutely relative cocreators of all that is experienced.

"In the beginning was the Word " say the words , but i see no reason to believe them . I don't trust 'em. For as far as words are concerned , in the beginning WAS the Word indeed, in a sort of self-created , backwards self-fulfilling prophecy. What a load of offloading ! What beginning and which Word was that? A four-letter one probably...

   The "problem" (since i'm looking for trouble) is that our language automatically excludes organic, fluid "reality" by defining it, freezedrying it, and creates a relationship (such as identity: x is y) that is patently false anywhere outside the flat plane of language and language-based thought. Ask any good psychonaut. Start a discussion (dissection) on "the nature of the self and divine consciousness" as has been done online and in print literally ad museum and you immediately run into a brick wall and then get sucked down infinitely branching tunnels of statements and refutations (This is this , that is not that, etc) that lead to nowhere. Because there is no way to express the "paradox" of "I" and "Other", of synchronicity, by our standard discoarse.
    For communicating the novel, the timeless, the spirit, only poetry and allegory will suffice , only creative use of the words like Joyce or Lewis Caroll showed:
'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.'

We have to learn to use this tool creatively and precisely before meaningful communication beyond "That's my territory, i'll have 1 kilo of that , this is good/no good, that is a tree over there, this is x and not y, the universe consists of x elements etc" is realised. Mechanically parotting desecrates language which by now seems to me to be our divine power as well as our curse...

"Every phrase i utter unlocks the gates of heaven and hell" says the wise fool.

  So unless we are to stop talking altogether ( a very interesting exercise ) some fine-tuning or enhancement of our use of language , if not of language itself, seem to me a forward step to take. We need to pay more attention to the language of the heart and of the body and less to the language of the mind. Then the language of dream may be like an open book. If we are to move a little bit away from the uni-verse of causality , linear time , the reallusion of limitedness, scarcity and concurrent slavery via fear of death ; and towards the multi-verse of synchronicity where everything is hapenning live at the same time in fractal recursion at the same time this is hapenning is nothing at all only what you make of it and become right now here .....

 

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