Base Nothing

(1) Not a Book

2012-02-08T12:44:00.000-08:00

“This (therefore) will not have been a book.”*

Some of the most enigmatic sentiments that we can find in a book (let alone its introductory sentence): (1) for it to proclaim its otherness to itself; (2) for the book to begin with a conclusion; (3) for it to begin by referencing itself. But then again, there is a sort of perfection here, in this line, if not every line, for this essay is a meditation on prefacing, and the preface.

This sentence, like the preface itself, is exemplary of how a reader interacts with a preface. The preface frames the book. It is usually written by author after the book has been completed, and is read by the reader before he reads the book.

It, in a sense, begins by representing the book. It prefigures several aspects of what you-the-reader are going to see. In this statement is the compressed essence of the rest of the essay.

In order to make this argument, a thinker would have to construct a definition of the book which was something other than what Derrida is claiming his own work as. I have a copy right next to me. It's shaped like a book. If I referred to it as a book, people would certainly know what I was talking about. Even if there was great distance between me and the book. So what's the issue here? Why is Derrida self-excluding his own work from book-hood?

Well, what have we so far is:

1. Self-reference
2. Conclusion at the end
3. Negation
4. Self-exclusion

And that is just the first sentence! Derrida goes on to deny that this (now ambiguous) thing on my desk is a collection of three essays (despite appearances). No, Derrida prefers the term assemblage and thrusts upon us another nerve wracking instance of self-reference: that this is a meditation (my term) on presentation, or perhaps more to the point, presenting.

So the quality we are dealing with here is verbal in nature, and we should be paying special attention to the treatment of nouns in Derrida's essay; particularly the nominalization of verbs or action words.

-=***=-

*Barbara Johnson translation

The Wager

2012-02-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

As an undergraduate student at UB, I took a critical theory class that focused on Derrida. From that point onward I was enthralled by the man's work, slightly peevish at the scope and brilliance of its achievement. I've gone back to the text on numerous occasions and back again to figure out what sort of logic was at work here. Was it really a game, and if so, what were the stakes? Could I win this game if in fact I was playing by its maker's rules? Did it matter if I did or not?

What my professor called a language of secrecy, I saw as a poetics of deception. A game which hides its own rules, a game, perhaps, in which meta-gaming was the only possible avenue to win. Perhaps part of the game is convincing you that there is a game to be played. It would be an anomoly for sure seeing how the logical opposite of this supposition is far more rampant in our culture. But is it truly honesty to say that Derrida's work is a game and play? Especially when it comes from the mouth of the man himself.

So, what I wanted to do is perform an intolerably close reading on Dissemination for as long as I can possibly stand.

But here's the hook. I'm going to be playing my own game. My game is master Derrida's game (to my own satisfaction but-) using Derrida's definition of mastery (which is dubious and impossible). I must master ALL the threads in the quilt, to win the game.

This ensures that even if I lose I will be lauded for my gumption and gravitas and each snagging of a thread will be lauded as a battle won for me, and if I win... well I won. Also, the journey will be worth it, because despite the fact I may seem an impossible underdog in this battle. To be honest I think I've already mastered this game and such arrogance should not go untested. Do I have a right to make a claim of mastery of Derrida's game?

This I don't know. I think I know, and at some point, am surely to be proven wrong. But one loss does not ensure I lose this game. For even if I pull out a majority of the threads, and can synthesize them into a conceptual network, I will (as I -think- I will show) have delineated the rules of the game, which in essence is to master the game (but is it to win?)

I will begin playing within the next couple of days, starting with the first essay in Dissemination, “Outwork”.

A Brief Argument for “Uncreative” Writing

2011-12-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

I'm not even going to quibble the term itself, though I could, for valid reasons, take offense to it. For me, let it be said, that to be creative is to make connections, and that there is a certain benefit to reusing famous lines because not only do they refer to themselves in the new context of their re-uttering, but they saturate the label/signifier with a doubled reference back to the original utterance.

The tension between the old reference, and the new reference, could be said to create some sort of energy between the two which has infinite literary possibilities.

The idea then becomes a resonance.

Take for instance:

Now I lay me down to sleep / Ere on my bed my limbs I lay
I pray the lord my soul to keep / It hath not been my use to pray
If I die before I wake / By moving lips or bended knees
I pray the lord my soul to take / But silently by slow degrees

There is enough metrical similarity between Coleridge's beginning to The Pains of Sleep, and the child's prayer that we're all taught, for a case to be made, that the one is the sublimation of the other. An echo of the prayer is there, and whether Coleridge intended this or not, the effect is subliminal (if not sublime).

So I think there is a lot to be gained by exploring “uncreative” approaches which in fact, may excel in a way in which “creative” approaches are not designed for.

...

2011-10-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

The Poetics of Random Number Generation

2011-09-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know how much has been discussed about this already by other gnoets (at gnoetry daily), but I wanted to touch on what I consider to be a very important element in text generation, which is random number generation. We must make a formal distinction here. Pardon me. There is no such thing as random number generation, and the notion of “random” is ontologically exterior to generation. Before you agree with me, fight this statement. Fight it with all your mental might. Try to develop a method for generating anything truly random. The problem isn't generating the random, I have no ability to explain why “gafar gen flaw” was the first thing to pop into my head as I tried. For all intents and purposes, the statement is random, or why 2,172 was the number that just popped into my head. The fact is, I seem to able to do this quite easily. Why then, should it be so difficult to devise any method?

Well, firstly I point this out, because “random number generation” really describes the impulse or desire and not the actuality of the process which is referred to as pseudo-random number generation. Most compilers use random numbers generated by twister algorithms, which approximate well the distribution patterns of an ideally random set of numbers. The result of these numbers is offset by a seed which can be input by the user, or (and more often) is generated from the computer's timer.

I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, because of the role time plays in acting as the seed for the generation. Time is a very loaded concept, rife with mythological and metaphysical potential. It's strange ability, to be measured indefinitely, allows us to make distinctions between instances, in essence, to linearize time. Linear time, however moves in circles, with familiar continuity between the extremes. A counter is set to turn once for each complete turn of another counter. And another counts the amount of full turns for that counter. It operates perhaps as dials, perhaps like your electric meter. Perhaps a face clock, perhaps a digital clock. Lines running in circles at different speeds. Repeating toward its limit, which is its modulus, its denominator. The time of day is its remainder. It loops always back to its beginning. In mathematics, this is called its base, the upper bound for a full turn.

Secondly the distribution pattern demands that the period (or size) of the upper bound of the random number to be generated not repeat itself, and this (and only) this qualifies it for “randomness.”

Much like trying to be spontaneous, generating random anything negates its own possibility before it even begins. But the urge to try is real.

Infinite Monkeys v1.50

2011-08-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

I wanted to announce that Infinite Monkeys has gotten a major upgrade. The new feature allows you to "eat" text into memory, and then generate new text from the old text, using bigrams (for now). The bigrams associate the word that comes before with the word that comes after, cataloging also the number of times it occurs. I'm going to be experimenting with the routine which draws words so updates will be forthcoming and most likely rapid.

https://code.google.com/p/infinitemonkeys/downloads/list

Also, if you choose to eat scripts to generate other scripts, please be aware that your bracketing of tags and the like may not be properly closed. Improper code may produce unexpected results. I'm not the greatest programmer on earth.

Recursion and Infinity

2011-07-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

According to Chomsky, a fundamental property of language is that any grammar can produce infinitely many sentences. However, an ethnographic study on the Piraha tribe of Brazil reveals that there is a grammar which lacks recursion, and is thus only capable of producing a finite number of possible utterances. My first reaction to this was: impossible! As I read through the article I noticed some things, and I basically want to sketch out a few of the things that I noticed.

The essence of human language is, according to Chomsky, the ability of finite brains to produce what he considers to be infinite grammars. By this he means not only that there is no upper limit on what we can say, but that there is no upper limit on the number of sentences our language has, there's no upper limit on the size of any particular sentence. Chomsky has claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion: the ability for one phrase to reoccur inside another phrase of the same type. If I say "John's brother's house", I have a noun, "house", which occurs in a noun phrase, "brother's house", and that noun phrase occurs in another noun phrase, "John's brother's house". This makes a lot of sense, and it's an interesting property of human language.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html

On this level, we have the last output of "John's" being re-entered into the meaning, so that we know it isn't John we're talking about, but his brother's house.

Let's contrast this to what the Piraha would say:

So in the case of Pirahã, the language I've worked with the longest of the 24 languages I've worked with in the Amazon, for about 30 years, Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house". You can say "John's house", you can say "John's brother", but if you want to say "John's brother's house", you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house". They have to say it in separate sentences.

On the level of the sentence, there is no possibility of chaining possessives, but the overall meaning of one sentence is carried over into the next and in fact it would make no sense to say "this brother" without the preceding sentence. "This brother" in fact refers back (self-refers, calling itself...) and is therefore fundamentally recursive. Because the chunking system does not allow recursion within sentences, it must allow recursion between sentences. "This" is an earmark of recursion because it is infinitely various, it refers to "the last thing" and is still built on LISP-like linked list principles which are different from "Infinite Language" that "uses recursion" only insofar as the rules which allow it to be employed.

Recursion is not permitted on the level of the sentence, because the sentence, like a word in English, conveys a single thought. On some level, every language is finite. Containing a finite set of agreed upon meanings regardless of articulation. The finitude in fact allows us to define. Without it, everything would remain undefined.

The endlessness with which such a culture could string their sentences together shows me that the set of all things described in tandem is up to the author's attention to detail, and does not limit the possibility of what things can be described. It may refuse certain possibilities but (Infinity - Any number), does not mean that number is finite.

At any rate, my only knowledge of this culture is from the aforementioned article so I take it on faith that these people have violated one of Chomsky's laws. However, we can still say that recursion occurs within this language, so Chomsky's law can be relaxed without causing a cascade failure of Chomskyan linguistics. My only point in making this argument is to corrupt previously held ideas about finite-ness and recursion. The idea of referencing back is necessarily recursive, in fact "this" is a tell tale sign of recursion. But perhaps not the kind Chomsky is talking about.

The Opening of Closure II

2011-07-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

In any one single statement, the implications of the fact of its capacity to be stated, is implicit in the meaning of the statement. A single statement means the entire reality in which it is produced, there are layers upon layers overlain in a sequence of causes which extends back to the beginning of time.

Closure is an effect of separation. There is no such thing as a discontinuity between an single individual and everything else.

The Opening of Closure

2011-07-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

The first time I read The Rejection of Closure I had a very emotional reaction to it. Perhaps because I am a naturally irate person, or perhaps because I felt there was an advocacy for something I couldn't abide. I haven't read Lyn Heijinian's text in a very long time, but I'm always struck with the same problem: closure can not be opened by rejection. Rejection is a kind of closure. Closure turned on closure. When we reject something we deny its possibility. The very fact that could be "true".

The target is closure. The strategy is closure. The system is rejection. When we think about closure, we can think of it along an isomorphic echo as encasement, encapsulation, containment, envelopment, often in terms of human affect as being "closed off", or "not open", or "not-openminded." And it's really there that we get stuck.

In the end you're left with another kind of closure. A tacit acknowledgement in the reality/possibility of a "closure" and the rejection of part of that reality. I have in my lifetime found it far more liberating to reject the possibility of a closure. There is always a veritable regress of information implicit in even the simplest of utterances.

Self-Similarity

2011-07-12T09:56:00.000-07:00

Throughout the course of my work, I've implicitly made reference to a type of similarity which also different, giving numerous interpretive schema along the way that was capable of at least tacitly accounting for this repetition. The foundation for this has been a thorough investigation into fractal geometry in which each part of a whole is more or less an exact copy of the whole. That is to say, if you take a look at a fractal, and then proceed to zoom in at various scales of magnification, the fractal will keep its overall shape, or you will be able to see little copies of the whole as you zoom in. This is known as self-similarity.

The sort of logic that can be drawn out of such a shape is one of scale invariance. To use a social sciences example, the same laws that apply to individuals, would apply en masse to societies, cultures, groups and so on.

During the course of my work, I have tried to point out the fractal nature of self-referential utterances such as $This Sentence is False$ which relies on a specific kind of recursion. That is to say, the last output becomes the next input into the function. This sort of recursion is implicit to fractality and is also a prevalent motif in Hofstadter's great work _Godel, Escher, and Bach_.

The eternal golden braid is the helicoid acid and holomorphic structure of none other than the bodies that constitute life. They too have an image of the whole present at each indivisible unit known as the cell.

The implications of this self-similarity resound within a new geometry in which each of the parts reflect each of the other parts within a reflexive and undifferentiable matrix of re-entry.

This (to a certain extent) can resolve the paradox of Western Ontology which was discussed in the Lossy Compression post.

It will be interesting to see how far self-similarity and fractal geometry can be taken as literary devices.

Cascade Failure

2011-07-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

We've, I've begun to think, identified ourselves ideologically with our strategies. The strategy of more government, more “oversight”, more “supervision” or less of it. As a result, we've failed to see an important part of the overall picture.

Namely, the corporate controlled government is no better than a government controlled capitalism. In fact the two, coming from different directions as they do, amount to the same thing, the emergence of a surveillance based fascism where the activities of the individual are all dictated from a single source. The question that we need to sit down and consider is to what extent this isn't already the case.

The impulse of the corporation is in fact the same as the impulse of the government: to consolidate power. Mergers and buyouts are the name of the game. Amass as much of the market as you possibly can. The latest company to prove this true is Microsoft.

The only way to thoroughly separate the government from its market, is for it be regarded as a conflict of interest to represent both the interests of a corporation through the government. In fact, what you have now is corporate controlled capitalism, which is sliding into a state controlled capitalism.

By and large the reason that this happened was that we had a fiscal conservative in GWB who outspent his “liberal” predocesser while simultaneously lowering taxes. It was a deficit that could only cause one outcome: bankruptcy. I believe that Barak Obama inherited this deficit from Bush Era spending. Bush in fact is perhaps the worst president in American history. Here is a quick look at his resume: http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushresume.htm.

It is ironic that his failure is so abolute in large part because he is a terrible businessman. The delicate balance achieved by former presidents was thrown completely out of wack. It could be argued that bankrupting the federal government is a really effective way to weaken it, and may very well have been intentional.

Now, if I'm philosophically committed to a decentralist impulse (which I am) how do I reconcile the fact that I think this is one of the worst catastrophes in American economic history with a weakened federal government teetering on the brink of death. On some level, we must face the fact, that this was by and large, a corporate orchestrated attack, and face down the realization that the oil companies have more government protections and personalized government influence than any other corporate power in America (other than perhaps banks).

So the real question becomes, what in pragmatic reality would happen if we allow the current federal government default on it's debt? The answer is something akin to an apocalypse (generally speaking) this is the terminology that has been used to describe it. The following results are probable:

1.The dollar would be worthless
2.Lending would stop
3....causing a large portion of the population to lose their jobs
4....businesses would shut down, collapse and the burden of unemployment benefits would fall on bankrupt companies, and the federal/state government
5.Mass bankruptcy
6.Famine
7.Most of our debt would fall to China

Many Republicans in congress have signed a pledge not to raise taxes, and this is primarily the reason why we cannot balance the budget, and why the debt ceiling keeps climbing. My sense of this is that while philosophically I'm opposed to it, the burden of higher taxes, must be borne in order to avoid a cascade failure of epic proportions. The New Deal is irrelevant if we don't have the money to borrow and our credit is worthless. There won't be any deal at all because there won't be anything to deal with. For the time being, the debt ceiling must rise, and if it is not going to rise again we must figure out to avoid an inevitable situation like this one from recurring, or else we won't face any more easy choices.

The Western Metaphysic of the End

2011-07-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Continuing from Lossy Compression

The issue then becomes not one of modeling, or mapping, but containing. The problem of the essence-that-contains is one of generality. Western Ontology is deeply rooted in the desire to set everything under a solitary system. The problem of the system is on the one hand a matter of properties becoming objects, and adjectives becoming nouns, it is also irresistably reconfigurable, and herein lies its redemption. The category is not a set containing objects, but a blueprint from which many models can be built. The category as an object of realism, a reality, objectifies each of its members by reducing it to a subset of qualities.

In the end of it all, you are left with a black hole signifier, that sucks everything under one sign. Even the qualativity of qualities, or an essence of the essence can begin to collapse this system, for its own externalization of this blueprint impresses it onto reality, and thus comes to manufacture reality. This is both “the Language of Eden” and the “Curse of Revelation.” What God would leave out of the Bible, is the fact that we are agents in our own creation. To a large extent, we've been making it up all along.

With our history mostly scripted by our mythologies, hurdling toward an apocalypse that even scientists are beginning to buy into, the majority of the resistance is ironically coming from a Christian dominated right.

Their arguments are based at least partially on science, citing a liberal usage of rate multipliers in producing projections.

At any rate, the multipliers do impact how the projections would pan out. The seemingly alarmless rate of one degree over the past 100 years has mollified the possibility of any consensus. The oil companies stand the most to lose and can no doubt afford to fund their own research projects. Since the oil companies have been a major target of environmentalists, one of the few government controlled industries within our sense of capitalism, the issue is on both sides politicized. The sense that one can take either side in earnest is intellectually dishonest. The speculations are all over the place for the projections. We could end up like Venus, or we'll kill off ourselves but life will continue. It's certainly possible that some tipping point will be reached triggering a chain reaction, which causes some sort of atmospheric cascade failure and kills off everything or most of everything. Maybe only insects survive, or bacteria. Certainly this is frightening to contemplate. And worse still it is all distinctly feasible.

So it's an interesting point for Western metaphysics. Will it have its apocalypse after all? Has our blueprint for disaster finally been realized? Never has it been more cleverly argued than by environmental scientists and perhaps never before has been felt the more pressing reality of an end that has been enacted several times before in history.

But the end is everywhere in every disaster, and apocalypses proliferate. Beasts are indeed everywhere, whores of all sorts, but no horsemen yet. We fantasize about it in movies and books. Two series in the last ten years dealt specifically with the apocalypse. Jericho and Jeremiah. Both were cancelled after showdowns with fascist police states. So we survive, perhaps, but suffer the death of our way of life.

But whatever the outcome, this will be remembered as a time when apocalyptic fears were very real.

The Book of the Damned

2011-06-27T08:54:00.001-07:00

This is a prototype for a book of poems, many of which were constructed with Infinite Monkeys and are now available for download vis a vis the Infinite Monkeys homepage on google code.

It contains roughly 4-5 years worth of poetry, which much like The Gospel of Echo, is a significant time investment in the construction of the work. It lacks the visual flair of TGOE, but retains the pseudo-religious feel for which I am prone.

Have a look if you please:

http://code.google.com/p/infinitemonkeys/downloads/detail?name=The%20Book%20of%20the%20Damned.pdf&can=2&q=#makechanges

Lossy Compression

2011-06-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

It's akin to a mandate, an impulse, a drive, an energy, a desire, things only in an abstract sense, energies, causes, processes, pulses, motion, things too unstable to become "a-thing", thinged nonetheless.

When I think about the impulse of western ontology, I think about it in terms of a mapping of a set of objects onto a smaller set of objects. The ontological impulse being always a reduction of the number of the objects in the explanation set. If this process is carried out to its logical extreme you are generally left with a choice between the following things: Being, Time, Nothingness, objects, properties, nouns and adjectives and sometimes even verbs.

The impulse here then in terms of functionality is then to create a sort of meta-map. What is crucial and irreducible, is also vague and all-encompassing. But it is precisely this impulse to encompass that allows it to be the container with the most objects.

The question now of the map becomes crucial, for it is precisely a matter of mapping that is relevant to this process, and an issue of scalability becomes central. Scaling out of the actual terrain is an image of it as a totality. In the process new information is gleaned but several details are lost. A new perspective is gained but the old one is (temporarily) lost. If the map "maps" to reality, then the map itself is included in one of the objects that the map represents and this is manifested in the ever-present desire to find yourself on the map.

What is present now is a mere antagonism, an uncertainty principle which pervades the pervasions of the map. This principle can be described as follows:

The more you know about the overall shape of an object, the less you will know about its details, and the more you know about the details, the less you know about the shape and as we can readily intuit, this would also apply in the world of objects as distance.

The pervasion of self-containment destabilizes the container logic of the set, and this is the technique I would argue Derrida uses in attempting to deconstruct western metaphysics. The search also yields the desire to externalize the set from its own self-membership and relay it to something on a "higher" hierarchical chain. The chain itself will point to either Being, Time, Nothingness, God or an origin which itself implies the mandate to relay it on a higher link.

The highest link is also the vaguest. In it all manner of potentialities roil. Nothingness is not an emptiness, it is absence of a "thing" which is here defined as an object in the world. No-Thing-Ness itself a transcendental noun of a thing which is no-thing. The image of the thing-in-space, its apparent self-containment, has been transmuted from a property as in a the transcendental noun, onto the image of an object.

So in the process of mapping, things are abstracted into sets of things, which are themselves object-after-transcendental-function with actual things-in-space as properties, potentialities, variations of, etc...

...more to come...

"Lossy Compression" in framing this ontological impulse, has cast it in the best possible light. Filtration issues are present when transcendental-objects are treated as things-in-space. There is also generally a degradation in the awareness that all things-in-space are not static unitary images, but processes which our senses have not evolved to process such as the dynamic processes of atoms and interactions with the environment, which are both intrinsically connected with the real-object which is at this point in human understanding a matter of guesswork.

In delineating these issues of ontology as such I hope to define a link between these processes and projection geometry.

Is Literature Intrinsically Evil?

2011-06-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

.
According to Georges Bataille writers are guilty of a kind of evil. I have my own thoughts on this, and I think it's an interesting and worthy question to ponder, but will pace my response for later this week. In the meantime, enjoy Georges, and try to remember that the greatest evil committed by either of the authors mentioned by Bataille was the unnecessary guilt that they placed on themselves for being writers. This was also true of Chaucer and is something that has really haunted Western literature for many centuries: the fact that a well written book is a distraction from the "real truth" of the Holy Bible.

More soon,

Dave

Jhave & Sandra Huber [The Poetics of Science]

2011-05-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

My first introduction to these to artists is less than five days old now. But having taken a look at their work, I feel like it is also mine. That is to say, these are kindred artists who artistic depth is foremost poetical. That is to say, they are poets first who engage other forms of media, and their work is therefore crucial to the legitimacy of e-poetry as a literary discipline.

First let me say, that I had the pleasure of meeting these two, and that they are both incredibly dedicated crafts-persons who are actively engaged in the sort of Consilience Pulitzer Prize winning author Edward Wilson wrote about in his book of the same name. In other words, both of these artists actively engage the theoretical sciences in their own approach to poetics, a common theme among many of us who are engaged in e-poetry. For those of you who aren't aware, there is a great deal of paranoia surrounding the sciences from the vantage of the humanities and not all of it can be chalked up to science-envy (although I've personally seen very little else to justify such a position). We don't seem to be aiming our ire where it belongs (psychiatry).

At any rate, Jhave is an important artist, not merely because of his relationship to digital poetics, but also because the man writes like he has a gun pointed to the back of his head. I find this quality endearing in an artist, for reasons which are apparent to those who have followed my work. My concern for our role in the destruction of our environment, the proverbial "shitting where you eat" theorem.

One of Jhave's most fascinating contributions to the theoretical ensemble of digital poetics is the notion of language as living entity. This is not as far fetched as it may sound given the groundbreaking work of quantum theorist David Bohm whose sense of dimensionality is a current topic of research for me. The notion here is that inanimate objects contain within them an imperative to animate, or else you have a problem. How can life evolve out of non-life unless there is somehow contained in seed form the potential to do so?

But everywhere the concern here is for life itself, and the questions of life: cells, bodies, seeds, nature, genetics, and environmental sciences. Language itself is an extension of life, of living process and entities seeking for a higher form of signal processing.

By contrast, Sandra Huber has engaged the sciences in a no less radical way. Her current project, "Assembling the Morrow" is an inquiry into scientific study of sleep. Ouroborically choosing to be the object of her own experiment she has literalized the notion of experimental poetry in a way which few artists have dared try (and scientists have advised against). Her project, though still a work in progress, utilizes the brain waves present during human sleep cycles to create a work of poetics that is literally constructed atop the patterns our brain creates when sleeping. Her work is so technically abstruse that to provide a thorough reading would require a great deal of temporal investment. However, there are two possible avenues that I can offer right off the top of my head.

Firstly, it engages "waves" which is a rich theoretical discipline within mathematics that is almost universally necessary for every science. Waves are generally regarded as having both circular and linear components, and the "purest" form of the wave are the sine/cosine waves. Sine and Cosine are generally referred to as "transcendental functions" largely because they require a calculus of interminable series in order to understand and express them. We knew about such sets long before we had a mathematical means to deal with them, which brings us to our second possible line of interrogation: Construction.

Huber's poetry is literally written atop the shapes of her brainwaves and engages the possibility of a concrete poetry in a way I personally have never seen attempted. I have written about Construction (somewhat) thoroughly as a Pythagorean extension of Deconstruction. If Deconstruction seeks to disarticulate things from the constructs that make them, Construction would be a reversal of this, and it would necessarily include the mathematical insights that can be provided from merely the compass and a straight-edge. Furthermore, it opens itself to architectural interpretations, as well as image theories such as Hofstadter's isomorphism, William Blake's literal imagination, and Jakob Bohme concept of the signature.

Both of the artists engage the sciences in ways that were heretofore considered anathema to the humanities, and each in their way collapse the boundaries between what is considered art and science, theory and practice, animate and inanimate, and literature and visual media.

I hope you will check out their works (if you haven't already).

Jhave: glia.ca
Sandra Huber: dearsir.org, Assembling the Morrow

E-Poetry 2011 Festival of Techno Art

2011-05-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

Having just settled down from the E-Poetry Festival which came to Buffalo, New York (where I live) I believe that I am prepared to offer some thoughts on the experience.

For those of you who have not yet jumped on the bandwagon, e-poetry and digital poetics (which are not really distinct from one another as far as I can tell) is an emerging category of artistic expression that is pushing the limits of what constitutes poetry. Indeed, it has inspired much debate as to whether or not digital poetics constitutes a literary art form.

Regardless of any prior opinion that exists on this topic, it is largely irrelevant. Poets have always fancied themselves the liberators of language and as writer who is inspired by the Beats among (many) others, it has always struck me that through these artists, that it was poetry itself that was trying to free itself from language. With the ironically named language poets you really do see a tendency to think about pre-lingual utterances that happen prior to what a linguist would properly constitute as language. Grunts, moans, ooohs, and ahhhs are every bit as prevalent in spoken langpo performances as syntactically perfect utterances.

Syntax itself becomes a prison from which language desperately tries to escape as luminaries such as Loss Glazier have made reference to, but it is not language that needs to be freed, it is poetry, which is as pervasive a force of nature as consumption and excretion. A failure to see the poetry in everyday life has left us alienated from not just language and each other, but life itself, the experience of being alive. We can blame this on language all we like but it is we who choose, who act, who remain bound and enslaved to notions which fix our images of the world into static forms. And language, while part of the problem, is also a solution.

