James Joyce, ULYSSES, Episode 3, Proteus
“You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.” - Robert Anton Wilson
Monday, August 22, 2011
Walking Into Eternity
James Joyce, ULYSSES, Episode 3, Proteus
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Falling on Deaf Ears
Written by Bogus Magus w/ Artwork by Bobby Campbell
"...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
We learned many wonderful things on RAW's Tale of the Tribe course, but Giambattista Vico's holistic view of human evolution and development as a cyclic progression, a spiral, really appealed to many of us and deserves further exploration. In spite of living in dangerous times for such thinking Vico perceived, and attempted to describe, history as a whole system, and humans as self-made, just as Darwin would later attempt to sum up how plants and animals formed themselves without a "creator".
Moderns might describe Joyce's fantastic novel Finnegans Wake (which implied this cyclic structure) as a hologram, but Vico might well have described it in the Hermetic or alchemical terms of a Microcosm/Macrocosm, "as above, so below."
BABABADLGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONN
KONNBRONNTONNERRONNTUONNTHUNN
TROVARRHOUNAWNSKAWNTOOHOOHOOR
DENENTHURNUK!
This 100 letter magical word appears on page one and some say it represents a clap of thunder, the Big Bang of Creation. To me it would work equally well as the sound of a slapstick fall (Finnegan falling off his ladder like a ton of bricks) - and, as the main character has fallen asleep, perhaps it could also remind us of a very loud snore.
The Gnostics seemed to think of The Fall (and the Original Sin) not as a human flaw - Adam eating the Forbidden Fruit - so much as something that "god" did. A demiurge fell for the temptation to slow Light down into Matter, to manifest Himself in the blissful void of the Great Mother, to create a world to rule over, and condemn people to a life and death struggle, etc. Confused echoes of this remain in the stories of Fallen Angels bringing humans fire and teaching the arts of civilisation, leading to the loss of an innocent life.
Vico worked with the Inquisition breathing down his neck, so he could not talk of an eternal cycle with no beginning, and had to start from the Creation in Genesis. He implied that after the Flood Noah's descendants wandered for some time, losing their god-given culture and language and degenerating to a bestial life. (Without that pressure to fit the story to The Bible story, we just start with "cave-men" these days, and already know about ancient civilisations rising, flourishing and then falling).
Vico chose to start his description of the cycle with primitive humans immersed in nature, using only a symbolic language of gesture, monosyllables, signs, hieroglyphs and ideograms to describe their experience of the world. Deeply embedded, they viewed the world in a mythic sense, and felt themselves as part of the whole rather than as separate individuals. He thought that they would hold the elements in awe. Storms and the voice of the thunder would impress them greatly, and lightning snaking down might bring them fire with which they could keep warm while huddled in their caves. In the face of such "gods" those brute humans covered themselves with fur, and guiltily retreating to the privacy of caves (a recap of Adam and Eve cowering from God's thunderous anger at their disobedience) so beginning the forming of human culture. The strong alpha males offered protection from predators, outlaws and other threats to the older or weaker, and to their families of women and children. Even if they seemed like giants, ritual may have proved necessary against these greater forces of nature, placating the "gods" and protecting the clan. Primitive religion thrives in the Age of the Fall...
As humans began to build shelters, cities, palaces and churches - develop communities and take up farming - they moved into what he called the Age of Heroes.
They gained more control over the elements, and the powerful either fought or joined in alliances, employing and ruling the poorer and weaker. Pharaohs, Kings and Queens appeared as demi-gods - a manifestation of an unseen deity. Laws, institutions, and rigid beliefs developed to control society. Their language became polysyllabic, and poetic - with the use of metaphor and simile - but few would understand this complex language - much of it remained a mysterious tool in the hands of the Priests and rulers. Rich families would have heraldic crests, flags, and other signs of power. Rules of chivalry and Romance (falling in love) might hold sway, but the social structure kept sharp divisions between rich and poor, as in feudal economies.
When the laws get applied fairly to all they inevitably restrict the abuse of power, and even the rich have to acknowledge and obey them, so gradually the use of logic and articulate common language leads to abstraction, generalization, free discussion, legal argument and rationality. Rigid, traditional values get challenged by a meritocracy and eventually this leads the way to "democracy".
In the Age of the People all have similar rights, although freedom can feel frightening...
