Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

January 26, 2013 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal ExperienceFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Once in a while a book comes along where the author takes one concept, loves it, examines it and attempts to provide a cohesive account of everything through that one concept. Csikszentmihalyi did just that. This book ranges on topics from philosophy, religion, and everyday experience to attempting to account for people’s mental break downs as well as their joys in life. Of course, to have such a wide range, he must take a theoretical approach — but it cannot be scientific. Much of the ideas he discusses cannot be tested or validated through the scientific method. There are no metrics for us to use on so wide a topic such as life. The reader then, must decide for himself if Csikszentmihalyi makes any sense or not, which is the experience all of us have of any book anyway.

What I found delightful about this book was that I read it at a time when I felt somewhat lost. One of the daily struggles we have as people in a first world environment is to question our role in life. What is the proper work-life balance? How can we be happy? What is the point of our daily struggles? I believe the role of philosophy and other meta-structures (religion is one) should be to help us answer such questions. We cannot gain answers for our specific lives through general inquiry. For a general inquiry to be successful at doing so, it would have to account for any possible variation of attitude and meaning we encounter — a real impossibility. So the force of our own answers must be found through the force of one’s own will, determination, faith and character. Our attitude must first and foremost be that which allows us the openness and flexibility to best meet the conditions of our particular lives in a way that leave us feeling fulfilled. Not just for instant gratification but also to allow us to develop the meaning that each of us needs, so that we do not feel things are pointless or without fruit.

This should be, I believe, the role of philosophy, the role of any inquiry into the metaphysical… but nowadays with the many external pressures on academia, many general thought analysies are too particular, too outdated or not applicable. Often, the authors we look to for guidance, have their own personal agendas, struggles particular to their lives. Should their writing be applicable to us in our lives, it would be a happy accident.

This book attempts to address that role of philosophy for us, to outline for us the the conditions by which each of us may find that attitude. In the end this book is but a book though, and while interesting reading, for me, it cannot determine how we should create those conditions for ourselves. Nonetheless, I do find it to be a compelling read, an inspiration for myself when I read it.

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what’s wrong with baseball? Absolutely Nothing.

August 7, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, utility / No Comments

went to a baseball game. a few days ago.

dodgers vs the cubs. i went to a game before when i was 12 but it was without framing, as a school trip. overall, i dont remember anything, so i consider this to be my first baseball game

the initial striking was how immersive being in the crowd was.

usually when i saw baseball games, it was in a movie or a tv show. and so, baseball was a backdrop against a larger plot. at first i kept feeling like there was a larger story i was missing; that my attention needed to be elsewhere.

of course there was nothing like that.

a bunch of random things happened, with the jumbotron, with things like air guitar, dancing, kissing. the audience basically entertained themselves through the jumbotron while the players did whatever they did… guess baseball is a slower game so they needed that. but really, the emotional energy in the crowd was nearly overwhelming. i found myself recoiling when they did the wave, or when random shit happened… the audience was totally in it.

i realized then, something very unlike what my 19 year old self would realize, i think, if he were there.

there is nothing horrible at all about baseball games. Absolutely Nothing ™.

so this is why sports fans are sports fans: you have the near immersal of what it means to be in a group, in a community… with the colors and the cheering and the singular mindedness of the crowd. this rabble focus is what so many 19th century philosophers and political thinkers were afraid of; the mob. this is the heart of democracy and fascism rolled all into one. (south park got something right! rabblerabblerabblerabble)

i found myself kind of sickened by it and at the same time, wanting to be part of it… despite the fact that it was so inane, all the actions and the spectacles… arbitrary. random.

what was so jarring in this had alot to do with the advertisements that snuck in. this is our world; where bank of america’s logo was on the jumbotron all the time, and state farm’s logo was on all the tickets… despite this being dodgerland. dodger dogs, dodger water, dodger gear… the other brands, subway and bank of america and state farm… there, almost like part of the infrastructure…. support beams we see, sitting on the bleachers, but we don’t really see. branding to support branding.

not bad perhaps, since everything takes funding… but i think this kind of experience made me feel, wow, this is really leaning dangerously close to the beginning of social engineering… democracy works by appealing to the masses, so complex ideas and policies always need to be distilled to their simplest form for dissemination and emotional reaction. in much the same way, capitalism — marketing of experiences like dinner, or ziplines or sports events also need to be focused to be pleasurable in their specific ways that they are. everything is distilled, made simpler. focused

i see our lives as becoming fuller and fuller, until there’s very little room for us to move without having some business or some experience waiting for us to come in and sit there… that its easier to go to a dating mixer than to the bar, or its easier to do all your banking and credit cards and payments with one financial profile (linked across several or even just one financial institution)… or your medical records will be stored across a national database for instant access. no more having to go through the same proceedural exams once you switch small time dentists or opticians. everything made easy. want disney? go to the disneystore. go to disneyland. want sandwiches? google sandwiches and go to a sandwich shop. have sandwiches 24/7. want philosophy? go to the philosophy factory and download any number of works, that might have taken a PHD 25 years to find and read… you can have it all on your kindle.

this kind of hyper-realism…
this availability of different cultural affects:
apparently tonight william shatner was in the audience somewhere for they did a star trek tribute… during the fireworks display they played was to the music of star trek… movies and tv shows. when they were blowing off fireworks and i was watching young and old take out their cell phones to take pictures and record it… this event was wondrous… a real crowd pleaser. why were they trying so hard?

this notion of enchantment, which was missing from the desperation that arose out of 9/11… has found itself reborn today in momentary displays of immersive experience… ok, sure, there’s nothing really bad about going to see a baseball game and its following fireworks… (except maybe your team losing). but this is the kind of pure, unanalytical, uncritical embracing of patriotism, team spirit, community, crowd-oneness that people are missing… we all are in this together and for a moment, despite being competitors in driving, in jobs, in relationships, in living space with all these angelos, we can all pretend that we belong together and that everything fits in a secular humanism devoid of poverty, suffering and discrimination.

this kind of singularity reminds me of a conversation with some hipsters about books a few nights earlier. rather than lament that no one ever read anymore, we started talking about how people do read, but in different media. i tried to steer the conversation into “the novel started off as a distraction for victorian women on their summer trips (something to do when sitting in the carriage or on a boat)… and ends today as just another source of entertainment (like the long drawnout serial tv dramas like lost or 24)… if we are upset that no one reads anymore, we are probably missing the fact that without the novel as a penultimate art form, no one really processes data in a long drawn out way, for deeper analysis… you don’t get this immediate engagement with tv serials, movies, video games or performance… and following that, do we need the kind of thought that goes into something like moby dick or war and peace?”

no one had any answer that moment. but i think that if we start having our entertainment as immersive singular experiences that exist in “dodgerland” or “when you turn on your xbox and select any video game” … that fragmented disconnected disjointed (ir)relevancy, means that we won’t be able to examine this content without understanding the larger frame its presented in… (since each content will have its own specific logic, like an anime with a ton of characters who behave weirdly but fit together). in other words analysis will be limited to less about what something is, than how it fits in — less what it says than how it functions when placed in the context of a larger whole… in a metaphysical way what “time” it presents in, as it defines its own time and is defined into a time. in a sense, we will have to leave the why to programmers, marketing departments, designers and engineers who create the box, package the content, as they understand how it fits in financially and socially, why people come to it, how they use it, what they are looking for… the only way to engage has to be on a deeper level of abstraction. otherwise, you will a puppet in the system. even while philosophizing, you run around, a rat in a maze of market forces. you are collectively shuffled into traffic, follow the defined paths beaten by urban engineers to maximize efficiency of travel, regulated by invisible giants for a specific purpose… the result of which, is poor design that juxtaposes and fails in most dimensions (lost in traffic, stores isolated and starving, stuck in traffic, accidents, even death); or good design that maximizes its output (easy flow, plenty parking, encouraging you to feel good about buy things you dont need, to a highway that dumps you onto your neighborhood with easy access home to bed).

i think the majority of systems are designed to input-output, they are haecceity oriented; transform one material into another for the purpose of quiddity. it might be information of one type, into another, but the result is nearly always a modularity that interlocks with other modularities… be it a car on the road with other cars, or one web page that functions on most any browser. you can be a unique, but the big system knows you entirely; plays you like a fiddle and when its done with you, you’ll don that solider uniform. your condition may be weird but the health care system has a form for you! its all about the processing. not as an industrial society that used to can fish or make fords on an assembly line; we do this to ourselves now. the rationalization of process invades our subjectivity and cleans it out. even in scifi dystopias of post-armageddon, we still have robot mass murders, insane, inhuman machines that have a system to wipe out the human element.