If I recall correctly, it was Ian Hatcher who stated that to name a thing is the highest form of love, but such a sentiment fails to take into a account that there are at least seven different names for the substance referred to by the word "shit." For me, on the other hyperbolic end of this notion is that to name a thing is to kill it. Something I cannot fully believe but if given an opportunity to sentimentalize language would utter this instead. The reason for this is that to name a thing familiarizes it in such a was as to fix its image and preload it with all the experiences that are associated with it, which is really the point, I do not relate nearly as well to language as the artist who can make that claim.

I am very much a "devil's tools" kind of tactician, so to become a poet was a natural extension of my secret war.

But enough about that. Over the next few days I will blog about digital poetics, the artists who are working in the field, the sorts of ideas that are being thrown around, and the excitement that is being generated around it.

Derrida & Binary Trees

2011-05-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Derrida in Dissemination speaks of the "double" and the "triplicity" of the concept, many times beginning with a dual opposition, and moving toward a dialectic transformation which con-fuses in an act of sublation, that Hegel refers to as abolishing and transcending.

In Of Grammatology this begins as a critique of Saussure's concept of the sign. The sign is a unity composed in opposition as a duality.

(sign) -> Signifier
-> Signified

To translate this concept of the concept, into computer terminology, you have in the signifier, a pointer which stands in the place of the reference to the value, which is the signified, the value itself.

The problem of such a methodology can be basically explained in terms of even the simplest expressions. Take for instance this utterance:

The tree is green.

The signifier is the raw text "The tree is green." The signified, the meaning, the value, of the utterance, means that there is a tree, and it is green.

The problem is that the green-ness of the tree, itself signifies (for instance) the season in which the tree exists, for winter trees are seldom green unless they're pines etc...

So in the discrete categorical logic of sign/signifier/signified, you have the reduplication of signifier/signified at the level of both the signifier and the signified.

That is to say, that a signified value can in fact, refer like a signifier to some extraneous meaning, that the categories in an of themselves, do not refer to some static relationship, but rather, are always codetermined by the relation of a signifier to a signified.

The effect of this is akin to the logic of a cause and an effect. If we imagine a row of dominoes toppling over, we can see that there is a first cause, which knocks over the first domino, and as an effect, it falls over. The next domino in the chain, will be knocked over on account of the domino which stands before it, which can now be seen as a cause.

So what we really end up describing is a state, and not a thing. The signifier itself is no-thing, it is merely the state of a relation between a label and a value. Furthermore, the operations which are the cause, necessity and desire for such a system, cannot be reduced to either relation, but rather must include both.

The structure of such a construction of the concept, would in all cases be identical to a binary tree. So let's say that you have 4 levels of bifurcation in a binary tree. How many references are there at the 4th level?

The answer to this question is our familiar binary logarithm of 2^N, ref: http://basenothing.blogspot.com/2011/04/materiality-of-paradox.html.

0->1 & 2 (level 1) = 2^1
1-> 3 & 4, 2-> 5 & 6 (level 2) = 2^2
3-> 7 & 8, 4-> 9 & 10, 5-> 11 & 12, 6-> 13, 14 = (level 3) = 2^3 (8)

***

For those of you who are wondering what the hell I'm doing and why, I've been rereading through Dissemination and Of Grammatology, collecting and recollecting references to topics which relate to the thesis of the $This sentence is false$ essay.

Being, God, and Writing

2011-05-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

Being, roughly translated is based on the Old Testament's Tetragrammaton and it comes out in translation as something like: he becomes which in Hebrew is all one word yah-way. In the Hebrew language in which the original version of the OT was written, vowel markings did not exist, so all that you are left with is the YHWH. Vowel markers were added several centuries later by grammarians.

Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I am that which I am, translated into Greek becomes "ego eimi ho on", "I am the being." (Wiki entry is good).

Being as an is-ness, as a manifesting, or a presencing, is like God himself, What was, what is, and what will be. The Alpha and the Omega are tied in a a knot in a continuous line. Times have collapsed into sequences. Times are relative to a location in time. Extremes meet, and infinity is bound to a pulse, not a circle, but a circling, which itself opens up into a line.

The word Being is a complex verbal noun, a process which has been transmuted into an object. The primordial cause of all known effects. The Origin. It has been sufficiently disarticulated to be all encompassing.

The primordial impulse of western metaphysics is thus to disarticulate the ontological object, shave off those qualities which at once are unique to some object, and so exclude others.

In order to construct such an ontological object, one in which any unique attribute assigned to it would discern it from something else, one uses a process of negation. In the Christian tradition, such a meditative practice has been handed down by an unknown Christian Mystic in the form of the Cloud of Unknowing.

Now, I haven't really done a great deal of research on via negativa, but the general impression I get is this, when we invoke the name of an image, for instance, we can evoke the image, let's say: God is not the sunrise, you will think immediately of the godliness of the sunrise, and then negate the idea that God is the sunrise.

The effect of repeating this process, over and over, we suppress the impulse by which we collapse Being/God into a single image, and allow the image itself, to "stand in for" the concept.

By evoking the concept of God/Being over and over, collapsing it into solitary images, and then negating, erasing, or blotting out the image, we can turn off the projections, without turning off the projector.

This is accomplished through a linguistic and visual process, by which God/Being, is positively defined by a negation of any image you may associate with it, regardless of whether or not it is concrete or abstract or even some event.

An object so transmuted, would cease in time to refer by collapsing, to what is in truly, all of the things that it is not, but not merely any of them.

The process is roughly analogous to reduction. In effect, we are searching the lowest common denominator between all existing things. That being, that they are.

The sense then of a text written in a fashion which adheres to such a process, would necessarily not refer beyond its own semantics or signification as a process, and also become a performance of the questioning as opposed to an answer to a question.

Now, this rather Christian notion, deeply grounded in Western Metaphysical tradition, has become the foundation for its collapse and the history of this process, is undertaken specifically by Derrida and the post-modernists who followed. It is also founded on the very Eastern metaphysical concern that the Word/Sign/Signifier not be confused with the concept/thing which it signifies, since in actual fact, the two are separate. However, by not trying to make the concept the direct object of some text, and by making the flow of the logic and the flow of the language a performance of the thinking, the text itself, becomes an example of exactly that to which it refers, in fact, re-fusing, the word and concept into a single unity, by virtue of the fact that it regards the two as two distinct entities.

Poetry Reading

2011-05-03T09:00:00.001-07:00

Hello all!

I will be doing a reading at Rust Belt Books with Matthew Cohen Dunleavy and Xavier Moriarty on Friday the 13th. It may or may not feature a new booklet hand pressed by yours truly. It will definitely feature exciting experimental works from some of the more interesting poets in the Buffalo area. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop by. The event should go from 7pm to 10pm. Thanks,

Dave

This Sentence is False

2011-04-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

In FreeBASIC, a functional demonstration of "This sentence is false" as a binary logarithm using a recursive function... This is the most perfect proof that I can muster of a double binary. Who needs evidence when you have proof?

;)

Original post: http://basenothing.blogspot.com/2009/04/much-ado-about-nothing-i-think-as-i.html

function CutSwap ( byref txt as string, byval idx0 as integer, byval idx1 as integer, byref newtxt as string ) as string

dim as string firsthalf = LEFT(txt,idx0), secondhalf = RIGHT(txt,len(txt)-(idx1+1))
return firsthalf + newtxt + secondhalf

end function

function ThisSentenceIsFalse ( byref s as string, byval it as integer ) as string
if it<1 then return s
dim as string res = CutSwap( s, InStr( "This sentence", s)-1, len("This sentence"), s & " " )
return ThisSentenceIsFalse ( res, it-1 ) & " "
end function

? ThisSentenceIsFalse ( "This sentence is false", 7 )
? 2^7
sleep

The Materiality of Paradox

2011-04-21T09:38:00.001-07:00

Whenever I am presented with a new idea, my first inclination is to head directly for all the cases that it cannot intrinsically handle, or in other words, the exceptions. The exceptions cannot “disprove” the theory. The theory's value is not in its rightness or wrongness, but rather, the quality with which it allows you to hedge your bets on the rode to discovery, and of course with the greatest efficiency. A theory's greatest test will be its willingness to self-correct and adapt, when a good guess proves untenable.

The best example that I can give to an ontological exception, is when a material object actually itself refers like a word to some meaning or value, a symbol like a flag, or a trophy. Here you can plainly see that what makes the object lingual, is immaterial.

But as objects can be made lingual, so language can be made material, but the reduction of one to the other causes a certain loss of information, both ways. The theory must then concede the argument that it is on some basic level, considering the immaterial negligible (verbal force/evaluation/meaning). It might even be said that the negligible is immaterial. Ha.

I've always been more interested in the verbal properties of language, but there are instances when the material properties of language express themselves verbally, in much the same fashion as machines act as producing objects, objects which can cause events.

Here, $This sentence is false$, has the mechanical property of being able to re-enter itself by infinite, metanymic substitution.

“This sentence” = “This sentence is false”

So, we can substitute the entire sentence for the part which represents the whole. After one re-entry we get “This sentence is false is false.” After two, “This sentence is false is false is false is false,” and this substitution will cause the number of “is false's” to double each iteration.

In this case the materiality of the sentence is expressed through a recursive re-entry, which allows the result of the last iteration, to be re-entered into the next operation. Thus this sentence is a linguistic representation, of the function, f(n) = 2^N, where N represents the amount of supplementations that have been enacted.

Hello All

2011-04-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

I have begun a new blog for featuring completed works of my digital poetry selection. Base Nothing has always been for critical essays and theory while Base Infinity has been a sketchbook for my poetry. I wanted to consolidate those poems which I consider to be "completed works" as opposed to "sketches" so I have started a third blog called Cardiac Neuropathy for such works. On it I will feature the definitive collection of my works which I consider to be "unimpeachably completed."

Take care all,

dt

The Second Coming of Yeats' Poem

2011-03-04T16:21:00.000-08:00

...As randomly generated by Infinite Monkeys. You can easily pick out the meter from the original Yeats poem; the new words are sort of interesting too.

murdering and shooting the descending engine
The speech cannot abnegate the summons;
descents intend; the thunder cannot rush;
emotional whistle is waited upon the gut,
The warmth - forced need is squandered, and everywhere
The innocence of fire is wavered;
The advanced lack all obscurity; while the survived
Are full of Jesus' prescription.
Surely some pipe is at hand
Surely the washed killing is at hand.
The skimmed knee! Hardly are those promises out
When a made problem out of reflex need
casts my thought: somewhere in the fades of the closed thing
A braid with static body and the success of a day,
A suspense bypassing and embattled as the paper,
is fornicateing its rhetorical facelessnesses, while all about it
dreams wills of the flat slouch prophecies.
The tool damns again; but now I make
That twenty bundles of swum inheritor
are wandered to architect by a loving blaze,
and what real tombstone, its terror come round at last,
brings towards dawn to be dredged?

Revelation as Script

2011-02-28T12:13:00.001-08:00

Apocalyptic literature is fascinating because it is written in code. Part of the reason why people can interpret apocalyptic literature as being portents to current events is because the language is intentionally vague to the point of disarticulating specific references into emotionally charged essences, that not only hearken back to writers who would be well known among their select group, but use a collapsed set of symbols to convey direct meanings in a round about yet pointed way.

What's interesting is that Revelation was written by St John the Divine obviously sometime shortly after the reign of Nero, since he is implicitly mentioned by the Mark of the Beast. During Nero's reign, Christians were openly persecuted, being blamed for a great fire that many believed Nero himself set. He was a vicious and cruel man who willing to murder anyone who stood in his way, and the Christians made an easy scapegoat, so they were rounded up and publicly executed.

The fact that this text in essence looms over the unfolding of our history, it is no exaggeration to assume that those who take it literally, or understand it as a prediction, are stuck in the role of the viciously oppressed minority of a world that is beginning to come true.

We in essence, when accepting this book, are taking on the lenses of spectacles that are still emotionally charged with the baggage of a community still reeling from the grief of its losses. There is a great hatred for the world in which the writer finds himself situated, and a great desire to see it destroyed.

The effect it has as a code is to write a script. And this is a script now that is being partially written by scientists with doomsday scenarios concerning global warning.

The question that I've always pondered, is how do our myths write our history and in a broader sense, can they, and I do not mean myth in the pejorative sense of a falsehood. I think in the case of Revelation, its unfortunate placement at the end of the Bible, ensured that those memories would forever direct our energies. It trained us to see inhumanity where there was wickedness and gave us the justification to punish those who challenge our power as enemies of God.

In essence, Revelation is a repository for rage, which was at one time justified. Projected through the lens of the future, it becomes a never ending war against not only the oppressors, but all that they stood for.

Stupid Poetry Generator

2011-02-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

Alright, so I was playing with the associative engine of my poetry generator and it came up this chunk of nonsense:

I need the passionate longing behind the fetishized nothing & my nothings are bereft of things. & my thing is made of nothing. my other name is tool. my toollike name: tool. not just before the fetishizing blow, or the blow of blows, or fornication 's fornication. cried by the shine. not just before the glowed thing beheld that tells us telling us. the speech whispers us. speaking us. that we are swallow. more. than what we consume.

Thought I'd share, for the sake of humor.

Hello All

2011-02-02T12:22:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on a new, better version of the Random Sentence Generator. This version will be capable of:

1.) Alliteration
2.) Assonance
3.) Rhyme
4.) Metrical styling (beats per line)
5.) Associative Tags

It is currently running at about the same level of capacity as the original Sentence Generator, except without the glitches and all. I am also working on a better dictionary file which holds information on pronunciation, definition, stress/accents, tags, and principle parts for verbs etc...

Stay tuned!

The Poetics of Ugliness

2011-01-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

It's difficult for a poetics of beauty to accurately come to terms with the world that I live in. Ugliness has its own beauty, I suppose, and it is in our despair and depression and our sense of hopelessness, our apocalypses that loom over every word we speak, that we find ourselves in the current midhaven of a poetics of sewage, tumors, insanity, and faith. We want to believe so badly in a God who hovers just beyond our perception who is willing to forgive us for our trespasses against the Earth, that we believe he will literally keep our environment in stasis no matter how little regard we show it. We believe that because our ancestors endured an ancient flood, we will not have to endure the same. How sad will it be when we realize that our prayers have merely been aimed at balls of helium and hydrogen millions of light years away, completely unaware of our existence.

Apocalyptic fantasies are the projections of species who are aware that their own lives are doomed to cease some time in the future. But they are also the fantasies of the oppressed who feel (rightly or wrongly) that a dominant power is corrupting the very world they cohabitate with it. To the children who are born with black lung disorders and asthma a poetics of beauty is a mockery of their reality. Who will take up their voices when poets believe in a looking glass universe and that perception is reality?

Perception is not reality. Reality existed before humans were alive to fetishize the sollipsism of their own self-obsessiveness. Who can write of beauty when the polluted air we breathe is killing our children. We wanted to grow up to be Romantics, like Wordsworth, who saw the beauty of nature and the wisdom of children. But we ended up caught in the Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, and here is where we must stay if we aspire to write the words that befit our place in time.

The only fitting metaphor for an economy that values growth above all things, is a malignant tumor destroying the very body that it feeds on for sustenance. A religion based on growth, is itself, much like a retrovirus or a prion which finds unlike cells and reprograms it with its own internal coding. Like psychotics, we have come to compartmentalize them in the moribund space of our own bodies, but we must recognize that the same basic mechanism that exists on an elemental level in proteins and tissues, finds another home (quite comfortably) in the human soul.

Nothing in nature can grow uncontrollably without necessarily destroying itself. These are lessons that we forget in our business models which are fashioned out our greed and our lust for power. A poetics that rejects the truth serves itself, and that which serves itself is reviled by the web of life and will in time be purged. We are seeing this happen now. We have made our apocalypses come true through years of systematic abuse. Abuse of our environment, we have turned out freshwater lakes to dead lifeless toilets while praying to a vacant god that would fulfill every promise of a destiny of renown. We want to suck in attention the way plants feed on sunlight, while investing in a dream of greed and egoic masturbation.

There will be no hand of God to save us if we cannot do the basic things that save ourselves, and to write about flowers and writing is (for a poet) to betray his duty as a thinker, like so many in so many other vocations who plod mindlessly toward a wormy doom.

The floods that drown our children and the sulfur rains that burn our skin will hardly destroy life itself, merely ourselves, and rightfully so. The research of our greatest thinkers who are coming up with replacement strategies for the burning of oil and coal are falling on deaf ears because the oil lobby is more powerful.

In the end, we will die much like Plato's Atlanteans who given all the technological prowess the gods themselves could not persist as they did without the virtue of their own foresight.

So when you ask yourself, why does this nice young man of good humor write such exotically ugly poetry, be reminded of the portents of the modern sciences which prophecy that we cannot by any means sustain the rate of consumption we are currently enjoying, nor house a place for all the waste we are producing without unfixably altering the chain of balance that is our biosphere. We are as a species, as of this moment, on suicide watch, and only the suicidal have devised a means of escaping the immanent doom that awaits our continued poor choices.

Hiatus

2010-12-23T08:03:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a break from academically inclined masochism until after the holiday festivities. Thanks for your interest.

Schizophrenics: Part 2

2010-12-17T07:35:00.000-08:00

I speak now of a typical malady of pedophiles, rapists, and those who murder for sport, and liken it to the ethics of a profession based on the Hyppocratic oath. What do they all have in common? Firstly, when they look at the person, they do not empathize with them as someone vaguely similar to themselves, but rather see an instrument, a thing, in the case of research psychiatrists, a bioda of research importance. The argument of course is that without such people there would be no way to gather such important information that allows for the helping of countless others. Such a defense is tantamount to the exoneration of Dr. Mengele and no less psychotic.

Like most ethical systems, the quality of its effectiveness is based upon the willingness of the practitioner to abide by its precepts. However, the psychiatric industry has manufactured such cures as the icepick lobotomy, and electro convulsive shock therapy. You have to ask yourself, how did the association between electrically shocking someone, and alleviating their depression ever come to be?

I will postulate a plausible circumstance. When dealing with the mentally insane, it easy to hide behind any defense because these poor souls can literally say nothing to defend themselves. Psychiatrists murder, maim, torture, and to this very day it is only with considerable oversight by powerful ex-patients within the industry that their research aims are to some degree stifled. The ethics that was instantiated by Hippocrates millennia ago failed, as all ethics must eventually fail.

We must consider the industry itself. The serial killer who murders for sport, secretly years to get caught so that their handiwork will be written about and their celebrity secured. So too with research psychiatrists whose publications ensure that their renown will be cited and recited, and that their celebrity is ensured. The basic Jesus-maxim is irrelevant. The psychotic who cannot speak for himself is less than a person and offers no possible threat to the psychiatrist who is an adept communicator.

The issue that concerns us here is that there is a disjunction in the person to person relationship which has been transmuted by the mental health professional into a subject to object relationship. This is further complicated by the society which uses the mental health industry to manufacture well adjusted workers for a dying economic system which itself produces nothing, preferring to send actual manufacturing jobs oversees to Thailand and China, where they don't have to pay the workers a living wage.

What it is tantamount to is instantiating a cultural schizoid personality which is itself alienated from the means of its own stability. The world is a resource, people are a resource, nature is a resource, our children are a resource. It is the common state of man then to think in alignment with the psychopath who uses people as instruments, and the psychiatric industry sees no reason to stand up for the person, who is a liability, and whose critical intellect and ability to see this system as evil and flawed, (and unviable) would be anathema to sustaining the consensus delusion that allows it to trundle toward its inevitable death.

No, the person in this system is a machine and its value to society is that of a production. The economy is thus a great machine built upon smaller machines whose soul value to the system is their ability to produce within the system. Being a machine in this system is tantamount to a productive member of society and is of course that very terminology we use when validating our role within that society. Nevermind the fact that we are trying to kill off the competing machines, and that the means of production is outsourced to foreign machines, if the mathematics of the bottom line is met to our liking, the machine in charge is pleased and can go about producing its own machines.

It is the phenomenological-existential debasement that American society, with all of its potential, has fallen into. True freedom is no longer civil liberties, it is the right of the economic establishment to imbalance the system toward a new depression. By funneling more fake money into the machine, and thus reducing the overall value of the money in question, we can give the appearance that the bottom is not falling out of the system. Meanwhile, the same banking schemes that generate money from money, and produce nothing but debt, are allowed to produce more debt. Our children, who are going to college on student loans automatically enter the work force in debt, and this is what our economy is capable of producing: debt. If you do not have the money, no bother, credit card companies are willing to give you the illusion that you can afford that new coat. Never mind the fact that you can by a similar coat for half the price, you want the name brand. This is what we manufacture, names and debt. It is a fake economy based on the illusion of credit, meant to enslave a society hypnotized by their own desire, pulled on invisible strings to sell their own interests to a name.

The pathology that we willfully instantiate is that of our own separation from the rest of the world, that our system is the free-est and people with socialized medicine are Nazi's. This is largely because the rest of the world is a resource to us, and we are not free even in spite of this. Again, the psychology of names is politicized in the act of name calling. If I can frame socialized medicine in the form of Nazism, millions of ignorant rednecks will immediately think our President is bin Laden. The problem is that it works. People really do sit in from of the TV and passively receive ignorance and pass it off as knowledge. These are articles of faith among them, but there is no distinction between faith and fact. Thus the manufacture of facts is hypodermically received by a passive viewership which does not understand the precept of its foundation.

Dawn Will Eat History

2010-12-17T06:44:00.000-08:00

dusk cannot eat history and hammer in a shell. the seat of a butterfly or a masochist's hell. the sulking shriek of a stroke of luck. from the homeless dreams of a calculator's fuck.

definition cannot move gravity or explain the portraits of a schizophrenic. heaven in a new dream. strangled in an animal's scream. the sandman better cry from the outside and empty into a field of bees. the emptiness. thrust crosswise. my desire around your day cell like a pimp in business season, moons through critical fornications and i heard her call my name.

rock and roll, baby. fear cannot bubble into a bankster's martyr. nor creep into the feeling that we're all linguistic knots. the hunter's kiss is a potential gift from a material god who collapsed into your field. and multiplied into names. i intercept the center. you avoid my secret demarcation, creating with a separation. like an angel being analyzed by a rat. dusk can eat history. lamenting the mystery of a phenomenal supercomputer.

i degrade again. you point me to the door. the vine of heaven is around my neck. a disposable sanity. a conjecture of the speculum. suckled around your clarity. dawn will eat history with a normative sun and a universal tooth.

another day then. one hundred years then. a grinding halt, then, the chaoticist becomes a god-knot. better assimilate into a punisher or the birds will sing an apocalypse of apples and our knees will become bloodflowers mirrored with peoples.

dawn will eat history, and rewrite our names in a homesick heaven. to be mused by sentient reptiles, who repopulate the stratasphere and dance on our bones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q5WjYjzrEQ

Schizophrenics: Introduction

2010-12-16T14:04:00.000-08:00

We introduce here not the typical schizophrenic known to the psychiatric community, but rather the everyday schizophrenic who by force of culture has severed their link to the external world by understanding, incorrectly, that their subjective experience of reality is somehow distinct from reality itself. Schizophrenics like Lyn Hejeinian, who in rejecting closure, create a new closure, closing her interior off from the exterior world. In dissecting the nature of this fallacy, the fallacious deductions that result from it as a lens, and the impoverished world it helps engender, we will be taking a look at Deleuze and Guatarri's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, RD Laing's The Divided Self, William Blake's prophetic texts, as well as contested authors such as Lyn Hejeinian who like all fabulous liars, opposes what she sustains. It will be here that we redefine the normal state of mankind as schizophrenic, careful not to include those who suffer from psychotic pathology. No, this schizophrenia is of an altogether more banal nature and is tantamount to dividing oneself from one's own perspective, for the world as we perceive it but a crystallization of our perceptions, and for most of us, is reduced to the mean.

It is therefore the aim of this text to point out first of all that the consensus delusion of what constitutes reality is forged in a scientific looking glass of psychiatric reductionism. More often than not, the theoretical underpinnings of psychiatry are based on studies of the brain, and this too is a reductive dismissal that the entire body is responsible for the internal states of the individual, and while inquiries into the brain may often lead to useful discoveries, patients are not walking brains, anymore than they are chemical imbalances. In treating their chemicals the underlying causes that resulted in their pathology are not considered or considered the realm of the therapist, who is more often than not a social worker who has taken a couple classes on abnormal psychology and is about qualified to cure the patient as I am to perform neuro-surgery. But the appearance that something is being done is often more important than the actuality of doing something, so patients are often left feeling hopeless that their malady has no cure.

In fact, it is this nihilism, this hopelessness, that is at the root of some depression, and that depression is treatable with pills, but the underlying hopelessness remains, for if I am my chemicals, then I am no one after all, a biological effect of a careless god.

The speculum is thus the issue. What you see is truly what you get, and the schizoid model of the self, which deems that we are separate from our environment, both hurts and helps us, depending upon the quality of that environment. The standardization of perspective however, has caused us to privilege one while making a disease of the other, and this why we've taken up this inquiry, for it is a delusion that we are separate things perceiving an objective reality, and in truth when we make this distinction, we are dividing ourselves from our own perspective, and thus projecting the psychic contents of our own experiences onto an illusion of objectivity.

I am not a body encapsulated at the fringes of my skin, rather, I am all that which is in range of my eyes, the clicking of the keyboard as I hear. I do not think from a hemisphere behind my eyes, I perceive with the entirety of my body, that is as a gestalt.

In order to overcome our denatured reality, we must relearn our mind's relationship to the body, which is to say, unlearn that there is a distinction between mind and body, for this is truly and illusion conjured perhaps by an evil magician ages ago to imprison men and women in a casing of flesh.

Fiction

2010-12-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

There was once an Assyrian, maddened by rage, as all men of his tribe were maddened by moral terror, to conquer men by their own fear; to impale them through their assholes and set their warriors as symbols. His brother, a twin, was lost in a battle to Canaanite warrior, and he knelt over the lost body, confused by its familiarity; knowing only that something that had inhabited him before was now lost. He shrieked at the moon. The sound sent shivers through the spines of his comrades. The held their heads and bowed; figuring incorrectly that it was his own death he was beholding.

The prophesies of the astrologers were not aimed at the warrior class; not at least at the individual warrior, and Sarkon, a man of reason, mistrusted the priests. In that moment, with the king's head beneath his knees, his fist clenched so tightly that it went white, he closed his eyes, knowing, but not wanting to know, that his brother was lost to him forever, and that a piece of him would be forever gone.

He stood without a word, the other warriors moving out of his way, and decided he would walk toward the moon until he stood directly underneath it.

For twenty days we walked without food, stopping only for water in the Arabian desert. He walked in a dream, with glazed eyes, staring at the waxing moon. When it had grown full, he knew that he would have to stop, and to his great joy, the gods had given him a sign. There, on the horizon, in the blank sands of the Arabian desert, was a perfectly cylindrical shrine, crafted in a black stone that he had never before seen.

