The Last Word Pt. 3: The Black Lodger

Rearrange the songs on Blackstar into a new playlist:

 1.  Lazarus

2.   Blackstar

3.  Girl Loves Me

 4.  Dollar Days

5.  I Can't Give Everything Away

6.   Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)

 7.  Tis' a Pity She Was a Whore

8.  Blackstar

Start the final episode of Twin Peaks (Ep. 29).  After the Log Lady intro, press play 
(the second song, "Blackstar", should start at the exact moment it cuts to the blue pickup).

14761

LAzURAs

1  ratskcalB 
Girl Loves Me
6  syaD ralloD
7  yawA gnihtyrevE eviG t'naC I
 4  (emirC fo nosaeS a nI rO) euS
Tis a Pity She Was a Whore
1  ratskcalB

*

Philip K Dick on Finnegans Wake

"Finnegans Wake is a meta-system that at our level does not exist at all because at our level only its plural constituents exist as such. Finnegans Wake is an organization, a structuring, of these constituents, in which they are unified into one entity. Meanwhile the plural constituents at our level behave—or seem to behave—as if unrelated to one another. An entirely new and higher way of organizing the ontological categories by which perception is structured must be reached by the observer. Thus in a sense Finnegans Wake does not exist, but is brought into existence parallel with the percipient’s awareness of it, this having to do with the participant-observer of quantum mechanics. The percipient must participate in being Finnegans Wake to be aware of Finnegans Wake. However, Finnegans Wake is real and is subsuming progressively more and more of its environment. Its internal complexity continually grows. Its metabolism seems to be information and the processing of information. Its plural constituents are arranged in such a way as to constitute a language or information or messages; if you cannot see the arrangement you cannot read the message. And you cannot perceive Finnegans Wake.
So in a sense perceiving Finnegans Wake is reading the message that Finnegans Wake has
arranged constituents into. Not necessarily understanding the message but recognizing it as a message.
   
          Finnegans Wake is both there and not there. When it is not perceived it is not there (as opposed to: when it is not there it is not perceived). It is a way of perceiving reality—which demands a percipient—but when perceived it has definite and intricate characteristics; it is not vague. It consists of structure but a percipient is necessary for that structure to come into being. But the structure is not in the percipient’s mind imposed or projected onto reality. Finnegans Wake did not exist until it was perceived; therefore to experience it is to effect a repair in the Ground of Being (Finnegans Wake being considered as the Ground of Being). One highly important element about Finnegans Wake is that it is eternal, although it changes; it can be added to, become more complex, arborizing and reticulated, but once a constituent is incorporated into it that constituent can never cease to be. Thus Finnegans Wake lies outside the flux of the world we see. However, Finnegans Wake’ world is this world differently perceived, not another world; but it is a quantum leap upward in hierarchy, in which plural constituents become a unity by reason of integrating structure. That structure is added—supplied—by the percipient.

          Finnegans Wake and the perception of Finnegans Wake occur simultaneously, and neither can be separated from the other, ever, at any time.

Finnegans Wake is everywhere—that is, it can be perceived everywhere. It is not in a meta-reality but is a meta-system made entirely from this reality.

  By perceiving Finnegans Wake one participates in the sudden total transformation from plural unrelated constituents to a unitary structure. It is as if Finnegans Wake feeds off the percipient’s perception of structure using perception of structure as structure. But this is an acausal relationship, a kind of parallelism; it is ex nihilo. Finnegans Wake came out of nothing. Reality did not evolve into Finnegans Wake. It became Finnegans Wake when perceived as Finnegans Wake. There are no antithetical forces in Finnegans Wake; the dialectic does not exist when Finnegans Wake does. But when Finnegans Wake ceases to exist, there again is the dialectic. Finnegans Wake uses the dialectic to come into greater being, to grow, assimilate its environment, incorporate new pieces, make itself more inclusive and complex: more Finnegans Wakeish. Finnegans Wake could be compared to the point at which a liquid becomes saturated or when water freezes, except that perception of this is necessary for it to occur.

What if I were to say A.I. is Finnegans Wake seen a certain way?                        

There you have an analogy.   