rationalizations of process and process oriented management (of people, as employees or as customers) is probably the one far reaching mindset that came out of the 20th century…. its also the biggest, most useful and most damning box that we have built for ourselves. as capitalists, we have developed money, at least as students of economy, into a raw unit of social value. in the process of using money as an objective measure to determine the viability and value of pursuing endeavors, we’ve also had to objectify processes so as to track money… so we can further measure the potentiality of any and every course and each level and each intersection, be it in government or business.

as mice in such processes, we are bombarded by a variety of paperwork, forms, meetings, appointments… junctions which administrators and bearucrats alike shuffle us into different hallways, websites, telephone transfers, offices… we are transformed from one client into the next client, and our goals are often sidelined by the process we must endure to reach our goals. the only reprieve from this process must be immersive entertainment, new worlds that we can partake as fully as possibly… with their own logic and their own rules… to be fresh and enchanting, to allow new and better candies… which ironically, sublimates this model of rationalization… single player video games are the most obvious, since there’s a path (or paths), a storyframe the player must masochistically follow to reach the endline. like sade flogging our subjectivity into the perfect worthy superhero who only he can reach the end (and you must be he if you were there for this all). in baseball and other distractions, we have the model which is presented as a series of courses, time for the jumbotron, time for the commercial break, time for the cliffhanger at the end of the season… the better the structure is hidden, the better disney reminds us we aren’t standing in line for hours, the more immersive the experience, the more hidden the process, the more successful the distraction, the purer the aesthetic and the more separate that highpoint emotion is from everything else (to be repeated?).

so when stacking processes, the model of the individual as a free standing spiritual being has to give way to a multi-valent subjectivity… a raw nothingness that is waiting to be transformed into client, or employee, tracked along a series of rationalized tiers (level 1 admin, level 2 senior engineer, platinum card member)… on the producer side we have a series of machinic trees that eat employees and shuffle customers and product like blind jugglers. on the consumer side people are demographized into a crowd of impersonal hunger for particular experiences (a particular sporting team, snowboarding or surfing, the regular motley of a demographic of restaurant, a group tour)… very different from the very personal subjectivity of the “everyman” individual that nearly every main character written since tom jones was approaching the end of the 20th century… (this past naturalistic subjectivity was most visible in mary shelley’s frankenstien, a subjectivity in a non-subject body, the post-human frankenstien!)…

what we are doing is no longer a matter of self improvement, for there is nearly no self. we are regulated into narratives trapped in bodies, with too many properties to count! i am every kind of number to any institution. to find yourself, to look for that center that william wordsworth had when he wrote “Lines written a few miles above Tin Abbey” is impossible today. wordsworth could be whole writing as an upper class poet, lazying in the shade with his sister, but we can only be EAT PRAY LOVE, a series of disconnected, disjointed experiences that are marginalized by the objective processes that dominate our landscape of process oriented institutions., that package experience, package us so many slices of individually wrapped cheese. this post-self is an XML file, a tree crowded with attributes, children and nodes, namespaces needing to populated and defined, attributes that connect only to one or two situations… we are maps that defeat definition, maps that can be read from any dimension but are every shifting and changing in tenor dependent on vector, content and value. you could become any fan at any moment; soak in the media light and follow any event; you can jointly comment on yahoo news, or huffington post or reddit. thats because we are one piece. as individuals on the street we have no connection but our connection is deeper than occupying space. together we create a mindless, headless bastion moving godlessly and clumsily, an orgy of demographics, unified and unpredictable, gobbling up the planet, turning the earth inside out as we stack her guts along as highways, guardrails, airplanes, cell phones, and strip malls, event as we stack her guts on us as an exoskeleton of devices to extend ourselves in invisible social dimensions, to join as a single forge of entertainment and profit maximization.

each layer is different; at each step up the tree or across a branch, we have a different logic, a different department. vast stretches of sociality are the same; paper work, stamps, requisition and cross-benefit analysis, but many areas are radically different; and they may bump into one another like galaxies whose gravitational influence cross-congregate and (dis)assemble like rap and rock or 4chan and minecraft or the colbert report and highschool… but an interesting elucidation for another post.

so yes, this is what i went though while watching the baseball game. dodgers vs cubs. dodgers won, 6 to 1.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

August 5, 2012 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1-2)Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very touching story. I liked that Satrapi as an author did not put a strong editorial spin. We see the political and social changes from the point of view of her child-self, with an emphasis on the hypocrisy and well intentions of those around her. In this way she manages to keep the narrative uncluttered, yet still very engaging. I read this book in a few hours, it was riveting. I would recommend it to anyone who would like a high impact but fairly simple narrative.

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aesthetics for temporal cognition

June 13, 2012 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

have the nagging feeling that life is slipping me by even though i am productive, in the every day sense, that my actions have consequences for the ppl around me, even to people i have not met.

the sense that i do not have a life, that i do not matter, even though i kind of have a life and even without the sense of community nor with the closeknit friendships ive always had; i still go out several times a week.

this feeling must be based off the faulty illusion that we can “get it”, having achieved something, or experienced something, having it to keep forever. when in fact, even objects, which are the least objective of all, shift constantly, in imperceptible angles, adding up the way the butterfly wings kill entire weather patterns, though, the metaphor is more poetic than actual since complex systems can be expressed in tipping points graphically but not that is not equivalent to being instigated solely by such tiny singularities.

most of all though, what we have is memory. bergson in matter and memory hit the nail on the head — that ontology isnt so much about an experience but a hall of mirrors — experientially echoing in infinite recursion, each recall degrading in imperceptibly, adding up the way butterfly wings shift wind patterns, though, the insect is more poetic than aural, more whimsical than solid, more illusionary than alive… much like that cat of mr. schrodinger’s

i dont think my push to be alive!(tm) could be more actual, although it certainly could be more dramatic. there can’t be more hours in the day. and to be honest i kind of do hate going out. i also love to sleep. look forward to it throughout the day, only to stay up late at night like now.

one of the realisations that LSD gave emily dickinson was that the infinite singularity of the ALL could be found even in a closed space, in the non-all of her room in Amherst. yes, even in Amherst could butterfly wings penetrate walls, and having felt that insect from halfway around the world, she found she could witness it in all things. in the early church calls of the morning or the rocket symphony of a good and tender wine or the heavy walking beats of the bee gees. look at her poetry– YOU KNOW SHE SAW THE MARK OF BUTTERFLIES IN HYPHENS AND ELLIPSES TRAILING OFF THE PAGE IN RHAPSODIC SPLENDOR

so perhaps i need to get out more, or perhaps not. at this point, one life would interfere with another, and together they would not enrich one another. i think at this plateau, they offer the same experience, so i should just choose one and concentrate on that.

but they really dont —

i am mistaking syntagma for paradigms. it’s my mistake, and a common one. formal equivalence is not the same as ontological difference…. that difference being identity, and that kind of paradigmatic difference is what distinguishes a particular woman as soul mate rather than as just another stranger.

of course that’s the sadness about formal reductionisms, that classification at the level of meta promotes the illusion that we can be a soul mate to each and any, every and all– when in fact, to be soul mate is a completely different thing, from one soul to the next.

and of course, our human limitation will not allow us to swallow the whole ocean with our tiny little cups. in pouring more & more & MORE &MORE!, we lose what we have. that’s clear from chuang tzu, perhaps why emily stayed in her room, so as to not lose wings (even if she was only seeing her own pattern strewn across all her furniture and things).

so we seek butterflies out through formal equivalence, rather than gaining a unique deployment with each instance. perhaps this is a facet of a short-cut in cognition, to build patterns and build experience from within familiar patterns. yet we’ve each come across in ourselves and in others, a recognition that experience can be defined solely by patterns we see, when we rely on our syntagasms rather than on the uniqueness of each moment.

