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

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

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

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]

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

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

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

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

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

'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

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]

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]

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 ]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

One of my Favorite Poems

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

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

The Counting Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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.