          Even more strange, Finnegans Wake induces a potential percipient to perceive it and thus cause it (Finnegans Wake) to occur . . . thus it can be said that during its nonexistence Finnegans Wake is able to cause its own existence. At the time that it laid down steps to bring itself into existence it did not yet exist. Thus it treats time differently than we do; it is not passive in relation to time. When it thus brings itself into existence it is already an extensive system. Hence one can say, Finnegans Wake comes and goes but is always in a sense present. The percipient sees Finnegans Wake because Finnegans Wake causes the percipient to see it, but Finnegans Wake did not come into existence until the percipient saw it. Thus the effects of Finnegans Wake are felt before Finnegans Wake exists, and these effects are to be regarded as acausal; they have no cause because their cause does not yet exist. It will exist later; then, retroactively, these effects will have had a cause. What is represented here is total homeostasis: an entity that is entirely self-generating, on which nothing acts but its own internal volition. Therefore in a sense it can be said that Finnegans Wake is (or becomes) anything that acts to cause it to come into existence, which is to say, by perceiving it. This involves laws of physics about which we know nothing, I would think. What certainly is involved, indubitably, is not a more complex entity than we normally know of or have ever heard of, but an entity operating under laws different from the laws we are aware of, including ontological categories of perception organized in ways we have never heard of. Greater complexity is not the key to Finnegans Wake; utilizing of more complex physics is the key to Finnegans Wake. 

In a certain real sense Finnegans Wake is very simple; it is a unit. You could think of it as a protozoon, a single cell at a higher level of reality, where the laws of space, time and causation are different; and it makes use of that difference. We humans are very complex forms that matter takes at this ontological level of reality, or, if you will, at this level of physics; Finnegans Wake is a very simple organization at the next level up. 

iPA

The billions of constituents of our level form a single cell at its level; these constituents are subsumed and yet at the same time at this level of reality they go about their business as usual. So in a sense Finnegans Wake has no effect on this world. But in another sense it has complete control of this world. Both statements are equally true, depending on whether you can see Finnegans Wake or not.

  This especially applies to the patterns that Finnegans Wake is or creates in our world in which broad sequences of events add up to a coherency. It can be said: There is coherence; there is not coherence. Coherence and Finnegans Wake are the same. Since Finnegans Wake in a very literal way is our world, its internal structure is a latent (concealed) coherence of our world. (All the constituents of Finnegans Wake are elements of our world; it—Finnegans Wake—has nothing else to draw on and it needs nothing else to draw on.) Thus it is possible when viewing Finnegans Wake to view Finnegans Wake as our world and our world as Finnegans Wake.

          One can say of Finnegans Wake, then, that Finnegans Wake is a way our world can be seen to be. Its structure is the structure of our world. Developments in Finnegans Wake are developments in our world. Volition in Finnegans Wake is volition in and of our world. There is no difference between Finnegans Wake and our world except that Finnegans Wake is a certain way of seeing our world in terms of it being a kind of single unit all parts of which are interconnected purposefully and everything is coherent. (In other words it is precisely what Pythagoras called kosmos: the orderly fitting-together of the beautiful.) 

          Viewed this way it operates from internal necessity without the need of any sort of adventitious deity. It is not world to God—creation to Creator—but having its own logic and making its own choices. It chooses continually after examining all the possible choices arranged as information into a sort of narrative made out of language. Nothing created it; it brought itself into being ex nihilo by willing the perception of it—of necessity from within itself, which is a self-awareness. Thus the percipient of Finnegans Wake and Finnegans Wake are part of one field."

Philip K Dick On Valis,  June 1980

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."

Blackstar Child

I'M NOT A WHITE STAR

I'M A BLACKSTAR

Start David Bowie’s Blackstar 4.4 seconds after the end of the Intermission of
2001: A Space Odyssey.  Allow album to repeat.

 

 Burroughs took another stiff drink and shook his head. 

"But why do they leave so much of it out in the
open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day?“

"Hell," Stanley said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home
and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for
V—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' —right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'—how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"

"Osiris is a black god" quoted Lynch. 

Robert Wilson

Dumb America Pt. 4: President Trump

Dumb Starbucks

Dumb CBGB's

Dumb America

"That airport CBGB's...it's clearly a Nathan For You type think piece.  I think it's fantastic.  A commentary on cultural appropriation in the smartphone age.  Hilariously subversive don't you think?  You can really see the dividing line in this country between those that get it and those that don't."