This stage, too cannot last, and Vico thought of the next stage (which he called the Ricorso) as a period of confusion and anarchy and self-indulgence. This could pave the way for a return to barbarism, a new upsurge of superstition, a neo-primitive phase, the resurgence of religion in all its forms, and a yearning once more for certainty, and the worship of a strong male authority figure, aka God.
Just as Joyce had written Ulysses to contain all the stories and struggles of humans manifest in one brief day in Dublin, portrayed by ordinary folk, so he structured Finnegans Wake as one long night, with several cycles of sleep and dreaming.
A falling asleep, a dreaming of all the tales of the tribe in all the languages of the world, an endless repetition of human relationships - marriage and a family ruled by the male in the age of gods, the fighting of brothers and the wiles of daughters in the age of heroes, the burial of the father in the age of the people - finally returning to consciousness at the break of day, to start the whole thing over.
We can see the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in Vico's model, and we can see the Roman Catholic Church giving way to Feudal England, followed by the rational Enlightenment, etc. Many people adopted the cyclic theory of history. Marx liked the inevitability he saw implied in the class struggle of the weak to demand and win their rights. He overlooked the fact that we cannot stop at any one phase of the cycle, so the reversion to autocratic Stalinism from the initially "rational" Communism might have disappointed him if he had lived to witness it. Of course, many of us may relish this anarchic period of confusion - but this model stands as a warning of the risks as time rolls on...and a Fundamentalist religious mentality kicks in.
Perhaps we can learn to control how long each part of the cycle lasts? Perhaps McLuhan's prediction of an oral/aural, post-literate, mythopoetic tribe shows one way that we could pass through the current age of change and movement and turbulence and opportunity to enter a mythical and wondrous 'golden age of the gods' , with every man and woman a star, without this time Falling for a Father Figure?
"As his title indicates (FINNEGANS WAKE), he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope". This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor", savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane and civilized."
-Marshall McLuhan
And Joyce felt tempted, god-like, to finally write his own sacred text, his last creation.
Here endeth the first lesson.
"The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the..."
(originally published online in Maybe Quarterly #5, and in print in "Maybe... #1")
"...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
We learned many wonderful things on RAW's Tale of the Tribe course, but Giambattista Vico's holistic view of human evolution and development as a cyclic progression, a spiral, really appealed to many of us and deserves further exploration. In spite of living in dangerous times for such thinking Vico perceived, and attempted to describe, history as a whole system, and humans as self-made, just as Darwin would later attempt to sum up how plants and animals formed themselves without a "creator".
Moderns might describe Joyce's fantastic novel Finnegans Wake (which implied this cyclic structure) as a hologram, but Vico might well have described it in the Hermetic or alchemical terms of a Microcosm/Macrocosm, "as above, so below."
BABABADLGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONN
KONNBRONNTONNERRONNTUONNTHUNN
TROVARRHOUNAWNSKAWNTOOHOOHOOR
DENENTHURNUK!
This 100 letter magical word appears on page one and some say it represents a clap of thunder, the Big Bang of Creation. To me it would work equally well as the sound of a slapstick fall (Finnegan falling off his ladder like a ton of bricks) - and, as the main character has fallen asleep, perhaps it could also remind us of a very loud snore.
The Gnostics seemed to think of The Fall (and the Original Sin) not as a human flaw - Adam eating the Forbidden Fruit - so much as something that "god" did. A demiurge fell for the temptation to slow Light down into Matter, to manifest Himself in the blissful void of the Great Mother, to create a world to rule over, and condemn people to a life and death struggle, etc. Confused echoes of this remain in the stories of Fallen Angels bringing humans fire and teaching the arts of civilisation, leading to the loss of an innocent life.
Vico worked with the Inquisition breathing down his neck, so he could not talk of an eternal cycle with no beginning, and had to start from the Creation in Genesis. He implied that after the Flood Noah's descendants wandered for some time, losing their god-given culture and language and degenerating to a bestial life. (Without that pressure to fit the story to The Bible story, we just start with "cave-men" these days, and already know about ancient civilisations rising, flourishing and then falling).
