The Composition(s) of The Dead

 

A Trick of The Light

"Maybe you're right," she admitted. "But what's this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about--they eat corpses. But bald vultures?"
In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail.The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. "The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. They're completely different." — Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)


 I was working on a short story regarding death, dreams and memory as extensions of how we demarcate the nature of life in a series of file drawers based on strictly our senses, as if living on the surface of a pond tells us the context of life below the surface or in the clouds and perhaps it does.. All of this was predicated on the recombinant nature of referents we navigate by, in that we have varying degrees of attachment to them although they are only images as proverbial navigation markers for whatever experiential reality portends to be.

One man's dreams may be another man's ghost if we remove the sieves we utilize to separate wheat from chaff, spirit or energetic matter from it's embodiments in cellular materiality. In this story for adults we have a visitor who happens upon a stranger in the wee hours of the morning upon the mall in Washington DC, who appears to be wary, preferring to remain distant and yet is in search of companionship that is sound asleep in his bed, separated by a century in the same general location. Things look both familiar and yet strange to him. Our narrative protagonist presses him too hard as to why he is wandering in the wee hours of morning only to find he vanishes like a mist.


Startled he returns to the park the next evening putting aside his flight home in the testing of his own veracity to distinguish more intermediary phantoms from perhaps his from his own waking dream...the entanglement of dreamers one unable to distinguish the other in a strange relativity when the bonds of memory are loosened just a mere fraction of a centimeter.  The organic hallucinogen of a biologic orientation. The utility of our memory certainly is a boundary that can be improvised upon as it is permeable if you ask any detective of either a paranormal or more practical stripe.

 The transference of memory outside of it's utility has been a chief feature of ghost encounters as well as dreams. What connects them is the strange bandwidth of a call, like the hoot of an owl or a sigh or the modality of words that proceed communication...the bandwidth of emotional engagement in the dreams that are superimposed as realities and the realities akin to dreams where the twain meets being neither one or the other, unconstrained by descriptors and yet in the genetics of an art where one brush stoke is built upon another, remain visible as a pixel in a memory without constraints..the glue of emotional engagement to referents that span our demarcations..become a cellular superimposition in a waking dream on both sides of this  proverbial mirror more akin to art than science more reinvention than mimicry, the recreation of our inner realities, a play upon solids that are not solids, but brush strokes.

The Canvas As A Metaphor of Recombinant Realities

"Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation." -Max Ernst

The transience of memory as a contingency of the whole is perhaps a shared incommensurable quality that has no location in specifics to space... that requires referents none the less to paint a imprint on the observer.  A memory called forth that is a living connective tissue as what has been is foundational and a part of what we absent misguidedly call a non existent "now" whatever That is...language as a constraint to perception in regard to a re-creative nature, the recombinant..as a driver of associations.

Whether it is intentionally sought or otherwise. this non verbal music of the spheres that even planets radiate is a energetic decidedly non human composition that is outside of the bounds of language and yet language is simply a carrier wave or so it seems of, something else akin to a complex music that can be understood and felt without a word being spoken. Between the spikes of materiality lies musical notations we cannot read directly. Undoubtedly.

If we look at a side profile of the oceans on our planet and view the mountain ranges within the depths they poke out of the medium of the seas and appear to be islands, as a metaphor for the connectivity of memory as a individuated illusion, a sleight of hand. If we take the profile of islands and superimpose them on the bandwidth of the linear measurement of sound, as sensory spikes within our range arising to meet the atmosphere of referent engagement, we attenuate these more global memories to our own orientation which is purely experiential and not containing ( at least on the surface) a more global memory or if you, will a foundation for ourselves as a form of pointilism on the surface of things, and yet when we pull back from this canvas, we see an organized composition, made from the interactions of uncountable millions of relationships of one point to another, again, like painting with a brush...

Perhaps if we ruminate deeply we could envision that this is a work more attenuated to art than science..which is why as I grow older I see the difficulty and the impossibility of viewing all of our conceptual models of various realities as machines or autonomic happenstance that works in a causal reversal of our own nature as being fluidized not set in a frozen landscape worthy of Antarctica, where evolution is a matter of environmental conditions alone.

" Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously.
It seems absurd." - Robert Anton Wilson

Perhaps an old lyric contains a truism when it comes to our senses telling us that the verbosity of language is a litmus test of sentience, whereas at it's root the opposite is also true.

In one post I wrote, "The Avoidance Of Silence" the sticky webs of this one dimensional view of sentience creates chatter without a context, the more chatter there is the less context is present, as if a scroll that reaches to the moon contains an alphabetic rune to what we appear to be and yet our nature confounds this view.

Beyond and Betwixt The Descriptors of Memory 

We have fallen back so far as to wrest certainty from language that like the old pioneer who sings, "The sun was so hot, I froze to death." seems to be a rational description of holes in between the surfaces of our little pond, where ghost memories and dreams compose alternate scenarios of what lies on the other side of a shimmering mirror, wherein in all points converge to create in effect more brushstrokes on a three dimensional canvas, that we simply cannot take in as a whole so we bite off more than we can chew in both paranormal and prosaic terms.