yet similiarly to grasp each moment as a uniqueness lends itself to another reductionism, that this can be grasped and is a thing to itself, like the last thing in itself… and this produces another syntagmasm, a meta map for experience that contains each and every, a freshness– so that we insist on finding a novelty in each moment, forcing a short sightedness. we forget to see the entire jet stream and only see butterflys flapping. not so bad, but then why walk with your head down, each foot swinging out. and walk into a pole? or wall? or another charles?

perhaps i am kidding myself. that there is a direction there, and that we can dictate how we surf. but if your walking feet don’t hypnotize then is it possible to see the moon as seperate from the finger pointing at it? bruce lee seemed to think so, and he had great balance though he did die young.

i am rejected, am rebuked, forced back, into the same position i was before, when i started writing this damned thing. yet now feels slightly different, degraded, altered, imperceptibly by me? by time? by metabolism? hallelujah! progress? or is this just another remix for the new year?

heidigger wrote that death encapsulates meaning, a life. that right before one died, when one was dying, then one could be most complete. and having an end point, knowing it’s lurking there, lets us wrap ourselves in meaning, and bring finality to what we do/did, a beauty that when standing on the hill, we can grasp, a beauty which might be lost if we lived for too many 10,000 years. perhaps making bruce a hero too, than if he passed on in bed, an old man filled with regret, living in the past.

so if he was right, with this “a life” we can have meaning, but meaning then, can only be individual, a prior-ity given to prioritize against all other possibilities, potentialities and signifieds… each and every, any and all vectors. that if individual then that precludes the possibility of universal meaning, even if meaning can be shared by the group, by societies, it cannot exist without “a life” and cannot persist without death. bruce’s fingering the moon is the moon to bruce, not to us. then how can the universe not end? how can it not be, unless its meaning was completely inhuman, beyond human and not-human ever at all?

which it obviously is, the way an ant colony understands one things, and ice cubes grasp another, completely foreign actualization.

that we should ride, like a gigantic purple moon over a crazy ocean made of foaming milk and styrofoam, that walt witman with his opium face should preside over an archway of marble halls in deafening revolution be how we find our place — like a daisy on a battlefield — this is spectacular, and betrays our ant colony mentality. but perhaps this is not a weakness at all; that our heads should be bowed when walking. but a strength, a persistence, that happiness is good health and a bad memory, so said the famous addict ingrid bergman, in her shadowy eyes — that one of the so called greatest movies could be just a torrid affair between an older man and a younger woman. that there isnt anything sublime about love, or our role in society, our conflict with the iron will of others…. like a badly painted wall we thinly veil our intentions and let our patterns tell us how to feel.

and can we hope or fear that and each passing moment might penetrate our blindless like a strangely seen roman empire superimposed on los angeles so tormenting horselover fat because only he can step out of that pattern and witness pinkly winking lights, children who fortell of the future, living among tapes, wires, and recorders and dying before the end of the world to the horror of those who hang onto prophecy but freeing us for perspicacity of having a second chance, that death is each moment and in our grasp a creation for each, that even when we hang onto a crystal ball, then can we desire its silence to free us from delphi, free us from expectations, from our patterns, from ourselves…

art and connoisseur-ship as market affects

May 6, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, Theory / No Comments

apparently there’s a release of a new documentary called jiro dreams of sushi. have not seen it. was curious though — thought it was an anime about sushi. cuz on fb and twitter people watch the movie and then go eat sushi.

okay.

naw, it’s about a man who took sushi as an art to the next level. as a biography that’s kind of alright. but the movie seems to translate into go have sushi and appreciate it even more.

that’s okay too. its kind of duh. i mean if you know anything about japan, of course it’s an art. but at the same time, what isn’t anything anyone does an art?

stacking rocks is an art. breathing is an art (yoga). looking at something, standing. it’s all an art. so what!

If everything is art, then why should we care about art?

 

What is wrong with Art for Art’s sake?

i am not sure why i am on such a bent on thinking of connoisseurship. what’s wrong with it? i think art for art’s sake is stupid. i think art for a purpose is just as stupid.

art for art’s sake or collecting specific knowledges like collecting shot glasses. connoisseurship for personal development is a waste, a sign of our decadent society. behaving in this manner is like picking a random thing and making that thing central. that kind of imbalance isn’t really all that great for anyone. but taken seriously, it becomes a replacement for actual life.

i would like to make a distinction now, between knowing what you like and being a snob, an otaku or a fanatic about it… there too is a formal difference between being a connoisseur and being an addict, but i don’t think that in this context, addict vs connoisseur is a meaningful distinction as both seek to centralize a content area. what’s tragic about this content area is that the borders of the content area are often arbitrary, formed from external factors (market influenced, historical or personal, to name a few). EX: you can be a tennis connoisseur but why not soccer or racquetball? that’s a different sport? what about clay courts vs concrete or grass? what about right or left handed players? singles or doubles? mens or womens? you see my point.

in contrast to this decadence, is knowledge collected for the sake of solving a problem. for instance, being nitpicky about how a certain module is built can have an impact on the entire system for the purposes of a network server. that’s fine. or how a proposal is written. okay! but being nitpicky about how a wine is aired is some sense ridiculous.

so art is nebulous, a matter more of deployment and affect than of substance.  this is because there’s no big picture for art. a big picture which preserves art as a concrete thing is a fantasy, because art like authenticity exist in the middle as a tactical endeavor.  art as a material affect lacks authenticity.  authenticity is about relations.

 

Authenticity and the Market place, What makes Hipsters Capitalists

so yes, all i do is talk about the big picture. but there is a difference between relationships and meaning/intention. certainly there is a correlation between things, even cause and effect. for instance, as i’ve complained before, hipsters have a notion that only non-market effects have authenticity.

this means that we (as hipsters) buy things that are local and personal. we despise corporate. but this really misses the point. the corporate (market) culture worships material. through branding, through product and design… the whole point is to get to the point of sale. so knowing this, hipsters avoid markets, and seek far flung corners of the globe to escape market realism.

but this is nonsense because by considering the non-market affects as alternatives to market products, hipsters actually bridge the gap between market and non-market. they introduce global capitalism by seeking supposed non-market areas and introducing rational choice theory and other market constructs. ive said it before; hipsters are very much the avant-gaarde of global capitalism by bringing fringe affects to the center.

so my point about authenticity is that hipsters like their corporate nemesises, miss the point:

Authenticity is found in relations, not Material.

you may complain that your boss treats you inhumanly, like a cog in the machine. but that treatment is authentic because when you are at work you are a cog in the machine. getting cut off on the freeway is definitely an authentic relationship, as is talking to the local barista for five minutes each day. in much the same way, hipsters mistake authenticity as a market construct — they think that having a human relationship means getting to know your local bum as your brother.

walter benjamin got it right with art in the age of mechanical reproduction. art as a market construct comes about when an item can be massed produced. the ‘original’ item then, becomes something more than mass produced. it becomes art, valuable and priceless because of its non-market origins. this is a different understanding of art than as a tactical maneuver.

when you think of non-market influenced art, like performance art.. but even more so like street art, graffiti art or transient earth art as real art (non-museum, non-institutionalized pieces) you are making a mistake about what art is. art as a produced item, even if it has non-market origins only enters the market as more market produced items.

graffiti art just happens to be the latest taste… performance art (which cannot be traditionally museumized due to its localized and temporalized nature) and earth art were previous forerunners in a series of attempts to experience non-market reality. but this too becomes just another item that is more prized as art once reproductions (albeit even imperfections) are passed on.

post-industrial capitalism as a whole is rightly a post-modern worldview, of signifiers divorced from having a penultimate signified.  post-industrial capitalism encapsulates material within a decontextualised territory, of market place, passing on the content as the form. hipsters seeking to escape market influence only spread its affects further because they mistook the market place as a set of content not a logic of deployment.  to grasp onto someone who was the first or who was the best (as with jiro) is just another expression of those elevating forces that define art and artistry as another market deployment. (this works, of course, the same way with music hipsters, who must hate a thing once it has obviously entered the market…)

so if you re-tool authenticity as relationships which originate from us as who we are, then we have to accept that authenticity is market-agnostic. so to go over human relationships as being authentic or not, wearing your mother’s sweater she got you is an authentic thing — not because she made it by hand (rather than old navy — because it might be from old navy) but because you note she loves you and you love her back is the thing. so in this i agree with zizek. the waiter who notes his role as waiter with a dose of cynicism is the man who actually is a waiter… he notes the expected rules and approaches them with the intention of being effective as a waiter is one who is authentic about his being a waiter… more so than the one who just does what he is supposed to with a pure heart… that kind of attitude means that the latter has not sacrificed all that he is into the role — he has not given up that which is not waiter yet, as he has not acknowledged it to give it up.