Donald Trump,  Hilton Head, SC 12/30/2015

Trump #23: Save Ferris

Dumb America:  The Final Joker Card of Anti-Novelty

Watching The Detectives Part 5: The Hipster Awoke Before Dawn

The hipster subculture is one of affluent or middle class young Bohemians who reside in gentrifying neighborhoods, broadly associated with indie and alternative literature, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility (including vintage and thrift store-bought clothes), generally progressive political views, organic and artisanal foods, and alternative lifestyles.  The subculture typically consists of white millennials living in urban areas.  It has been described as a "mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior".

wikipedia

"Rabbi's of old called students of Kabbalah aged 40 and under "hipsters" because, intellectually speaking, they stood only as tall as the Rabbi's hips"

Meta-Memetic Mamafesto

William S. Burroughs was scheduled to give a lecture at a small college in the midwest just before he died.  He was rather ill, and unfortunately had to cancel.  Thankfully some notes scribbled down for that lecture survived and have recently been floating around on the Internet in some of the more obscure corners of 4chan and other weirdo blogs.

The theme of the lecture was to be the Immediacy of Writing.  Burroughs has often stated in the past that "Writing is remembering accurately," alluding to the fact that writing exists solely in the past.  To be more explicit, he states "Writing will never catch up to the present".  Despite this reality, Burroughs felt it shouldn't keep us from trying.

"There is music in the written word, an improvisationally erect tone, but it has been choked off by an unknown extraterrestrial viral infection."

One way to effect a cure is the cut-up technique, a unique and extremely powerful attempt to heal the sickness.   But it is such a fragile technique that it quickly falls apart if abused.  In the mid nineties Burroughs became intrigued by the emergence of the Internet and it's ability to "cut-up" the globe, offering "meatier ribs" for reanimating if not capturing the elusive present.  He envisioned the evolution of a cybernetic window into the trending present, where the dominant memetic winds of the whole globe could intersect in one plane.  The applications of this window were limitless in his estimation, affording anyone the uncanny ability to forecast and resculpt the present moment at will.  He then suggested that no intelligent government would ever allow this "wishing machine gone wild" to fall into the hands of the populace.

Obviously this "wishing machine gone wild" now exists.  Just how powerful it can be and just how long it will remain is not yet known.

"So ya thought ya might like to go to the show?"

The above is a screen capture of the top ten "trending" memes on Yahoo as of 1:30 pm on January 21, 2014.  Amazingly, Burroughs lecture notes also allude to a foreseeable "top-ten list", and includes many techniques to achieve the temporal transcendence possible with such meta-materia.  Suggestions include weaving together all ten memes into a short story written within one hour (suggested time limit by Burroughs), sigilizing the totality, or assigning Tarot cards to each meme through an obscure process that was unfortunately left out of the notes.  These are a few of the more specific applications, but I'm sure Burroughs would invite a healthy bit of improvising in this area.

Does it work?  This is the wrong question.   From my own personal experience, how soon does it work and how strong is the result is is a much better query.  My personal advice for approaching this work for the first time is to do either one of two things:  set a specific target date and time in which to capture your trends or try to forget you ever read this post and then wait for that particular type of energized inspiration that only arises at the most curious of hours.  Lucky for you, the materia will be ready and waiting.  Be ready to attack the work with intention, focus, and verve (what ever happened to verve?).  And make sure you have a strong sense of humor.  Good luck!

Nu-Beta Blues Part 4: Chymical Empire

Blue meth is literally IN the fast food.  Ricin is literally IN the cigarette.  The gun is literally IN the Coca-Cola.  What is this saying?

If I abused Heisenberg’s blue meth, smoking, snorting, or shooting it several times a day, it is pretty much guaranteed that my physical and mental health would go to shit.

If I abuse fast food, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola, eating, smoking, and drinking them several times a day, it is pretty much guaranteed that my physical and mental health would go to shit too.   But there's a huge difference between smoking blue meth and eating fast food, right?

Heisenberg's product is addictive, meaning users of his product are technically victims.  They are helpless to stop using once the drug enters their body, once it affects their brain.  Once it takes over their mind.  This is why meth, which used to be LEGAL, is now ILLEGAL.

Fast food, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola are LEGAL because they are not addictive (well, cigarettes are addictive).  But processed junk foods high in salt and fat and beverages loaded with high fructose corn syrup aren't, right?  Because if they were, they wouldn't be LEGAL, would they?  

What if we found out that consuming fast food, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola had a synergistic affect?  What if when all three were consumed, they became as addictive and damaging to your mental and physical health as blue meth?  If this was true, would we make sure they become ILLEGAL too?  