 Perhaps the dead view us as dead as much as we view them to be artifacts of memory put in their place as we dream we are something termed alive. File cabinets, reams of paper, language, islands, the waves of sound washing on the material making patterns of undeniable artistry that has no objectivity we can wrest from it. Reality is silent to the words we utter, yet we partake of this orchestrated art, to make images in the mind, to imagine what is not and to visualize it as a stick one end pointing to the devil, the other to Angels in a relativity of an art critic.

The constructs of language produce enormous hives, right angles and vehicles that we become to navigate the streets of sentences..pronouns, locked descriptors and in the rigidity of outcomes, in our dreams the unconscious destruction of this artifice remains, we the frightened, the over-awed, cling to this vehicle at any cost, at any price, real or imagined, we thirst for the immortality of our constructs..while reality itself knows no such thing, it is fluidity, uncertain, creative..and can never be frozen onto the death of it's immaterial nature that informs the lego blocks of human architecture,.as a superimposition of energy constrained outside of the subjective. This much I know is true. Call it the Fall of the Euclidean Universe, the American Implosion of Words, the Aztec Paradigms subsiding once again into weeds, but the unseen and the Immortalists bear witness to  shells membranes, and civilizations themselves as simply eggs for the fertilization of an art we cannot constrain.

Part One: An American Implosion

"His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen."
— Raymond Queneau

 In an age where the United States rightfully decry s "the shooting of peaceful protesters" we turn to another form of warfare that has everything to do with tribal and organic resources as well as suppression, economics and the accumulation of wealth by a minority of individuals at the expense of many. 
This is the hidden history of a smoldering dynamic that may catch afire when the democracy of inexpensive transportation grinds to a halt. Call it class warfare when we could perhaps call democracy, equally, a form of "collective bargaining". 
The growth of the American Empire in the continual search for increased profitability at the diminished requirements of labor in the fantasy of a democratic  transition to a economy of information, workless work while moving onto the greener fields of China leaves Strange Angels in the form of Ghosts..that taunt a increasing division between survivability and the accumulation of wealth. 

Myths as a story as old as the ruins of Summeria or Egypt.. of a monarcial universe ruled from the top down.

Who really owns the saddle for this horse? Ghosts perhaps.... that never left. The goose that laid the golden eggs..a fable for adult children perhaps.

A playing field that has been historically fueled by suppression, inexpensive labor and equally inexpensive energy that upholds the temporal arches of cultural myths now meets the other of increasing "have nots" in suburbia.......while the inner cities are rife as they have been since time immemorial with drug addiction, the unemployed the selling of flesh and a medieval system of drug lords that would rival the Opium Kings of Afghanistan whom we pay off in a theocracy of  bribes as a utility..  Democracy as defined by it's vested interest is perhaps positioning legislation  in advance of a future world of a mobility implosion, a whimper followed by a big bang we can hear like a  train rumbling toward us miles away and yet gathering steam.  Fantasies fall like dominoes, rhetoric becomes bullets when the haves... have not whether it was the Khybers of Cambodia or the Sun Kings of France who are possessive  inventions in a fairy tale. But then there's the irony of a Kurt Vonnegut who saw the dead child in a heaven surrounded by balloons and firetruck rides in a land of plenty that wrests a sardonic tear hidden by sarcasm, when history personal or otherwise comes home to roost, as a ghost that refuses to leave..My lost son Matthew sits behind my shoulder as I write this as the gist of this is an unfinished discussion left suspended in the air like a lazily floating cloud of dust covering me I cannot brush off, even more so now.....the sobriety of a child's rubric clothed in a suit and tie leads back to an elementary school of history, of armed revolts carving up new franchises, brand names, and the paranormality of the prosaic remains like a thick film obscuring vital details....depressing.



Transportation as a metaphor for personal freedom. Dreams and fantasies as a form of collective bargaining between the employed and the employer, whether it is technology that is employed or the rhetoric that fertilizes the propaganda of certainty. The dream as a nightmare gone unrecognized in the comfort of sleep. 

"The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion."
— André Breton

Energy, mobility and the economic engines of corporatism smolder as record numbers of dolphins die off in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of a certain explosion. Hardly noticed in the corporate media. Call it a perfect storm or avoidable. Your choice whether it is in Libya or Ohio, or is it? Here they come...on the tensioned dynamics of the fuel that drives democratic mobility as a choice, an artifice of "economic engines"..that may prove a ironic prison.

The photograph at the top of this post is the aftermath of what became known as the Ludlow Massacre  during an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914. The 19 deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. Two women and eleven children were asphyxiated and burned to death. Three union leaders and two strikers were killed by gunfire, along with one child, one passer-by, and one National Guardsman. In response, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard. Warfare in all of it's forms between corporate interests and the  impetus that led to the Wagner Act that that established minimum wages, shortened workdays, and improved working conditions for those who labored in the mines, or worked for the Pullman interests in the era of the unprecedented accumulation of wealth by what were termed a relatively small group of individuals termed "robber barons" in what was called The Gilded Age, the arising of a economic class system in the U.S. This is the context of the social warfare, rebellions and violent battles that has been swept under the rug when singing the praises of the economic superiority of the capitalist democracy..Here is a political cartoon of that era and note that the synchronicity between then and now is not a paranormal anomaly in terms of economic warfare but to those of us who actually read history, the writing remains on the wall.Humpty Dumpty.