When he entered it, he realized that it was several times larger on the inside, than it appeared to be on the outside. It is the work of the gods, he thought to himself. When he entered, he saw the moon itself, a little ball in a glass globe; then the sun, shining like template. When he looked up, the firmament hung atop him, moving several times more quickly than the sky of the mathematicians and astrologers. Surely this was the work of some god.

His faith would not hang in indeterminacy for long. A light broke from the miniature firmament and if by reflex, he dropped to his knees and averted his eyes. He could he it on his back, the smell of his flesh burning, but no pain, not yet.

An image of a man, bearing a great cross on his back and being led through the deserts of some foreign territory. Metal machines racing through stone streets; great buildings as tall as the sky; a small women bent over a glass ball, peering into it, she could see him, and he could feel her gaze looking down on him.

Her eyes, fogged over. Ogden saw this with some dismay. Blue became gray became black. Then suddenly she was back.

"Your brother is dead," she said. The man looked away to his wife. "Killed in Arabia, he was on an expedition there? For the Royal Navy?"

"Yes," he sighed.

RIP, Sam Paley

2010-12-14T15:07:00.001-08:00

Uhm. I wanted to e-mail Dr. Paley, tell him that I was doing well. He treated me like a son; I saw in him a father. He wanted me to stick through the Akkadian, but I had other plans post-September 11th. He knew that I needed the discipline, but I would in time, gain that on my own. He would always look at my papers bemusedly, I was a born interpreter, and he was a master scientist. We exchanged gifts, I suppose, I don't know what I could give a man of his renown, but he kept me around for whatever reason, giving me opportunities that he denied others.

I wish I had an opportunity to tell him how I unleashed his tricks of rhetoric on unsuspecting humanities professors, and that I indeed had lived up to the gifts that I had been given. It's a shame that I left him without knowing these things. He would have proud of me. And I was proud to have invested with his time. I offer his family my condolences, his wife and brothers. He shared his culture and his knowledge with a student who was convinced that the X-Files was a literal truth, and understood, I think that we are all groping at shadows in a vast sea of confusion. We come to these arenas with the baggage of a lifetime, and end up trying to unscript our deficiencies with the desire to be renowned.

I consider him a guru, and I believe that his time was not wasted on me, that I indeed shared what I know about Akkadian and Hebrew, and I have applied what I learned there to the theory that I have developed.

I wish his family the best, and assume that he will be transmigrated into a good life, without too many stains on his soul. He was a good man. Goodbye, Sam.

Your faithful student,

Dave

Hello All

2010-12-14T05:26:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a break from Much Ado. Most if not everything that I could say has already been said, and now it's a matter of repeating myself ad-nauseum, which is fine, but I need a break.

I am thoroughly proud of the scope and the product, and will be proof-reading and correcting the grammar before I get into Borges and maybe some more Blake. We have noticed that the trend in critical theory is moving toward science. This is great. Science has much to offer literary criticism and archaic psychoanalysis is not the end all and be all of interpretive understanding. It is great that Lacan has found an arena where his insights are not suspect, but Relativity also has much to tell us, especially when we get into collapsed temporal frameworks, and writers who think they're enlightened.

This really began as a joke. I was like, well, if you think you're so enlightened Mr. Blake, so illuminated, let's test out just how illuminated you really are. He's illuminated. The insights of Einstein do well to understand certain qualities of texts where opposition has been rendered simultaneously true. The principle transcendence afforded to us is our ability to make insights across time. If we are doing it in succession, we are talking about evolution, and this schema I used because I was, and still am, a student of Archaeology. My Guru, Samuel Paley. He taught me Akkadian, and Hebrew, and I studied Greek and Latin under UB's phenomenal Classics department.

If we want to study principles which transcend time, we can talk about them in terms of Relativity and theoretical physics which afford a schema and an impulse to do just that.

Psychoanalysis is still a great tool, and I am a big fan of Lecercle, whose name I pun on, yet still admire. The older I get, the less admiration I have for Jung's archetypes, but I still admire his insights, and Campbell did much to advance Jung's theory.

From a personal standpoint, I admired the mysticism of Judaic tradition, as a student of Rabbi Noson Gurary's Jewish mysticism class. He said that King David's great gift was to take the highest spiritual knowledge and relate it to everyone; I believe that I have lived up to his criticism, merely by living up to my own name.

Anyway, thank you for your interest, more will be added when I've thoroughly proofed the twelve chapters currently here.

The Art of Perspective: DaVinci

2010-12-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

All the problems of perspective are made clear by the five terms of mathematicians, which are:--the point, the line, the angle, the superficies and the solid. The point is unique of its kind. And the point has neither height, breadth, length, nor depth, whence it is to be regarded as indivisible and as having no dimensions in space. The line is of three kinds, straight, curved and sinuous and it has neither breadth, height, nor depth. Hence it is indivisible, excepting in its length, and its ends are two points. The angle is the junction of two lines in a point.

Every number, expressible and inexpressible sits upon a template for organizing the numberness of the number. We call this template a base. The base of a number is a power series which escalates to infinity in one dimension, (it's post decimal dimension), and toward zero in the other pre-decimal dimension.

Here we have a vector going in either direction, toward infinity, and toward zero. For instance, base 10 mathematics uses 10 as its base and thus everything is power of 10. Behold:

116,651 = 1*10^5 + 1*10^4 + 6*10^3 + 6*10^2 + 5*10^1 + 1*10^0

Now if we wanted to add .1234 to this number our power series would extend like so:

1*10^-1 + 2*10^-2 + 3*10^-3 + 4*10^-4.

Now, when we represent the number, we only consider the segment between the highest and the lowest place value, where 1^10^0 would always be considered the origin of both vectors. So, when you are seeing a number, you are always only seeing part of an infinite series which is lit up between extremes.

~~~

Now in Base-2, or Binary, the same rules hold true as in base 10, except that everything is a power of 2.

So instead of the chain extending like this:

1,10,100,1000,10000 ...

It extends like this:

1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 ...

&

.5, .25, .125., .0625, ...

~~~

Our Base 10 system of representations is not without its paradoxes. Behold:

1/3 = .333333...
1/3 = .333333...
1/3 = .333333...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3/3 = .999999... = 1

In such an instance the bare bones of our structure to contain the Number is laid bare, extending infinitely toward 9*10^-INF which is also Zero. So, even with an eternity to work with, we can never finish the task of writing this number.

~~~

What is the Point?

Well, just that the number seems to be describing the relationship of one thing to another in a very specific sequence, where the sequence conveys a large part of what the representation refers to.

Suffice it to say, when we introduce the concept of number it's a how much/how many indication. Each number occupies one infinitessimal point on a line known as the "real number line". The end points (which do not fall on the line) are INFINITY and -INFINITY.

The number is a point. A geometric object which describes itself only in relation to other objects and as part of some system.

Much Ado: Core Concept Inventory

2010-12-13T01:47:00.000-08:00

As we have discussed earlier, the primary fundamental binary that we have proposed in our discourse is one between mutability and symmetry which is personified in the Blakean concepts of Los and Urizen.

Urizen represents the mutable motif of variability. He is in Blake a demon, but needn't be. When the mutable aspect becomes frozen to a specific image, he loses his potency, and this act is considered "demonic" in Blake, not the principality of reason itself, of which Blake has plenty of.

In number theory, this amounts to being able to abstract the concept of the number to a numberness, and this allows us to create systematic theorems that describe the relationship of numbers to numbers, that work regardless of the specific numbers in question.

The Losian principle becomes a reflective principle which you find in Derrida's work that amounts to a structural re-entry and motif revolution. We find in the Bible, in Blake, in Derrida, in Heidegger, and Gertrude Stein, and here is where it is most evident.

The movement then becomes a thematic element of the text, and this recursive re-entry, afford a higher geometry than what was available to the Pythagoreans and others Classical thinkers that we discussed. The re-entry however is still evident in the handing down of ideas, sometimes it whittles its way downward and reduces complexity, or to put it otherwords, the snake swallows its tail, other times it increases complexity, or the snake generates its tail.

Other core concepts to Chaos theory as we are explicating it, are confusion, self-reference, self-negation, self-generation, a dialectic of dominance and submission, and vicious circularity, which has been articulated in Lecercle's concept of Derlire as a master-slave dialectic. We have engaged in other discourses as well, but these concepts are themselves, by nature, chaotic.

Hi All

2010-12-13T01:45:00.000-08:00

I haven't "finished" my book, I have merely found a definitive ending toward which to work. There are still a couple poets I definitely would like to add.

On that list: Borges' Aleph, Stein's recursive poetry, and RD Laing's Knots.

Again, thank you for you interest.

Dave

Much Ado, Chapter N

2010-12-13T01:42:00.000-08:00

The structural repetition that has dominated the course of twelve chapters is the Losian notion of symmetry. The symmetry we speak of needn't be a perfect mirror, but the image of the pattern can be exemplified in a repetition similar to the modality of writing found in the poetical sketches of Gertrude Stein. Another luminary of thought who utilizes this motif is the great psychiatrist, poet, theorist RD Laing.

The Judged and the Judger [The End]

2010-12-12T17:17:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, lived a rich and humble servant of God. He was richer than any man in the land, and God delighted in his child, telling the Accuser: "Look upon my servant Job. He is a good and righteous man; he would never hurt a soul." "Of course, Satan replied, he is rich, and the rich act well to ensure that they remain so. This is the world that you have made them."

God considers this and says, "Ok, Accuser, you may blight my righteous servant, only do not touch his body." So Satan makes sure that all his property is stolen, and his servants killed. Then he kills his sons and daughters and whatever else bore life about him. Job cries but does not curse God.

God says "Look at that, you did your worst and Job has remained faithful. Ha!"

Satan says: "Of course he's faithful, he hopes in the future you will grant him more wealth. Let's see what he does when I curse him with boils."

So God says "Ok. Just don't kill him." So Satan blights him with the boils, and Job curses the day he was born, in a poetical sort of way. This amounts to a rejection of God's gift, and in fact, a curse on the act of creation, a curse on God himself, so Satan wins.

Job is caught up in a world in which, like the Protestant Work Ethic, material gain is a sign of God's favor, while scant wealth is a sign of malicious intentions. Job knows that he has done nothing wrong, but his friends, invested in this notion, insist he must have done something to earn God's ire. Why, he's covered in boils and all his stuff is gone. And his children are dead.

Job faces down judge after judge who insists on this system where ethical purity is manifest in material wealth, but Job sticks to his guns himself insisting that he has done nothing to deserve the sort of punishment that God has heaped upon him.

We know as readers that Job is correct. Now the cyclic nature of the structure which is beyond our capacity to reproduce, but is evident in the repetitive discourse of judging and defending, is a very simple expression, of the cyclical-linear form that we have called spiral. It is an example of a recursive text.

The reason it is structured in this cyclic pattern is because it was originally a song, that was meant to be performed in from of an audience, and songs tend to repeat for the sake of a listener. The basic pattern vascillates between judgement and defense, two principle parts, and ends with God agreeing with Job, he is indeed a good man, and blameless, and in the end he gets everything back, regardless of the fact that he cursed God.

Structurally, Job is paradigmatic of the sort of recursive geometry we are advancing in this book. The actual content of the story however is also relevant. We have a story about a man who is living in harmony with his world and his God, and even when he is robbed of everything that makes his life good, he is still faithful to the God who gave him life. Eventually he breaks down, but who can blame him?

This accounts for about one fifteenth of the entire story. The rest is back and forth between him and the community who is judging him on God's behalf.

So we have the first principle of vascillation between judgement and defense. And a cyclic turning with is also linear, as we mentioned in our paradigm archetype $This Sentence is False$.

In Revelation, the recursive geometry is still there, but now instead of identifying with the judged, we are to identify ourselves with the judging. The entire psychology of the story is different here, it is a ballistic finger pointing and a mass negation. The spirituality is itself of abnegation. It moves in turns, first a repudiation of the churches, then a holy vision of heaven, then the opening of the seals, then the seven trumpets and etc...

The issue that we're drawing to the four, rather than decode the numerological code of Revelation, is that the repetition is itself, much like Heidegger's work, written on the name of God.

It is this emanation from a center that defines recursive turning and the repetition is not a defect of the articulation, but a conscious choice to move in accord with the temporality that is evident to a human living in this realm.

YHWH, remember, is the a participle for the word Being, and that being moves through time in a fashion which is both circular and linear. The week is seven days long, and in fact, was also when Revelation was written. The days move forward, but also loop. So when we move in turns like this, as we are writing on the name of God.

The principle of $This Sentence is False$ is partially generative, itself infinite, mechanical, temporal, spatial. It transcends and sustains the dualities. It is unwritable, but can still be referred to.

It suggests a complex geometry, and a rule set which is scale invariant. If it is not God Himself, then it is God's patterning on to human language, the generative mechanism as it is patterned on language.

Jerusalem and Milton both by Blake move in accord with this cyclic linearity. It is (if not god) the pattern of being, and it is here that we will end. In the abnegating space of Revelation, having scribbled our histories on the creative principle itself, returning to that very place we began, in the wide gulf beyond even yawning distance, namely Chaos.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 6

2010-12-12T05:24:00.001-08:00

One attempt to reconcile the monists with the pluralists was the atomists championed by Lucippus and Democritus who both postulated that there were only two principles: the void, and the atoms of plenitude. Non-being is a great vacuum and this accounts for movement. He believed that nothing happened at random, and that is about all we know.

Democritus left his stain on history in a more evident manner. He believed that perception is unreliable, and learning must divorce itself from reality. Opinion flows into us from the vast external gulf and truth lies somewhere off in the abyss. Atoms exist, the void exists, and only by convention are things hot or cold, soft and hard, dark and light. Knowing makes us ignorant, and the best we can hope for is the luck of this or that opinion being at any given time true.

In other words, it's all downhill from Heraclitus. Now let's consider this for a second. Heraclitus takes us to the edge of reason, the great triumph of which is to cast doubt upon its own validity. But if this is all we can know, that no knowing is adequate then where do we go as thinkers?

This is the major glitch in Heraclitus' system, being like Taoism in the sense that it if we take it literally, it is an attempt to shut down reason, to stop thinking. But the Taoists don't transmigrate into ethereal beings once they have this revelation, they spend all day training their bodies and disciplining their minds. And this is where Heraclitus' theory of knowledge must go, into a theory disciplining, a theory of dissatisfaction which seeks to better itself in every way, and this is where we are left.

Pythagoras will be the great master who advances the Heraclitusian glitch that the end of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom which does not seek for an explanation, but rather becomes an experimental dialog with the real world.

Pythagoras was part scientist, part philosopher, part mathematician, part mystic. He is reputed to have trained under the Egyptian priests who had some twine in which the ratio of the lengths was 3:4:5. Pythagoras saw this and realized that this principle did not just apply to congruent triangles, but any right triangle could be described by this process. Pythagoras was a careful student of reality. He recognized that general principles could be extracted from anything.

Pythagoras, the story goes, chanced upon the sound of hammers clanking anvils and realized that the larger the hammer, the deeper the sound. It was from this that he acquired his doctrine of the Music of the Spheres. It was his mathematical training that allowed him to translate this idea into numbers. So among other things, Pythagoras was a musical theorist.

From this notion the doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration, or reincarnation came. He believed that our souls had been born and reborn many times and that they were being purified for a higher form of life, a poetical notion indeed, and an article of faith among the brotherhood.

It is precisely his insight into the real that mankind lost when the disciplines that he was engaged with specialized into their separate sectors.

It is precisely this discipline that I am attempting to resurrect; for I am after all a student of the humanities, and music is not divorced from modern theories of physics; for the the string theorists postulate that the rate of vibration of a string determines the qualities of the particle that it will become, so now is the perfect time to resurrect such Pythagorean insight into the real.

Pythagoras' insight was that we could align information, mythological, spiritual, mathematical, musical, and that the same ratios or harmonies would yield a consistent pattern. Discovery was a matter of recollecting a higher form of knowing that had been lost upon being reincarnated into this realm. He believed the spirituality of the mysteries. His dialog with nature has proven invaluable, and every student of mathematics knows his name by heart.

His insight opens up the expanding dimensionality of the Taoists, and reveals it to be a triangular revelation, the one becomes the two becomes the three, and so on toward the myriad things:

o
o o
o o o

He added a fourth layer to this, knowing that dimensionwise, it requires four points to define a three dimensional plane. This Pythagorean insight makes us believe that we have nothing to fear, that there is no death, that in fact this world is as far away from the source as is humanly possible. There is an underlying unity, but this unity seeks to express itself in plenitude, and that we should be grateful for the opportunity that we are given.

The fundamental nature of this reality is chaotic. The principles that are expressed in the very large are the same as the principles expressed in the very small. With discipline and experimentation our knowing can expand. It is not ourselves that we should search, but our world. This was the end of the Heraclitusian method. It works when you stop needing it. It expresses reality to an end, and this ending of searching is anathema to our method. We seek because we don't know. If we knew, we would not seek. We know better than to know. This is the end of knowing to not stop seeking for more knowledge. Knowing is a limit. We limit ourselves by knowing, and this is the basic insight that Socrates dies for. That we know that we do not know, and that this is true wisdom.

Praise be unto philosophy. I have searched myself, and now I search the world.

Much Ado About Nothing

2010-12-11T21:13:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1: This Sentence is False

Chapter 2: Part 1

Chapter 2: Part 2

Chapter 2: Part 3

Chapter 3: The Hyper 4

Chapter 4: Part 1: From the Perspective of Light / Hegelian Dialectic

Chapter 4: Part 2

Chapter 4: Part 3

Chapter 4: Part 4

Chapter 5: Stanley Fish & Self-Consuming Artifacts: Part 1

Chapter 5: The Trace: Part 2

Chapter 6: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Chapter 7: The First Book of Urizen

Chapter 8: The Blackness of Blackness

Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports

Chapter 9: Part 2: The Rise and Fall of Satan

Chapter 9: Part 3: Milton's Messiah

Chapter 9: Part 4: Where the Contraries are Equally True

Chapter 9: Part 5: An Inquiry into the Good

Chapter 10: Interlude

Chapter 11: Part 1

Chapter 11: Part 2

Chapter 11: Part 3

Chapter 11: Part 4

Chapter 11: Part 5

Chapter 11: Part 6

http://basenothing.blogspot.com/2010/12/chapter-12-judged-and-judger-end.html

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 5: The Fall of Heraclitus

2010-12-11T13:18:00.000-08:00

The philosophy of Heraclitus was neither monist nor monadic, but rather both; what happens is it splits in half. The monists become monists, the monadists become pluralists, the first of which Empedocles, was part scientist, part prophet. Empedocles believed that the four elements, earth, air, water, and fire pervaded all things in different proportions, and their nature could be discerned by determining the proportion. For instance, fire was 100% fire, and 0% everything else. The particular forms were all derived from the elements, and the principle verbal ontological commitment was to growth and mixture. This will form the foundation for Aristotle's philosophy which is itself based upon empiricism and observation. But the quality of the observation is dependent on the insights of the observer.

Empedocles postulated a crude form of Darwinistic evolution that speculated at an also crude form of natural selection. He was working from Anaximander's writing as well as the prevalence of fish fossils available in creeks and rivers.

Part of the lure of monist theory was that it stipulated that being could not arise from non-being, and this makes a certain sort of sense, appealing to an intuition that is at once sensible and rational. The correllary to this was that like beget like. But now you have a problem that mandates a pluralism. Namely, that we eat an olive it turns into bone and blood and muscle.

Anaxagoras' solution to this issue was a notion that dominated the qualitative pluralists: that the olive has bits of bone and blood and muscle.

The issue that concerns us here is the "fall" from Heraclitus into what we are arguing are two half-theories at war with each other. The monist paradigm does not explain, or deems as trivial all the stuff that we can see that is prone to changing. The pluralist paradigm fails to accurately describe the system of transmutation that pervades the natural world. The rise of monism thus predicts its own supplementation by pluralism; and honestly all this had been previously solved and now is resolved inadequately. So what happened?

This is where we theorize a little about the environment that constitutes most academic circles. You get one guy who is truly a genius, and he comes up with a theory that should settle most arguments. But then you get more guys who are less smart who want to feel like genius who mimic the genius in their own reductive way and they take control of the argument. Since they are not as smart as the genius (Heraclitus) their theory is of course his theory except that its only half understood. Suddenly there are more pseudo-geniuses and they come along and realize the inadequacy of the other pseudo-geniuses theory, argue with it, and you end up with two half theories which explain only the inadequacy of the other.

Such is the nature of theory. Not quite an evolution, is it?

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 4: Eleatic School

2010-12-11T07:25:00.000-08:00

Eleatic School
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Eleatics were monists, and their most famous pupil was the great paradoxist Zeno whose is most well known for the famous race between Achilles and the tortoise. The result of the race is less important than Zeno's technique which Aristotle called "dialectic syllogism" but in modern terms is known as reductio ad absurdem. He also uses the rather modern method of systematic assumption, which pervades Wittgenstein as well as Hofstadter, and Russell.

Parmenides and Melissus were both of the Eleatic school of monism which stipulated that all things are one, but it lacks the intellectual fortitude of Heraclitus and the Taoist tradition, neglecting the plenitude of particulars that define our experience of this world. It was our experience, our seeming, they argue that was the illusion, and the logical consequences of such a system are refuted by modern physics and are thus of little consequence.

Suffice it to say, they believe that the Great One was unchanging and uncreated, and thus everlasting. Space was boundless, and filled. Reality was eternal, unlimited, everywhere alike, unchanging, unchangeable, and pervasively filled.

This incomplete doctrine of the Monists would lead to another which fulfilled it. Namely the doctrine of Qualitative Pluralism.

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 11: Part 3

2010-12-11T06:39:00.000-08:00

Heraclitus
~~~~~~~~~~

The Taoist spirituality of Heraclitus is not based, like Taoism, on water, but rather takes as its base principle fire. Heraclitus' spirituality is of a psychologically mature order which seeks to unite the opposites, and understands that things are in flux.

"Good and evil are two sides of the same coin."

Paradox becomes the modality of this expression, and bespeaks an understanding that sees any genuine discourse with the real as having a peculiar epistemology. Heraclitus believed in an upward mobility that sought to transcendence itself, which was a transcendence of the desires and the customs of the common man. The Logos (as opposed to Tao) was the all-pervasive principle which was present in all things. The Logos comes into being by differentiating into the myriad things of nature. It is itself nature and to put yourself in accord with it is to be in accord with the highest possible principle.

Heraclitus believed that we should put ourselves in accord to that which is common to all, which bespeaks the syncretistic reduction of his forebearer, Thales. He also believed (paradoxically) that lovers of wisdom should put themselves in accord with the particulars. He believed in searching the self for understanding, and that the eyes and ears of men were naturally prone to error.

Most people then lived in a state of sleeping, pulled this or that way by desires they did not themselves control. Most men were asleep in a private dream, hypnotized by the rhythms of greed and fame.

He had a Blakean sense that everything flowed, but nothing abides, as in no single law could explain the myriad forces moving through the myriad things.

"You can never step in the same river twice."

Such a statement undermines our notion that a river is an irreducible thing; rather it is the flow of waters that is ever changing, ever in motion, and it is as it must be and we should take it as a metaphor, a lesson, which teaches us the wisdom of being:

"It is in changing that things find repose."

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 11: Part 2

2010-12-11T03:46:00.000-08:00

No single interpretive schema will do anything but reduce our various examples to a categorical imposition which is anathema to our discourse. We offer essential repeating patterns which are born from the texts themselves. We treat criticism as religion, and science as criticism; we criticize science and religion with the same arguments, we refuse to compartmentalize, and refuse to boil things down to their essences, doing sometimes both, and often neither.

It will be here then that we re-enter the philosophical debates of the pre-Socratics who, having inspired the dialectic born out of Plato and Aristotle, have done much to color our perspective on the nature of reason.

It is part of the nature of the western mind, that those luminaries of thought initially existed in a state of confusion. They were scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, and mathematicians who wanted nothing more than to understand the mind of gods. It would be later that religion became religion, math became math, science became science. Only philosophy retains this primordial confusion, and thus it is of particular interest to our discourse.

Let us begin (again) then in Miletus.

Miletus was an ancient Turkish city which acted as a center of trade, and as such, became the breeding ground for the exchange of ideas. Stories were traded as well as material culture, and the diffusion of notions resulted. Thales, who became the first in the line of Miletusian thinkers, collected these stories and attempted to bring them into a unity, to find some principle that described or accounted for the various accounts of gods and godesses and the trials and tribulations that resulted therein. According to Thales all things are filled with gods and water, the gods pervade nature; they are themselves forces of nature. Lacking formal training in mathematics, Thales' was a qualitative approach, ontologically committed to qualities, which were themselves the basis for categorization. Bertrand Russell's Set Theory is contained in the embryo of Thales' insight. So from Thales we get attributes which are sets, and also actions, or dynamis, motion, for "to ask what a thing is involves asking what it does." So at the advent of proto-philosophy, you get water, gods, fullness, and soul (which amounts to motion).

Then comes Anaximander, who is reputed to have invented the first sundial. He correctly guessed that earth was a sphere that "hung" in the sky. His insight was that all things seem to change from one state into their opposite. Night turns into day. Darkness turns into light. Life turns into death. Thus the transformative nature of reality, it is constantly in flux. Anaximander believed that when the day passed out of being, it was stored in a great warehouse of potencies he called the apeiron, (Greek for boundless); that in fact all things were stored in this warehouse, this storehouse of potencies or potentialities and that the day willingly sacrificed itself so that the night could come into being; that in fact, all life partook in this sacrifice so that things could pass in and out of being, and that without this opposition there could be no dynamis, or change.

Anaximenes abstracted the serial order of the elements, (Earth/Water/Wind/Fire) to a fourfold series of relations, thereby making a principle of the sequence itself. The guiding principle of the order was defined by weight. The heaviest things settled lowest. Therefore Earth was at the base, water next, wind and then fire. He postulated that Wind was the pervasive principle because breath is associated with life.

This partitioning of things in a few basic principles is by necessity the impulse of metaphysics. The abstraction of the principle will guide Greek reason and it still facilitates the potency of Western metaphysics. It is from these insights, that the alignment of nature with man, and man with ethics is guided. For the rules that applied to the external world, were seen as indicative of the right way to govern our own actions, and this tradition endures all the way to Hume's skepticism, which argues that we can never know what should be from what is.

The key ontological issues are physis (nature), and pervasiveness. These will guide the pre-Socratics and the post-Socratics, in their attempt to come to terms with life and nature. They also will form the foundation of the metaphysical knot that humankind will spend perhaps its entire existence trying to unwind.

