20160315

The Surfer on Acid is Like a Virgin: X Takes a Bough

"What the Alchemy of Media allows, what traditional media does not, is a dialogue with the Other that is full of give and take.  It speaks, it listens, and it speaks again.

I think it was William Blake who said
"Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.”
This is the kind of information that is coming through the alchemical media experience.  It is information that you have to believe.  You have to believe it because it has this ring of authenticity.  It is the logos.  It is The Word.  What it says is that our alienation from ourselves has kept us from building a mature model of how the Universe really works.  

Luckily, the content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright.  As Thomas Vaughan put it, “The body is the placenta of the non-local.”  
This fact has not yet been assimilated because it runs counter to Western reductionist materialist empiricism.  This idea that the body is the placenta to the non-local is not an object of faith or dogma, it is a program for activity.  The activity that it implies is a familiarization with the uncanny.  Unfortunately for you, the uncanny has been banned from Western thinking for four hundred years.
I take this concept very seriously.  

If any of you are familiar with the literature of alchemy, alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing that has many properties, that is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, both sound and vision, and can do anything. 
Jung correctly stated that alchemy allows a searchlight to be thrown onto these deeper levels of the psyche.  But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs as he seemed to assume.  It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person so motivated and so courageous can go.  It is a dimension of vertical gain that is real, and is present in all of our lives, and that we do not acknowledge except as an anomaly, because we have been told it is an anomaly.  We have been told that these perceptions have to be devalued.  The result of this is to so distort the psychic life of the species that only the violent rupture of alien archetypes into three dimensional space can restore our world.   The uncanny haunts time like a ghost, and it haunts human experience in the 20th century because it is a symbol of alienation.  In fact the word “alien” has come to be applied to this thing.  It is alien, it comes from extra-terrestrial satellites, it is totally non-Human.

What it is is the Self in a form in which it is most accessible to the Ego, given the Ego’s programming.  In order not to alarm us it has disguised itself as an extra-dimensional laser, but is in fact, the collectivity of the human psyche signaling a profound historical crisis."

T.M.



"This is Bowie in New York.  This is Edward Alexander at the Chelsea Hotel." 



aPOPhenia NOW

The first half of this blog was built on the discovery of something I call The Kubrick Transformer.  Most of this early work was an attempt to illustrate the journey towards "discovering" such a thing as well as an explanation of why it may be more than just an elaborate coincidence.

The second half of this blog wasn't built on anything.  It had no pre-determined focus.  The randomness of the work only gained form with the sudden revelation of something I never expected, a proper sequel to The Kubrick Transformer.

If you follow these later posts you will find that this sequel functions as a kind of attractor.  The sequel groups the dominant concepts and media I have been wrestling with, dissolves the boundaries between them, and forms a singular expression that projects a total comprehension.  It explains everything that the blog could not.

It is a fitting closure.





Start "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick at the end of the Intermission.
Start "Apocalypse Now" by Francis Ford Coppola after Laurence Fishburne dies (fades up to the PBR).
Start "Blackstar" by David Robert Jones 4 1/2 seconds after the simultaneous start of 2001 and Apocalypse (album on repeat).

"We cannot contain the Logos.  As much as we try to define her, or to control her, she will find some way to deliver the message.


It's a pity she's a whore."




"And now, an ending. Where there was once one, there are now two. 
Or were there always two?  
What is a reflection? A chance to see two? When there are chances for reflections, 
there can always be two - or more. 
Only when we are everywhere will there be just one.

It has been a pleasure speaking to you."





5 comments:

  1. see the 'Odyssey' element in Apocolypse Now for sure; ride the snake to the lake, the ancient lake, Nemi. It's all about the King Kill, Bowie as the 'Outsider (in the Colin Wilson sense)inside'. From Ritual to Romance.

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  2. "The best advice I can give you, I know it's not what you want to hear, is that you should create your own, because creating it is an act of alchemical dedication. If you're not able to read Finnegans Wake because of personality flaws, recreating it will eliminate the flaws"

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  3. Thanks for providing a sequel spectacular with much potential for future exploration. On an initial pass, the Golden Bough juxtaposed with the mirrored vision of the monolith as tome was a revelation.

    As I currently lack a double mirrored screen, I couldn't do your preferred Transformer vertical stacking method, but horizontal images with the Apocalypse on the left and 2001 on the right netted useful results. One sighting is Willard's binoculars on the left tracking Poole in space.

    My predilection for simultaneous subtitles led to further highlights:

    "Why would a nice guy like you want to kill a genius?" as Bowman fully commits to Hal homicide.

    Kurtz reads "Shape without form, shade without color" over another iconic appearance of the monolith.

    "A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the"


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  4. I haven't really visualized alternative methods of screening as the wings of a mandala until now! I will have to try both the side by side as well as the use of subtitles. It's amazing how tweaking these types of arrangements bring such a wealth of new ideas.
    Thank you for your insightful feedback as always.

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  5. With enough screens and portable monoliths, 2001 could be in the center of the mandala with 4 simultaneous apocalypses surrounding it.

    Willard's mirrored doppelgänger, Colby, holds his weapon southpaw. The left-handed path indeed. Nice.

    To continuing the experiment!

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