Then there was the Battle of Matewan, West Virginia. In Matewan was the monopoly of the coal companies. Instead of being a capitalistic system, the coal companies dominated the town and every aspect of the miners' lives. Miners wanted to emancipate themselves from the monopoly of the coal companies and joined the union. Miners joined the union with the risk of losing their homes and jobs. The companies responded by using Baldwin-Felts detectives to evict miners and their families from the company-owned homes. The Baldwin-Felts detectives arrived on May 19, 1920 and evicted six families and stacked their belongings outside the homes. Many people heard about the evictions and became furious. They rushed into town with guns to confront the detectives. The mayor, Cabel Testerman, and police chief, Sid Hatfield, sided with the miners. Hatfield attempted to arrest Al Felts for evicting miners without Matewan authority. The miners and detectives faced each other. It is unknown who fired the first shot, but someone started firing and then the melee broke out. There were several deaths; seven detectives were killed, including Al and Lee Felts and two miners were killed in the battle. Also, Matewan’s mayor Cabel Testerman got shot and was dying. Angry miners followed the Battle of Matewan with events such as the march to Logan County. Hatfield eventually died 15 months later when the Baldwin-Felts detectives killed him at the McDowell county courthouse. In August 1921, approximately 5,000 miners, still angry, gathered for a protest march to Logan County. Between 1,200 and 1,300 state police, deputy sheriffs, armed guards, and others stopped the marchers at Blair Mountain, near the Boone-Logan county line. A battle went on for four days. At Governor Ephraim Morgan's request, 2,100 federal troops to Blair Mountain to stop the event. A group of planes flew over to survey the event. To be prepared, reinforcement of Federal forces came back including a chemical warfare unit and a bomber and fighter planes. The miners eventually surrendered. About 543 people were indicted on charges, including murder, treason, and carrying guns. Union membership plummeted after 1921.

The Battle of Matewan led to the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, which established the right to bargain collectively. The NIRA was eventually replaced by the Wagner Act that established minimum wages, shortened workdays, and improved working conditions.The reality was that the forest fire was suppressed but the tinder smoldered beneath the surface in an era of inexpensive oil, which replaced coal as the economic engine of industrial technology. However a trap no one had envisioned occurred, as tall a barrier of imprisonment as concertina wire,that predated the arrival of what were once called and remain, the working poor. A maze of pavements, a locking of mobility into a economic class system of mobility, based on resources that are privately owned outside of the purview of democracy.The smoldering burned underneath the green lawns and rotating sprinklers of suburbia, while the inner cities like Detroit became virtual economic prison camps. 

"There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state."
— André Breton (Manifestoes of Surrealism)

Next in the dynamics of history in regard to current events is another lost history swept under the rug in the Age of (allegedly inexpensive)Oil, which is The Interurban Era and the lost opportunities that occurred in electrification of transport, that later was lost in the arrival of the automobile, the age of Standard Oil, the age of government funding in the paving of America,  which has been replaced by Exxon and the Achilles Heel of a U.S Empire.

The smoldering dynamic of class distinctions, mobility and the rule of law under corporate, (read government) control led by a president whose tactical strategy is political compromise is reflected in an unrest that is viral whether it is in Libya, or Madison Wisconsin,economic warfare, the tokens at the casino of game theory ends when one player opts out of his or her assigned role piles on the table as the rule of law becomes the playing of odds. Or thousands, perhaps millions opting out, moving out of place when there is nothing left on the table to lose. Thousands waiting at a bus stop for a box of Cheerios.

Transportation as a right or is it a privilege? Further, who is controlling this right or privilege? Exxon or George Pullman?
During the economic panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demands for their train cars plummeted and the company's revenue dropped. A delegation of workers complained of the low wages and twelve-hour workdays, and that the corporation that operated the town of Pullman didn't decrease rents, but company owner George Pullman "loftily declined to talk with them." Wages and the economics of private ownership of resources are interesting to view in the light of not when things are " roses, roses, roses" but when the chips at the casino are down. Whose rights have been historically defended?
The strike was broken up by United States Marshals and some 12,000 United States Army troops, commanded by Nelson Miles, sent in by President Grover Cleveland on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail, ignored a federal injunction and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and subsequent deaths of workers led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. An estimated 6,000 rail workers did $340,000 worth of property damage (about $8,818,000 in 2010 dollars). Strange Angels..of history armed with a sword and plowshares... "here they come, here they come..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXGH-Y_DvI8&feature=related

A strange sunrise follows the ruminations upon the follies of the night, the tossing and turning driven by unseen phantoms that wrest from polite dialog in this American Empire, a history that was an imprinted fate long before the Romans the Vikings, perhaps even when the native people's memory fails when a history is rebooted to begin again."I can't remember the details of the dream." Perhaps history has a afterlife and we are the past seeking a new opportunity to resurrect old demons that pursued us beyond the grave. Where we once looked for the divine reconciliation in the whispers of a breeze through a lace curtain, we await naive extraterrestrials in ironclads or flying saucers to deliver us. Strange Angels indeed.

The Imperative of Avoiding Silence

"To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been." - Rene Magritte

 

One of the interesting litmus tests regarding the proverbial alkalinity or acidity of paranormal experiences as an immersible, largely involuntary medium that appears on the surface to be random is the observers fit into the skin underneath the many masks of a public versus private persona.