One key point to be made here, is that the philosophical tradition is necessarily antagonistic to the secular mythic tradition of "the people". The two are not necessarily antagonistic, that is to say, they could be aligned with each other, but the philosopher here is seeking to define his own strategies of truth in contradistinction to what is held to be true by custom.

~~~

All info on pre-Socratics is taken from Phillip Wheelwright's "The Presocratics"

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 1

2010-12-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

"Nocturnal the river of hours flows/from its source, the eternal tomorrow."

The concept of spacing in Derrida's Differance is related to this quotation which is taken from Miguel de Unamuno's poem. There is something which hovers just beyond the last, the space in which the next will reside; yet as soon as it is occupied by the next, a new space is created to hold the next next. We call this space, tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes. It shadows, in fact, what was and the moment it opens up, it is closed off. What we are describing then is a relation to this space, the last's relationship to the next. The eternal tomorrow, the one that never comes.

Tomorrow is adequate to describe the spacing and temporalizing aspect of Differance, in fact, it is so readily apparent that it ruin's Derrida's game, which is what I'm all about, beating Derrida at his own game.

For this I go to Borges, whose History of Eternity proffers the Blakean notion that in eternity, the past, present and future happen simultaneously, and as we know from Einstein's Relativity, this is literally the case for light. As an object approaches the speed of light, the past and the future collapse into an expanding present.

For Derrida, there is no outside of time, Eternity is a collapsed word set, redoubled in several turns. The words stay the same, the meanings in context change, but the movement is always there, even if it comes back as Nietzsche's ghost in an eternal return.

This is not the eternity we wish to endure, rather, we postulate a framework which hovers just beyond the real, where the future is present, and the past is also present, and we can see the unfolding of the present into the future as man on a mountain overlooking the city-scape.

Now this man is not outside of space just because he can see the entire city at once, in this "outside of time" there is still sequence. There is an order to events, but that is all. Time is a discontinuity of happenstances, not the continuous ebb and flow we have in the earth realm. Perhaps there is a realm even higher than the sequential space of no-time, I do not know.

In Blake eternity is the manner in which a child perceives time, as a succession of events, and then he is indoctrinated by Urizenic adults. We fall into the cinematic time of the sun dial, quite possibly the origin of the spiral construction of time.

The difference between this construction and the sequential construction, is that we can roll the sequence forward and backward, or see the entire sequence as a whole. This in ticker time is accomplished by force of will, by measurement. In Blakean sequence, there is no measure, no notion of time at all. We simply disregard it.

According to Plotinus:

"For all the Intelligible Heaven is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea is heaven; and animal, plant, and man. For spectacle they have a world that has no been engendered. In beholding others they behold themselves. For all things are translucent: nothing is dark, nothing impenetrable, for light is manifest in light. All are everywhere, and all is all, and the whole is in each as in the sum. The sun is one with all the stars and every star with the sun and all its fellows."

This is a "unanimous" universe, as Borges so wonderfully puts it. Unanimous, insofar as it is of a united spirit. This is only partially a univocal tradition. It is partially monist. It is both univox and polyvox at once, these two notions not being mutually exclusive. Monadism, is reconcilable with monism, we are one and we are many, e pluribus unum. The One, the All-Father, the Pleroma as he is referred to by the Gnostics, disarticulates himself, and solidifies, and we are his articulations. This is the nature of Blake's universe, and Blake's schema, of which our mythographical framework has been partially derived (as is Northrop Frye's). And Blake's is derived from Plotinus, and Jacob Boehme.

Chapter 10: Interlude

2010-12-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

I find it behooves me the writer to take an inventory of my theses, as many have been brought to bear in the short space of nine chapters. In dealing with paradoxes of self-reference, we have argued for a theory of reading which is cyclical, being at once linear and circular, and we have called this concept "recursion" and linked it with the concept of the spiral. As we will see as we continue, this will be the pardigmatic motif which binds our texts to a unity.

We have discussed number theory, and talked about two "nothings" which are not nothing, but amount to a zero sum. One is symmetry, the other variability. We have discussed the role of paradox, the role of myth, the strategies of description which unsettle their own meaning. We have mentioned regresses in terms of Aristotle's First Mover. We have transcended time in the personage of Sophia, and space in William Blake. We have fallen into time, and then out of time, and then back into time.

We have traced a magic circle, and performed a magic trick. We have seen the prevalence of fours and threes and twos and ones. We've seen contradictions become truth, and rode a beam of light into the sun. We've watched difference engines in turn, differentiate into similitudes, and we've watched luminaries of science fall into mere reactionaries. A line is a circle? A point can be a line? Artifacts which self-consume, and snakes with their tail in their mouths. Heaven and Hell are married and contraries are equally true.

This is the gift of an analysis which resists the urge to define itself. We are arguing then for a Chaotic interpretive schema which seeks out the fringes of reason, and then rationalizes itself, all the while arguing with itself, arguing for itself, as it argues against itself.

There is no transcendence here for us to find. If I want to leave this world, I'll build a spacecraft. This is an engagement with texts that understands that the fractal geometry that makes up my brain, makes up the produce of the brain. We project as we create. Creation is an act of projection, and while it's easy to see the phallic nature of $This Sentence is False$ it functions also like a projector, shooting forth light through a lens.

And yes, we have obliterated the name of God, for the name of God, the image of God, becomes the final barrier to "oneing" your soul to God, or in less secular terms, we have merged with our creative faculty without suppressing the analytical faculty.

We have resurrected the other way, the kataphatic tradition, neglected in Derrida's work. And this is where we stand, as resurrectors of ancient wars, playing out their battle in this space, attempting to explain the unexplainable.

It is now that we can move into the dialectic we have suggested. The war between sworn enemies, spiritual enemies, corporeal friends.

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 5: End Chapter

2010-12-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

For Blake, the rebel character is a redeemer in disguise. The force of the oppresser, boomerangs back into his face via the agency of the character Orc, who is the archetype of compressed energy exploding. This is echoed in the prophesies of the American and French revolution, where Orc is depicted as serpentine. He is the child of Enitharmon and Los, the sacrifice they leave on the mountain; a Promethean figure.

In Milton, the rebel is Satan who organizes the angels in a rebellion against God. When his war is shown to be mere hubris, he causes the fall of man or rather the loss of Eden.

For Freud, the loss of Eden is the loss of the womb, that state where we want nothing and live in perfect unity with the environment. For Blake, the loss of Eden is the rise of Urizen over the other eternals. Eden then is a balancing of the four principalities of intelligence so that one doesn't take control of the entire personality. In Jung, this is known as "centering" which isn't really a centroidal method, it is more like during certain points we can only see from one principality at a time, until we are centered at which point we take a step back, so that we can utilize our entire personality at every given moment, instead of a part at a time.

This Unity of Personality is a paradigm motif in Kitaro Nishida's inquiry into the good and echoes a Buddhist belief that one can unite the conscious with the unconscious to achieve a higher form of consciousness.

And this is the fundamental principle which pervades the text, a sort of Gestalt synthesis of varying psychic energies which operate best when operating together.

Milton isn't just a poem, it is a reading of a poem, and itself a method for analyzing poetry, prone as it is, to hyperbolic ballistics and forcing the reader at every point to interpret, to re-interpret, to analyze the quality of the interpretation, to test the interpretation, and to see eventually that interpretation itself is indebted to some context.

Blake's is a theory of states, which is about you, the reader, and Milton, the subject. It is more about how it signifies than what it signifies. It tropes on motifs the same way Gates suggests Ellison tropes on Richard Wright. Blake's insult of Milton is an homage to Milton. Blake's read of Milton is a work of art in and of itself, it is poetry. Poetry is not pile of words but a mental act that brings disparate things together, mimicking a structure, troping a motif there. With rhetorical turns, and catechresis (the intentional misuse of symbols).

The role metanymy plays is of the utmost significance but outside the thesis of this text. Suffice it to say, many parts are all fighting with each other to take control of the whole and while Albion sleeps, no resolution is possible.

It is not until God forgives Satan that great Albion awakens.

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 4

2010-12-10T08:23:00.000-08:00

Next we are introduced to Blake's concept of the spectre. The spectre is the divided aspect of a soul which becomes its other.

"I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One! He is my Spectre"

Much like Jung's concept of the shadow, the spectre casts its own negative across the external world, seeking to destroy its opposite. What Blake is saying here, from the voice of Milton, is that Milton at some point recognizes that the satan-principle is a portion of his own soul, that portion he has sacrificed to God, and by so sacrificing he has betrayed his own nature, his is as a poet of "the devil's party" without realizing it. That is to say, he was full of energy. Afterward, Milton beholds his shadow:

M14.36; E108| Then on the verge of Beulah he beheld his own Shadow;
M14.37; E108| A mournful form double; hermaphroditic: male & female
M14.38; E108| In one wonderful body. and he enterd into it
M14.39; E108| In direful pain for the dread shadow, twenty-seven-fold

According to Northrop Frye, Beulah is a place where lovers perceive their beloveds, Ulro is a mechanistic void where subjects perceive objects; and Eden is the dichotomy of creatures and creators.

The shadow is 27 fold, or 3^3; again a Hyper-Four. And Blake waxes mathematical in his very modern construction of the nature of infinity.

M15.21; E109| The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its
M15.22; E109| Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity.
M15.23; E109| Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind
M15.24; E109| His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun:
M15.25; E109| Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
M15.26; E109| While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth
M15.27; E109| Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent.
M15.28; E109| As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing
M15.29; E109| Its vortex; and the north & south, with all their starry host;
M15.30; E109| Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding
M15.31; E109| His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square.
M15.32; E109| Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
M15.33; E109| To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the moony shade.
M15.34; E109| Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth
M15.35; E109| A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity.

We know that in an infinite line, any single point can be taken as the center. So too each being upon the earth is an infinite vortex, and not the "three layer cake" of the of sky, earth, and hell. This is a construction of reality, which limits reality. Each globe in the sky is its own center; and each man and woman is their own center; and we too are the center of all being, so long as we respect that each person is a center and do not think ourselves the sole center of everything.

Also, heaven is not a place you go when you die, rather it is a passed eternity, a script which has already run its course. Earth is still in motion, still evolving into a new heaven which is collected in the mind of God, when its script has fully run its course. Thus to resolve the contraries is to destroy creation, to create a heaven which will then be taken into God so that a new script can run its course.
To be in Heaven is to be in Eternity, which means outside of time.

Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic
M19.16; E112| One to the North, named Urthona: One to the South, named Urizen:
M19.17; E112| One to the East, named Luvah: One to the West, named Tharmas
M19.18; E112| They are the Four Zoa's that stood around the Throne Divine!
M19.19; E112| But when Luvah assum'd the World of Urizen to the South:
M19.20; E112| And Albion was slain upon his mountains, & in his tent;
M19.21; E112| All fell towards the Center in dire ruin, sinking down.
M19.22; E112| And in the South remains a burning fire; in the East a void.

The four principalities of man, Urthona, which only mitigates itself via Los, Urizen, Tharmas and Luvah, who represent the four forms of intelligences. The four zoas, or energies of life, collapse into the void. Milton attempts to go toward the universe of Enitharmon and Los, but is headed off by Urizen. It is toward Beulah where Milton is headed, that place where the contraries are equally true, echoing Fish's aesthetic of the good physician.

M26.45; E124| And every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not
M26.45; E124| A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems, it is Delusion
M26.46; E124| Of Ulro: & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory.

For Blake, natural causes are an idiotic conscription of the soulless attributions of science. Spiritual is indistinct from mental. Bodies have no cause, minds cause. The ratio is by analog. Anything reducible to an analogy is reduced to the ratio.

Book One of Milton ends with the labors of Los against the facts of Urizen. Again, for Blake meaning, and understanding are a matter of attribution. We give meaning to the world around, we propose possibilities, we live in our imaginations. This is the language of Eden, the logic of the imagination, that we create the world around us, we perceive with our imagination; if the doors of perception were properly cleansed we would see the world around us, as if for the first time, in its infinite complexity, an unspeakable beauty that all life on earth rejoices in.

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 3

2010-12-10T06:48:00.000-08:00

Milton's Satan is Blake's Orc. Blake's Satan is Milton's Messiah, and Job's Satan, the accuser, the deceiver; he is weak in courage; he is strong in cunning. He tricks Los accusing those around him of the turpitude he himself is guilty of. He plays on their desires, their emotions. He plays them against one another. He is associated with a class of men Blake refers to as "the elect" who were created before time and space, and who are perpetually recycled into the world system, whereas the Reprobate and the Redeemed can go to some manner of Heaven. For Blake there is more than one Heaven.

Milton's Satan, like Blake's is the only full fledged personality in Hell. The other demons are more like aspects of his potency than fully realized characters in and of themselves. When Satan finds his mill workers celebrating with drunken revelries, he cries and comes back to Los, convinced that Palamabron is behaving badly.

Satan is not the god of desire, he is the god of moral imposition and austere self-hood. He wants everything to run according to a specific order. He is a tyrant, a megalomaniac. But as Blake reminds us, one man's Satan is another man's God.

M9.19; E103| For Satan flaming with Rintrahs fury hidden beneath his own mildness
M9.20; E103| Accus'd Palamabron before the Assembly of ingratitude! of malice:
M9.21; E103| He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll,
M9.22; E103| Of Moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah
M9.23; E103| To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth
M9.24; E103| With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease
M9.25; E103| Punishments & deaths musterd & number'd; Saying I am God alone
M9.26; E103| There is no other! let all obey my principles of moral individuality
M9.27; E103| I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses
M9.28; E103| Of my Eternal Mind, transgressors I will rend off for ever,
M9.29; E103| As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering.

Satan here tries to supplement the creator, he is a false God, mimicking the God of the Old Testament; he passes these laws down out of jealousy for Palamabron's "ingratitude." Satan alone is God, and this individuation which exists at the expense of all others, will prefigure the wars that are fought. It is this desire to put all people under one name, the insanity of unity, the insanity of unifying all human consciousness, which Paul himself is guilty of, that drives men to destroy men.

Satan's bosom grows opaque so that his heart, and motivations may not be questioned. He offers everlasting death to those who disobey him and thus the world of Ulro is born, out of moral slavery, and Satan's jealousy.

Satan's role now is to obscure vision, his motivations are megalomania and enslavement. What is lost is the ability to see through language. Instead language acts as a barrier to the external world, a barrier which must be broken in order to reclaim the divine vision, which is the sole providence of no single religion, but rather all religious systems.

It is then that Blake mentions the Covering Cherub which the God of the Old Testament placed before the Tree of Life after the fall. This re-echoes the fall from Eden, and Urizen's fall from Eternity, which is explicitly spelled out by Blake: Satan is Urizen.

So Satan's role is to divide the whole of humanity into pieces, and then set the principle parts at war with each other.

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 2

2010-12-10T04:54:00.000-08:00

So we fall into essences, call generalities, and together, Los and Enitharmon, bring forth their family. Orc, the "shadowy female" and Satan himself who like Urizen "refuses form". He is called the Miller of Eternity, and is assigned the qualities of mechanism, and grinding, and the "prince of the Starry Wheels." Again, the notion of machine logic is called Satan by Blake.

M4.1; E97| Beneath the Plow of Rintrah & the harrow of the Almighty
M4.2; E97| In the hands of Palamabron. Where the Starry Mills of Satan
M4.3; E97| Are built beneath the Earth & Waters of the Mundane Shell
M4.4; E97| Here the Three Classes of Men take their Sexual texture Woven
M4.5; E97| The Sexual is Threefold: the Human is Fourfold.

This mirrors the Dogon division of the male aspect being threefold, while the female is fourfold. Here, the sexual, or generative process is threefold, and the human is fourfold. The threefold is aspected as head, heart, and loins. While the fourfold is, Tharmas, Los, Urizen, and Luvah.

For Blake, this process links back to the notion of opposition. We have thesis, anti-thesis, and negation, where the thesis is considered a contrary, like love and hate, and the negation is all that which is not love, a delimiting of the infinite toward the finite. Blake's association of the starry wheels with Satan comes via his disposition toward Newton. The notion that reality could be set under discernible laws was anathema to Blakes antinomian tradition. He imagines it much like a clock, with gears, and cogs, void of humanity, void of soul, void of spirit.

Blake goes on to stipulate that every man's wisdom, being born out of his experience is peculiar to his own shortcomings. Wisdom is thus a strategy, what in Freud is called a negation. It seeks to un-script the experience in order to leave the speaker in a new place which is free of the psychic baggage caused by the experience.

Blake's Satan, is Milton's Messiah, and Newton's Pantocrator (or all-power), the Woof of Locke. Again, Blake's argument is not against the machine, it is against the principality of reason taking over the entire show. We are selling our souls to this amorphous essentialist principality. Logic is a tool, not an end in itself.

Blake goes on to blast the "druidicle proportion" of "length, bredth, and height", contrasting it with "naked beauty" and "flutes, harps, and songs".

The important thing through all this is the association of machine logic with Satan, and the fact that if we reduce ourselves to mere logic, then I will be able to write a piece of code that simulates your machinations.

M5.5; E98| And this is the manner of the Daughters of Albion in their beauty
M5.6; E98| Every one is threefold in Head & Heart & Reins, & every one
M5.7; E98| Has three Gates into the Three Heavens of Beulah which shine
M5.8; E98| Translucent in their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins
M5.9; E98| Surrounded with fires unapproachable: but whom they please
M5.10; E98| They take up into their Heavens in intoxicating delight
M5.11; E98| For the Elect cannot be Redeemd, but Created continually
M5.12; E98| By Offering & Atonement in the crue[l]ties of Moral Law
M5.13; E98| Hence the three Classes of Men take their fix'd destinations
M5.14; E98| They are the Two Contraries & the Reasoning Negative.

The reasoning negative is associated with the "elect". Note that the structure of the heavens is a Hyper-Four (also called a tetration) but its 3^3, so our sense of dimensionality is fourfold but aspected in terms of three.

New Blog

2010-12-10T04:51:00.001-08:00

To reduce clutter here, and on Base Infinity I have created a new blog for philosophical and political writings called Base Meridian

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports

2010-12-10T03:05:00.000-08:00

Mental Sports
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before we begin the passage of "Milton" through the polluted climes of Urizen's void, Blake is going to give him a little kick in jewels by calling his work the perverted and stolen writings of the Classical Poets, set up "by artifice against the sublime of the Bible". Milton is really a poetical critique of Paradise Lost, a Paradise in fact that we lose everyday by seeing it as lost. Blake promises us a second innocence, an innocence born out of the desire to return to the place we as children habitated, a way of relating to the world which is partially imaginative, in fact, consciously imaginative.

Now, in Milton there is a conflation of reflections, images, and creations that is apparent during the Narcissus scene in Paradise Lost, as Eve stares at her reflection in the water. Eden is solipsistic sort of place where an act of perception, is also an act of creation. It is the poet's paradise, a Second Eden.

Now, what Blake is arguing for is a sort of pacificism which is not passive. Spiritual war, a war of words, rather than murder and swords and guns. We are supposed to fight each other, without contraries is no progression. But we're not supposed to literally kill each other. We should attempt instead to debate. This is Blakean war. It is the reason I have taken up his case. Blake won, but no one realized it. We are in a looking glass universe, as modern physicists are sure to tell you. The observer is not distinct from the observation, so Blake defeats Locke, but Locke, trapped in the hubris of his own reductivity, could never tell.

Three Classes are Created by the Hammer of Los, & Woven t214

M3.1; E96| By Enitharmons Looms when Albion was slain upon his Mountains
M3.2; E96| And in his Tent, thro envy of Living Form, even of the Divine Vision
M3.3; E96| And of the sports of Wisdom in the Human Imagination
M3.4; E96| Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever.

The role that Christ plays in Blake is similar to the role that Los plays, but also different. I don't want to jump the gun on a conclusion, here. Suffice it to say they are both redeemers, and Christ came here to redeem the outward creation, so that Heaven could be opened up for the souls of the dead. Blake doesn't care about the next world too much, he is more concerned with this world, and even if there are heavens and angels, Blake will argue that each of these concepts have psychic analogs which pattern themselves onto the consciousness of everyday men. He is extremely pragmatic. His is a religion of strategies. The goal of this text then, is to One (or unite) the soul with its God, the creative source of all gods, the imagination.

What we get next is a sleeping Urizen, who refuses "definite form", and he is called an "abstract horror". Urizen is an essence, in the philosophical notion of the term. A reductive abstraction that refuses to articulate. In Blake things move from the indefinite, or a reductive essence, toward articulation, and articulation is considered the highest as opposed to the lowest form of a thing. This is a reversal of the Platonic notion of essences and ideals, which are disarticulated proto-forms which are considered more real than the world around us. Blake wants to get out of our own heads, and return us to the now, the present, the stuff before your eyes. He echoes the language in Urizen, "another age pass'd over, and a state of dismal woe."

Then we find Urizen's body articulating into corporeal form, with the inlets of soul, the five senses petrifying or solidifying. The tongue hungers and thirsts, the nostrils hang upon the wind. He throws his right arm north, his left arm south, like Christ giving us the choice between heaven and hell. The right hand path of restraint and bodily deprivation leads to heaven, the left hand path of indulgence and sensual bounty leading to hell.

Terrified Los stood in the Abyss & his immortal limbs
M3.29; E97| Grew deadly pale; he became what he beheld: for a red
M3.30; E97| Round Globe sunk down from his Bosom into the Deep in pangs
M3.31; E97| He hoverd over it trembling & weeping. suspended it shook
M3.32; E97| The nether Abyss in tremblings. he wept over it, he cherish'd it
M3.33; E97| In deadly sickening pain: till separated into a Female pale
M3.34; E97| As the cloud that brings the snow: all the while from his Back
M3.35; E97| A blue fluid exuded in Sinews hardening in the Abyss
M3.36; E97| Till it separated into a Male Form howling in Jealousy

The curse of Los, you become what you behold, is a recurring motif in Blake and speaks to a certain relationship of the judge to the judged. It is a wise insight that we judge people out of our own fears and desires, in fact, out of our self-hate, for the truly contented see no need to judge others.

So Los is going to split in half the moment he sees this red round globe and in fact is already divided from Urizen who lay sleeping in his mental cave. Enitharmon is depicted as the fates are depicted, tending a loom. And these are the three geniuses that we have access to thus far. They are all mere functionaries of the sleeping God Albion who is Urizenic in character. The end game is to wake him up.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 8: Sig Monk

2010-12-09T15:04:00.001-08:00

The Signifying Monkey

God help me for going here, but I do it knowing full well the dangers I face. It is my relationship to the monkey that differs. I do not see the animal as a non-person. It is here that I enter the slave's discourse against the master. The slave who must appear small, and feeble minded tricking the master by self-mockery, and tricking none the less. Our job as madmen is to create instability in the sane man's discourse with the real, an intercourse really, a fucking of reality with a meta-linguistic dick. Finding holes in theories, and plugging them up. It is a sexual discourse, it is bereft of telos; we are the Signifying Monkey. But like the feminist who despises the association of females with the land, we are born into a system which preloads that association with ownership. If we were Native Americans this would not be an issue, for the land sustains, nurtures us, gives us life. And the monkey in pre-WWII anthropology is one step behind the Australian Aborigine, and it is this discourse, this evolutionary notion that there is hierarchy to culture that puts the white man at the top, and everyone else beneath.

It is precisely this desire to fuck you, Mr. Gates, to put you underneath them that we have rebelled against in our doctrine. The same basic hardware that was gifted to you, has been gifted to me, by fate, or chance, or God himself. It is precisely the right to feel good about our own brilliance that white men lost in the wake of Nazi Germany. For if we are great and white, are we not white supremacists (in a literal sense)?

It makes me sick to my fucking stomach this is the tradition I am born into, for it killed evolution, with so many Jews. We can't talk about our similarities, we cannot talk about our differences, we cannot talk at all, like Chaucer's Manciple, we are terrified of our own ideas, and how they may be received.

Natural Selection only Applies To Lizards and Fish

At higher levels of mammalian life you get some natural selection, but otherwise you get aesthetic selection. The survival of the prettiest. It is here that American culture has advanced evolution itself, for all people of all colors are now seen as beautiful. And this is as it should be, and it only could have happened here. For a brief history of Aesthetic Selection, please have a look at the Irish Elk.

One possible interpretation of the fossil record, an interpretation which suits human cultural factually, is that the female elk thought the men with the biggest horns were indeed the most desirable, so generation after generation, the horns of the elk became larger and larger, and thus did the Irish Elk die out, because they could no longer take in enough energy to support their own heads.

Simple enough, and you can see how aesthetics take over natural selection at the higher forms of life. Birds too share this tradition. They sing, the floof their plumes, they manipulate, they seduce.

So it is here that we enter, the Blackness of Blackness, still in the wake of Nazism, still recovering from genocide, all of us, together, in Hitler's hell.

"The Signifying Monkey is a trickster figure...(Esu Elegbara)...they are mediators, there mediations are tricks."

Esu is an interpreter of the will of God, he carries the people's wishes to the God, he mediates, he is a messenger, an angel; he is a master of style a phallic emblem, a divine linguist (Gates, Blackness of Blackness), but himself a slave, having no motive of his own, no telos to advance, no bone to pick, just games to play, and systems (and players) to break.

Esu's job is to wreak havoc on the signified, he signifies signifying, like our ejaculating Sentence, he represents the signifier in a constant state of signification, signifying the act itself, he is a process, like all gods, he is a force of nature. He does not signify something, rather, he signifies in some way. And the way is more important than the meaning, (or signfied) in fact, the manner of signification carries more meaning that the object referred to. It is a stylistic imperative that demands we sound cool.

And this style imperative is tropological and ballistic in nature, it annihilates that which it refers to, vividly; like the Hegelian dialect, it abolishes, but not in order to get to a higher level, which is largely to sink into the basement, so that you can feel what its like to ascend, there is no other level, its a play, a game, a pastiche.

This type of signification is known also to punk subculture where the insult is really seen as a complement in disguise. It means I'm cool with you, cool enough to get away with insulting you, and your response is a shot back. White culture really doesn't understand this unless they told so by punks or blacks, the value of a thing is pre-assigned, always prejudicial, we always pussyfoot around the issue, you're black, I'm a punk, you're a white bred cracker asshole who really wants to freeze me into this post-WWII place so that you can tell me how to signify.

Not a chance.

So the slave always wins by losing, by pretending to be an idiot, they never see him coming, and when his tricks get found out, they go mad and cry foul, but the Signifying Monkey has disappeared into landscape, and they have nothing left but their own unsettled rage to vanquish. No one but themselves left to fight.

The master's pride is our greatest weapon. Praise be unto Esu, I too have worshipped here.

Much Ado About Nothing

2010-12-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 5: Part 2

2010-12-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

The Trace

"Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be "present" appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element."

When a new word is formed, it is given a value, and immediately it instantiates in a holistic sense the division between itself and all other things. A word like "foltung" which means only itself, or perhaps jabberwocky which refers to itself, ends up meaning the value of its relation to the other words in a sentence.

"Oh man, I've got the worst case of foltung."
"You foltung peasant, give me back my cheese!"
"I'm going foltung with the wife and kids."

When the word is meaningless, as we discussed in chapter one, it refers to its signifying act, and this is where we differ from Derrida, we can still get away with assigning values, we don't need to Deconstruct everything all the time. We deconstruct, we reconstruct, we construct, we un-construct. We do what we please, because this is a game, and its fun to assign values to meaning, otherwise I'd be doing something else.

Next he goes on to say "an interval must separate it from something else". The interval in calculus is the shadow cast on each axis or the range value of all x and all y. By this "token" we are given a notion that time can become spatialized, and space can become temporalized which relates to our thesis on dimensions which stipulates that you can rob an object of its extension in space, so long as you give it another extension in time. Otherwise you are transmuting the object, you are burning it, and the extra information is given off in the form of nothing.