Vico chose to start his description of the cycle with primitive humans immersed in nature, using only a symbolic language of gesture, monosyllables, signs, hieroglyphs and ideograms to describe their experience of the world. Deeply embedded, they viewed the world in a mythic sense, and felt themselves as part of the whole rather than as separate individuals. He thought that they would hold the elements in awe. Storms and the voice of the thunder would impress them greatly, and lightning snaking down might bring them fire with which they could keep warm while huddled in their caves. In the face of such "gods" those brute humans covered themselves with fur, and guiltily retreating to the privacy of caves (a recap of Adam and Eve cowering from God's thunderous anger at their disobedience) so beginning the forming of human culture. The strong alpha males offered protection from predators, outlaws and other threats to the older or weaker, and to their families of women and children. Even if they seemed like giants, ritual may have proved necessary against these greater forces of nature, placating the "gods" and protecting the clan. Primitive religion thrives in the Age of the Fall...
As humans began to build shelters, cities, palaces and churches - develop communities and take up farming - they moved into what he called the Age of Heroes.
They gained more control over the elements, and the powerful either fought or joined in alliances, employing and ruling the poorer and weaker. Pharaohs, Kings and Queens appeared as demi-gods - a manifestation of an unseen deity. Laws, institutions, and rigid beliefs developed to control society. Their language became polysyllabic, and poetic - with the use of metaphor and simile - but few would understand this complex language - much of it remained a mysterious tool in the hands of the Priests and rulers. Rich families would have heraldic crests, flags, and other signs of power. Rules of chivalry and Romance (falling in love) might hold sway, but the social structure kept sharp divisions between rich and poor, as in feudal economies.
When the laws get applied fairly to all they inevitably restrict the abuse of power, and even the rich have to acknowledge and obey them, so gradually the use of logic and articulate common language leads to abstraction, generalization, free discussion, legal argument and rationality. Rigid, traditional values get challenged by a meritocracy and eventually this leads the way to "democracy".
In the Age of the People all have similar rights, although freedom can feel frightening...
This stage, too cannot last, and Vico thought of the next stage (which he called the Ricorso) as a period of confusion and anarchy and self-indulgence. This could pave the way for a return to barbarism, a new upsurge of superstition, a neo-primitive phase, the resurgence of religion in all its forms, and a yearning once more for certainty, and the worship of a strong male authority figure, aka God.
Just as Joyce had written Ulysses to contain all the stories and struggles of humans manifest in one brief day in Dublin, portrayed by ordinary folk, so he structured Finnegans Wake as one long night, with several cycles of sleep and dreaming.
A falling asleep, a dreaming of all the tales of the tribe in all the languages of the world, an endless repetition of human relationships - marriage and a family ruled by the male in the age of gods, the fighting of brothers and the wiles of daughters in the age of heroes, the burial of the father in the age of the people - finally returning to consciousness at the break of day, to start the whole thing over.
We can see the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in Vico's model, and we can see the Roman Catholic Church giving way to Feudal England, followed by the rational Enlightenment, etc. Many people adopted the cyclic theory of history. Marx liked the inevitability he saw implied in the class struggle of the weak to demand and win their rights. He overlooked the fact that we cannot stop at any one phase of the cycle, so the reversion to autocratic Stalinism from the initially "rational" Communism might have disappointed him if he had lived to witness it. Of course, many of us may relish this anarchic period of confusion - but this model stands as a warning of the risks as time rolls on...and a Fundamentalist religious mentality kicks in.
Perhaps we can learn to control how long each part of the cycle lasts? Perhaps McLuhan's prediction of an oral/aural, post-literate, mythopoetic tribe shows one way that we could pass through the current age of change and movement and turbulence and opportunity to enter a mythical and wondrous 'golden age of the gods' , with every man and woman a star, without this time Falling for a Father Figure?
"As his title indicates (FINNEGANS WAKE), he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope". This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor", savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane and civilized."
-Marshall McLuhan
And Joyce felt tempted, god-like, to finally write his own sacred text, his last creation.
Here endeth the first lesson.
"The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the..."
(originally published online in Maybe Quarterly #5, and in print in "Maybe... #1")
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Testify feat. John Sinclair
- MC5 magus, white panther founder; the myth that is Jon Sinclair delivers his testimonial to the bohenium ideal.