One of these dynamics is simple enough, the reaction, the avoidance, the seeking of silence whether it is audible, visual internal or external. Your author has a smirk on his face in that the most extreme example of a fascist salute is always aimed directly at one Humpty Dumpty versus another. The pavement is thick over the dialog that questions the roots of this fractal tree of frantic and antic menu of poseurs, in a heavenly war of words that tower over the landscape of the paranormal neurosurgeon, who pry's back the skin of light to probe a darkness that informs the phantoms and monsters beneath, who have a profound desire to murder what they love.Entertaining serial killers. The masks of desire are perhaps the featureless clones of a human hive who possess a love of ritual dances..in rites of disambiguation by an invocation of behavioral patterns in the commerce of language.

We have been abducted by the genius of a madness, yet we blithely ignore the bone fragments that bear a genome of repetition to the death. Gurdjieff pokes a stiff finger forcefully into my back from the row in the theater of seats behind me.. Ouch. He says, "You see.. people no longer believe in their eyes."

Decades here have passed since the decline of the organic world began, the admonishment of oil as a fuel and yet...to sit on a wall, dance on a ledge..as yet the the probe beneath the skin reveals more skin inasmuch as..

"The imaginary is what tends to become real."
— André Breton

Disassociation by referents alone perhaps is how our ship is steered which is a frightening consideration in light of this process being as though we prefer the obscurity of our own words to comfort ourselves in a rubric of self referential eggshells, membranes, and trivial egoisms that form a singularity, a beast called Humpty Dumpty that rides roughshod over space itself as a grace, to pause, to allow accident and uncertainty to have their say in matters.

"Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."  -Jean Arp

A pause in the acceleration of words as fuel on the gas pedal toward a cliff  seem to be nearly as extinct as organic life has become. The contingent as certainties sung as a lullaby as we enter the grave without being aware of this movement, scuttled by a entertaining noise factor. What was that you said? Oh, here's the next bit, never mind. We now need a supercomputer to untangle the miasma of words alone, disassociated data lacking a driver other than the data itself? Try that on for a template factored as an existential sink hole as Rome burns.

I have found that associative clockworks or the signal noise of our recombinant platforms of information are often mistaken for awareness. That is to say, of course, using myself as an example, these whirly gigs of signal noise can be self comforting, obsessive, possessive or quite simply, a babbling nuisance. One of the first exercises I was given involved a watch held in the palm of my hand with a second hand making it's sweep in a circular measurement of time, and was asked to attempt to see how long I could avoid internal babble. Try it.

One could think of this biologically based cross talk as the countless activities of parallel processing through neurological connections like heat less sparks as ants scurrying around hither and yon to keep the somatic hive afloat against the slings and arrows of the environment, without our direct awareness of our heart beating or our pancreatic enzymes being balanced, and perhaps the mind in it's aggregate sum is perhaps is no exception. Coca Cola is our expressive modality.

Is there a driver behind the cross talk? Maybe it is the possibility of one that frightens us as we encounter a paranormal experience, that whether it be the recognition that we can be driven or in the pursuit of the paranormal we are avoiding the silence, the fit of our skin may have an itch..how much of an itch perhaps is the propensity to have such experiences...a lingering doubt, a question in our minds placed in a mirror that asks what lies behind my own babble? Silence.

 Perhaps it has nothing to do with the persona we so carefully craft and nurture that has an abundance of holes in it that we attempt to seal them by the indirect possession of  our environment, dare I say control it subconsciously as a deeply embedded desire that we see the effects of, in our cultural sociology. Information without context spans the prosaic as well as the paranormal dialogs of exchanges, whereas information becomes dissociated from the linkage to self and becomes an environmental "escape hatch" of the participative relegated to the realm of sociological voyeurs while a psychic storm cloud of repressed anxieties blooms in the paranormal realm like a black rose, a suppressed scream hidden by dilettantes..with every finger attempting to cover the holes in the dike where the ocean rises in anger. The tensional dynamics of the surface written by canaries in a coal mine.

Reality made in our own image. How self referential is That which we have conceived of and perhaps the best response is as Pythagoras thought that toward all this viewing of reality through a human eye.. "It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word.." Always in his own image is all, in an inversion of the incommensurable, which is perhaps best reproached by silence in the face of an immeasurable self glorification at the expense of nature.

"A constant human error: to believe in an end to one's fantasies. Our daydreams are the measure of our unreachable truth. The secret of all things lies in the emptiness of the formula that guard them."
— Floriano Martins

The passivity of television, the walking while talking, the trumping of the outrageous as a ginned up heat sink for thought. A whirlpool in the eddy's of  paranormal currents, a strange form of existentialism that will accept any information, any old tale to avoid radio silence. In short, a unconscious addiction to our own biological constraints that requires no deeper conscious rumination to have it spin like a top.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never..." The old man turns his back and refuses to engage us. Perhaps too much has already been said and this he thinks, as if an instinct has gone far beyond words...like a web, a sticky entanglement of stringing nouns vowels and verbs to catch the inexpressible we all run away from as fast as we can, while appearing to be rational..He thinks it now to be a preferable choice to have said nothing..but there is no amnesty from this, in this world or the next..Listen to him, he raves..did you hear what he just said? We heard him from a distance.."Humpty Dumpty is an autocrat!"