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 5: Self Consuming Artifacts

2010-12-09T08:23:00.000-08:00

A dialectical presentation, on the other hand, is disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe and live by...if the experience of a rhetorical form is flattering, the experience of a Dialectical form is humiliating." [2]

"...rather than distinguishing, it resolves, and in the world [...] the lines of demarcation between places and things, fade in an all-embracing unity..." [3]

"...the dialectical presentation succeeds at its own expense...it becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment."

The dialectical relationship then is a left brained vehicle which ends in the shutting up of the left brain, so that a right brained understanding, a cloud of unknowing, may persist. Untruths which lead to truths, ladders that crumble under the weight of the climber, as Wittgenstein would have put it. The lines of demarcation fade, the opposites collapse into the reference, the past and future fuse in an expanding present.

Stanley Fish is writing here about the aesthetic of the good physician which is itself an anti-aesthetic which judges not, but merely repairs. It is in truth a necessary negation of being so that being may be revealed. In Christian terms this allows a soul to be "oned" or united with the creator, or in Blakean terms, the imagination, the creative principle as it maps onto human consciousness.

The anti-aesthetic is not against beauty, but rather against the privileging of one opposition over another, which is similar to what Derrida is accomplishing, but here there is a sense of meaning, where Derrida claims to a truth beyond meaning, Fish claims to meaning beyond Truth (with a big t). This is the lie that unveils the truth. The system of values that prevents us from being united with our creative principle is blank slated so that a new form of knowing can be understood, a knowing which sees all principles in a unified field.

The problem here is that once this dialectic has run its course, there's nowhere left to go. The creative principle seeks to resolve, unite, the analytical principle to distinguish and categorize.

If we must turn one off in order to access the other then the two are constantly engaged in a Zero Sum Game, sort of warring, and this amounts to a civil war of the soul, which is the nature of western religion.

Fear against desire, man against nature, man against man, reason against imagination, God against man, God against nature, God against reason, God against imagination.

The primordial apparatus of this dialectic then is negation; the property of negating negates all things until its only left with itself, and yes, it negates even that, and there we are, in a cloud of un-knowing, or knowing which is purely unconscious; floating as it is, in a stream of unconsciousness.

In Lacan, the symbolic order is patterned atop the unconscious, which is itself a roiling void of potentiality, the Zero principle in its Urizenic articulation, the wildcard, the variable, the infinite potential, the numberness of the the number.

The self-consuming artifact succedes because it fails, because it signifies not itself, but something beyond, meta, trans. It is a metaphysic of the fractured, a transpersonal identity that can be looked from, but not at. It is Tao for the Taoist, the Holy Spirit for the Christian.

It is then that Fish digresses into a Plato's Gorgias where he elucidates the human condition of the soul, which is to be constantly at war with itself. It is perhaps Plato's fault, for he is the one who made the primordial distinction between soul and body which forged the necessity of warring in the first place. The fallen live to delight in their own body, the philosopher mistrusts such indulgent behavior being at once the master of his own domain, and the slave of his own mastery.

There is a sense that we are born into this world with desires and expectations that are utterly foreign to beings which have evolved here. We spend our lives trying to recover a vision that was lost to us in the fall and this is literally true, (according to Plato) we are literally fallen.

If we are fallen in the Blakean way, then we tripped ourselves up, for Blake's is a vision that recovers the lost vision which allows us to see the infinite in all things.

Urizen himself is the left brained analytical impulse which has taken control of the entire game, ie: taken control over the other faculties of experiencing so as to prevent change.

On some basic level, many of us are comfortable with sameness and predictability. We don't necessarily want change to enter into our systems. We want them to work the same way they worked before. For this we sacrifice the Divine Vision which raises men's perception to the infinite.

In order to do this, we must sacrifice our false selves, the phony egoic image of who we are, as well as its self-bound desires. And it is Blake's argument that this sentence is again false. We don't have to sacrifice our natural desires, we have to sacrifice our self-conception, what in Lacan is referred to a imago and elsewhere in Freud and Jung persona.

We give unnatural precedence to the reputation, thereby conceiving ourselves in the sulfur of another's values, sacrificing ourselves without necessarily seeing it. We must as dialecticians sacrifice the desire to be seen as wise for the wisdom of dialectics is that a thousand falsehoods lead inevitably to the truth.

So then what can we rely on? Our senses? No. Our passions? No. Our reason? Nope.

The trick would be to bring the four intelligences into an order that allows us to integrate them all at once.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 4

2010-12-09T05:53:00.000-08:00

So then, in the Derridean dialectic, we can say that if the sign is arbitrary and differential, as Saussure would have us believe, then it is also caught up in an integral, ad-hockiness, which persists throughout time. Signs are created by chance, they are caught up in a history of conquests, and class wars. I'm not supposed to eat with my elbows on the table, because that's how sailors eat to keep their trays from sliding about, and I don't want to be associated with them. See how this works? It's hardly the Difference Engine of analytic distinctions that Saussure is making it out to be, and in fact, I believe he thinks he can reduce the entire system to some sort of mathematics that he himself is unqualified to produce. Anyone who operates on this principle should see Charles Babbage's difference engine. This is the limit of your reason, it will end where Babbage ends, and then to Turing.

The line of signification, can then be transformed into a circle. If there is continuity at the extremes, that is to say, something defined in contradiction, like a word made out of flesh, an alpha and omega, we have a continuum bounded at the extremes, the extremes meeting, and the first and the last are situated next to each other in a one dimensional circle (See Urizen).

This knowledge is not new, it has always existed so long as men have had systems they've had rules and orders that transcend the linear temporal unity of signifier, signified, and symbol, which itself is defined as the fusion of opposites.

This system of circularity is not the end all and be all of the story, it is still merely two dimensional, and as we'll see, the Book of Revelation and the Book of Job boast an even more advanced spiral geometry.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 3

2010-12-09T05:21:00.000-08:00

1.) The Sign is Not Arbitrary

Regardless of what you've been taught, the sign in Western tradition traces its lineage to specific concepts. For instance, the aleph is based on the root word Ox, and is traditionally depicted as a upside down triangle with lines extending from the base vertices, or in other words, an upside down A. Likewise, every other letter refers to some readily present concept in the ancient world; Gamma, traces to camel, Delta, traces to door; Mem traces to water etc. It is largely because Saussure is so wrong that I initially took great issue with his work. The problem here is that the historical argument is being left out when such an utterance is emitted. So it is not the sign itself that is arbitrary, it's the system of values that is largely arbitrary. And more to the point, this notion that the sign is arbitrary, itself is arbitrary.

Now, I understand the rationale behind such an opinion, it is a reaction to religious dictates; but if we get caught up in reactionary politics, can we really claim any pretense to science?

Sure why not. Take a look at evolution for instance. The Platonic and religious argument is that man fell from a higher state into this lowly state we find ourselves in now. Evolution inverts this saying we are growing toward higher levels of consciousness. Again the Big Bang states that creation was an act of fusion between matter and anti-matter, while in Genesis, God separates the heavens from the earth. So in the wake of this revelation, is there any science, or is science merely the inversion of religion?

Now, the insight of Saussure is that any sign could have any meaning, and this is true, so long as you understand the historical argument, and that words have a specific trajectory, and certain layers can be peeled back and understood in terms of one another.

Take the numerological value of Mem, which is 40. Mem is the Hebrew word for water, and God poured rain upon the world during the great flood for forty days and forty nights. Then there is Enki, the Sumerian god of the waters, whose number is forty. There is a definite patterning of information, a trajectory, that we are in danger of losing when we consider such signs to be arbitrary.

The same also is true for utterances such as "our system of values is arbitrary." They are passed down generation to generation, and so arbitrary really is not the term to describe this. Chaotics predicts that nothing is arbitrary, everything comes from some source, but it also predicts a non-linear recursive aspect to the linearity of passage from one generation to the next.

So, is the sign arbitrary?

Yes and no. If we are caught in a web where we think that the sign is handed down to us by God, then yes, we should change our minds. If we are not, then look to the historical argument, because it reveals what Saussure's argument conceals: that the sign is literally both arbitrary, and not-arbitrary, and in fact, arbitrariness is a useless and impossible distinction to critique language from.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 2: Differance

2010-12-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

1.) I don't care what he says, it's negative theology

In the seminal post-modern essay, Differance, Jacques Derrida utilizes self-reference as a strategy of articulation. It is here we encounter a difference which is perceptible only in the written form, a soft a, which is imbued with the French meanings of the verb to differ, and to defer, in English. It has both spatial and temporal qualities and is autological in the same way our paradox of self-describing statements is autological. It has the quality of that which it refers to.

It is here that we are met with the Derridean double-bind, which, while paradoxical is not the full fledged vicious circle that Russel encounters. There is a quality to differance which makes it atomic (by definition, by convention) in the sense that it is irreducible, it is an Origin.

"Differance is not simply active...it rather indicates the middle voice."

In English, which has no middle voice (proper) the middle voice translates to something like:

"It broke", "It died", "He fell."

Every articulation of the "middle voice" then defers the agency, it hides the agent in a wishy-washy construction that children everywhere use when their mom says: "What happened to my lamp?"

"Uhhh... It broke."

So you see, the point of the middle voice in English, is to defer the agency of breaker, the killer, the pusher.

"It precedes and sets up the opposition between passivity and activity."

But of course it does. Differance is the origin of differences, a difference engine, a machine for analyzing differing, an analytical engine, which itself is anti-analytical. Derrida wants to define it externally to both concept and word, and see it instead as a violation of the order it is transgressing. Wherever it goes, it reeks havoc on the privileged and celebrates the marginalized notion, in this case the written word.

Never mind the fact that people have lived under written law for 3500 years, speech is the privileged form of communication according to anthropologists and so we have a difference which is only perceptible in writing. Never mind the fact that it is a word, if we define the term word in such a manner as to exclude it, we can conclude that it isn't one; never mind the fact that it is a concept, if our notion of differance is expansive enough to be concept-like. No, it is an assemblage, and we must see it in this manner, according to the rules of Derrida's game.

Forgive me, Jacques, I have my own game to play. And mine brings things together, instead of seeking to define itself in contradistinction to every other thing ever. Like a fly, we get caught in Derrida's web, which does in its own way bring things together, by describing itself as it describes itself, in a manner which is self-descriptive.

Now, I poke fun at Jacques (we're on a first name basis, now that he is dead) but I have a ton of respect for Differance, although I think teleologically it would be tantamount to reducing everything a polynomial, and if it is not a Turing Engine, then perhaps it truly is the difference engine Charles Babbage proposed and never created.

"It is a tomb that (provided one knows how to decipher its legend) is not far from signalling the death of the king."

Who is the king? Heidegger the nazi-philosopher king? Tammuz, the proto-Christ? Is anyone who assigns meaning or value to language a king?

All three of these are respectable possibilities, but the third if true, would absorb the other two in its web and be swallowed by the spider that tends it. The written word signals a kind of death we have made mention of before in our discussions on chaotics, to write a thing is to freeze it forever in the land of the dead, unchanging, unconscious, the realm of symbols and signs and names. For that is what we leave behind, our name, and all else is stuff, matter, life.

Derrida goes on to critique Saussure's structuralism by talking about what he leaves out: grammar. Saussure's system is there to deal with signs only and is well suited to do so, but Derrida always finds what is missing, what is marginalized, what is *not* there. The founding distinction between sense and intellect is now dismissed, or failing that, resists it in order to sustain it, by the play of opposites, similar to how Hegel would hope his dialectic functions.

In the interplay between speech and writing, speech vs. writing, sense vs. intellect, we are drawn to a more holistic understanding that is anti-interpretive, since interpretation freezes the meaning to one value.

This is why as soon as it becomes possible to say "well, this is just (negative theology) Derrida, always a step ahead, says this is not-negative theology. Differance resists the urge to be defined, terrified of the label, it's too slippery to pin to any name.

You can say this is Via Negativa certainly there is more similarity there than there is difference, but to pin it to a label is to kill it, to bury it. To interpret is likewise to murder it, and yet it seems to invite the attempt, even as it slides out of the grasp of language.

Derrida's definitions (even for the sign) are always negative, and he sets up his definitions like algorithms in an elaborated calculus which marginalizes the Integral by advancing the differential.

It is a language born out of paradox, a paradox that does not seek to resolve itself, but rather turn, revolve, play, elaborate, indicate, infer, apprehend. But the idea that there can be a knowledge or a writing which has as its object some truth, is anathema to Derrida's style, and in fact, the writing itself is the object and subject much like our favorite paradox $This sentence is false$. Differance is a word, it is a concept, but moreover it is a strategy employed for the sake of determining which values are privileged and at what other values expense.

The key issues in Derrida as they relate to $This Sentence is False$ are the negative definition of sign, the notion of the supplement and the metanym contained within the system which can be swapped out for the whole of it.

"This sentence" as we stated before, represents the whole sentence, and is the metanym referred to by self-reference. A careful analysis of $This sentence is false$ unlocks the key to Derrida's game, which is based on the transition from basic algebra to modern calculus which can deal with the infinite series algebra fails to fully describe.

One last point to be made is that in such systems meaning is reducible to this or that shape and then the mechanism of interpretation is supplanted by a mimicking of this or that structure, redoubled on multiple levels of meaning. Since a distinction is nothing more than a decision, we can unravel the web of traces backward and this is called Deconstruction. Construction, defined positively, is the series of insights that are capable of being wrought with just a compass and a protractor, which at once contain the bisection of the line, the Pythagorean theorem, and the insights of Free Masonry. It is in their dialectic that a new schema for interpretation should be born.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 1

2010-12-08T14:59:00.000-08:00

From the Perspective of Light

In Blake, there are two kinds of opposition, negative and contrary. The contrary to love is hate, the negation is all that which is not love. The principle of negative theology is to leave the practitioner in a cloud of unknowing, which shuts down the left side of our brains so that some revelation can be experienced via the negation of all that which is not God. The right side of the brain sees the world in a very different way than the left hemisphere. The right side collapses all distinctions into an all embracing unity ( Click here for source ) while the left side makes distinctions between this or that thing. The right side of the brain realizes that the consciousness is united to the external world, and in fact extends beyond the body. Therefore to speak of anything in a way which does not contradict itself is largely to only understand half the story. Thus in writing about concepts such as Truth (with a big T) we are compelled to speak in contradictions, because the understanding of left brain, and the understanding of the right brain are necessarily antagonistic, and it is in this antagonism that truths are forged.

"Here, we are dealing with forms of consciousness each of which in realizing itself at the same time abolishes and transcends itself, has for its result its own negation - and so passes to a higher form."

Hegel "Dialectics" from the Science of Logic

How then do we begin to understand a "logic" that has as its end its own abolition? Here's a better question, what is similar about love and hate? They are both passionate expressions of emotion. What is similar between a unity and a division? They both consider the relationship of parts. Most things when scrutinized fully will reveal themselves to be caught up in some contradiction, so if logic fails, as logic must always fail, to come to terms with that which it describes, then all that is left to say is a structural mimicking of an actual event. This, of course, even if true would need to be abolished. Even if no explanation is possible, and no description adequate, writing will always be, for it is a surrogate memory, and a craft that is part art, and part science.

If we believe Hegel, then the author who speaks in contradiction, transcends by abolition, and this too is inadequate, because there are more ways to transcend a thing than self-abolition, and if we think rigorously enough we are not left with a vague notion of dimension, but rather a vague notion of dimensionality, an n-foldedness which is present at every point in space.

When we look at the world around us, we see light bouncing off the magnetic fields of the objects in our view. We don't see the objects themselves, rather, we interpret using our senses. We hear the vibration of molecules, not the molecules themselves. Being able to hear still objects unmoved could be a veritable definition of deafness. Being able to see air would be blindness.

The self-abolishing nature of $This Sentence is False$ abolishes the capacity for universal truth. It speaks of a relativism which itself it undermines, for if there is no universal truth, then there is one universal truth, that there is no universal truth.

Much of my work in dealing with this paradox has been to save relativism from this easy dismissal. I failed. Relativism is dead, but Relativity isn't. Relativity argues that things look different to observers moving at different speeds, and the observation is relative to the observer. So there is a universal truth, things do happen, there is a correct and false answer. There are myriad paths to take that lead to it.

Everything may be fine to God, but I am still allowed to judge when I see an evil act, and I am still allowed to call it evil, and this principle is not based on logic, but rather ethics, principles and fundamentals which I hold dear.

Much of what constitutes Relativity is based in the boundless imagination of Albert Einstein, who road a beam of light all the way to our most pivotal expression of the truth. It may be overturned in time by String Theory, which is attempting to resolve the macrocosm's math with the microcosm, but until that day, Einstein's imagination is the closest we've come to understanding our universe and its fundamental equation, e=mc^2, which sets energy at a symmetry of mass and the speed of light. The equation discusses only three principles, the speed of light, energy, and mass. It predicts that matter is a form of energy, and thus no clear distinction between the two is possible, though we think of energy as a verbal property, and mass as a noun. The constant always describes some relationship.

The mathematics then is a simulation of the real, a description of how these pieces interact and relate to one another. The speed of light is equal to the square root of energy divided by matter. From the perspective of something traveling at the speed of light, time would stop completely, and this brings us back to Blake, who writes at points in his "illuminated texts" from a collapsed temporal framework, ie: from the perspective of light.

From a collapsed temporal framework, things in mutable time would happen simultaneously, the past and future collapse into an expanding present, and presencing is not a matter of things coming into being, but rather being coming into things, at every temporal angle.

Again, to see things outside of the temporal framework mandates thinking in paradox, and paradox (or contradiction, though not all contradictions are created equally) is the modality of that form of reasoning.

Chapter 3: The Hyper Four

2010-12-08T06:31:00.001-08:00

Chapter 3: The Hyper Four

1.) Dimensions in Math

In order to express addition and subtraction, you need a number line, and that is all. Therefore I would argue that addition is a one dimensional procedure. Moving upward, we have multiplication which is itself two dimensional, you need a square to express multiplication. The multiplication table is itself a square. Moving further up we get exponentiation which is three dimensional, which is a recursive function where the last output becomes the next input, and then tetration, the hyper four, is n^n, is a four dimensional expression of the recursive function.

Other examples of recursive functions are the factorial:

4! = 4*3*2*1

It is recursive because the last output gets fed back into the function to become the next input. Note that recursiveness is a looped iterative process and we can unlock the mechanism of texts based on this mere insight.

2.) The Prevalence of the Four

At the dawn of philosophy, the ancients believed that four elements existed in all things: Earth, Air, Water, Fire. Hofstadter mentions the prevalence of the four in his critique of Bach, and Blake is working with four Eternals. The Taoists have a fourfold dimensionality:

“The Way begets the one; one begets two; two begets three; and three begets the 10,000 things.” Lao Tzu.

The fourfoldedness is numeric in and of itself, moving from one to two to three to the world of individuation and separation; although it literally stops at three, a dimensionality known well by Christians in the form of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are four articulations of a solidifying process that goes from infinite mutability to the temporal existence of creatures here on earth. Thus the Way that becomes a way is not the eternal way. The Way cannot be explained because language will always attempt to freeze what it describes. The Way is infinitely mutable, like water, taking the form and function of that which it moves through. To attempt to make the Way the object of language is immediately to lose it (Sproul). It can never be the object, it is the eternal subject. To stare at the Way is to become blinded; to stare from the Way is to be enlightened. It settles the earth, gives the gods their powers, fills all valleys, and leads kingdoms.

Now, like the Taoists, the Dogon employ water as their paradigm metaphor for the creative principle. Like Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the Nummo, the first beings created with speech.

“[The making of clothing] manifested on earth the first act in the ordering of the universe and the revelation of the helicoid sign in the form of an undulating broken line.”

The wavelike fashion of the line echoes the way in which actual light travels, as well as the way water moves about. The importance of the principle of water as a paradigm metaphor for the Dogon's idea of the sign has already been stated, but the line is about to get an additional circular property, so what we are going to be talking about here is a spiral, “like the movement of a reptile,” rectilinear locomotion. Therefore, the numerical system cannot be divorced from the geometrical system which is employed by it.

When the Dogon are making their clothing they are reliving this divine myth of the first Nummo who are attempting to protect their mother from the Jackyl who is born of rape; and from a merely pragmatic perspective, it adds a religious depth to an activity which is fairly mundane. But the notion of weaving is a paradigm symbol for language in Derrida's work as well, at least insofar as a web is woven. For the Dogon, the metaphor of language is tied up in water, being the life blood of the earth itself. For myself it has always been light. The spiritual instruction is embedded within the mundane act of weaving, so the act itself connects the Dogon with a timeless mystery and a sublime revelation. The making of the skirt is understood as the creation of plant life here in this realm.

The first act of creation in the Dogon mythological system is an unrequited sexual advance, or in other words, Amma raped the earth. The result of this unrequited union was the meaner things of nature, ie: the jackal or the pale fox. The pale fox did not possess the power of speech being himself imbalanced and born out of an act of violence. So he must force himself on his mother (which he does) reliving the original act of violence committed by Amma himself.

On the surface these myths appear as simple etiological myths, just-so stories. However, they are structured in such a way as to imply a mathematical structuring which is in and of itself more complex than many of the western myths (not to demean the accomplishments of the Bible, merely to point out the amazing complexity of this system).

Now jackal, who is the child of rape, goes unto his mother, and rapes her, so that he could possess the power of speech, which to this point he does not possess. The result of this is menstrual blood staining the fibres of the sacred skirt, ie: the web of life.

So at this point in the story, we have two Nummo who were born in an acceptable manner, and the jackal-rapist whose birth was singular being a birth born with the consent of only one party. This echoes not only the Sophia myth of the birth Ialtobaoth, but also the sky's impregnation of Gaia in Hesiod's Theogeny.

Now every male and every female is born into this world with both feminine and masculine aspects, one of which will get removed during puberty. Females lose the male aspect of their sexual nature, the clitoris, which protrudes, and males lose the female aspect of their sexual nature, the foreskin, which envelops. This is part of the Dogon right of passage and should not be confused with how female circumcision is practiced in Islamic culture, which has to do with the male fear of not being special. Instead of a right of passage, it ensures that women will receive no pleasure during sex and thus the male won't have to worry about being cheated on. In Dogon culture you are fully a man once you lose the feminine aspect of your sexuality, and children are simply not sexed, or not considered sexually.

Now, the first man and the first woman have regular sex and bear eight children, which of course is two cubed. The twin births which were the norm, metamorphize into dual souls, and thus the need for circumcision. Dual souls are a danger to the world system.

So from the two Nummo, come the eight ancestors, and the original Nummo are hermaphroditic as are their offspring being capable of producing without the need of a consort. They had one dominant and one recessive sex, but their souls were dual in nature. They were defined in terms of a gendered contradiction. Also, the pervasiveness of the spiral defines the creative principle:

“The Spoken Word entered into her and wound itself around her womb in a spiral of eight turns.”

This concept is echoed again and again, the prevalence of 8 is the prevalence of four beings of each gender or two raised to the third power and then halved. The Nummo themselves are conceived as being made of water, and Ogotemmeli uses water to describe them interchangeably with their own name.

It is clear that in the beginning normal unions produce twins, and unrequited unions produce single births. The seed of all life is contained in the Nummo/water and the Nummo beings are half human and half serpent, the serpentine force being associated with the eight-fold coil that turns the earth and exists inside the sun. Eight is the symbol of speech, and all life is derived from speech/water/Nummo who “excrete” light because they are light.

The divine revelation of skirt-making is the Nummo's attempt to protect their mother from Jackyl who is mimicking the crime of his father. He wants to possess the creative power and the Earth is incapable of resisting him. The giving of the garment is the first act in the ordering of creation and leads to the birth of vegetable life. In response to the assault, Mother buries herself in her own womb (inside the ant hill). Etiologically this myth explains why there is menstrual blood.

So, the human soul, which is by nature schizoid, possessing both the feminine and masculine principles must be cut off from the recessive principality, therefore the need for the circumcision during the time of puberty, men lose their foreskins, women their clitorises.

The word is conceived also in a dual fashion being at once synonymous with water, and the eightfold spiral.

So after their great labors the Nummo-ancestors transform into purely spiritual beings and Ogotommeli stops at the seventh to pay special attention. The seventh represents perfection because the sum of the female element is four, and the male element is three. So seven represents a completion of the series, ie: a Gestalt or unity. What is left over is an imperfect knowledge of the Word, destined as it was for usage by man and nature. The Jackyl still had knowledge of the first word, which he could use to manipulate mankind, who was to be given the potency of the second Word. All in all, the first Word, or God's original script had run its course with the transformation of the Nummo into spiritual beings. Over time mankind takes over the generative power of the word, his mouth and teeth fusing with the ant-hill. He becomes the feminine aspect of the creative impulse, supplanting the Jackyl, and forever raging against his imposition.

3.) Magic Trick

Take a deck of cards and arrange the Ace, King, Queen, Jack of each suit in decending order and set the rest of the deck aside. Cut the cards and lay them out again in order. What do you see? Do it again. No matter which way you cut the deck, it always comes out the same way.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 2, Part 3 [End]

2010-12-07T02:17:00.000-08:00

In Deleuze/Guatarri the schizophrenic is called the universal producer, and let's consider this alone for a second. The schizophrenic produces meaning, at the expense perhaps of whatever the meaning points to, and probably because the signs are all pointing at the schizophrenic. I think it's probably insulting to schizophrenics to have a disease that so terrorizes them to be idealized. But on the other hand the delusions can often be so unconsciously self-indulgent that the schizophrenic would rather not be cured.

Whatever the issue is, we don't seem to be hearing much from the schizophrenics about it. Do we? Unless Deleuze/Guatarri is only one person.

At any rate, "This Sentence is False" comes back around to this concept of the "Universal Producer". Let's have a look:

"The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product. We need merely note that the pure "thisness" of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing...the non-termination of the table is a necessary consequence of its mode of production."

$This Sentence Is False$ is both the subject and object of its discourse, both the speaking subject and the object referred to. It's redoubled circularity, a circularity that exists on multiple levels is bent into itself in such a manner that one category always remains unstable.

In this manner, the product can produce, the "this-ness" the self-reference, constitutes production itself. I am, I guess, what I am after all. This creative self-penetration allows the object to produce itself without having (like a food pooper) to take anything into itself.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 2, Part 2

2010-12-06T12:49:00.001-08:00

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 2 Part 2

1.) The Regress

