Jhave & Sandra Huber [The Poetics of Science]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E-Poetry 2011 Festival of Techno Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derrida & Binary Trees

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

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

(sign) -> Signifier
-> Signified

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

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

The tree is green.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Being, God, and Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry Reading

Hello all!

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

Dave

This Sentence is False

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

;)

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

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

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

end function

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

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

The Materiality of Paradox

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

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

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

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

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

“This sentence” = “This sentence is false”

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

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

Hello All

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

Take care all,

dt

The Second Coming of Yeats' Poem

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

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

Revelation as Script

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid Poetry Generator

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

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

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

Hello All

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

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

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

Stay tuned!

The Poetics of Ugliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiatus

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

Schizophrenics: Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn Will Eat History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schizophrenics: Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," he sighed.

RIP, Sam Paley

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

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

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

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

Your faithful student,

Dave

Hello All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of Perspective: DaVinci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

So instead of the chain extending like this:

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

It extends like this:

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

&

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

~~~

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

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

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

~~~

What is the Point?

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

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

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

Much Ado: Core Concept Inventory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi All

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

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

Again, thank you for you interest.

Dave

Much Ado, Chapter N

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

The Judged and the Judger [The End]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

o
o o
o o o

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

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

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

Much Ado About Nothing

Chapter 1: This Sentence is False

Chapter 2: Part 1

Chapter 2: Part 2

Chapter 2: Part 3

Chapter 3: The Hyper 4

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

Chapter 4: Part 2

Chapter 4: Part 3

Chapter 4: Part 4

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

Chapter 5: The Trace: Part 2

Chapter 6: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Chapter 7: The First Book of Urizen

Chapter 8: The Blackness of Blackness

Chapter 9: Part 1: Mental Sports

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

Chapter 9: Part 3: Milton's Messiah

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

Chapter 9: Part 5: An Inquiry into the Good

Chapter 10: Interlude

Chapter 11: Part 1

Chapter 11: Part 2

Chapter 11: Part 3

Chapter 11: Part 4

Chapter 11: Part 5

Chapter 11: Part 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 11: Part 3

Heraclitus
~~~~~~~~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is in changing that things find repose."

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 11: Part 2

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

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

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

Let us begin (again) then in Miletus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Plotinus:

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

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

Chapter 10: Interlude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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