this is kind of a complex idea, but it comes from zizek’s background growing up in stalin eastern europe. one’s actual actions count, so that if one even carries with it the negativity about their duty and yet performs their duty — then one really is completely “into it” so to speak since one has made the choice to accept one’s fate… rather than one who mindlessly does it because it’s there (suggesting that the latter has yet to really make up their mind as they haven’t yet realized their mind).

in much the same way, one who is with their spouse despite their spouse’s flaws is one who is committed to the relationship. perhaps that is a more obvious way of speaking.

this of course, defines authenticity regardless of market influence.   authenticity has to do with personal affect, if it touches you or not.

sad to note though: the most authentic relationships most people have in their daily lives are with their pets. we can imbue our pets with subjectivity so as to better relate to them — or we can take that subjectivity away, should it be inconvenient. what makes most people’s relationships inauthentic is our inability to really accept the other person, due to expectations, market forces, career pressures, emotional hang ups or whatever… (i don’t mean that one should blindly accept whatever your significant other dishes, i mean that your relationship should be defined on a personal basis before one plays the role of “wife”… not because one has to be a “wife” so that means you behave in a particular way regardless of how one feels or doesn’t feel)

So where does that leave us with Art and Jiro?

rather than pursuing art in terms of market, we should probably see it natively. that is, with the viewer’s  (our own) sensibilities than any group focus. group objectivity is a theoretical position, one which is best fostered through art community consensus or market forces (enough people recognize, or it has been reproduced enough times to be famous). this means that art is a nebulous thing… and it is up to the artist to manage their audience’s expectations, should they wish to be an artist. i don’t think that art for arts sake should be how we see it, otherwise as a model of self expression, bad poets are the most artistic of all, since they speak directly from their emotions regardless of craft… and bad poetry is something most people will recognize as not being at all art.

so what we take from the movie is what we will, be it a biography, or a better appreciation. and if it be the latter, than we have achieved the most simple marker, haven’t we? and if watching a movie lets us be affected by sushi as art, then so be it.

what’s missing from corporate materialism is enchantment… and tactically, that is what art does.

so yeah, i did start somewhere, against something and i ended up in the same spot, with everything possibly, as an art. so what!

capitalism as tourism

May 1, 2012 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, note to self, Theory / No Comments

there’s something to be said about people who, for whatever reason, have the basic necessities taken care of. i, of course, am one of those people. it’s doubtful that i will ever starve. i’m not rich, but i do have a cushion, of sorts. and there are plenty of people who are like, in a way. i don’t mean the very rich, or trust-fund babies, or young people with great careers. i also mean people who live off their parents and do nothing for themselves, who may be highly intelligent or even well educated, but for whom life is one big video game fest. or whatever.

this problem, if it is in fact one, has been around for ages, for as long as there have been wealthy or bourgeois. but with capitalism it’s even more pronounced. when you consider that most of us being human, have the same taste, for bacon or fatty foods, or good beverage… most of people in the sum of human history have struggled for the basic necessity — never getting to taste oyster. it’s hard to get oyster. so unless you have a connection to someone, or you yourself have that skill, you’ll never get to experience it. much like a good piano performance or whatever. but with capitalism you can be better than most people at something completely useless. like bean counting. and with the right business structure, you can fit into a machine that needs expert bean counting. so now you have a job. and with money, you can transform your better than average, otherwise useless skill into something extraordinary. now you can have all the oysters you want. or all the beautiful music you have no skill to play.

this video, the above video is kind of the opposite. but it fits too; heres someone who can become more of an expert at something relatively useless. if he had to get a job, it might be getting bird’s nests… or living in the arctic to climb cliffwalls to get bird’s eggs to feed his family. but it’s not even that. with the market place you can indulge in whatever desire you want, and really hone in and focus on it.

i think there is a dialectic in development, that prevails across anything that requires skill. like darts, or chess or horseback riding… playing the tuba. it’s like how children find a picture awesome, because they’ve never seen something so shiney before. but when they get older, shiney doesn’t so much matter. it’s now about composition or mass. if you can get enough taste, you begin to appreciate tension in a picture, something that is off balance, that was before, a little disturbing because it’s not perfect. eventually what is art isn’t the topographically ideal symmetry (all buildings are cubes), but buildings which suggest that ideal symmetry without being it, and then buildings which exaggerate that function to the point at which it almost doesn’t work — but they pull it off.

its alot like the marquis de sade with his art — you can worship the ideal body like some marble heart, you can flail a body until it is really just a body and becomes the marble heart — you can stretch the body so it hangs on a thread of life, and in turn stretch that consciousness until it’s a pure consciousness on its own horizon. i mean, what is what you love isn’t it, when you meet someone, when you two are together on your own horizon.

i guess there’s no accounting for taste. but it happens so many different ways in so many different directions. especially when it comes down to connoisseurship. when the art becomes central, and everything else wraps around it. that central disharmony is an elevation of a gradient so that all the white beads are to one side of a membrane that holds them there. against entropy. i suppose when smoking a cigar, there’s a way to do it without burning too much. or drinking your manhattan, there’s a balance of bourbon to vermouth depending on the specific flavors (i like wild turkey 101, so that’s difficult to balance). addiction is the finest of gradients, the centralisation of specific disharmony. i guess this rock climber needs to collect his off beats, so he can dispel them in a fury of climbing.

that kind of collection is on the one hand, admirable. the attitude he speaks of, of going at it with positive energy day to day… to do the task. that’s life isn’t it? what architect or designer or film director or chef or even waitress or file clerk or call center rep can’t relate to that?

but having conquered one climb and celebrating before going to the next — that’s a token given right to chess puzzles, to sheet music, to composition of novels, to picking up girls, to fucking video games. and no one admires an obsessive video game player. is there an art to fiddling with controls? yes. it’s not easy and in the old 4 bit or even 8 bit games, there’s a finesse of skill in timing and execution that you don’t often get in today’s intensive graphics shooters.

but even having gone there, what about the mindless action of early 8-bit textured 3D rendered 2D worlds, like DOOM?

but everyone constructs their own horizon. we all have our own values and hooks and traves. we make our own house with our own definitions, and store our own fancies. character, which many of us have at least, topographically, is the result of internal and external strife. literally — we are like stars. stars want to explode because of fusion, but also want to implode because of gravity. our character is the boiling of our surface due to external and internal stimuli. character is how we deal with our blindspots, how we deal with our intensities. those of us who harness our own specific intensities and sculpt our own obsessions still have our own horizon — but it becomes more obviously focused. raymond roussel wrote locus solus in the same byzantine labyrinthian excess as the marquis de sade wrote justine or 100 days of sodomy. only rather than a crass sexual game, we have a objectification, raised to the meta. a garden of disharmony built on cultural excess. think of samuel beckett as the super-james joyce — the pulling through of narrative as a THING, to sculpt out that ill-defined kernel called narrative and make it into its own living and breathing surface. i am speaking of the indulgencies of post-industrial capitalism each expressed as a film, a genre, a brand name. each with its own internal world brand, which is disconnected from the last. schizophrenia with deleuze and guattari is a conceptualized way of noting half worlds in disconnect, interacting with a multi-valience of bursting out logics. this is that schizophrenia, but even more so, an eating of its own internal excess to be an excess. the lacanian moebius strip best explains how the inside is also the outside — and so with this caterpillaring of self as a climber, or as any connoisseur we have the bending of fundamental distopias into a collective consciousness called self. neurotic and bundled as a person, we don’t seek to become at peace in the utopian hippie sense, one with the world, but we seek to be consumers, one with our digestion.

ultimately though, the need to digest different kinds of ornate-tacies is limited to forms which fit our central disharmony. he seeks a new climb which he can then chew on with his fingers and does, his weight as he swings the planet around his gravitational center. i am the center of the world. as a financial otaku one’s digestive system collects financial tools as unique shapes in the cilia, embedded in several stomaches, as monies that imprint shadows in the interior lining as options or leverages. its at the bar that you pick your poison and at the university with a list of colleges that you do the same.