The anti-body tradition finds its most ballistic expression in the Atheistic religion of the Jains. The Jain's argue with Aristotle that there is no creator because if there is there must be a regress of creators, ie: who created the creator? With a few mental gymnastics we can resolve this paradox by saying that the creator who created time and space is not subject to its laws. Thus sequence in this fashion is irrelevant.

Gertrude Stein dismisses cause and effect on this basis reinventing the chicken and the egg paradox.

Realizing that the cause is a relationship of one act to another, and the effect becomes a cause via the butterfly effect is the modern notion of how to deal with this. If I knock over a series of dominoes and thus am the first cause, then the effected dominoe itself becomes a cause, knocking over the next one ad-infinitum. To throw away cause and effect is to transcend the temporal world, and we may be interested in discussing this, but we don't want to throw away cause and effect entirely, if only because it works.

Throwing away cause and effect is a rejection of logic and is tantamount to rejecting a tool, which to my mind is not useful. We keep the tool, and use it where it is effective to use. We regard the chicken and egg as being relative to each other, but the egg always comes first, because fish existed before chickens and they lay eggs.

“Some foolish men declare that Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.” Jinasena: There is No Creator.

Jinasena goes on with his argument to dismiss the possibility that this world was fashioned. However, the Jain's find themselves in what we have identified as one of the leading causes of paradox, namely, that when a distinction is drawn between something and itself it often leads to paradox. And the paradox only points out a deficiency in our understanding. No logic can begin to describe the maker of this world, who does not make the world, but rather articulates it all the way down to the realm of matter, which is slowly vibrating energy.

“If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of modality, would have no desire to create anything.” Jinasena

This is an interesting point. All creation is the process of some imbalance, some need that must be filled. What (assuming there is a God) would have been his imbalance for creating this world? Loneliness? At any rate, the Jainian philosophy wants to unask this question. But aren't the Jain's projeting human motivations on a being that is utterly incomprehensible?

The Jains themselves take extremely small steps in order to avoid killing insects beneath their feet, which (cynically speaking) necessitates an atheistic point of view. It takes an atheist to have that much respect for the life of this world, and that is what the Jainian argument is all about; not the impossibility of a creator God, but rather the villainous justification that a Creator being allows for. For if we are God's creations then there is no death, only the loss of the body and so we can murder with impunity because the soul will merely be recycled into a new body. And it is this that Jain's rebel again. There's is a strategy of respect for all life.

“Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine.”

I need a copy editor

2010-12-06T10:52:00.001-08:00

Proper grammar for my theses will be availible once I find a publisher. Please bare with me, I think fast and type slow.

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 2

2010-12-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

1.) The Implications of Paradox

The moral of the Manciple's tale is that we should not create new stories because they are bound to offend someone. The Crow's sentence is that he loses the power of speech and among other things is turned black by an amoral god consumed by his own obsessiveness. It is our argument then that This Sentence Is False.

If the moral is more or less the same as the punishment, then we are punishing ourselves out of a certain form fear. Chaucer defers to the clergy after the Manciple's tale and instead of a story about not telling stories, you get a story about how to create your own story. But now it is couched in terms of a Confession. The Priest's story is a mechanism for generating confessions, or as I like to call it, a confession generating mechanism.

This progression echoes the transition from modernism to post-modernism which privileges process over product.

The prevalence and pervasiveness of this progression is what concerns us here. The creator turned into an anti-creator turned into a creator of creators. Sadly, the Chaucerian argument has been neglected largely because it is couched in religious terms and many of us, myself included, become writers to escape the grip the priests have over our expression.

So the question then becomes: why does the liar paradox sit on the edge of this tradition? What mystery does it hide?

I don't know if I can provide a satisfactory explanation, so let's wrestle with it and see if we can come to terms.

From the voice of Sophia, the principality of Wisdom, emanates the Gnostic apocalypse The Thunder, Perfect Mind. The tractate involves the transcendent principle of a paradox, which can be understood as implying a higher hierarchical order than the one we (the author's audience) are currently operating on. Sophia's wisdom is analogous to I am the alpha and the omega. It presupposes a simultaneous state in which the opposites are both true at once. And this is accomplished through a profusion of I am statements.

I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.

Sophia is a composite of all women, and the echo of her words are true if and only if we are working from a collapsed temporal framework. Also, Wisdom defines herself not negatively, but positively using zero sum expressions. She is the all-mother, every woman at once, a principality of a divided knowledge.

The tradition goes, that Wisdom herself wanted to procreate, being in and of herself feminine and masculine, but did not have the consent of the male portion of her soul. So, when she created, the being that emanated from her Ialtobaoth, was himself unwhole. And we can see here the problem that Jews would have with a philosophy which demonizes their God.

The reason for the style of speaking in paradox is firstly, it's difficult, secondly it speaks to a transcendent principle which is an "eternal" form, meaning not in time, as opposed to forever.

Let's consider the mathematical argument for a moment. Sin, Cosine, and Tangent are considered transcendental functions because algebra alone can only describe things that are finite series, and the trigonomic functions require an infinite series to be expressed. The functions still work (more or less) in a finite state by approximations. The McLaurin series can estimate the Sin/Cos/Tan with the following equation:

The sum of all x's to nth power over n factorial.

We cannot fully express such an equation unless we have some method for dealing with the infinite. So the articulation implies the need for a new strategy to deal with it. We can roll it open to a logical extreme via the concept of the limit, but until the simultaneous invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton, we don't have a system to handle the functions that we're working with.

The tradition of paradox is carried in the East as well, sometimes to shut down thinking entirely so that a different sort of knowing, an intuitive apprehension that leads to a unity of personality. In An Inquiry into the Good by Kitaro Nishida, Nishida argues that the highest good is an educated intuition, and this concept is echoed here in The Thunder Perfect Mind. It is not a rejection of reason entirely, it is the desire to not let Reason control the entire show.

The nature of logic is that it can be used to validate almost anything, so unless it stands under some principle it is prone to universal justification. A purely rationalist philosophy is prone to cracking on the lack of any firm foundation. Thus the necessity of paradox, which unsettles the possibility of a true expression.

The magic circle thus traced will also prevent the unconscious from breaking out again, for such an eruption would be the equivalent of psychois.
Carl Jung "Pyschology and Alchemy".

This issue in Jung is tantamount to annihilating the subjective projecting mechanism that is born out of our experiences. It casts its shadow over the objective world. Again, the principle of perception as taught by the Buddhists and Taoists teaches us how to see the surface clearly.

The ability to do this is based on the individual's willingness to embrace their shadow, or in other words, their other.

So what we get in the body of paradoxical tractates is a sense of wholeness that no long impinges upon the external world, no longer casts its shadow on the object, no longer projects the psychic junk that has been absorbed via experience.

2.) The sentence is still false.

Sophia in her utterances is both the subject and the object of her discourse, she seeks to define herself in contraries, at any given time a mother, at any given time a daughter, at any given time a wife, and at any given time a whore. She is no less than a composite of all women through all time at all phases of emotional and spiritual growth. She is no-women, the mother of the God who gave birth to this world. She is the seed of womenhood in the timeless ether that hovers just above the realm of matter and time. The "I" maps to the "this" in "This sentence is false."

But the Gnostic tradition varies greatly in practice, and it is clear that many individuals come to this tradition because feel trapped inside of their own bodies, identifying themselves instead as pneumatikoi, or those of the spirit.

The Gnostics understood that there were three classes of people: the hylics, the psychics, and the pneumatics. The pneumatics were thought to possess a "light spark" which some identified themselves with as being imprisoned in their own bodies. The elitism of the pneumatics is born out their victimhood, their desire to free themselves from their own bodies.

3.) The Name of God

According to Rabbi Noson Guary the I AM affirms this world as an act of creation every solitary moment, creating it with the affirmation of His name. The tetragammetron is the four letter name of God: YHWH. For all intents and purposes we are looking a participial construction of the verb to be, or in other words, being.

Heidegger's bastardization of the name, and his subsequent circular propositional tautology is largely irrelevant to our work, because I can trace my lineage to others without invoking works that I largely despise.

I mention this here because being raised a Catholic, I am imprinted with the legacy, and my job then is to redeem the Catholic by destroying its foundation, and rebuilding it out of what works and is interesting. It is a pretense to Catholicism to destroy Catholicism, and by Catholicism I mean the hierarchical church of masturbatory judges, that seek to damn people as opposed to affirming them.

I would argue that the mechanism that causes "This sentence is false" to generate is the name of God, thus God is unnameable, like an irrational number, it cannot be fully expressed, merely pointed toward and delimited.

So, the role of paradox is:

#1. Psychic wholeness
#2. To point out the incompleteness of the system
#3. To imply the recursive nature of the real
#4. To imply that our methods of describing and explaining are necessarily reductive
#5. To point out the fractal geometry of the thing referred to

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
-Alan Watts

Hello All

2010-12-06T04:27:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be continuing Much Ado About nothing, elaborating a bit, and then talking about the function of paradox as a strategy in communication.

The second chapter will consider the religious argument. We will be working out of The Thunder: Perfect Mind.

Dimension Theory Proposition #1

2010-12-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

'Methods of Conservation in Dealing with Dimension

1. It is assumed that if you rob an object of its extension in one dimension
you must provide it with another place to store that information, and then
you can go back and retranslate it so long as you've kept the right
information. This may or may not have anything to do with reality. We don't
want to lose our information. We don't want to 'transmute' the object. We
don't want objects to change to be a one way change from which there is no
return. We want our object to retain all its properties and then force it
to fit in a space that it's not supposed to be able to fit in.

The info we are dealing with is length. Length in circle terms
equals circumference. If we crush our circle into one dimension we swap out
the space dimension for time. When we do that again, what we need is another
temporal dimension. So, a one dimension circle/loop (the same way I recall
Brian Greene describing a string) would be able to exist at multiple locations
but never at the same time.

That is to say, a Zero dimensional circle -vascillates- between two distinct locations, which is defined by a center. The distance between the first location and the second location can be considered the circumference of the 0d circle. The diameter is half that distance and the radius is half the distance of the diameter.

So we are dealing with a doubling and halving.

Now if I construct an object like this and shoot it in any direction it will accelerate by a factor of 2, that is to say each step will be twice as long as the first step.

At present, there is no explanation for why this happens although I can demonstrate it via simulation.

Special thanks to Brian Greene for the insight to give this idea a try.

To reiterate we can rob an object of its spatial dimension so long as we add a temporal dimension to it.

The Philosophy of Chaotics

2010-12-05T15:38:00.000-08:00

Ok, very informally, we are developing a theory of states, with an ontology of grammatical objects.

Adjectives account for dimensions. IE: Anything that can be called a quality, we call a property, and this is expressible in terms of dimensions, ie: Length/Width/Height = X/Y/Z axes. Nouns are objects being a locus for dimensions. Verbs can be either attached to an object, ie: an acting or action of an object, or energies independant of objects; adverbs are properties of verbs, articles are adjectival.

Pronouns and shifters are indebted to a system or a context, and the grammar (incompletely) rules the production of "meaning" which is necessarily incomplete.

This metaphysic is still in the experimental phase (at least as far as describing goes). The results of assuming it's truthfullness has not lead me astray (yet).

Peace,

tlkz

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Delineation]

2010-12-05T11:46:00.000-08:00

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Delineation/Interpretation

Part 1: The Argument
Part 2: The Necessity of the Other
Part 3: Troping Cliches
Part 4: Mythography
Part 5: The Science of Prophesy
Part 6: From the Perspective of Hell
Part 7: The Rest of the Story

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 7: The Rest of the Story]

2010-12-05T10:27:00.001-08:00

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.

"Did I ever tell you about the illusion of Free Will?"
-Lucas Buck in American Gothic

We are born with desires, we do not choose them. We do not choose to have a sex drive, we do not choose to restrain that drive, rather the restraint is imposed upon us by the religious culture. What role does choice play for those who grow up impoverished? Can we really choose not to be poor? If we only choose between acting or not acting then can we really say that we have a choice? Do we really choose to be gay, or straight, or are these impulses pre-programmed in souls?

The answer is this: we do choose, everyday, but we don't get to pick what set of choices we get to choose from. And if we choose against are natural inclination, we are torturing ourselves.

We choose cunning because we are weak. Most of Blake's proverbs are not principles, but strategies for survival:

The Spider a web. The bird a nest. Man, friendship.

This is nothing short of a Darwinian notion of tactics employed toward some telos, some goal.

Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer, as a sea, recieved the excess of his delights.

To the passive observer it seems as though the snake is swallowing its tail. The wise man sees that the snake could be just as easily vomiting it forth in an act of generation. The presence of a creator demands the need of a devourer, for the devourer blanks the slate clean so that a new Heaven may be forged. This is the Shiva principle. To kill the old is to make room for the new.

Some will say: 'Is not God alone the Prolific?' I answer: 'God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men.'
These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.
Note: Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to seperate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! & he says I came not to send Peace but a Sword.
Messiah or Satan or Tempter was formerly thought to be one of the Antediluvians who are our Energies.

The reconciliation of good and evil (which is what the Marriage of Heaven and Hell literally is) is an attempt to destroy creation. To take this literally means that Blake is trying to show us something about religion, that this world is a game of Chess between God and Devil, and this dichotomy is not good and evil, which is a confusion principles, but rather between a creator and a destroyer.

The dialectic of the anti-philosopher with the philosopher is necessary to the game because it allows us to keep the ball in play. Without anti-philosophy, philosophy would grow cold and stagnate, like Derrida vs. Stanley Fish, Dissemination vs. Self-Consuming Artifacts, the ball must stay in play or the game is truly over.

So in the wake of mutual reconciliation how does the philosopher keep the ball in play? For me I am engaged in a dialectic between Deconstruction and Construction. And I mean Construction in the mathematical sense of the term.

If this is not an essay, or Dissemination is not a book, that is true because we've crafted the definition of book in such a manner as exclude our own text. The sense of this is lost on me. Derrida reads like a horoscope, with a collapsed ontology and small set of words being sucked dry to the core, and its effect is much like a hall of mirrors, something that will test our faith, something we must face, reject, and in so doing we will be stronger, smarter, better. This is the value of a deconstruction, it fixes the glitches in our system.

So my role as anti-philosopher is not to destroy philosophy, but rather patch the glitches in theories that I respect. The Devourer can be seen in the same light. Neither good nor evil in and of itself, but necessary to the process of advancing a philosophy.

At this point we have said all that we can say about the text. Blake takes us through a dialog with an angel who is condemning his vice, and what it all boils down to can be explicated by this:

Opposition is true Friendship.

"To sell your Soul to God is to betray the other."
-Amy King

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 6: From the Perspective of Hell ]

2010-12-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

What Blake is providing in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an incomplete doctrine which balances the austere religion of priest class. He is destroying the bounding line between contraries in such a manner that they collapse into each other and are consumed by their mutual antagonism. Once this revelation is fully realized, a state of all embracing confusion ascends, for if Blake is correct, any metaphor will do.

The basic point to be drawn here, is if the Bible of Hell is true, then the Bible of Heaven is false, or, that if they are both equally true, if we can wander down either and still end up in the same place, then basic doctrine of the priests who promise heaven to the passive can be folded up like linens, and set aside as a history which has already run its course.

The Book of Revelation, which is mirrored in Jerusalem, is a personal apocalypse that negates the experiences that came before. The history of Christian oppression by the Romans is mirrored by the Egyptian oppression of the Jews.

Religion is no less than the rise of the oppressed over the oppressor. The harder the oppressor pushes a group of people down, the greater the counter force the oppressor must endure. No force is exerted without a counterforce, and ultimately, the opressor's war is mere hubris and leads ultimately and invariably to their extermination.

This is an apocalypse of language, but it's also literally true in a scientific sense. The earth will be consumed in the fire of the sun when it dies, ironically.

In such an apocalypse, the symbol, which is opaque and literal, becomes transparent and infinitely variable, again the notion of Nothing as infinite potential and nothing as Reflection (in the personage of Los) become paradigmatic interpretive metaphors that help us unlock the text.

The Zero sits in the center of the number line splitting the negative from the positive values.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.

Perspective here is like a lens refracting information toward a certain aim, a telos. In Christianity we are given a life by God which we must sacrifice in order to get to Heaven, otherwise we are doomed to burn in the eternal fires of Hell.

Blake is pointing out that Hell is only Hellish if we are tortured by our desires and ashamed of our indulgences. In fact, we damn ourselves.

From the perspective of demons, Heaven is Hell.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 5: The Science of Prophesy]

2010-12-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

The Memorable Fancy is another illustration of Blake's pragmatism when it comes to issues of religion and God. Here we find him engaged in a dialog with Isaiah and Ezekiel, who do not speak to God, but rather are trying to raise people's consciousness to the infinite in all things.

In modern terms, we have the notion of the fractal which is an example of an infinitely complex geometric object. This same notion would have been understood in Blake's time by "seeing the microcosm in the macrocosm", that is to say, the search for a scale invariant rule set which works all the time. When we think of Bohr's planetary vision of the atom, we are left with the sense that this notion is scientifically mistaken.

Then I asked: 'does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?'
He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.'

The firm persuasion is no less than Faith itself. We can bend reality to our looking glass if we are firm enough, but we must be certain that the reality we invest our faith in is worth the investment. And we must understand that one man's heaven is another man's hell. Here faith is a matter of imagination which demands we ontologically commit to something that is in essence a lie we tell ourselves to come to some sort peace.

Then Ezekiel said. 'The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin & some another; we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God. that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews.'
'This' said he, 'like all firm perswasions, is come to pass; for all nations believe the jews' code and worship the jews' god, and what greater subjection can be?'

Taking Blake's argument literally, the Jews, Christians, and Muslims are worshipers of their own imagination, insisting on the literality of their vision to the mutual exclusion of all others. It is the stupidity of the mutex (programming lingo for mutual exclusion) that Blake is trying to free us from so that we may mutually see each other as brothers. Of course, we all share the tradition of Cain and Abel, so brotherhood is not necessarily a good thing. But Blake's argument is for a form of "good narcissism" which allows us to recognize what is common to us all, namely, that Genius (with a big G) is the gift of God to all nations, not one over the other.

The second point to be made here is that the religious tradition of the East teaches us the principles of perception. Namely, to see the surface clearly is the work of sages. And this is echoed in the Piper who wants to "stain the water clear".

So if we take Blake at his word, or see what he is doing as literally true, we can only conclude that Blake, at this point in his career, is an atheist using religious expression to destroy religion.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 4: Mythography]

2010-12-05T04:57:00.001-08:00

As an engraver, Blake had access to all sorts of books which passed through his shop; he had a wealth of information to draw from. His rejection of science is a rejection not of science proper, but the idea that "knowledge" is the end all and be all of "understanding".

Understand, I take these words literally. To "understand" something is to literally "stand underneath it." Again, knowledge can only work via the past. It categorizes, analyzes, reduces, and confines. In fact, without standing beneath some principle that we can all agree on, no collective knowledge is possible.

However, like Urizen, the scientists want to control the whole game by asserting the supremacy of their own methodology over all others. A knowledge, a scienz which only sees backward in time can never tell the whole story.

Now let's watch Blake violate this principle.

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

This is a valid mythographical framework which is seldom seen in the light of a new science. The Genius, or the Poetic Genius could be seen as a rather haughty expression of self-reference, but the Genius is a term used in mythography to describe some force of nature which has been animated, or enlivened, or inspired (literally to in-wind) is Blake's key metaphor for talking about myth which why I say Blake's mythology is so close to Native American spirituality which Blake had a ton of respect for.

So, Blake is arguing that religion is a form of animation, or animism, which has been abstracted from its original source, so that some men/women can become the sole arbiters of the craft.

Blake sounds downright atheistic at this point. If the gods do not literally exist, but "reside in the human breast" then what is it that we're talking about when we invoke the name of God.

Well, we are talking about a principle which has mapped itself onto human consciousness in the form of a deity, a creative deity, a creator, and so the creative principle of man's genius is no less than God himself.

So the key motifs in Blake's mythographical system (as articulated here) are Animation, and Concretization.

A Poem by Randall Masterson

2010-12-04T14:43:00.001-08:00

a poem begins as a alarm thanks to the boot, a sense of yeti, a tunnel, a waist sickness. a man of voodoo is also full of rage. as your pendulum is circumsized, you will root that there is no longer the butterfly to have a sense of bed, that things will dazzle as they will, and that you will carry with them, to your great delight and benefit. be faithful sinful things because it is in them that your bastard lies. doubt is a adult too torrid to turn that toy is his twin brother.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 3: Troping Cliches]

2010-12-04T12:42:00.000-08:00

Before Blake gets into the Proverbs of Hell, a brief meditation on how the "good" perceive the "evil" as tormented and insane digresses into this:

How do you know but ev're Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

This is the politics of experience as delineated not only by Blake, but one of his biggest fans RD Laing. My experience of this world is invisible to all others, nothing less than a world of delight (and suffering) which you can only understand in terms of your experiences.

As the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.

from All Religions are One.

This is nothing less than a scientific attitude toward understanding. With that in mind, let's take a look at Proverbs of Hell.

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

There is time for passivity, and a time for action. To set any principle as an absolute is to destroy the possibility of acting appropriately given the time and context of a situation, which Blake would see as mere common sense.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

Much of what constitutes western burial practices is geared toward the preservation of the body after death. Think, for instance, of the way the Egyptians preserved their dead Pharaohs in mummies. The impulse there is prevent the body from rotting, and to this day it is illegal to not bury someone in coffin. The key motif here is self-preservation.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

Blake is implementing a sort of reflexive logic that breaks the number one rule of the game: the game is not a game. That is to say, if we see the game as a game, we are in violation of the rules of the game. The cause and effect reflexivity here is that we make criminals of our citizens when we enforce the law. It would be tantamount to saying that one could reduce crime by making less things illegal.

The case against religion is more subtle, or perhaps, less effective. The religious impulse to "criminalize" sex or to see sex as sin eventually necessitates the need for the sin because not acting on the impulses of the body "breeds pestilence."

My favorite articulation of this concept is Lao Tzu's:

Obedience to law is the dried husk of faith and goodwill.

The truth behind a statement like this, is that we craft laws out of our mistrust of people, our unwillingness to believe in the basic decency of the individual. This runs anathema to Blake's belief that the western religious tradition is based on the necessity of an external center, or measure. This gets reiterated and expanded in this proverb:

"One law for the ox and the lion is oppression."

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

Blake is playing off the seven deadly sins in this clip of the Proverbs. Pride is not intrinsically bad, in fact it can be a good thing as long as it is not a comparative pride which is forged at the expend of others. God created sex and sexual desire and man perverted it with rape. God created wrath also but without it, men would be weak and trodden. To be motivated by destruction itself is evil (even to Blake), but wrath prevents us from being abused twice.

Blake here is rebelling against what Joyce called the "didactic" relationship to an object. Joyce says the pornographic wish to possess the object, the didactic wish to reject the object, and thirdly, the sublime seeks to behold the object. Religion teaches us to fear the intoxication that comes when beholding something beautiful. Men project their fears of being controlled by women by blaming women for their incapacities and spiritual immaturity. Blake is arguing we are rejecting God's creation by demonizing beauty.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 2: The Necessity of the Other]

2010-12-04T08:32:00.000-08:00

After the argument, Blake has a brief meditation on Swedenborg which amounts to an utter dismissal of his angel based ministry followed by the necessity of the demon. Blake's argument against Swedenborg is not against speaking to angels, but about the rejection of demons. Let's have a look:

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

Is energy really evil? Is passivity really good? These are qualities which in and of themselves are neither good nor evil. However, if I'm a priest whose megalomania mandates that I control my flock, I would deliberately say so in order to impose guilt upon action and expression. Blake is pointing out the hypocrisy here, and the incompleteness of the Swedenborgian tradition which considers only half the argument.

He goes on to explain that through the "Voice of the Devil" that all religious systems divide the person into souls and bodies, a tradition advanced by the Hebrews, Christians, Muslims, neo-Platonists.

The Devil goes on to say, in one of my favorite lines of all time:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

...And in the process of being restrained, it (by degrees) becomes weaker till it becomes a shadow of its original self. Blake goes on to point out that the history of this concept is written by Milton in Paradise Lost and that in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah (the accuser) is rightly called Satan.

In Job, the Devil points out to God that a good man is good and loves God, if and only if, he is prosperous, for the man who has not, condemns the God who created him. The Devil's accusation is that men are good who are contented with their lives, and evil is merely a product of having not. The man who has not rejects God, as he rejects life.

What Blake is talking about truly, is Reason's war against Desire. From a Buddhist vantage, the vast majority of men don't need the religion of the ascetics. Our lot with desire is indulge and suffer and if we look at this as a terrible bane, then the strategies of the ascetics are necessary. But for most of we can deal with the fact that not every desire is going to be satiated. That's simply the way it works down here. Suck it up and enjoy it, or leave the game completely.

From the devil's perspective, Messiah rejects his own soul, the part of us which is animalistic, the desire for sex, for instance, is deemed Impure.

The Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell and formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss.

So, good amounts to a rejection of this world in favor of the next world, a world Blake isn't even certain exists. The desire for sex becomes the desire to procreate via manuscripts, the desire itself is not lost, merely re-patterned and directed in a different way. Blake's art, then, is the desire to "deprogram" the way in which we view good and evil, to re-pattern it so that it does not afflict the soul, but frees it from the bonds of its own shame.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part 1: The Argument]

2010-12-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Chymical Con-fusion

0.) The Necessity of Evil

With the recent discovery of the Gospel of Judas, the world is waking up to a new vision of its dialog with evil, namely, that without evil, good has no other, and to be without an other, like God, is to be unreal.

The argument is this: the betrayal of Christ was necessary to God's plan and so evil itself is part of God's plan. This is tough argument for most Christians to accept, but this world is a dialectic of God's war with the Devil; in fact this world is the breeding ground for that war being itself fought on the battle grounds of your soul.

You needn't believe in Gods or Devils to understand this dialectic of good and evil, in fact, the concretization (or realization) of God has suited the Devil's aims so well that many rational people have rejected the concept of God entirely even though it seems (to my mind) impossible to explain my own presence without such a beast.