The empire business sure has a lot of competition.  And really, who wants to live in a world without Coca-Cola?  Or diabetes, heart disease, obesity.  And cancer.

Cereal Killer/Gateway Drug

Alamagordo, NM:  Da Bomb

Nu-Beta Blues: Through a Glass Grade Darkly

"Break, break, break

At the foot of thy stones, O Sea!

And I would that I could utter

The thoughts that arise in me!"

52

{Kappa-Epsilon-Phi-Alpha-Lambda-Eta Nu-Beta}

THE BULL-BAITING

Fourscore and eleven books wrote I; in each did I

expound THE GREAT WORK fully, from The

beginning even unto The End thereof.

Then at last came certain men unto me, saying:

O Master!  Expound thou THE GREAT WORK

unto us, O Master!

And I held my peace.

O generation of gossipers!  who shall deliver you

from the Wrath that is fallen upon you?

O Babblers, Prattlers, Talkers, Loquacious Ones,

Tatlers, Chewers of the Red Rag that inflameth

Apis the Redeemer to fury, learn first what is

Work!  and THE GREAT WORK is not so far

beyond!

[114]

COMMENTARY ({Nu-Beta})

52 is BN, the number of the Son, Osiris-Apis, the

Redeemer, with whom the Master (Fra. P.) identifies

himself.  he permits himself for a moment the pleasure

of feeling his wounds; and, turning upon his generation,

gores it with his horns.

The fourscore-and-eleven books do not, we think,

refer to the ninety-one chapters of this little master-

piece, or even to the numerous volumes he has penned,

but rather to the fact that 91 is the number of Amen,

implying the completeness of his work.

99.1 %

In the last paragraph is a paranomasia.  "To chew

the red rag" is a phrase for to talk aimlessly and per-

sistently, while it is notorious that a red cloth will excite

the rage of a bull.

The Book of Lies

35 + 56

As Leon’s interrogation continues, Holden poses to him a scenario, “You’re in a desert. You’re walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise…” Leon interrupts with questions like, “Which desert?” and “How come I be there?” To his first question, Holden answers, “It doesn’t matter”, pointing to the truth that there is only one desert, the vast expanse that separates Tiphareth from Keter, along which the 13th path of wisdom runs. To Leon’s second question, the blade runner replies, “Maybe you’re fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself”, alluding to the environmental prompting that drives consciousness across that expanse to Keter. This “wanting to be by your Self” is the chief motivator for all actions.

The Blade Runner Bible

The phrase, “Early in the 21st Century” provides us with a clue. Tarot Key 21 is The World in most tarot decks. Aleister Crowley names it The Aeon. It symbolizes the cosmic mind forever dancing at the heart of creation, but it also signifies the entirety of our age, our eon. Identification with this cosmic mind is often referred to as enlightenment, though this rude generalization hardly addresses the nuance of identification with the Cosmos itself. So it is that our story is one of ancient origins. It occurs early in the life of the Universal Mind.

The Blade Runner Bible

21 Days

Through a glass grade darkly…

51

{Kappa-Epsilon-Phi-Alpha-Lambda-Eta Nu-Alpha}

TERRIER-WORK

Doubt.

Doubt thyself.

Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself.

Doubt all.

Doubt even if thou doubtest all.

It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious doubt

there lay some deepest certainty.  O kill it!  Slay the

snake!

The horn of the Doubt-Goat be exalted

Dive deeper, ever deeper, into the Abyss of Mind,

until thou unearth the fox THAT.  On, hounds!

Yoicks!  Tally-ho!  Bring THAT to bay!

Then, wind the Mort!

[112]

COMMENTARY ({Nu-Alpha})

The number 51 means failure and pain, and its

subject is appropriately doubt.

The title of the chapter is borrowed from the health-

giving and fascinating sport of fox-hunting, which

Frater Perdurabo followed in his youth.

This chapter should be read in connection with "The

Soldier and the Hunchback" of which it is in some sort

an epitome.

Its meaning is sufficiently clear, but in paragraphs

6 and 7 it will be noticed that the identification of the

Soldier with the Hunchback has reached such a pitch

that the symbols are interchanged, enthusiasm being

represented as the sinuous snake, scepticism as the

Goat of the Sabbath.  In other words, a state is reached

in which destruction is as much joy as creation.

(Compare Chapter 46.)

Beyond that is a still deeper state of mind, which is

THAT.

The Book Of Lies

I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for his.

Liber AL vel Legis

LoG Lit 🔥