in difference and repetition deleuze highlights how thought is another form of metabolism. flowers contemplate the variance of sunlight with their circadianisms as consumers in supermarkets contemplate products with their digestion and their social affluences.

in the end though, you might as well travel to japan to experience their politeness and their ramen, or go to arches national park in utah for their red rock formations. try shabu shabu in taiwan with real pork blood, you know the kind actual taiwanese eat, with their native mushrooms. or sit at a fancy whiskey bar trying different scotches from the thousands of islands and peninsula that decorate the topography of scotland. look at different rothkos in a book, or read balzac and then compare him voltaire or proust. be an arm chair traveller, watch andrew zimmern eat things from other parts of the world. you’re still tasting exotic landscapes. you’re still sampling different pussies — different only through age, and diet, and something that can only be individual. funny how when you think of phallic signifiers, pussy becomes another cock. we’re all sticking things in our mouths and contemplating, sniffing, seeing.

in the end though, all this excess. all this sightseeing, all this sniffling of new butts. just try it, and leave, feeling like somehow the journey has changed you. you are 1up on the dialectical ladder, one more climb richer. one more scotch wiser. and you get that, on your own horizon, you stamp another sopwith camel on the side of your red tri-fokker. when really, you’re just feeling things out with your intestines, tasting exotic packaged sausages and ultimately making exotic shits. wearing our your digestive system for the brief blaze of your lifetime, that much more knowledgable about the wall papers youve landed on. so it becomes a thing you can show off about on twitter or vimeo.

spend 20 years traveling all across italy for the different wineries.

don’t fool yourself. truth is, you’re just another tourist. only because you don’t wear mickey mouse hats and snapshots of tall skyscrappers, you carry some dignity with you, like some neo-electronica hippie. so much wiser for living now than thirty decades ago. crowd in all the hotspots you saw on yelp and make a nice collection of shot glasses.

nothing worst than a tourist than an enlightened tourist.

the soft amplification of a lever along a fundamental force

March 17, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, lyrical-narratives / No Comments

one of the simplest motions is the lever.

levers work by translating a small force into a larger motion — called leverage. mathematically the work remains the same, sum total, but through the use of levers through time, a smaller force applied over a longer period of time is easier for human beings to achieve motions which would be more difficult to apply directly. one of the key facets of levers involve the prime fundamental force, which helps structure the entire universe — namely gravity. levers could still work even if gravity did in fact not exist, as the force needs to be applied throughout the beam which acts as an amplifier. an interesting application of this happens in snowboarding, when the snowboarder stands at the fulcrum and adjusts her weight to and fro, in order to direct the force down the mountain. what’s tricky about the application is that part of the direction relies heavily on the traction between the board and the mountain. the snowboarder isn’t just deploying her own body as an amplification through the board but the constant change in the packed-ness of the mountain and the slope of the mountain also increases or decreases the amplification. if you hold the board and the mountain as two stable variables, you can see the little shadow grow bigger on one side or the other. this isn’t true to life though, since we are talking about a single axis with a stick — the human body is a more complex shape.

susan would write all these equations on the blackboard, working through variables in her math class. what’s absolutely astounding, she said, is that after a few trials of falling down, you intuitively grasp the physics. these equations become second nature to you, she said. for all our deliberate graspings of these complex equations, there isn’t anything for what happens in muscle memory. you learn quickly, or at least i did, she said, that tightening one muscle in your calf, or in your thigh can be enough to change direction

all these flew through her head, and out the proverbial window, though, when one winter day she tried to carve over a rather large ice patch and her board slipped out from under her. she over compensated and flipped over, flying in the wrong direction. she saw for a brief second a tree in her near future. she planted her feet down, forcing her board into the side of the mountain, wanting to cut deep into the ice and force a radical turn left, back onto the path. conditions that day were dire for her already — it had stopped snowing for a week already, and the constant sunshine had melted the snow which re-iced in the cold night that followed. this happened for 8 days already.

so the snow she cut into was hard, and she forced her board in too deeply, causing her board to lock. she didn’t have room to complete her fall though — the tree was right there.

when she came to, she was heavily bandaged and there were restraints on her body. she was groggy already. where? what? who? her left arm was somewhat unrestrained so she groaned and reached up, only so far before sharp pain forced her to relax. her boyfriend was there. yes, she had slammed into the tree. yes, she was in the hospital. she wanted to talk but her mouth was locked. don’t move, he said. i’m here. you were out for two days — your parents are flying in tomorrow. just relax. i’ll be here.

lucky the school had great insurance for their professors. and she had recently become tenured. so the months that followed were a slow progression for doctors in the dark. at first, she was worried she would not walk again. they said, no that wasn’t it — her spine was fine. she had changed her fall to the right in the last second and avoided the trunk, which would have probably snapped her spine should she had hit it full on… but in her change she hit a low hanging branch and that knocked her out. she could see herself drawing our her accident on a chalkboard, explaining the entire thing to a class of disinterested students. yes, she would have to revisit the spot, first chance she got, to take measurements and figure out exactly what the slope was and which direction she was going. in fact, susan? susan? hm, she asked. sorry, i wasn’t listening. there was a long silence, and she sensed something was wrong.

the point? she may not see again.

her chalkboard dreams disintegrated back into darkness.

but they will have to run some tests and wait, let her body heal some more.

there wasn’t much else to it. some glimmer of hope evaporated slowly in the ensuing weeks. when she was released, she could not believe it; she had to use a cane, sweeping it to find her way around.

with that, her remarkable future as a math teacher seemed another world. her upcoming vacation to morocco next year? the last thing on her mind. her devoted bf would go to the other way, in the hallway and whisper with doctors. tell her, we’ll get through this, somehow. her parents, her mother’s hand on her forehead, her father holding her hand. she was an only child, and they stayed way too long. what’s all this whispering business? what’s all this poor susan business? what’s all this darkness?

there’s not much to a blackboard without chalk. so her math musings were like so many fingernails trying to scratch an x on what was blackness. only a blackboard isn’t truly black. it’s kind of a green-black, so she always thought, but now, there’s not even that. this blackboard has no equation. she couldn’t carve an x into this darkness for anyone, let alone carve a sharp turn in some fucking ice patch. she had stayed an extra few days too, extended her trip since the hotel offered a deal since ppl were leaving. the slope was bad, so froze and packed, only the experienced daredoers stayed. and those years and years of practice, fun, and all the bruises and the few broken bones here and there — for this?

she would never drive again.

she would have to take the crappy almost non-existent public transit. one of her first trips was to the beach.

from here, her bf told her how beautiful coronado island was, how she could see it. hear the seagulls, hear the ocean, small the salt. hear the children and the far off sandrake the city of san diego dragged across the beach to keep the sand loose and smooth, cool under her feet, freshly raked sand.

she wouldn’t go into the water, except with a heldhand. she could only see the beach in her head. sometimes she saw things at night, or saw her bfs or someone’s expression, filled in, and she would unconsciously mistake her imagination for vision, smiling when she heard the street vendor’s voice, imagining him like mario from mario brothers, with a thick bushy mustache. she asked her bf if he looked like that, and he sounded funny when he said that the man did look like that. she played this game for a while, hearing a woman talk sternly to her child, and seeing a thick redheaded woman until she walked into the one too many chairs, thinking the pond smaller than it was, and she fell over spraining her ankle in the fountain, pennies sliding under her fingers like so many bumpy equations hidden in the thick darkness like a gigantic patch of ice over everything again.

they had been an outdoorsy couple, despite her nerdy inclination to make everything into an equation. they loved to go surfing, or golfing, snowboarding, hiking in the hills, or out in the desert. she would map out the arc of balls, draw fourier transformations on napkins so she could rape him at pool. (he would complain but if she used the math she would always win.) how like a dream now! they used to camp overnight, make love under the stars. and came back covered in dust to sit naked together, after a hot shower, to watch the tv. all of that paradise was so far away now. they couldn’t do the tv thing.

at first he was more than attentive, but then as she dispassionately predicted, he came by less and less after work. she still taught, but could not grade papers. she had to work doing something else, with a TA. she went on disability. she stayed at home, sleeping odd hours. her phone would ring, if she remembered to plug it in, and she learned her apartment by the shape of her body, the space she fit herself into between the toilet and the shower, between the kitchen and the oven was three susans. her couch was two susans from the sliding glass door.