The spin doctors of the paranormal are well known but we are all perhaps critics without any authorship under our belts. The human compulsion to overlay, pave and interject words in the midst of the right angles of our architectures, may be the source of some despairing amusement from as they say, the other side of what constitutes life which may be attempting beyond the human recording of it's attributes,  to be heard. Yet more and more, what I can see and taste and touch internally is a proverbial busy signal on the party line. Self skepticism seems to be a opinion toward the other rather than our own context of creating outcomes.

Something is off balance here....and there. How many more communication satellites do we need? The sky is literally the limit. I am exploring the context or environmental factors in which the paranormal is imprinted on the prosaic as a counter narrative yet to be described. Weight and counterweight in the co-joined orbital rotation of interior planets of a moon that may be lock stepped in a dance of an illusion of communication. Keep modality at home, look at the psychic environment.The body language of the spirit is behavior.

Yet we fear an unknown actor, the motives, yet to be revealed. We do not fear death but what comes afterward and so uncertainty more and more is driven over by experts and vested interests.

Is the avoidance of silence a  technologically enhanced addiction? Is the inability to maintain 'radio silence" a barrier to the immersion of both creative attempts to cross the brackets of language as well as being able to listen when the non local attempts to interject a concept?  Do we talk over our experiences? Is perhaps the goal of evolution not to become clever users of communication making sounds to over ride the environment but to become better listeners? Does communication preempt the rumination on it's context, while in flight, as it were?   Do we require a magazine or a program or a borrowed philosophy in order to function? What is by some miracle, all the world in it's telecommunications became silent?  We might meet our neighbors, we might greet our fellow creatures on the street..we might even begin the first steps of communicating a context not borrowed as a voyeur would do, by an environment of communication lacking a ground wire, or a kite without a string.

As goes the prosaic, so goes the paranormal in search of perfection through words alone, when words may be of no use toward that goal of erasing uncertainty as found in our own biology..yes, the imperative of avoiding silence at all cost and what a cost this is, my own debt included in this, which can never be repaid by attrition, or good works..the codex of the human is oiled by blood, and sinews in search of recognition by dancing and prancing atop a wall...

The old man waves us off, do not approach..he knows us better than he knows himself..

Toys

For Matthew

 Your hard boiled scrivener of all that is not fit to print is at times is at a loss to refit the recombinant pieces of  far flung debris into an appropriate arrangement, like a collage at times it seems that appears to me afterward to be a whirlygig made out of recycled hubcaps. How do you capture a white rabbit by inference, well, that is the tale of the paranormal..In these times of sinking under the weight of a gravitas that is my own invention, I reach for a toy. This sexless duck is poised on a tricycle that is furiously peddled in a circle once he has been as they say, wound up. He has a propeller growing through his head that acts as his spine that twirls furiously as he pedals and of course, he never lifts off. It is a sort of soothing meditation on one's own certainty as well as a doorway into what constitutes a toy, then again, think of the definition of a toy for a moment and then ask yourself to exclude what is not a toy. Rather odd isn't it? What wound me up, well, I don't know know, do I?

I held up my bicycling duck and looked deeply into it's eyes. At first glance toys are rather purposeless, especially to what is termed an adult, whatever that means, but anyway, I looked into this toy duck's eyes and thought to myself as I was stuck in the quandary of conceptual toys anyway, and thought to myself a toy is a material sort of mediumship for what are called children.  In the "collecting" venue it is said, "he who dies with the most toys wins" How odd this phrase and how true from the perspective of gathering icons, trinkets and objectifying a certain valuation that is well..lopsided to say the least. When I was younger some sage advised me that you can have all the toys you want as long as you are not "attached" to them. Well, by the isthmus by which station and state we transit we are all sort of attached as living metaphors, or perhaps mediums for seeking the true nature of toys. Are we living toys? Pinocchio comes to mind. I sat the duck back for a rest from his journey I had set him off on as well as setting myself. Enough toying, or is there never enough? The desirous grasp for autonomy when the key is wound, we seem to have been spun by an equally desirous hand, which of course we call That. All that's left is the play of self and non self in the reintegration of a persistent amnesiac state where the toys and the play are prone to the frailty of our attention spans. The rediscovery of a cast off memory, a faintly familiar face, a reopened box sealed by moths often reveals what is an essential part of us whether it is our personal or global histories as revealed in play things, those mediums of dreams left on the wayside awaiting our rediscovery of a lost footpath. Could we speak to our younger selves or those close to us that have now vanished the linkage of psychic impressions linger in that which has been left behind either by a presumed choice, or a sort of arbitrary sense of self survival against transitions and transits, perhaps what we discard is more important than what we chose to keep close at hand.

In praise of the toys, in praise of the play of dreams wound on a mainspring by birds on the wing..never to return this way again. Then if we left all of this to the recycling bin, to the scrapyard of the impractical, I sense we may lose our sense of enfoldment, which as an attachment, I have found is crucial to a life, perhaps more so than that ATM card we keep close at hand.

Sunrise.