- credits from The Politics Of Envy, released 25 July 2011
Words by Jon Sinclair
Music by Youth
Produced by Youth
Mixed by Youth & Michael Rendall
Chorus Vox- Angie Brown
Bass - Youth
Gtr- Andrew Robertson
Gtr- Alan Clayton
Gtr- James Sedwards
Drums- Stever
Piano- Alex Ward
Sax- Alex Ward
Hammond/Harmonium- Michael Rendall
http://thenewbanalistsorchestra.bandcamp.com/
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
What is the question to which life is the answer?
Cover to the next edition, which may be awhile yet, so why not enjoy here & now!?
Monday, August 01, 2011
Rushkoff's New Book
You can find Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age" at O/R Books (as well as Amazon, kindle, etc). If you email a completely empty message (no title or content) to studyprogram@orbooks.com you will get a generous 24 page PDF chapter-by-chapter breakdown, with additional study suggestions.
Coming Round Again
Written by Bogus Magus W/ Illustrations by Bobby Campbell
Don't talk to me about journeys to the Underworld. I think of myself as one of those people who doesn't dream.
Oh, sure, 'Everybody dreams!' they say, with a knowing smile, 'it's just that some of us remember them'.
But I forget, I forget.
They tell me this stuff, these people who remember all their serial incarnations. Seriously, they emerge into our daily world from some curious realm that reacts directly to their thought, and calmly step into this entirely different reality - finding me haggard, hung-over, habitual - and they seem neither excited nor scared. Why? Because they not only remember their dream interludes but they also remember their continuity from the day before. Despite all the picaresque adventures of their nights, they seriously rejoin this apparently stable place I call ‘reality’ with quiet resignation. Maybe their consciousness is virtually continuous.
I can go no further. At this point I feel blind. When I finally shut my eyes I drift awhile then I vanish into the black - not for an eternity because as soon as I open my eyes again the world continues. It often seems as if no time had passed. When I felt frightened of the following day I used to stay up - waking hours last longer - if I fell asleep then OPENED my eyes I would face the feared morning (oh, I don't know, dentist, exam, interview, opening night). And yes of course, sometimes the anticipation felt great - how do you think I ever let go into sleep then OPENED my eyes to another day?
But here I just refer to the good days. After all, I often seem to only get sixteen hours daily life to many other people’s twenty-four. So I get a bit behind having to do my dreaming in the daytime - pressure on - but then again, I don’t have nightmares, I guess (how would I know?)
They've done tests. It appears that sleep deprivation alone doesn’t make a human hallucinate in the waking state, but the deprivation of dreams does. So, imagine - me with no dreams, no surrealism, no lucidity, no monsters or jump-cuts, zooms or eternities, always stuck with gravity, and hunger and life-threatening situations that are REAL goddamit, how do you think I feel when I open my eyes to the same old world, still, without a break.
At the breakfast table the jet-setters come in with their travellers' tales of mythic adventure in lucid dreams. Me, I feel like I haven't slept (I often feel like I haven't slept - sleeping often seems about as refreshing as blinking). Anyway, my ‘real, one and only’ world has to incorporate any fun I might get, and for sure it contains some problems I'll have to confront - dead subtle, too, some of them.
Dream rememberers often appear refreshed by their dimensional vacation (though sometimes they report getting stuck at some psychic airport), and they also remember what they were doing in real time yesterday, and why – so they may well have a script and plan for the day ahead, as they move smoothly back to take up where they left off.
What I call sleep is like the black bar between the frames of a movie. Normally (awake) we don't see it, but when someone like me slows down into sleep it takes an age (a split second) to cross that line. Many mornings it goes as smooth as a flicker book - next image, next day. Just some days I cross the line and it's a CUT to another scene entirely - sure, there's probably a connection, some editing gets real suggestive, but there are shock cuts, like coming round and finding someone tied you to a chair and a light shines in your eyes.
Oh, sure. Call me hero. 'Talk! ' they said. I can't talk after I wake up until I have had at least three cups of coffee, some days. At 150 milligrammes per cup I must use a gramme a day. A gramme of caffeine.
It keeps me in the awake world - better the frame you know than the one coming up. Funny that, most people think coffee speeds things up, and I take it to stay awake and get more time in the same frame.
cut
- somebody slugged me
- They put something in my drink
- what happened?
- It all happened so quickly
I find myself back again - seeing if I can figure out a sequence to this movie or find out if the cuts have a logic or merely a careless randomness to them?