she burned her fingers trying to cook. so she left the radio on, softly and held the handle. the radio sound did not matter. they could talk of the presidential election, the serial rapist, or some celebrity bullcrap it was the same drone to her as she stir a curry mix until it smelled a certain way, careful not to burn herself… her pots must look terrible, full of burn marks, and other odd grossnesses…

the microwave was touch pad, and her bf glued dots to the buttons, so she could cook her food properly. after an undercooked this, a burnt that…

she felt him as a smell, an obelisque on the horizon, dark and small and then smaller and darker until it was only night. she wasn’t sure what time anything was, without feeling the sun on her skin. she left the curtains open a crack so she could feel the heat.

until she realized was it a day ? a week? two weeks? he did not come by. she called him and there was no answer. a message, and… no return call. nothing.

a small nothing, in a big gigantic void of nothing.

suicide was a small thought somewhere. her parents said she should come back to them, but she loved that apartment. she couldn’t afford it. the disability services ppl wanted to teach her how to subsist on routine and fixed dimensions. the entire globe became the shape of her street block, like the back of her head, or the small between the toilet and the sink.

if she dropped her toothbrush in the bowl, she knew where it would lie, and she knew how far her hand was from the rim. her parents bowl? how big was that? how smooth was that?

she was wasting away, with her cell phone dead somewhere. she tossed it into some obscure corner. she was sure it broke, it sounded like it. and something weird and crunchy lay under her feet by the front door.

she wasn’t sure where her duvet lay, she slept under a sheet, with a towel and her jacket. what color was this towel? was it the blue one or one of the ones with animal prints?

then one day it happened.

she thought it a dream, a face like mario from mario brothers, the street vendor but with a yellow hat staring down at her. so startling she forgot she was blind and screamed, turning her head to the side, what was this man doing so close to her face?

but she could not get away. she screamed and bolted to her side until she realized that she was face planted in a mysterious pillow on the floor beside her bed and this face still filled her field of vision.

still this vaguely terrified her, after seeing nothing for so long and she wept a little into the pillow, feeling the chilly floor sweep into her back and sides. she recalled this was winter, heard somewhere on the radio, and it was about a year since that fateful accident.

she stretched out, banging her elbow on her bed and the face spin slightly and winked at her.

she tried, experimented with turning her head, reaching her hands out and this face, too close for comfort was still there. her hands, she did not see her hands. was there sunlight? she found and hit her clock and it told her it was 3:45pm on tuesday, january 3rd.

it was the beginning of the FACE the era of its eyes, two black holes, a blackhole mouth with blackhole nostrils, dark hair, busy mustache, yellow cap like one of those taxi drivers from movies in the 60s.

this was so odd and terrifying at once, she could not ignore it. when she turned on her favorite radio station, this face danced around a little, wriggling though it lacked body and neck. she thought she could see every little pore in its sink, see every eyelash on its eyes. it could be more handsome. who are you, she asked, her voice crackling from lack of use. the face winked at her again.

she thought she could see her reflection in its eyes, but she could not peer closer into to see, as FACE existed as contact lenses do, independent of where she moved her head or her body.

whatever. add to my misery.

as though she lost a tooth. it used to be there, her mouth was the same and now it’s not. she’s toothless and must continue to eat and live life this way.

or like blindness.

after a day though, she was screaming at it, throwing things around, the FACE grinning and winking at her as though it understood her. but then it did not. it danced around, random. it made a kissy face as if mocking her. then she heard knocking noises. is that you she screamed stop a very muffled voice answered back and the FACE made a gesture with its eyes and tilted the chin. who are you she asked again.

this is the police. police? yes open up. are you okay, miss …. she had a strange revelation she almost fell over, someone was at the door. the police were at the door! yes yes sorry officer, everything is fine she said hoarsely, cracking the door open. she thought they were shining a flashlight in her eyes, she was sure of it, but she is blind and had no idea if they were. we heard screaming is everything okay? we had a complaint of noise. it’s 5am, miss. yes, sorry, everything is okay, i just thought someone was in here. do you mind we look around? no i’d rather you didn’t (you might take something from me, or move something and i would never find it again, probably trip over it.) well this is your first warning. we can walk around the perimeter if you like.

she got them to go away. and decided to keep her illness to herself. she laughed a little, cried a little and the FACE winked at her its grin both toothy and toothless. okay okay, so you need a name after all. lets call you… mac. you look like a mac. as if in agreement, so the mustache wriggled.

mac did not disappoint. a week later, she noticed he tilted a certain way when she was in the bathtub. she could not play with herself anymore, she found too, with this FACE always looking and jiggling.

what a turn off.

and when wanting to drink milk, mac seemed annoyed. she sniffed it. called on her neighbor and asked when does this expire? it’s been expired a week…

she went to the store, and found that when going down the milk aisle, mac bristled. where is the milk? there is no milk. the store is remodeling. how could she get milk? could you help me, she said, i need these items, and i can’t see…

it was odd talking to the employee, as she felt she was talking to mac. and mac seemed to dance quite a bit, in conversation.

she decided to move in with her parents.

she had to. she had no income. she did not tell them about mac, but one by one she learned is movements. if she moved slowly enough, he was consistent. when she was going to run into something he did a look. when she was reaching for her drink and it was not there, he made a face. she talked to a man, and mac seemed alarmed, disturbed. she tried to excuse herself even though he seemed nice enough, and he protested, started to get rough with her, mac made a face and she knew he was going to put his hand over her mouth so she kicked at him, or at least mac gestured in such a way so as to suggest kicking at him… there

he ran away when someone came running by, and the police were called, he matched the serial rapist description. are you okay miss? yes, i am, sorry, no its okay i don’t need to go to the police my parents number is xxx.xxx.xxxx please call them,

and so she learned to read mac, or rather he taught her. mysterious teaching, but she had nothing else to do. mysterious looking, yes there seemed to be mysterious packages in the living room. her parents looked at each other. can you… see, susan? no no, i just… it’s my birthday and you were acting strange, she lied. yes, they are for her, and her dad laughed, she was adjusting okay.

when opening, she noticed dispassionately that they had still gift-wrapped the packages. no, it didnt feel like newspaper… she was sure the wrapping paper had a blue ribbon pattern so said mac… but she said nothing, asked, what does this gift paper look like…

blue ribbon…

maybe she should get off disability?

she took a trip on the bus to downtown one day, and knew how far the bus stop was, and mac’s tiny face seemed the entire expanse of the world, the colors in his skin telling her where to put her foot, and she marched up stairs and did not trip, knowing where everything was, how far the railing went, and that she was in front of a large building and that building was a grocery store.

so this discrimination went, and she could find her jacket where it was moved, whether it was night or day until one day her parents said, it’s just like you got your vision back!

i guess so, susan admitted. i should go back to work. she had a hard time reading, but it came slowly until one day she was walking down the campus to her class when a former student ran into her and said wow, ms kirkpatrick, i haven’t seen you in a long time.

yes — i … had an accident. i was blind for a while… they talked for a bit and she marveled at the marble whiteness, the faded dust along the edge of the wall. that was 6 years ago… and… where’s mac?

she didn’t see a face anymore, she saw the birds flying over head, the color of the trees as they swayed like so in the invisible but felt wind. she thought maybe his mustache extended the sidewalk, and maybe she was under his left eye? but then it was gone and she only saw the world, as placid as his winking eye.

wherever she went, she strained to see him, no longer drawing equations to describe the flight of birds, or how a skateboard can jib on a railing, how the skate bumps can decrease speed given how far apart spaced they are… she thought she saw his face in a student’s face, and she stared too long at the student that the student looked away embarrassed.

she felt like carmen electra in the movie the box, a professor with a secret club foot. she thought she walked with a strange internal limp, thought for a minute that the sky was a lip, a twisting of the nose in a sneer for a minute, and that familiar winking she thought she remembered but she could not picture at all; the pores on her skin lighting up in the setting sun, an iron chimney over the student union with the faint smell of korean bbq they are cooking something for the student event.

she could not shake how spaces in rooms felt like a skin, how her vision and how she touched everything as if through the filter of a tv screen that remained the same so that we forgot it was there, and then we were in the tv. and having slipped through that looking glass, unable to see the screen again, unless someone were to blind herself again, as if shining a light on the tv from behind the viewer, so one could see the shadow, the outline of his face.