 In the last two posts I transited from the ongoing creation of our global memory as a superimposition of edited benchmarks that create behavioral patterns as we reject what has not been lithographed by the whole, and yet we do not know beyond the fragmentary, what the language of a dreaming universe is. Then transiting further into the surrealism that underpins the prosaic, I ruminated on the unknown language of the paranormal and how we, by default, attempt to transpose our own methodologies onto one which may bear no resemblance to how we ourselves communicate conceptual models of reality.  Yet, the paranormal, the other side, the mirroring universe, whatever we wish to call That in the dance of self and non self is certainly, if anything, a provocation to the imps and gnomes who reside in square boxes under the glare of the corona of a star. The loom of living systems and our estrangement from it. In search of immortality, of certainty, of perfection as an absolute..all these strange things arise under the sun, while the sun itself contains all possibilities. Think on that for a moment.
A dimensionality only limited by the containers that store, transmute and radiate an exchange created by a burning ball of  thermonuclear fuel with gaseous tongues ... in fractals of arrangements in a singularity of creatures woven like threads from decayed vegetative matter that radiates beyond the possible, beyond our triangulations and recombinant conceptual maths. Truly a technology of the universe that has a myriad of agendas to provoke, to destroy to uplift the ash into bipedal elves....riding their bicycles over the cliff..certainly a strangeness surrounds us as we pause at an ATM. We who pass through this exchange, truly lack a name, but then again, here upon the Earth, all the world's a stage.

Perhaps every note in this composition may be a universe, and every universe a play upon another the songs of an alien tongue that we mistake for our own in a sleight of hand we have played upon ourselves as a self glorifying totem of what we misinterpret continually, off key, discordant..a music of chaos arranging itself and ourselves as notes...these thoughts range within me me as I observe them from without...these glowing orbs, large and small, from biophotons to those that encircle the ruins of an abode, perhaps as T.S Elliott wrote, "dust in the air suspended, marks the place, a story ended.." only to transit in a space that does not perish between the words as a necessity, not a abstraction..space itself may be a solid that we cannot grasp...that continually composes a language we cannot speak..yes, all these things within an invisible sun this morning calls forth dark matters from the other side of a mirroring universe..the music of orbs seen and yet unseen..this was with me this morning at sunrise, as I watched my neighbors till and hoe without a request to do so, as if they had some choice, some possession of the logics that bear no rationality to our own.

 A living composition worthy of a Gauguin. Painting without a brush, singing without a tongue..as if That had a mind of it's own. A sentience being born as we already have a post editorial existence as living pixels that cannot be separated from the whole in this imaginary imprinting itself into a waking dream in search of comparisons. That in search of it's own nature through ourselves as mediums, artists as co-creators of That we are unable to ascertain to the other side of this sun, as it's shadow play of dreams seeking life. 

Perhaps mimicry is the greatest form of flattery.

Are Realities As Contingencies A Hexagraph?

A hexagraph (from the Greek: ἕξ, héx, "six" and γράφω, gráphō, "write") is a sequence of six letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds that do not correspond to the individual values of the letters.

If we take this rubric and apply it to sentience, what we have are semiotic relationships wherein one word or term is meaningless unless it is in a related context of another term, whether this is transposed to a visual or an audio context or several modalities combined,, or the internal symbology imprinted in the mind from without through these mediums, that is played with with the tools which have been gathered as measuring devices. Hunter gatherers of the mind. Everything in our bones tells us of the fragility of our host that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Yet, time itself has been superseded by space and in this, all bets on the causal linearity of our experiential reality are off as far as the edges of science are concerned. If this is so we inhabit parallel universes. One as described with a sequencing we are familiar with, and another whose language we cannot ascertain.

In a sense, we are mediums divining conceptual dreams as it were from the many parallel streams of information we have a experiential grasp upon. All this is confirm by language as a transceiving exchange of referents that have no existence of their own although we tend to think they do, which is a nasty business as far as the angels of our better nature are concerned.

We assume we are the drivers but for the most part, the steering, the differential gears and the shock absorbers are conceptual will of the wisps, and so we have a sort of half life going on, a sort of informational trance..induced by nature in order that we abide by her needs. Someone once called this paying off the debt of existence.

Of course then in the paranormal realm a smell or fragrance can be a sentence, a cryptology of visual transpositions constitute a translation to be made otherwise the  irrationality of such exchanges would be absent, or they would be as prosaic as a piece of junk mail, but they are not, are they?

We seemingly try to use our own prosaic orientations in a hexagraphic sense, when we attempt to discern the portent of unusual experiences, so much so that Ufology is largely a joke played upon itself.
Peeling away the layers of thought to perception, to awareness, to semiotics, to the lithography of memory, to the parallel processing of sentience itself  leads one along into a very strange environment where words are irrelevant, knowledge is a provincialism, and self fulfilling logic is a bane, but then what is there, behind all this entangled business of referents as a mirror through which we perceive? Aye, there's the rub...

How do we describe space without a stick? Energy without a coupling relationship? A footstep without a bipedal movement?

This was the aim of the surrealists in advance of quantum physics although they were stereotyped in the context of Freudian theory in relation to the unconscious, or Id. But then one must ask, how do we define what is unconscious? Are we conscious? Using ourselves as an arbitration factor in setting demarcations in relational terms is the bane of astrobiology, theories of evolution and our own propensity to rationalize the hell out of cross purposed babble.