Now, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake is not advocating evil. Blake is pointing out that the Priest Class is in fact adorning the creative impulse in the properties of evil in order to rob men of their godhood, which is to say their capacity to become themselves creators. Blake understands that there is a God, and in fact, this God reveals Itself to each nation in a unique way which is passed down by their spiritual leaders, poets and prophets. So, to prophesy is to speak on behalf of God, and all nations have prophets whose prophesies are man's reception of his divine will. To freeze this process is to get stuck with one image which it is considered blasphemy to try to advance. In modern terms, this becomes an evolutionary dead end.

1.) We never lost the Language of Eden

In our fallen state, we cannot bring things into being like God himself, we can name, like Adam the things we see. This signifying process was robbed from humanity by the Priest Class which attempted to control the interpretive power of the human intellectual faculties not by literalizing the Bible itself, but by literalizing their own interpretation of the Bible. This is key because more often than not my work can be seen as a new form of fundamentalism, which is fine, but I take the words themselves literally, not my interpretation of the words, and so to draw this distinction is paramount, because Blakean literalism is a sort of fundamentalism which frees us from getting trapped inside one interpretation.

The new fundamentalism therefore will be an ontology of fundamentals (or principles, or propositions), which we must assume to be the literal truth in order to destroy the “abstracting” (or concretizing) power of the myth itself.

Blake wants us to partake in our own godhood by showing us that any symbol set is fine by God. Again, fundamentalists literalize the interpretation in order to prevent creative thinking.

2.)Didn't You Know, Clarice...

...That typoid and swans were created by the same God? (Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs)

Blake is going to shove this principle down our throat, firstly with The Tyger, and then again in the opening passage of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Out of all of Blake's illuminated texts The Marriage is the easiest to get a feel for because it is not so "name based" as the other illuminated texts. I like to imagine Rintrah as a great beast forged in fire shaking off sparks like a wet dog. Again, to get caught in the name is a real problem to Blake which is why he writes the way he writes, and the reason why he's collected so many degenerate acolytes through time. But again the Judas-principle is echoed by "Roses are planted where thorns grow."

The rest of "The Argument" deals with the "voice who cries in the desert", the Serpent's argument against god, and the leaving behind of a comfortable path in order rage against the Rationalist Priests who are attempting rob men of their creative gifts.

It is important that we try to take Blake's words literally in order to understand what's wrong with taking word's literally, (and also what's right about).

Deconstructing Trig

2010-12-04T05:20:00.000-08:00

This is an article I wrote for Back To Basic Mag which is supported by the FreeBASIC and QB64 community. It deals with the similarity between triangles, circles and vectors and is aimed at beginning programmers so that they have a nice brief reference for all the equations and their visual similarities.

It supposes you have Math I, (basic algebra) under your belt.

Link

Hello All

2010-12-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

Uhm. Embarrassingly enough, I caught a couple bugs in the sentence generator. It works more or less. I'm going to rewrite it using new and advanced string manipulation functions and hopefully it won't fail on very large scripts.

Also, I take requests, so, if there is some feature you would like to see in the sentence generator just post it in the comments section.

Apologies and thanks. I use the sentence generator on very small sentences and I barely ever use it generate whole poems.

Proposition 1: Chaotics

2010-12-03T11:53:00.001-08:00

“the experimenters, the ones who pursued chaos most relentlessly, succeeded by refusing to accept any reality that could be frozen motionless.” -James Gleik from “Chaos”

The Spectacle

2010-12-03T08:18:00.000-08:00

The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided. The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on both sides. Each of these seemingly fixed concepts has no other basis than its transformation into its opposite: reality emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and support of the existing society.

-Guy Debord, "The Society of the Spectacle"

The notion that we live in a reality which produces something which seeks to falsify itself is not without a biological foundation. Consciousness as experienced through our senses seeks to reduce the amount of irrelevant information that can be perceived since it is basically inefficient to perceive irrelevant things. How awful would it be to see air? Is it really a coincidence that we can't? Air is clear because our eyes need it to be so in order to see. Still we can sense its presence.

The reductions that falsify reality allow us to see. But also, the spectacle seeks to supplant reality, not merely to become reality or to become a part of reality, but to replace reality's role in our construction of the objective, and what is objective if not objects void of meaning; having property, location, duration, but in essence mere objects that don't refer to anything but themselves. What is it that the word tree conjures if not the image? We see in pictures. We remember in pictures. But what we are describing (so far) is a world of things. A spectacle is more than an object. A spectacle can be an event.

The spectacle transmits reality, encapsulated and reduced. It hones reality. It sets precedent. It focuses on specific values and either unconsciously or consciously transmits them to an audience of passive observers hypnotized by the splendor of the spectacle.

Well, maybe that happens. The power of images is that they take on the properties of language. They refer like words and with internal logic can have a grammar. So what emerges out of images, is a language, as in, a picture's worth a thousand words, and refers like a Symbol to something more than the Symbol.

The faculty which Symbolizes in the spectacle is itself anti-metaphoric. Part of the game is that we can't recognize the spectacle as a game.

Take Wife-Swap for instance. We enjoy watching people from opposing walks of life irritate and confound each other. We enjoy watching others being judged.

Personally, one of my favorite programs to study is Judge Judy. Judge Judy has a master class bullshit detector, and if you pay close enough attention, you can pick up her tricks. I believe she sees her job as a both a fake and a real judge, and her courtroom, which is dialectly committed to the cleansing power of humiliation. Judge Judy believes that she protects women from their own stupidity, and she accomplishes this by humiliating them, and those men who would take advantage of them.

By making a spectacle of their stupidity in a public forum, she educates people on making the proper choices. So in our culture the spectacle not only transmits cultural values, but educates people on a diverse number topics, including, but not limited to, seeing through peoples justifications.

Another great show which educates the viewer in the same way is Lie to Me, which based on the science of Paul Eckman, a body language specialist who understands the signifying capacity of facial expressions to refer to internal processes of the mind, and its reflection on body language.

So, the idea that the Spectacle is by nature false is to me reductive and prejudicial. Of course, the way that the Spectacle transmits data, and is constructed via cutting and pasting, forces us to consider it in terms of a voice, or a perspective with an intent.

The Politics of Computer Programming

2010-12-03T06:04:00.000-08:00

Even techniques involving computer programming have an ethical aesthetic and this aesthetic is basically reducible to a dialectic of an alphabetic language meant to reveal and a priestly language of Mystery meant to obscure information so that it can be controlled and is only decipherable by an elect group.

When an alphabetic language was invented by the Phoenicians it marked the first time in history that the power of the written word was available to those outside of clergy. In computer programming, obfuscated code is the direct correlary of the priest caste's attempt to hide information. Obfuscated code is created by creating macros (supplements) in place of the actual language's built in commands.

If the code is written using the compiler's native commands it's easy to read and therefore to understand and reduplicate. The macro supplement divorces the reader one step from the native commands and therefore requires a concerted effort to reduplicate.

So what you have in Object Oriented Programming is a style imperative that demands the writer make his code easy to read and therefore to understand, as opposed to a code which is meant to obfuscate the operations of the code.

The alchemists were on the opposite end of this imperative. Theirs was a code meant to be understood only by practitioners of the Craft, an imperative despised by Blake. Blake understood the priest cast as withholding the mysteries of faith from its practioners, and they do this in order to create a dependency, because if everyone knew what they knew, they would become dispensable.

Schizophrenic Love Song

2010-12-02T14:37:00.001-08:00

to/for Charles Forte

i can use my tears
to guide you home
through the streets of the damned
and the fetishes of the included
i have rewritten your thesis
an ontology of anomalies
i have demonstrated the unexplainable

I have loved you
I have understood your criticism

I have in turn excluded you

Circus Punk

2010-12-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

Am I just schizophrenic, or is this song about me?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYu854Dbaho

One of my Favorite Poems

2010-11-21T16:19:00.001-08:00

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief 5
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap 10
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Check Mate

2010-11-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK463fcJebI

The Counting Argument

2010-11-19T06:46:00.000-08:00

Understanding how the counting argument impacts topography will be a major step in the evolution of theory. So far, the impulse of ontology has been to explain as much as is humanly possible with as few propositions as possible.

That impulse isn't wrong per se, so long as you understand what the counting argument is going to say about your ontology.

Firstly, the idea that you can map a data set of n objects to a data of < n objects is provably inaccurate.

What happens to the data when it is collapsed via this ontological impulse is pretty interesting however.

Predictably, it maps backward to states of potential. The further back it maps, ie: to include more information with less propositions, the more multiplicitous it becomes, ie: the less information about the original state you have.

"If you bang your head against the Counting Argument for long enough, you will lose the ability to disprove it." -Richard

Again, not understanding the counting argument is the number one cause of discrimination.

The Impossibility of Evil

2010-11-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

With only the rarest of exceptions, all conquerers come in as liberators, secretly believing that their penetration is deeply desired. They come in thinking that, or that they are punishing evil, and so their act of evil is truly good. Evil against evil. The Devil's Tools, the Devil's House.

The function of evil against evil is to predict and to contain.

The psychiatric industry can no longer be considered the practice of medicine. It is there to augment our prison system. We are controlling our society with drugs, as Huxley predicted, evolving into the dystopias our geniuses feared.

For those of us who can see the forest, this is unacceptable. All sorts of bullshit prejudices can be acted out in the guise of real science, and as we have seen, this has been the case now for two hundred years.

If you consider psychiatry as a technique set, let us first consider the icepick lobotomy. If skull fucking is too strong of a term to describe this, it isn't because it has blown out of proportion the logistics and pragmatics of the act itself.

Any method would be equally as brutal if it caused the same effect. But the quality of the solution is a manifestation of the personality of its progenitor, so the skull fucker comes up with a skull fucker solution.

And Zeus will have his bolts of lightening, zapping the depression out of convulsing victims.

If I mistrust the intentions of the medical community, please forgive me. If you gave a shit about your patients, you would not stick a fucking wire into their eye socket so that you could scramble their brain.

Consider this, would you allow someone to "cure" you like that?

Of course not.

So, to reiterate, it is almost impossible to find a pure case of genuine evil because it is always adorned in the properties of good.

If you find my anger at the psychiatric industry unfathomable, it would largely be because you're stupid. And here in lies the problem. Human beings are too stupid to be in a position where they both have the authority over another person, and the capacity to exercise it in a way that genuinely helps them.

So instead of medicine, you get skull fuckers and torturers. This is, in fact, is my experience of psychiatric medicine. It is a form of psychic rape that is employed by the culture in order to control aberrant behavior.

More Sources / Up Next

2010-11-18T05:15:00.000-08:00

Having gone back over Blake's Urizen critique the influence of Zen on my philosophical leanings cannot be dismissed. Two authors who have influenced my work in a Zen-like fashion are Kitaro Nishida and RD Laing.

Next I will be working on Black Magick. For some grounding in this please take a look at the episode Daemonicus in the last season of the X-Files. This will please my occultist readers, the psychiatric professionals who are interested in the bullshit case study I've spent my career manufacturing and the academics who are caught in the middle of a war they may or may not realize exist. At this point we should all be recognizing how dis-ease is manufactured out of our fear and dis-comfort with one another. *Bow*.

So that we're all on the same page, please take a look at Daemonicus, while I prepare a visceral meditation on the banality of evil, and wait for the end game to bait out.

;)

William Blake's First Book of Urizen

2010-11-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

Here is the "table of contents" for the Urizen delineation.

Urizen Preludium & Ch 1

Urizen Ch 2

Urizen Ch 3: Part 1

Urizen Ch 3: Part 2

Urizen Ch 4

Urizen Ch 5: Part 1
Urizen Ch 5: Part 2
Urizen Ch 5: Part 3

Urizen Ch 6

Urizen 7,8,9

Urizen by William Blake Chapters 7, 8, 9

2010-11-16T16:58:00.000-08:00

The last third of the book is the last three chapters, the very ones before you in the title. We're going to see that the imagery isn't so abstract anymore. The beings may be surreal, the landscape hellish but the imagery is starting to come together in a real way which we can identify with as human beings.

No one has the experience of rending themselves from eternity, but people have kids, and those who don't still have parents.

Well, anyway, we're in a world now where the actions are less abstract, though still pretty weird. Orc is named for the first time. A girdle forms around Los' belly, and as he bursts the girdle from his belly, another forms, and the cycle continues, in precisely the same manner as Orc cycles inside and outside of his mother's womb. By day the girdle forms, by night it's burst in twain (Urizen 7:16).

So Los and Enitharmon bring Orc to the top of the mountain, and chain him there atop the rock “with the Chain of Jealousy” (Urizen 7:24). We are not told precisely what Los and Enitharmon are jealous of, but we know that jealousy motivates them to chain their son atop the mountain.

The imagery associated with Los' girdle is already Promethean, but it's about to become even more so. Blake will mix several metaphors at once. Orc is at once the sacrifice of Abraham, the sacrifice of Prometheus, and the voice screaming on the mountaintop.

But once Orc's screams awaken the dead, all things “began to awake to life” (Urizen 7:28), even Urizen who hungers and craves in spite of himself. His desire drives him to create measuring tools, weights, scales, compasses. He also forms a brazen quadrant; the Cartesian grid on the one hand, the Cross on the other; and indeed the scales weights and compasses, have that similar double meaning, where they imply the methods of science on the one hand, and the morality of the written law on the other.

This passion for measuring, characteristic of Urizen, is a passion (yes) to measure on the one hand, but it is the necessity for an objective standard, that one common measuring stick that we would all share that Urizen wants and yearns for. By creating a solitary communal standard, Urizen seeks to exteriorize a process by which perspective is generated and codify it, fixing it to a system for measuring; a system which on the one hand can measure the goodness or badness of deed; and on the other, my leg (for example) in a manner which is absolutely communicable and does not require a conversion to another standard of measurement. For instance, if I tell you my leg is 32 inches, you would know immediately how long my leg is. On the other hand, if I said my leg was one daveleg long you would not know how to gage this in terms of any physical set length.

So Urizen's motives are caught up in a web of intrigue that we have only begun to scratch the surface of, and which we can't begin to imagine until we realize the ramifications of what is at stake. Urizen as a character is the embodiment of the desire to create an objective standard. This standard, is an abstraction of a purely arbitrary system of agreed upon values. The utility of agreeing upon the system is for ease of communicability. If this was the sum of Urizen's influence we would all gladly celebrate his holiday.

But this same demand for a standard imposes itself on all arenas of man's existence; the ethical standard of Good and Evil which is established in the Bible as a primordial Post-Edenic governing principle which suggests that our material well being is causally related to our ethical and spiritual relationships to men and God respectively.

At the end of the chapter Los encircles Enitharmon with "fires of Prophesy" from the sight of Urizen and Orc. And she bears "an enormous race".

So Urizen has a look around his creation, he has a globe of fire to light his journey, and whereas before he "contended with shapes" he now is annoyed by "cruel enormities" or, in other words, forms of life.

2. And his world teemd vast enormities
Frightning; faithless; fawning
Portions of life; similitudes
Of a foot, or a hand, or a head
Or a heart, or an eye, they swam mischevous
Dread terrors! delighting in blood

When Urizen looks upon living things he is disgusted. The are portions of life, specters, simulations. Suddenly his children appear, as if blinking into existence, shocked by their sudden incarnation. His children are crying, screeching, wailing, pits, monsters, worms, animals, howling at the God of reason. They have failed him. Time again sinning and failing to meet the harsh standard of their surrogate father. No flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws one moment.

7. Till a Web dark & cold, throughout all
The tormented element stretch'd
From the sorrows of Urizens soul
And the Web is a Female in embrio
None could break the Web, no wings of fire.
8. So twisted the cords, & so knotted
The meshes: twisted like to the human brain
U25.20
9. And all calld it, The Net of Religion

And the mind twists and hardens. The result being an identity in stasis, and an identity that cannot recognize its own reflection anywhere.

7. The remaining sons of Urizen
Beheld their brethren shrink together
Beneath the Net of Urizen;
Perswasion was in vain;
For the ears of the inhabitants,
Were wither'd, & deafen'd, & cold:
And their eyes could not discern,
Their brethren of other cities.

8. So Fuzon call'd all together
The remaining children of Urizen:
And they left the pendulous earth:
They called it Egypt, & left it.

9. And the salt ocean rolled englob'd

Urizen, your reason, ourizein, to bind, Uranus, the sky god. Urizen the horizon. The defined limit of our eyes.

Los, the Eternal prophet los/sol, who like his name is a reflector and exists and is mapped onto the reflective dimension that sits in the "center" of the number line: 0. Urizen is Infinity, anything, the wild card, the variable. He morphs and changes into the phantasms of his own nightmares. His fear of the body is born out of a rejection of this world, a rejection in fact of life itself born out of impending death.

Blake makes the same points over and over again, cycling the same images and yet changing the names. This forces the reader to really see the images as they happen by and see them in relation to other images. Orc, Urizen, Los, Tharmas, Luvah. None of these Eternals are real. They are all parts of the Divine Man, the Adam Kadmon template which is fourfold.

Los represents: Time, Imagination, the Sun, Light, Reflection, Prophesy

Urizen: Logos, horizon, limit, reductive analysis without the knowledge that this is merely one technique among many, Architecture.

Tharmas: Body, sensation, painting/sculture, touch, sight, smell, taste...

Luvah: Heart, music, emotion

These four "eternals" correspond to Jung's "personality types" at a one to one level. The problem for Jung is that Blake isn't representing them as "types".

Because that would be largely to make the Urizenic fallacy that Blake is drawing attention to in his Urizen myth.

The issue then becomes, how do operate without a standard, without a measure?

Well, Blake would not have to wait long for science to catch up with these problems. The naivitee of Lockean materialism would wither and die and we continue to be reminded that what we were analyzing was not reality itself, but our capacity to analyze reality, and how that effects its transmission to us.

It would not be until Einstein's General Relativity that the paradoxes of light and time began to take shape, and Einstein will use what he calls "mind machines" on which to build his proofs.

And so concludes my delineation of Urizen. Urizen in his proper place is a lens, from which to refract the infinitude of the imagination. Urizen and Los are psychic energies in this text which have a reciprocal relationship to one another. When the one goes up, the other goes down, also know as a Zero Sum Game. Blake is merely pointing out that this needn't be the case.

***

Thanks for your interest, and I hope this meditation has opened up some interesting stuff. I'm just beginning to work with ideas associated with projection geometry and Urizen really is a great text to try some of it out on. Thanks again.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter 6

2010-11-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

Archetypes vs. patterns

People say "archetypes are patterns". They are not. If they are, they become scripts, and the play becomes scripted. Archetypes properly defined are the image of a pattern, achieved a la reduction. To say "the archetype is a pattern" is to sow the seed of its conscription.

The archetype can never in a sense refer to the entire pattern save for by metonymy, which often it will. It is therefore better to reckon the archetype as an image of a pattern, rather than a pattern proper. In a sense, what we are sensing is the recurrence of selected attributes. And in another sense, when we create the archetype, we negate or regard as negligible those attributes which do not fall within the inner circle of the Venn diagram. We are thus left with a remainder, an excrement which falls outside the pattern; and so the archetype proper is the disarticulated image of a set of articulated examples which considers only those qualities/attributes which are common to all members. It is thus the disarticulated image of a pattern, which by metonymy represents the entire set.

I call this "shit theory". But you needn't. Modular Ambiguation would be a good way to describe it as process, I don't know, something fancy. Maybe, Modular Concretization Fallacy. Ostrich Nominalism?

Because now the overlapping dimensions are going to map to multiple real world referents/objects which are in fact being subsumed by this reduction.

If we were to imagine that this archetype was more real than the objects to which it maps we would be making the same mistake that Blake is arguing Plato makes in his conception of ideals. Blake is very interested in annihilating Plato, and we'll see that Urizen affectively does what Derrida's work takes on and does as well.

Blake's critique, I think is more direct than Derrida is willing to be. Blake argues that the origin that Western Metaphysics is built upon is in fact a void, a blank slate, and emptiness, that allows allowing the senses to prevail at any given moment of perception.

The foundation, having no grounding in itself can only imply a greater grounding, an ultimately unknowable God-principle.

God, being defined as un-knowable, subsumes the shape of a disarticulate infinitude that is all potential shapes at once.

Thus the foundation of a temporal system of knowing, is actually the process of some sort of fall from an atemporal system.

On the other end of this pole, you have Aristotle or "Science" reducing everything to that which is sensible.

The argument, according to Blake, is that they're both wrong and they're both right. How? Well, the two are each methods of understanding data, and the lack of one, necessitates the desire and demand of the other.

The preferable solution to this ontological battle, would be to understand these both as methods, and that the way they handle, sift through and interpret data is unique to the sorts of inquiry they are engaged in.

This gets into the different ways in which Aristotle and Plato understood the relationship of the eyes to light.

Aristotle believes that they eyes are the purely passive receptacles of data. Plato argued that the eyes partially transmit data, and partially receive data, and perception is a mixture of what they eyes output and what reality inputs.

I have no doubt in my mind that Plato wins this argument hands down. The endless proliferation of particle accelerators is enough reminder that our eyes don't tell us what reality really looks like.

Back to the text.

To this point, we have seen Blake through his character of Urizen perform a critique on both Science and Religion, particularly the sort of Science and Religion thats holds itself as the only form of Truth to the exclusion of all others; the truth of the refutation; negative truth which assigns the value of falsity to all that which lies outside of its rigid self-contained logic. Its own self-affirmation, is thus the cause of it being all-repelling.

It is now safe to assume that Urizen is the personification of the “Reasoning Negative.” He is in a sense, the Reasoning Negative's god or genius, or Animus; he is presented to us in a human form as having a personality, as being jealous, and full of sorrow. His goal is to refute, abstract, and externalize the other Zoas, or Eternals, in a sense, to prevent their capacity to be acted upon. It is thus unreasonable to act on one's emotions, and one restrains one's anger and compassion in a single stroke. The disciplines of the ascetics thus become sanctified; self-control; self-denial; causes and effects; the privileging of the mind, over the animal portion of man (ie: the body and its desires, impulses etc).

In so denying, it negates (by degrees) its influence over the whole person, and such denying becomes habit, and whichever habits happen to be patterned on those which become replacements to the unwanted desire, exhibit themselves whenever this desire does. This basic behavior in religious humans is based on the this process of Negation, which in turn is based on slicing all possible behaviors into two categories, Good and Evil. Blake defines good as the “passive which obeys reason,”; evil as “the active springing from energy.” (TmoH&H)

In the Devil's estimation, Good and Evil represent a pure binary partition of the impulses of life and by extension, the body; & everything else which works against those impulses in an attempt to police, and eventually decondition them. They are the attributes which govern our ethics.

Now the attributes which govern Western ethics, are based on a primordial division between man and nature, for the God of the Western tradition elevates man above nature and thus in a sense, he esteems him in contradistinction to his “animal” self. And this separation, which is at once the foundation of Western metaphysics, the patterning principle which governs not only our relationship to our environment, but also our relationship to our own bodies. In this sense, Urizen, the personification of the Reasoning Negative, proves to be archetypal1.

Urizen himself is characterized as a brooding deity constructing books in solitude. His preferred manner of communication is the written as opposed to the spoken word. Derrida has written extensively about the Mythological History of the craft (the tekne) the technology of writing.

The appearance of the first female, who the Eternals call Pity, is once again a creation based on separation. Los attempts to embrace her, she refuses and escapes; he follows. In one of Blake's most peculiar lines:

2. Eternity shudder'd when they saw,
Man begetting his likeness,
On his own divided image

This strange line commemorates the birth of Orc, an ambivalent force of human nature who personifies the violence of condensed energy exploding. He is at once the hero of the revolutions; and the murderous single-mindedness it takes to achieve victory. He is at once the Devil and the Christ who both seek to overturn the established order; for it was Christ who preached for a philosophy of which the highest principle was compassion, and against the Laws of his father. Orc himself is distinctly ambivalent; he can go either way. We can call him an archetype of the revolutionary (in our modified way); we can see him in the same sense as the disturbed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud found his archetype in the character of Oedipus, who literally kills his father. Orc (on some basic level) is merely the desire for change. To overthrow one hierarchy in favor of a new one. He is born out of the unrequited union of Los and Enitharmon. He is the product of being bound against one's will. He is imprisoned, fettered, restrained. He is the one who attempts to break free. He is the sort of frenzied freedom one associates with those who have nothing to lose.

His description is thus serpentine. He is at once a worm, lying on its mother's bosom by day, and being shoved back into her womb at night; he cycles with time, and grows. He changes from a worm into a serpent. His utterances begin as hissings. His hissings turn in a “grating cry” (Urizen 6:32); it humanizes; it personifies. Suddenly there is an “infant form/Where was a worm before” (Urizen 6:36).

The source of this humanization: “Many forms of fish, bird & beast” (Urizen 6:34). This is a man born of animal; of nature; Darwin's man on the one hand, the Priest's uncivilized savage on the other, forever acting on the animalistic passions of his repressed desires.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter 5

2010-11-16T10:06:00.000-08:00

The interchange between Los and Urizen suggests that one has a reciprocal relationship to the other. The sense of balance that exists between Los and Urizen is much like a sine curve, vacillating between the positive and the negative. For Urizen to be awake, Los must be asleep, they have a reciprocal relationship, but here, instead of any sense of a spectrum, you have the cold vacillation of binaries, moving between positive and negative limits, or to extend the analogy of the sine curve, between 1 and -1.

This vascillation is a 0-Sphere, it is how we imagine an object of the order, circle, sphere, simplex is expressed in 0 dimensions.

A 1-Sphere is a line. If you walk all the way from one end of the line to the other, you will end up at the beginning, much like the 2-Sphere, or the circle. The 3-Sphere is of course, a sphere proper, and 4-Sphere is called a simplex, and those are four spatial dimensions, for the sake of titillating the imagination.

The Earth is simplex-oid with one dimension in time. Of course, this is the expression of earth at any given point in time which not only contains its past, but predicts its future.

So, if scientists were given a snapshot of the soil of some random planet in our galaxy, they would be able to roughly guess most of the properties of the entire planet with just one simple clue.

The ability to envision this entire world from any given piece, necessitates that the rules that operate in this portion imply, are the same as or are derived from, in fact engaged within the same system as the part, and we know that this is not always the case.

A scientist with a clump of desert will have access to information, as it is contained within and refracted through the environment of the desert. We won't know anything about the nature of rainforests from a clump of desert even if we're clever enough to imply that they should exist with the clump of desert.

So Blake isn't really "at war" with science, or reductive logic, rather, he is at war with those who are trying to negate the imagination, in order to get to a truth. Blake understands this as confusing the map for the territory.

What Blake is trying to make us aware of is the infinite complexity of the information.

We have entered an either/or universe created out of the seven ages of corporeal concretization, demarcating time, as the remote functional God in the first pages of Genesis creates his vast Eden, part by part, in six consecutive days, resting on the seventh.

This story instantiates time. It is divided into seven segments and is geared toward revering the one day upon which God rested from His heavy labors; the one day on which God created nothing at all. This day, the Sabbath, is both the end and the beginning of a new cycle. This story of Creation is attributed, according the Documentary Theory to the Priestly tradition, a theory invented twenty years after Blake's death.

The Documentary Theory holds that the Torah proper is a composite of four earlier accounts of the Hebraic history and folklore, which are separated by ideas concerning God, and the sort of vision the other has of that God, calling Him at points by different names. Blake would have been aware of the different names, and as keen reader whose main concern was perspective, he would have recognized different visions of God. He uses the terms Jehovah, YHWH, and Elohim to evoke the sense of connection those terms have to their respective visions of God. Urizen is somewhat of a composite of these different visions, himself being at once an image of God and an agent of Creation, who himself represents the will of the Priest.