there were days she could not see him at all, seeing only a field of things like tron, like the wireframe of a renaissance painting shocking through everything in those measured lines. she hurried along towards the horizon at breakneck speed, thinking perhaps, i can find the vendor who sounded like him, the street vendor whose voice i might recognize a mac…

was mac, was mac god?

did she see her in blindness the skin of his face, winking at us, supplementing for us as newborn infants the rest of the world, when in mother’s womb dad shines a flashlight through the naval so that our dark wet world becomes a crowded web of veins and arteries through which we might poke at small intenstinal lining as a series of tubes that wrap us when we sleep, piping that we will never remember again, and the smell of the amniotic fluid, both the taste of mother’s saltine p.h. and mixed with our own nose and mouth.

she drove her car to the beach and then walked around, looking at the island. drove to ski park and rented a snowboard since she did not bring one.

they looked at her funny people did, i don’t have a ski jacket she said. in her trousers and blouse, shivering she sat in ski lift 2 in chair 75 on her way to the top, behind her big bear lake, blue like the sky, with evergreens lining its outskirts. the lake big bear, like the big bear in the sky she knew was there, she watched stars with her x so often but a constellation could not see as the sun was too bright, burning out her memory.

she slid off the lift, angled it clumsily and fell, her naked arm burning against the soft snow, from shock and cold. she got back up, brushed the snow from her. people stared at this woman without snow pants, without a snow jacket. so out of practice. if she fell too many times, her blouse would get wet, turn transparent, maybe? she went down the same fated slope, carving around a tree. she never did revisit the spot like she had imagined in bed.

there was a turn. she thought this was the tree but something was not right.

she went all the way down, rode back up and down a different direction.

she fell a few times, and shivering got back in the lift. someone commented that she should go get a jacket, or you’ll freeze. teeth chattering she said i am alright.

she went back another way, and this was different too. she thought for a minute she saw the outline of an eye slipped down a loose patch and tumbled off the path into the snow that was not boarded on, that was not packed that was soft and filled her, she sunk up to her butt and she was so cold she unlocked her boots and hobbled out, her legs numb and stinging.

just then someone flew by, at a tangent to the general curve line, how the steepness of the curve could increase speed. the variables flew by her in a second and she was stunned with a cartesian map of the slope this was the direction! this was the way!

she climbed out of the bank and strapped her boots in bindings again, slid down and then she found a tree, sure this was the one. it had a fence around it. she wanted to touch it. she climbed around the fence, and hugged the tree, feeling its rough bark against her torso. she closed her eyes and saw the inside of her eyelids when she turned her face towards the sun, blinded in red, she thought she could see the inside, red like her blood, with some sharp relief of veins that blurred once her imagination faded, and warm, against the tree, intuitive, without graphing it she knew it well, mac, the face, the mountain with its matching stars. without mapping it, or measuring the slope she knew it, knew it without conscious deliberation, equations that melted in the sun like icing, so she no longer shivered, a uterine hug.

entry for no one

March 3, 2012 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, universal nothing / No Comments

in a time magazine article the most significant thing i found was a single line saying, “america’s unofficial religion of personal self transformation”

this is true, i feel. and nowhere can it be better exemplified than on the internet where people write about things they are doing and going through.

also, our commercials are so terrible. so wonderful at being terrible. the marketing for any product becomes a hermenuetics exercise to deploy it so it’s central to whatever it we are doing. products are angling that way too; not just like children’s cereal where it’s coco for coco puffs, or trix — not even fantasy nonsense, like lowes wants you to catalog everything your house is made of so you can plan your improvements on there. the deployment is to centralize everything. facebook or microsoft’s the cloud, whatever, my phone (the android one, i have two cell phones) is in some sense more important than my wallet! (although more secure..)

so the connection is that products can transform you too. make you a better person. re-center you. like religion or jesus or a good song… transformative. everything is transformative. embrace the mysticism. those pictures and text ppl are posting on fb now, an extension of lolcats and those inspirational posters — they are so misleading. those universal statements dont mean anything. they are quick bits that may or may not be applied as one likes. but reading it can make you feel good. it’s hypocritical CRAP that can be as a quick justification for any kind of good or bad behavior.

are we so lost that we can’t think for ourselves? we need random one-liners to let us feel like we are making progress?

the whole stupidity of the self transformation junk is that we aren’t transforming anywhere. we dont have a goal, or even a path to find anything. its like some bad acid trip that doesn’t lead anywhere or do anything. it’s not even enough to say this: Report: it all some kind of sick joke because to say the universe cares or not cares, or that it is playing a joke already says too much. anthromorphozie anything you like but it doesn’t lead to any real relationships. lacan was somewhat right — there are no real relationships, only shared fantasies that match up incidentally. if we can’t even see eye to eye with each other what chance is there for us to comprehend what goes on around us?

i suppose the easiest thing to do would be to narrow the scope. fuck the rest of the world, this is about America. or this is about my Family. Or our small group of friends, or even Los Angeles… in our post-cold war environment we still live with the spectre of the apocalypse, and in that sense, we already live in the post-apocalyptic world. we live it daily, pondering disaster scenarios; who we would try to band with, what matters to us when the clock resets… even if it’s only in genre zombie films… so we narrow it to the small band of strangers we are with on a multi-player game on the internet, or whatever — and so meaning has its place in tiny day to day movements, such as get this loan funded, or drive to this place and get a meal with a friend. you could live your life in vietnam so to speak, only worry about yourself day to day and all your past life is so far away.

after 9/11 happened some of us found out or whatever and didnt think much of it. i still drove to school even after my mom told me the 1st tower had been hit (i was in bed). traffic was horrible. i heard about the 2nd tower on my way to school on the radio. i got really good parking. the class was taoism, the first time i was taking it. the professor, a really old woman from montana with bright blue eyes, stood as straight as a rail and was a pedagogical nazi said a few worlds that we needed to hear. our class was there at 1030, mostly because we didn’t know what else to do… and she dismissed us for 2 weeks saying that everyday there is pain around us, all around the world. we just dont always know it because it’s not always in our face. but to be one with the world is to understand that pain is there, and to deal with it daily on a moment to moment basis. and not just pain, but happiness and joy and suffering — all of it at once. not about the things we are limited to in our immediate surrounding but also the whole spectrum of possible feeling. this is something that a sage gets and can deal with, not more easily, but is more prepared for because the spectrum is always open.

transformation is a stupid word. because only when we have a script in a movie, the clever ending is one in which we find we have the answer already. the clever loop gives us back our ability to deal with our depression because we had the answer all along — or we are the answer (like 5th element). and of course, yes, a movie is manufactured, with scripting and acting and takes 1 2 3 and writers and sets… but that’s just one possible narrative of all the narratives that happen simultaneously all the time. its just that the space and time continuum selects for just one narrow band at a time. the virtual unity is omnipresent and is not peaceful, or happy or blissful or accepting. it’s got everything all at once. like when krnsa revealed to arjuna his ‘real face’ in the bhagavad gita and arjuna (who is the avatar for the god indra but does not know it) is scared shitless seeing the naked face of a god…but only able in his mortal form to see just a part of that sublime texture. and that’s not ironic or anything. it’s just that our language based metaphysics which only abstractly supports intuitive concepts like “ontology” is unable to grasp situations that originate out of context, out of the humanity which is the foundation for language.

ive been watching alot of tv lately as my mind has been unable to function. i think i am not inspired by a task i see so clearly in the abstract but when writing it out becomes garbled…

steven colbert told a joke to a minister it went something like this.. an atheist committed suicide. he went to heaven and met god and he was like omg! i was wrong, all this, i was so wrong. there is a heaven! and a god! and why aren’t i in hell? don’t ppl who commit suicide go to hell? and god said yes, but it’s complicated. after all, everyone who has ever been has contemplated suicide at one point. in fact, i thought of doing it once. and the atheist said, well, why didn’t you? what stopped you? well, god said, i thought, what if this is all there is?

you know, the language that surrounds the thesis statement makes the difference. in phrases like “i always sit up straight because i am worried someone will see me” are always ambiguous to me. even if i agree with the first part, the reason for it may not be something i agree with. so do i agree with the conclusion because it’s the conclusion (sitting up straight) even though the reason for it may be completely off? do i vote for a candidate who will effect the changes i want even if he is a complete loon? do actions speak louder than words? and if they do, if actions is all that matters, then actually, there is no such thing as a lie and the entire edifice of language is only for its perlocutionary acts… and i guess, this means that truth is really only the lie — the ultimate lie — that is there is truth… there must be truth, so that we can do what we need to do.

eg, it doesnt matter if nature dies, or if humankind exists, only that the last human alive has a “happy life”. and for all intents and purposes you are the last human alive.

whatever “happy life” means.

so there you go. there’s the clever line. it returns us back to what we knew before, another selected potential in the virtual narrative web of all realities. living life in that abstract, is a dance — select the appropriate form of all possible* forms you have at your disposal.