In my dealings with non biological entities, the apparent is absolutely useless and the first rule of order superimposed on the transcription of the strange is to place chaos on a elevated operating platform and not assume that the reordering of a garbled experience is the correct transcription as I may as well have invented it myself, which I have from time to time, as we all have.

However, in the lexicography of many such experiences, the context of the strange becomes a sort of cryptographic reordering of semiotics that over time, becomes less threatening and more fascinating. Remaining neutral is a impossibility and anyone who tells you they are objective toward the anomalous is lying through their teeth. The non local as superimposed on the local as a transcription brings to mind Plato as seen through a kaleidoscope of  relationships built like a stack of randomly placed straw. Yet, so many individuals take them at face value and superimpose upon a transcribed hexagraph and smash it and jam it into the geometries of right angles..just as language does with thought as a pack rat's companion. How odd. Is reality in of itself a hexagraph?  I think so. A individuated fractal of the whole may simply constitute a vowel.

In my own madness, a envision a Frank Sinatra type in a polka dot pork pie hat snapping his finders while proclaiming; "Monkey see, monkey do, baby.."

Or perhaps in some very strange parallel universe, we are looked upon as a weather system of dreams with tensional systems that are centripetally driven by a strange cybernetic data stream of dreams, a quantum  hexagraph that measures as as pressure points in a shared topology that has no visible quadrants. Forecasting human weather based on the veracity of coherence and chaos as relational high and low pressure systems, in a relativity of veracity.

We are perhaps phonemes of an odd transcription in the cartography of a dreaming universe.

The Lithography of Memory

"The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish." -Terrence McKenna
  

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. " - Marshall McLuhan


Twisting Linearity: Is Evolution Hindered by a Language Based On Economic Factors?
This post concerns the uncertainty of the creative and it's relationship to the banality of destructive tendencies and influences in evolutionary terms. Perhaps in this, the word addiction bears fruit.  The satiation of  repose as a downward spiral fed by a full stomach, a warm habitation and of course, coinage. In this we ask is evolution now driven by the precepts of economics?
A respected Sufi once observed as we walk into the grave as our new habitation, it is not the good nor the evil we have done to others that is cause for remorse in the remembrance of death. It is when we did neither, we did nothing with the time that is counted. The personal transposition to the sociology of Empire, and the indexes of trade as a sleight of hand when ruminating on value, and perhaps in this self interest becomes a lodging dynamic toward the evolution of communication ,hindered when it comes to terms, rules, and the editorial choices we make, unlike other species.....

The Biology of Words
A new book I have on my reading list is one by Dr Bruce Lipton entitled "The Biology of Belief" which explores the potentiality of how the nature of  consciousness in it's states and stations is a  determinate of  both our genetics and our behavior, which is a topic that I have also explored in terms of memory, without realizing that this area was also of interest to others. It was Antonin Artaud who observed that "All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."

The arbitrating operating system of conceptual determinates arising from our use of language as an inversion of evolution, or feedback by the imprinting of cultural memory as a form of spoken genetics that creates a pattern of  potentialities as well as limiting them in an evolutionary process is so unique to our species ( as far as I can tell) that this book promises to be a fascinating read.

http://www.noetic.org/library/publication-books/biology-belief/

What is fascinating to me is how this ties into very abstracted considerations that when fully digested become relatively obvious as to cause some amount of wonder as to why no one had considered such propositions before which directly relates to the concepts behind Biocentrism that proposes that consciousness must be accounted for in any theory regarding the nature and origin of the universe. A green world beyond our sensory perception that has probed it's way onto the cellular as a viral implant which is perhaps relates to the quality of the soil in which it is planted whether it is a harsh environment not prone to mutational adaptations or one that can grasp as a living system, the necessity of differentiation, of the counterweight of spirit manifested onto the raw vegetative matter of predictive certainties in order to upset them by provocation. Some would call this the work of the devil whereas I would say it is yours as well as mine as well as no one's in particular in a cellular framework of intelligence. The potentiality of self organization has been buried in the landfill of recycled materials thousands of years old in cultural terms.  In terms of McKenna's observation that  the "syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words.."may have found a material science not found in the correspondences arising from the arcane numerology of the traditional magical arts but in the boardrooms of corporations where there is no conspiracy to be revealed other than the material possessions of controlling human resources in adherence to the ego as a hunter gatherer lodged in the animal instinct of desiring predictability as a reward for a pathological behavior.

Is Uniformity The Death Knell of Diversification?
The domestication of this potentiality creates drones so much to the extent that our unseen agents like to twist our shorts beneath our pants by tying our semantics into elastic knots. While other digest the strange by this domestication set by the edicts of compartmentalized sociology and  binary choices, I welcome them into the camp of encircled wagons and say in so many words, twist away.