And unlike the God of the Elohist and Yahwist tradition, who is more or less anthropomorphic, being Himself capable of the sins He prohibits, the Priestly God is abstract and a functionary of the necessity to organize time; what in Blake could be called time-scraping because it represents the week cut into days, and then a day into hours, an hour into minutes and so forth, in both directions, toward millennia and nanoseconds, the aeon and the instant.

Likewise, this fall into organized time, instantiates routine, predictability, habits; the future as born out of the past. It is the beginning of the cycle. The seven ages of Urizen, in which his body materializes into a solid obstruction, occurs at precisely the same moment that time becomes carved out into the days of the week. The curse is this: the Vision, which is process of creation for Blake, has been reduced to the ocular, sensible world of matter, and the mathematical ratios which can be derived from measuring the length of the day, the shadows the Sun casts and, of course, the Architect's compass.

This is the future in some basic sense, being continually reborn out of the past. It resists change in favor of tradition, and identity. It instantiates self-hood, continuity, predictability all as the various forms and functions of Tradition in the absolute sense.

Tradition as an absolute principle, that is taken to its logical extreme; whose function is to preserve the self at all costs, and in a special sense, the past, the collected memories of the people; a shared sense of honor toward their principalities. Blake recognizes that the statehood, or the collective identity of the people was a prime target for deification, alongside the realms of nature, which had daemons, geniuses, or gods presiding over them as their powers. The gods are human reflections of the processes of nature, the cycling of the summers and winters are expressed in the liminal seasons of spring and fall, as when Persephone is taken into the underworld, or Tammuz must replace his bride Ishtar. In the case of Tammuz such a cycle was celebrated by the Sacred Marriage of the fertilizing goddess with leadership of the god-king. The union represented a harmonization of the powers of nature with kingship itself, and it was a community sacrament to be performed in the springtime.

The issue at play in Blake is the collective identity or selfhood, or more specifically, the nationalistic selfhood which prevents one from recognizing the Divine Vision. It is necessary to state that the selfhood Blake is critiquing is not necessarily nationalistic, but its system of religion was necessarily aimed toward providing a collective selfhood which could represent a city-state or an empire; and so by ritual, it becomes imbued with the power of the fertility/war goddess by observing Sacred Marriage in the springtime.

Back to the text; Los undergoes a transition in Chapter 5 and it is subtle yet significant. There is the sense (initially) that Los is either chained or conjoined to Urizen in some way. However, when Los' fires die and Urizen's world begins to cool and harden, Los is suddenly capable of beholding Urizen in his “abominable petrific chaos.” Suddenly, it is Urizen who is bound in chains while Los beholds him from afar, and Pities him.

Pity is a concept of enormous magnitude in Blake's Illuminated Texts, and likewise is one of four qualities attributed to the Divine Vision, the others being Mercy, Peace, and Love. Elsewhere, Pity plays a healing role, acting as a catalyst to some selfless action. Here, in Urizen, it merely “divides the Soul.”

Let's for the sake of argument assume that what Blake is describing is a personality experiencing a single internal reality. Los and Urizen are not separate autonomous beings, but rather parts of a divided whole. Los pitying Urizen would be something akin to “I pity myself.” “I” and “myself” explicitly refer to the same being, (the one who types this essay at his keyboard for you to read). It is no stretch to say that the subject and the object are then the same being, with different names referring to parts of the whole. The part of myself which does the pitying, has thus separated itself from the part of itself that it pities. To assert the statement “Pity divides the Soul” is to assert that there is only one certain kind of Pity, self-pity, for to Pity another is an entirely different affair in Blake, and to do so means to partake in Divinity. But here we have an instance, for example, of a Soul in lamentation over the turpitude of its Body, or more mundanely, the image of the Earth from the Sky.

Thus the Eternal Prophet was divided
Before the death-image of Urizen
For in changeable clouds and darkness
In a winterly night beneath,
The Abyss of Los stretch'd immense:
And now seen, now obscur'd, to the eyes
Of Eternals, the visions remote
Of the dark seperation appear'd.
As glasses discover Worlds
In the endless Abyss of space,
So the expanding eyes of Immortals
Beheld the dark visions of Los,
And the globe of life blood trembling

Blake is drawing a rather explicit connection between the way the Immortals behold Los' visions and the way Scientists peruse the sky with their telescopes. We are once again being shown a world which has been reduced to the ocular, visual representation; a type of knowing which has assumed a supremacy over other sorts of understanding, such as apprehension, imagination, aptitude, emotional intelligence. We have rational, systematic, and system bound reasoning asserting a sort of supremacy to the exclusion of the other types of knowing; a system which binds Reason into the observations capable of being made by the five senses; a system advanced by the empiricists and most notably, John Locke. It is built upon an observer/observed dichotomy. Einstein's Relativity would morph this dichotomy into obersever/observation, and Quantum Physics would further complicate Newton's Machine World by only being able to talk about probabilities.

So much of what scientists over the centuries have attempted to achieve has been based on territory generally reserved for the prophet. “What?” you say, laughing at my ignorance. But both the scientist and the prophet are concerned with accurately predicting the future; for if an experiment can be carried out once, but never duplicated, it proves nothing but an anomaly. It isn't good that an experiment work once, it must always work, over and over again. This ensures that the relation can be represented mathematically; thus “abstracted,” and can be worked with according the system of rules we agree constitute mathematics. Mathematics is a system, a machine, for analyzing the truth of its own assertions. If Newton's laws were universally accurate (that is, they applied to the Universe as a whole and were not just Earthbound approximations), then everything indeed would be predictable, and given a fast enough computer, one could predict the history of the entire Universe from the present. Blake knew better, and felt no need to prove it. Kurt Godel would do this for him with his Incompleteness Theorem. It is precisely our ability to break the rules, to use metasystemic logic, that allows us to fashion the rules of our system. Thus by assumption do we discover the truth, even when it runs contrary to our assumption. Thus by trial and error, experience, and experiment. The rules themselves cannot so much evaluate their own truth. The theory cannot assert its own correctness. They require an observer, an advocate, a mathematician, or a prophet.

How then does the Prophet predict? By seeing time as both cyclical and linear at once. Certain patterns keep repeating (though with infinite variety). There is the same rhythm to a song, and yet the words keep changing. As they do, the language becomes more and more opaque, until every every word is at a one to one correspondence with its referent. So constructed, the word, the thing itself, loses its connectivity to the world around it, becoming itself a solid thing in a universe of lonely monads. This superficial, sensory empiricism is only part of the story, according to Blake, whose argument goes something like this: if our senses alone dictate our knowledge of the world, then how could we perceive (say) Time? Without Time, we have no concept of Motion. Without Motion what becomes of Time?

The issue that comes into play for the mathematicians and empiricists alike who are in defense of their Machine World, is the undefinability of Truth itself, and the impossiblilty of constructing a system which can verify the truthfulness or falsity of all of its own statements. As Godel proved, even if it were possible to construct such a Machine, there would always be (at least) one question that the machine could not answer. In other words, there is always a base assumption at work within the system which is not provable within the system. For Blake the idea was simpler. Any idea which represented reality in accord merely with the five senses was bound to be a reduction of a greater whole. Such is Blake's critique on science. There is also the element to which Faith is antithetical to Demonstration, which plays a large role in Jerusalem.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter [Inbetween 4 and 5] Part 2

2010-11-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Chapter Five begins with Los dropping his hammer beholding his own fires and sickening. He falls into a sleep. So Urizen and Los exchange places, as if like the Sun and the Moon in Derrida's sky, one can only exist in the absence of the other, or more precisely, one hovers over the Void/Abyss while the other has a nap.

Firstly, setting speech at war with writing makes about as much sense to Blake as setting your eyes at war with your ears. The idea would be to delegate the "seeing" and the "hearing" aspect of your own senses so that they can work without mutually excluding one another.

So, something like "common sense" to William Blake, is the ideal organizational state of the mind before it's been tricked into rearranging itself via the culture.

What we end up getting in the name Urizen is a lot of different qualities that have been collapsed into an expanding concept.

Urizen himself is the literalization of the process by which knowledge goes to die. At once being based on experience, it seeks to abstract itself from its material referential axis in order to prove the self-consistency of its own set of inter-relations.

In Structural Linguistics you get a line segment for this process, a one dimensional fourfold line that works like this:

Signifyer-> (Signifier/Signified) <-Referrent

The problem comes into play when you get an object like a flag which itself is a material object that is functioning like a signifier.

Do you

a) create another term to describe this object
b) understand the labels as describing relationships and not types

Obviously, I'm with B, I'm going to argue Blake is with B. I'm not going to lose that argument.

The other argument that I'm not going to lose is that Explanatory methodologies such as those persued in science are intrinsically prone to losing information in the process of their communication, while a Blakean methodology, though extremely confusing, retains more information, while presenting and packing information in a way similar to how CD's transfer information.

So one of our base dimensions then will be light, and the other base dimension will be lens.

The idea then will be that Urizen's actions lead to the refraction of data in such a manner that causes the loss of information.

In scientific terms, this is the crux of Blake's argument against science. It loses information.

Not that reduction is in itself evil, but that its application as an act of "perspective cleansing" so as to create a "pure object" via non-contamination from perspective, is in fact, an act of contamination.

It is, at once, one of the most powerful tools of human knowing: generalization, abstraction, reduction, that it becomes so fond and full of itself, it tries to take over the entire show.

Again, to reiterate a point I have spent my life's work insisting on, that modern psychological theory is trying to exterminate the reductive generalizing principle of abstraction that is symptomatic of schizophrenia, while simultaneously utilizing it as a founding principle in diagnostics.

It is largely because there is no internal coherence to such a system, that it seems to me to be suffering from the very disease it is attempting to "cure".

A literal schism which has the property of being "set against itself" except that it lacks the self-reflection necessary to become aware of it, being itself a discipline, and not a human being.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter [Inbetween 4 and 5]

2010-11-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

We are, in a sense, positioned between the interstitial non-space of chapters four and five, and I think for my part, it's time to take an inventory of the concepts that we've introduced and think about them generally.

Firstly, Urizen is the personification of negation. He is associated with Priests, and Scientists, being criticized in fact on the same grounds. Blake is under no obligation to criticize science and scientific materialist philosophy, and in fact could have an apt ally if in fact his war was more focused on social bondage and political reality of his time.

Well, Blake's war is not against the individual priests who have made the choice to reject pleasure, it's against the impulse to impose a system specifically adapted to their own short comings on the lot of us all.

Science in this regard is no better, pretending to a truth which is an abjection of the senses and non-reasoning forms of intelligence.

Blake believes that man has a four-fold personality, but his sense of dimensionality is 2^3 or 3^2, ie: 8,9, or 8*9 = 72 = 2^3 * 3^2. In fact, you have to convert the whole thing over to 72, a mystical number indeed, especially if you want to "rearrange your base".

The reasoning intelligence, Urizen, which is depicted by Blake as asleep is one of four parts to the intelligence or "divine soul" of man. For that idea think of an Adam Kadmon, or a general template, a seed of humanity, which is sort of archetypal.

Freud, Jung, Lacan, all want to create a map of the psyche. Well, so does Blake. He is going to see the Bible, and all sacred codes as projections. Modern psychoanalytic concepts of projection are applicable. Modern mathematical concepts dealing with projection geometry are also applicable. The ability to map data from the physical world, and reshape it, so that you can see it as a Gestalt as a whole... That is the impulse and desire of understanding.

We leave Urizen standing, as Los was before described, with his feet hovering over an Abyss. This stands in contradistinction to the Void which Los stood over, perhaps now being aspected differently. The aspect in Blake is matter of perspective. The image of Christ with his hands pointed up and down, is a gesture, signifying the judgment of God and the Eternal abodes which await each soul. It signifies moral choice and fear of damnation. And here Urizen stands at once in the image of the fearful shepherd, protecting his flock from myriad goats. He is a Divider, not a uniter. He does not wish to bring men together, but to tear them asunder. From this a civil war of the soul is born, the same way men war over ideology. The caution of our conservative sensibilities forever wars against every natural impulse of the body.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter 4

2010-11-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

Click For Urizen 4 Text

The sort of logic that Blake is working with should by now be clear. It is heavily pragmatic. It considers the effect of certain philosophies on the people who are being forced to adhere to them. Blake considers philosophy an adaptation which has been form fitted to the weaknesses, and desires of each man or woman.

Now, Blake considers himself a psychic and prophet who can see with a specialized vision into this world and elaborate the consequences of our philosophies and actions.

Blake's attack on religion is swift and damning, having already been taken care of in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake's critique of science is more subtle, even more damning, and categorically dismissed.

Blake is ontologically committed to science. These are demonstrations, living proof of a discovery that Blake has made, that religion is not words in book, the favor of God, or an eternal battle of opposing forces, but a living memory that is playing itself out like a script toward some teleological aim.

The nature of this teleological aim is therapeutic in nature.

Scientists pride themselves, like psychics, on the their ability to make predictions based on solid and verifiable suppositions.

The thing is, so does Blake, but he has a different system of methodology, and Blake's critique on science is going to tell us a lot about how far we can take Blake's methodology and to what extent Blake is rejecting science.

So, as we begin with chapter four, Blake reiterates that Los' function within this system is to prevent changes. What is also going to happen now is that we have an elaborated and delineated sense of time. Also, Blake likes to use the term "roll" to describe what time is doing, and we'll see that used repeatedly.

This is the first time we see Los beating on his "rivets of iron" a motif which is repeated by Yeats in Sailing Toward Byzantium and again by Sylvia Plath in Blackberrying.

Urizen is about to fall again, last time from a state of Eternity into Time, this time, from continuous time into cinematic ticker time.

The imagery is basically describing the same sort of stuff that was being described before.

1. Pouring "soder"/blood to "cool"/freeze. Here the blood becomes metal, the imagery more industrial; rivets being beaten with hammers, belching sullen fires.

This is the fall into discontinuous time, which ticks via the passage of one repetition all the way through. Think of a loop, with a set of instructions:

Washing Dishes

Fill sink with soap and water
place dishes in water
rub dishes with scratchy pad
rinse excess soap from dishes
let dry

We execute this "script" (and I use this term variously to describe a tri-unal set of concepts) just once and the task is done.

A "script" can be like a movie script, or script for a play, it can be a chunk of instructions, like an algorithm, and by extension a recipe, or also a presecription, like a drug, hopefully a cure.

Each of these "aspects" of the script would be binary themselves in dimension, so what you have is threefoldedness which is two-fold at each point.

This sort of construction is limitless in terms of being able to rearrange it to fit into certain things. Four-folded-ness is a byproduct of this configuration, because it is binary, and so can be expressed as power of two. The problem then is that you have to rearrange the base.

Back to the actual text. Los demarcates time while Urizen sleeps. What's interesting is that Urizen controls with an infinitely passive force. By what compulsion does Los hammer the rivets, heave the bellows, divide and demarcate time, and find Eternals to confine?

Los' activities become the very chains that bind him, creating in their wake an opaque landscape of solid obstruction.

Chains, spines, snakes, Urizen rises as a dark negative of the body, growing out of its spine, connected in sequence to to the chains of ticker time, a "first age passes over, and a state of dismal woe.

Then, a second age, and branches shoot out of his bones like wires, like a vast net, a third age and it enclasps his heart, two little orbs, fixed in two little caves, eyes, you see, then ears, nose, throat, the orifices of the senses. Thirst and hunger now. His one arm goes up, the other goes down, like Christ pointing toward heaven and hell.

And thus the great body of Urizen is formed. A negation of the body, and itself a negative.

Los (called Time by mortals) prevents change in Urizen's void, his job is preserve continuity, but in the process of that preservation, certain inevitable changes occur, and thus begins the first Age of Urizen, with the Eternal Prophet (Los) “beating on rivets of iron” an image reused by Blake in several instances. Here Los beating at the rivets results in the measuring of time. It creates a chunking process, creating a discontinuous state of chunked repetitions.

Los also “heaves the bellows” and pours iron solder, and brass solder into molds, “inchained” to sleeping Urizen, who through Los creates and “inclos'd” roof, “in an orb, his fountain of thought. The motif of enclosing which was at once attributed to Urizen, is here attributed to Los who works under the agency of a sleeping Urizen. Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity are introduced into the world as a result. Los beats on his own chains, and a vast Spine writhes in torment; “shooting pained ribs, like a bending cavern.”

The identification of the ribs with a cavern, which is by nature a negative space, like a hole, defined by the absence of surrounding rock. This isn't the body proper. This is an image of the body as a void, and as we've seen before echoed by Urizen's perspective that Nature's wide womb is also a void. And what the other Eternals see from there perspective is black globe, a negative image of the Earth, a place where light cannot escape. Urizen's desire is create a dark negative of the body to control the body. It is built out of laws and prohibitions. The simile however does not end with caverns, it extends to “bones of solid obstruction” which would be the result of a purely visual interpretation of the world around us. This image of the negative parallels the creation of the world of solid obstruction.

Urizen, although “rent from Eternity” retains his fourfold nature. Tharmas and Luvah rage from the fires in Urizen's void, and Los hovers above with the void for his feet, while Urizen himself sleeps. The primordial unity that existed in the Heavens among Urizen and the other Eternals, however has been deformed. Los is the fallen Urthona who comes into being when Urizen severs his connection with the other Eternals. Then First Age ends, with a state of “dismal woe.”

From the caverns of his spine, a red round globe appears and sinks into the Abyss. The result is “ten thousand branches shooting around his solid bones. Seven Ages pass over as Blake describes a body being formed from the inside out. First the bones appear, like caverns; then the ten thousand branches shoot around his bones, evidently appearing from with within the cavern, while at the same time sinking into the Abyss.

Slowly, Urizen takes corporeal form, on the one hand becoming a body, and on the other hand dividing into parts: the spine, the branches, and then the eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, the corporeal inlets of the five senses. His mouth, his stomach, are all negative spaces; they crave, they thirst, they hunger and they want.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter 3 [Part 2]

2010-11-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

Urizen Chapter 3

I highly recommend keeping this open in another window as we work our way through the rest of chapter three. We are going to continue to read in a linear fashion, and do a parallel reading. With interjections from modern mathematics, science, philosophy and metaphysics and other disciplines which I know about.

I am intensely aware of the fact that the presentation I can offer you today will pale to that presentation that I can offer you in twenty years and that I am a master of none of these disciplines. So I hardly relate to any of this as if it is the final word.

Anyway, beginning with Stanza 4, Chapter 3. We find Urizen clasping his book of brass. Now, when I talk about the speech vs. writing we aren't exactly talking about two opposing forces as we would be in Derrida. We are talking about language which is subject to different laws.

The laws that govern speech: immediacy, cause & effect, human memory, and they are lost the moment they are spoken, movie.

The laws that govern writing: atemporal, cause in effect, uncorruptable stasis, photograph.

In effect, it is a dichotomy that has nothing to do with speech and writing, that nonetheless gets expressed in terms of speech and writing, and in effect becomes subordinated to speech and writing.

Let's re-orient ourselves at line three, take a step back for a second.

Sund'ring, dark'ning, thund'ring
Rent away with a terrible crash

Sundering and rent convey ripping and separation, a violent separation, of a whole into parts. Urizen is taking control of the show and the other Eternals don't like it. Departing, departing, departing the echo of a fall, mountains rising around us, obstructing our view, fragments of life, frowning cliffs, and voidness, un-fathomable. Fires run over the heavens, whirlwinds, cataracts of blood, desarts, darkness, sparseness. The fires try to break in on the void, but the void continues to expand. No light breaks through. Black combustion. Motors, factories, black smoke, heat, flames. A vision whose main character is blind.

Urizen flees to the desart to retreat from the flames. It's hard to hide there, he has no survival instincts. Instead he burrows into the ground like a mole, "digging mountains & hills", piling, containing, enclosing, structuring a base, on all sides around him "like a womb", rivers, veins, networks, webs, lines. They are made of life, and set against life. The "eternal fires" are cracking through Urizen's structure and he uses his own blood to "cool the eternal fires" It works, allowing the energy creating instability to slow and slow and slow. "Like a human heart strugling & beating, the vast world of Urizen appeare'd."

As a whole, (the treatment of a part of a thing as a whole), this is Urizen's fall into a separation, a state Urizen identifies with wholeness. The separation into an on and off state inaugurated by the appearance of the human heart, the rhythm of the body. This inaugurates the fall into Time, and simultaneously, the emergence of Los, who “keeps watch for Eternals to confine,” while Eternity stands “wide apart/As the stars are apart from the Earth.”

This suggests that from the Eternals perspective, Urizen is a black geophysical globe who at once inhabits his own world of creation. At the same time this happens, he is not entirely separated from the other Eternals who are imagined as a flames pouring through a void encircled by mountains within Urizen's creation.

The moment Los comes into being, he feels anguish because Urizen is “rent” from is side, a term in Blake which always entails a violent separation. Relative to Los, the Void, is his feet, and he dwells among the fires of the Eternals, looking for other Eternals to “capture.” Los is subservient to Urizen's will which is to void Nature by creating a selfcontained indwelling which captures the impulses of the body, and emotions to create a cold center of ethics and reasons. So the other Eternals are partially voided in the process, and these Eternals, Urizen, Tharmas, Luvah, and Urthona, manifest themselves in Urizen's realm in specific ways. Urthona manifests itself as Los, the Eternal Prophet, here enslaved to be a restrainer, and judge, and a punisher, while Urizen himself lay shapeless, dormant and malleable, “unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity,” like a man whose turned his back on the skies: “Urizen is a clod of clay.”

Los heals himself, but Urizen cannot be healed. He just sort of lays there like a shapeless blob, asleep in a dreamless night. So Los arouses the fires “affrighted” at the blob. This image of the Sleeping God recurs in Blake's depiction of Albion in Jerusalem.

8. And Los round the dark globe of Urizen,
Kept watch for Eternals to confine,
The obscure separation alone;
For Eternity stood wide apart,
As the stars are apart from the earth

Hey, Los comes into being, and immediately has a job. Not bad kid. He's the policeman for Urizen, he's Urizen's goon. He finds eternals and "confines" them, he inprisons them. Again, Urizen is associated with the Sky, and identified here with the stars, carrying an Astrological sense of a "Divine Writ", a static destiny.

The separation scars and heals. Urizen is "a clod of clay", malleable, impressionable, depressable. A thing to be shaped. The Urizen think he's dead, but he's in a death-like state, a sleep, a snooze, a dreamless drunken sleep.

***

Hello and thanks to good folks over at Blake 2.0 / zoamorphosis.com Awesome, awesome project. Can't wait to take a look through.

Urizen by William Blake Chapter 3 [Part 1]

2010-11-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

The nature of blogs being as they are, the entries are in reverse order. In other words, this is the forth part, labeled the third part, in the first position. The other parts you can find by scrolling down.

1. The voice ended, they saw his pale visage
Emerge from the darkness; his hand
On the rock of eternity unclasping
The Book of brass. Rage siez'd the strong

2. Rage, fury, intense indignation
In cataracts of fire blood & gall
In whirlwinds of sulphurous smoke:
And enormous forms of energy;
All the seven deadly sins of the soul
In living creations appear'd
In the flames of eternal fury.

Imagery that is associated with the body is going to begin to become more prevalent. Special attention is going to be paid to the eyes, and cataracts have both the sense rivers forking into tributaries, as well as impediments to vision, as we'll see this is just about perfect.

The response by the other eternals is anger, though their reasons are not really clear yet, and I want to avoid jumping the gun a conclusion. The relationship between the presentation of Urizen's Book of Laws and the Eternal's rage is causal. The seven deadly sins are imprinted on their souls immediately. Flames, and sulfur. The imagery is downright hellish.

It is significant that Urizen first begins with a speech, and then opens the Book of Brass. The immediate result is rage, fury, and intense indignation. The speech which has the magical property of creation in the Book of Genesis, summons contempt in the Eternals. But when Urizen unclasps his Book of Brass, it throws all heaven in a fury. So what we have is an inversion of the tale of Creation in the Genesis text along the bounding contraries of speech and writing, the “limits” as Blake refers to them elsewhere.

This gesture, the opening of the Book of Brass, signifies the beginning of moral slavery, analogous to Eve and the apple incident, and the fall from Innocence into the state of moral dualities. It signifies the beginning of Good and Evil. Good being at once in Blake's system, a Negation of Evil, and thus of energy, and the Divine Vision, which is the ultimate ultimate good. Thus it's necessary to untangle our references into a hierarchy.

Good to the Urizenites means this: “From these Contraries [love/hate, attraction/repulsion, reason and energy] spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy./Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.]” (TMHH). This sort of good which is the inheritor of judgment, self-sacrifice, punishment, and moral cruelty, is also the inheritor of evil, being itself, generated in contradistinction to evil. Good inherits Evil. Evil is Father of Good. Good is the Negation of Evil.

Blakean Good, is a Negation of Good and a Negation of Evil. The result is a sort of omne bonum est Divine Vision, that is seeing divinity in all things living, “for everything that lives is Holy.”

Also implied by Blake's Urizen character, is that the Created world exists before Urizen's creation, the Book of Brass in which is inscribed the Seven Deadly Sins, which then appear in living creations. What Blake is underscoring here is agency of the Seven Deadly Sins coloring perceptions. Greed, Gluttony, Wrath, Envy, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, each of which is the conditioned fear of certain sort of desire. Urizen acts of desire of fear. He seeks for a “joy without pain,” for a “solid without fluctuation. His is a world of identity in stasis, a self-enclosed selfhood whose foremost desire is “not die.” “Why will you die O Eternals? Why live in unquenchable burnings?” Urizen imposes a unity, a law, which in turn enslaves vision to a system of vision, reducing wholes in their minute particulars, to parts containing only what is relevant to a particular intent, and that intent, in which in this case is to not die, but also, to not change, is born out of a fear for certain forms of desire. This is the sort of austere selfhood which enslaves the passions of the body to the fears of the imagination, inverting perception, inward and somehow creating a dark negative out of prohibitions, each coming loaded with an intention, leaving the imprint of a motivation, attacking the bodies impulses like an anti-body. This is the forbearer of the accusatory doctrine of St. John's Revelation, a mass purgation of all that which is not holy. This implies a self-contained negative definition of Good which has become “Holy” - negation, which is Urizenic in nature. When Urizen looks upon Nature's Wide Womb, he sees a void, where nothing is.

This solves our Creator/not-Creator contradiction.

Urizen is a perverter. He takes what is already there, reduces its to its mean, set its on high as an ideal.

Northrop Frye refers to this as "Flat Disk" vision of the sun, where as Blake sees a sun orbited by angels. Why? Because it's prettier. Do you need a better reason? Blake can see that angel orbited sun, literally see the angels orbiting the sun, while also recognizing that other people can't.

This is an act of adornment.

From hence forth the rules of our game are about to change. We are going to start covering things in larger blocks so I don't have to repeat myself and potentially insult my readers by pointing out the obvious over and over.

We're going to be arguing a few things that will take some getting used to.

Number one, this system is consistent the rules of science and mathematics.

Number two, it opens up a discussion of paradox that would center around the fact of paradoxes being in a sense atemporal theories which are considering things transforming into time, often from one state to another which has been defined in contradistinction to each other.

We can say that the caterpillar is both a caterpillar and a butterfly if we consider it in terms of the entirety of its existence and not at any given point. This is the transcendence of dualities. To consider things externally to the temporal dimension is to enter the realm of paradox, and by extension contradiction. We can't just throw something away because there is a contradiction anymore.

The contradiction is potentially meaningful in and of itself (Francisco Verela, A Calculus of Self-Reference). It's worth noting that Joseph Campbell reaches the exact same conclusion in his critique of duality in mythology.

I'm going to break off here, and repost a second part which will cover the remainder of the chapter.