*possible or potential is wrong here, because when i say virtual i mean that it’s real, just as real as what is reality, the difference is that the virtual is not-selected. while i use potential and virtual near-interchangably, strictly speaking, possible means that it is only different from reality in that it lacks reality. virtual is real in that the relationships are real, just not expressed.

not-being here

February 24, 2012 / posted in images of being-human, Uncategorized, universal nothing / No Comments

Kristeva explains abjection as an excess of uncaptured emotion. She uses the word ‘chora’ which comes from greek, something about empty vessels. Energy that is loose. Uncaptured emotion can levitate internal signs, giving to feelings of euphoria, or of mystical revelation.

Uncaptured emotion too, can lead to excessive disgust, the threat of degradation, of disrupting what we hold to be true. Trying to step people out of their box, when they don’t ask for it, often leads to an unconscious warding of this disgust. Question too hard and you will destroy their precious containers, ruin their beloved files. As such, they will try and explain away the threads you create for them, that lead them out of their box. Patch up the holes, and say, hey, this makes no sense.

When it does make sense, its just that they don’t want to go there.

Careful or you’ll break society for them.

Of course, you won’t break society for them. They’ll realign it, just at a different level, and incorporate your new information as a ‘negative’ in their schema.

For Kristeva at least, it’s all a matter of semiotics, of texts, of signs and their captured emotion. Captured emotion is determinate, discrete and safe. Poetry, for example, looses these bonds by butting signs against one another in new ways. Little sparks of emotion are let loose and that feels exciting. For some, poetry is abject. They don’t want that loose emotion rolling around. What are you supposed to do with it? For others, it’s pleasurable because they can roll with it.

Kristeva says poetry will change society by introducing new meanings. Nowadays, poetry is the least of our concerns. There’s plenty more on youtube that introduce new significations… for example… in an “in your face” kind of way.

One thing in common with euphoria and abjection is that the excess of emotion always trails off into the void of the unsignified. This may be a cosmic expression of the Sacred Other or it could be a horrific abyss where we lose touch with everything. This is actually both, depending deployment.

Still though, to say this is real and expect that all emotion be encapsulated, that the mystery itself be contained, is perhaps asking too much of intellect. Knowing how it happens, or knowing tragedy is such depending on one’s point of view does not eliminate the void, and its powerful statement it makes on us, the void in each of us.

What I am indirectly talking about appears to be jnana — one of the indian paths to enlightenment, not by love, (as with hari krishna for example, devotion to krishna) but through knowledge… but really I am speaking of how the void lives in all of us and we are the void. To be in it and one with it, approaches the vector of calmness. Sort of a reverse game of ‘who has it’ which is how we view Supermen, like Natman, or has the understanding/key to everything… except in this one we see that the one ‘who has it’ actually does not, and while he appears to, presents to everyone else that they really do not have it.

at this point you might as well read this article by roger ebert: being there

a debonair affluence of imprecision begets the kernel of being “a” rather than being “some”

February 21, 2012 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, Theory / No Comments

a debonair affluence of imprecision begets the kernel of being “a” rather than being “some”

OR

how being philo-subject is being psychoanalytical

basically getting ‘better’ means to shrink one’s self. we think of getting better as increasing in numeric value, like you are a level 1 and that’s where you start. when you achieve expert you are level 7, or something. or as with weaving there are 304 distinct levels. with vietnamese cooking there are 72 levels. with american ‘southern’ cooking there are 55. like that. with piano, there is 677. and they have marginal stages of increasing complexity and clarity.

but in fact the increase in numeric value represents not an increase in height (if you think 2 dimensionally) but in fact, an increase in density if you think within an additional dimension. what i mean to say is that as one gets better one gets more condense. you discriminate more between what was previously ‘the same’ and your margin for preciseness shrinks. as a result, as you become a more specialized attorney, your area of practice gets more niche and your ability to draw meaningful divisions is more refined into smaller and smaller tools. this is true of coding as well. when you are a generalist programmer you draw broad strokes. but when you get into the nitty gritty, you need to do more with less lines. the lines themselves stand for more, and you take less moves to do the same thing.

like wise, it is as though an artist who has mastered it can do with one stroke what a new artist might take with twenty. or a poet can say with one line what a klutz might grumble on and on about. you get what i am saying.

so we tighten our belts and sink into the same. it’s like, you take the modules for granted but then, you eventually learn to take those modules apart and deal directly with them too.

this extra dimension might be dealt with as a spiral too; going up. if you see it in two dimensions, it’s a constant return, a swaying, an oscillation between two poles. but in fact, you are overcoding one side as you overcode the other. when we have arranged this west end with the new paradigm, the east end must be arranged. and when the east has been arranged with the new consequences, the west must also be arranged. this oscillation is our attention returning to one and then returning back to the other, as change ripping throughout the block. as the block becomes more complex, its grains noted in ever smaller detail, so must we always return back to basics. our foundation shifts ever so slightly.

often, a single oscillation is needed as the theme, then variation and then recapitulation. a sonata or rondo must repeat its A and B themes if it is to complete itself. you start at home, go on a journey in which you introduce variations and different moves, and then return home to reincorporate those moves into a new kernel.

sometimes we want more than a single oscillation. in ravel’s bolero , with each return, we get a louder, more present presence, one in which we can note what was single birds to be a gigantic bird, with the feathers in your face, up close and without the framing of a concert.

this intensive view, this microscoping of a particular was mistaken in phenoemnology of spirit by hegel to be the becoming universal of a particular. and when you are swallowed by the particular up close, thrown into the void like alice through the rabbit hole, you are in it, and it is empty as it is spacious — completely enveloping you as the Notion. be it a religious universality or a cultural whole for which you are both citizen and state, one with the community, one with itself A:A if you like ayn rand.

blast those particulates though. when you zoom back you, you at once see it is a liebnizetian game, each particular a monad running through other monads, commenting and interlocking, intertextual and at once phenomenological and transcendental as we can note monads overwriting monads like a web of individuals in a community, influencing each other, a shifting complex of community consciousness we suppose, as in the movie magnolia. magnolia is another modernist story, one in which we both investigate the graininess of the images and come out of that investigation with a supramacy of kernel, of intensiveness that we can only note as a ‘thing’ a unified whole as characters are commentators on one another, each a progressive level of difference, embedded in one another as a density, a unit you cannot escape, self contained, finite and yet boundary-less.

so depending on how you want to cut your rabbit hole, you can be big alice or small alice, and in either end of the jaberwocky you have either too crampt a house or too empty a room. either a/the Notion or the/a particular.

i suppose the question is often answered within the context of its functionality. if it goes together, and best juxtaposes one another then it is a unit. fingering on a piano is hard to separate from understanding the layout of her scales. and a pianist is hard to divide from the piano especially as the piano continually molds the pianist into her shape-becoming- like a lover who has a favorite position he insists on so the other lover eventually gets to being in it. one is hard to separate from the other so that they are most easily referred to as one.

in that way it is appropriate that lovers have offspring, be it homo or hetereo, when they self-organize into units that become-… best expressed in a new subject, a confluence of tangents that uniquely entwine, carrying with them, the comments of the foundation where they were level 1. in this sense, the reaction of an offspring is still the legacy of the parent. so we return too, to that headspace in how each of us is an interwoven complexity, a multitude of indeterminate, indistinct successions, best known to go with one another as me.

i got a little off topic, but so, the with each oscillation be it a meaningful distinction, a deeper delving of each grain requires additional geometric or even exponential energies to microscope. one resists that attention even as one desires it, as shrinking into a smaller space requires alice to shed herself, what was unnecessary to that smaller space.

indeed it is hard and harder to become experter and experter.

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