Self Medicating Behaviors As A Benchmark of A Genome

All of this directly relates to the cultural arbitration of the human communities dialogs being set by economic considerations that act as literally channels for evolution in various mediums, that leads one to consider how these must be transformed in order to promote growth and differentiation rather than creating a factory production line of mass produced lithographic products proverbially designed to be consumed as an addiction rather than as a choice. Uncertainty and memory as strange bedfellows in the evolution of our species brings to mind the  renewal of a pattern within another strange season in "The Wasteland" by T.S Elliott. The proliferation of our ghosts of what has been as an arbiter of what will be. All of this parabola is placed in a lamentation through the renewal of Spring as a foreboding of the dissolution of illusions ..as in " April is the cruelest month of all.."  is followed by a meditation more than worthy as being a precursor to Lennon's "A Day In The Life" as observation by someone keenly aware that history, personal and otherwise has a surreality that can be cutting.

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead, up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you,

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

--But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal.

 

http://bigthink.com/ideas/26912?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigthink%2Fblogs%2Fdr-kakus-universe+%28Dr.+Kaku%27s+Universe%29

Since our earliest origins the transmission of purposeful data with an agenda toward our gathering of the necessities to sustain life has been a two edged sword whether it is a happenstance that is cognizable  or the domesticated variety as a arbitrator for editing the realities we inhabit as a buffering editorial script..the message is the medium ship of our potentialities..the parabola of cycling genomes, that live and die as referents that we steer our stars by. Odd, isn't it? No one has the rudder in a game of bluffs against the uncertainty of tomorrow's hunt. Our cultural shaman appease the intercessory rituals we demand, not as some whim by but what we call necessity and the powers that be, will always oblige, will always tell us what we desire in an economic exchange where information is the human variant of possessing nature's power by proxy. Whether it is an illusion and a sleight of hand over time, becomes a moot point, unless our territorial prerogatives our threatened by perhaps, the nature of nature itself when it will not abide by an agenda. 

 

Lithography and Templates Considered  

Whether it is pharmaceutical corporations prescribing sociological antidotes for depression and anxiety arising from the edicts of scientific materialism or the sexuality of high performance automobiles, perhaps we are "products" as we are consumers, which is a sobering consequence of the same processes of repetition creating a shared memory that becomes a social arbitrator, as much as did the grade school indoctrination of the "pledge of allegiance". 

Consciousness as an Abraxas can be as much of a damnation as a miraculous gift depending on how well we are fed. The domestication of ourselves as hunter gatherers of data whether it be material or found on various medias has spawned a factory of harnessed productivity that stresses uniformity at any cost in a subservience to the medias that make "1984" a beach party bingo game as a misdirection of attention worthy of Rome. In those times as well as these, the materialism of valuation led Tacitus to describe the relativity of valuating profitability in solely economic terms when at the apex of the  freedom that can be exercised through possession. As he noted the paradox of the surface tension of those had all and more than they could consume. 

"We see many who are struggling against adversity who are happy, and more....... although abounding in wealth, who are wretched."

Ray Bradbury as a prophet tied to the jugular vein of Marshall McLuhan in a engagement of energy brought to you by the heat sink of corporate sponsorship. The vividness of HD. 

 

 Has consciousness become incorporated and franchised?

  Call it material industrial consciousness, armed to the teeth with buffering compounds. Addiction as a fantasy inducing prescription that creates genetic monstrosities of a strange nature, like a Viet Nam or a Afghanistan.

Beyond the film we are being induced to perform as actors within, life awaits us with the same patience that keeps the moon aloft in our nightly sojourns to unknown assignations with the imaginal realm, to create what does not exist in a material form which is an underrated gift if there ever was one, free as it is from the constraints of social tampering in the environment, like a seed deeply buried in the soil. If the nature of nature is a creative gestalt, than we have secreted from it, an artifice of certainties which condemn us to a hermitage without bars or the necessity of shepherds or jailers. 

"The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward."   -Terrence Mckenna 

 In another perspective akin to the quantum relationship of the incommensurable and the observer as a creator by the act of observation was ruminated upon centuries ago.

"This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal...) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols, a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing."

Ibn al-'Arabi (1165 - 1240)

Order as the death knell of the mind..comes to mind in these times, were possession is 9\10ths of the rule book in terms of the mediums through which reality is currently arbitrated on a default setting chosen by consumerism rather than a strategic retreat from the tyranny of our memory. Play has been removed from the menu as it is considered to be outside the realm of scientific materialism whether it is music program, the arts, philosophy or theater in the realm of an education. The incommensurable value of these universal languages seems to be largely replaced by a draconian memorization of factoids, arranged and to be imprinted as edicts without so much as a whimper. A world of drones, sent hither and yon by dead factoids as a religiosity of worshiping the autonomic. I saw children being loaded onto a bus this morning. 

April is the cruelest month of all.

Play It Again, Sam,

 The wolves imagine they are sheep in my world, which may not be necessarily yours but is one were intended by circumstance to share in at least the theories of democracy that hide the black shadow of the terror of the majority to impose dreams, to improvise reality as a game field with prizes and punishments for our cultural memory recedes behind us as a genetic stream of behaviors lock stepped to the potentialities of consciousness made uniform.  You ask why this is so. The medium is the message, from the stirrup to the computer, the manufacturing of the material as innovations has created a world where we have become subservient extensions and not the other way around in this mountainous terrain of the consciousness of dreams  The physics of information is our genome. In this we have the recycling of history as a genome of memory that becomes set pieces of a theatrical pose that has many roles and masks and so the same observations may apply, as time goes by, waiting for the phone to ring.