Each morning I struggle to piece together what I remember of the time before the last blackout. With a continuous memory of previous frames I might have a chance to pick up a theme, at least - some kind of order apart from mere habitual days, another page of the book, semi-coherent action flickering by (or at least the image of it.) No abruptness interrupts my days.
I find belongings, sometimes, and notes to myself, when I wake up alone and I'm not tied to a chair or whatever. I have no idea what they mean, beyond what they say.
Don't talk to me about journeys to the Underworld. I think of myself as one of those people who doesn't dream.
Oh, sure, 'Everybody dreams!' they say, with a knowing smile, 'it's just that some of us remember them'.
But I forget, I forget.
They tell me this stuff, these people who remember all their serial incarnations. Seriously, they emerge into our daily world from some curious realm that reacts directly to their thought, and calmly step into this entirely different reality - finding me haggard, hung-over, habitual - and they seem neither excited nor scared. Why? Because they not only remember their dream interludes but they also remember their continuity from the day before. Despite all the picaresque adventures of their nights, they seriously rejoin this apparently stable place I call ‘reality’ with quiet resignation. Maybe their consciousness is virtually continuous.
I can go no further. At this point I feel blind. When I finally shut my eyes I drift awhile then I vanish into the black - not for an eternity because as soon as I open my eyes again the world continues. It often seems as if no time had passed. When I felt frightened of the following day I used to stay up - waking hours last longer - if I fell asleep then OPENED my eyes I would face the feared morning (oh, I don't know, dentist, exam, interview, opening night). And yes of course, sometimes the anticipation felt great - how do you think I ever let go into sleep then OPENED my eyes to another day?
But here I just refer to the good days. After all, I often seem to only get sixteen hours daily life to many other people’s twenty-four. So I get a bit behind having to do my dreaming in the daytime - pressure on - but then again, I don’t have nightmares, I guess (how would I know?)They've done tests. It appears that sleep deprivation alone doesn’t make a human hallucinate in the waking state, but the deprivation of dreams does. So, imagine - me with no dreams, no surrealism, no lucidity, no monsters or jump-cuts, zooms or eternities, always stuck with gravity, and hunger and life-threatening situations that are REAL goddamit, how do you think I feel when I open my eyes to the same old world, still, without a break.
At the breakfast table the jet-setters come in with their travellers' tales of mythic adventure in lucid dreams. Me, I feel like I haven't slept (I often feel like I haven't slept - sleeping often seems about as refreshing as blinking). Anyway, my ‘real, one and only’ world has to incorporate any fun I might get, and for sure it contains some problems I'll have to confront - dead subtle, too, some of them.
Dream rememberers often appear refreshed by their dimensional vacation (though sometimes they report getting stuck at some psychic airport), and they also remember what they were doing in real time yesterday, and why – so they may well have a script and plan for the day ahead, as they move smoothly back to take up where they left off.
What I call sleep is like the black bar between the frames of a movie. Normally (awake) we don't see it, but when someone like me slows down into sleep it takes an age (a split second) to cross that line. Many mornings it goes as smooth as a flicker book - next image, next day. Just some days I cross the line and it's a CUT to another scene entirely - sure, there's probably a connection, some editing gets real suggestive, but there are shock cuts, like coming round and finding someone tied you to a chair and a light shines in your eyes.
Oh, sure. Call me hero. 'Talk! ' they said. I can't talk after I wake up until I have had at least three cups of coffee, some days. At 150 milligrammes per cup I must use a gramme a day. A gramme of caffeine.It keeps me in the awake world - better the frame you know than the one coming up. Funny that, most people think coffee speeds things up, and I take it to stay awake and get more time in the same frame.
cut
- somebody slugged me
- They put something in my drink
- what happened?
- It all happened so quickly
I find myself back again - seeing if I can figure out a sequence to this movie or find out if the cuts have a logic or merely a careless randomness to them?
Each morning I struggle to piece together what I remember of the time before the last blackout. With a continuous memory of previous frames I might have a chance to pick up a theme, at least - some kind of order apart from mere habitual days, another page of the book, semi-coherent action flickering by (or at least the image of it.) No abruptness interrupts my days.
I find belongings, sometimes, and notes to myself, when I wake up alone and I'm not tied to a chair or whatever. I have no idea what they mean, beyond what they say.
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