The Last Word Pt. 2: A Big Piece of Art with a Little Piece of Shit In The Middle

The flux world is real because the dialectic is real, and it is the mechanism by which Finnegans Wake advances up the ladder of its own evolution—Finnegans Wake, then, is not static. It is permanent but this is a dynamic permanence. Equilibrium must always exist in Finnegans Wake;  the antithetical forces of the dialectic are in a secret partnership in and as Finnegans Wake.  This is why Finnegans Wake main device in dealing with the flux world—in order to use it to generate new bits for Finnegans Wake is enantiodromia, the conversion or backward turning of something when it reaches an extreme into its opposite. It is by this and this mainly if not alone that Finnegans Wake evolves.

Possibly we would see Finnegans Wake as a flicker of on-off, on-off, on-off, a flip-flop back and forth in its ceaseless dialectic that is in it but beneath it or rather enclosed within the palintropos harmonie of Finnegans Wake;  Finnegans Wake as our world is this flip-flop; Finnegans Wake as a coherence is palintropos harmonie.  All this is very much what Heraclitus taught and he would probably have called Finnegans Wake Logos.

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You look at one spatiotemporal continuum and another spatiotemporal continuum and you see that they are one. They do not merely resemble each other nor are they just tangent. They are the same thing in terms of some underlying essence. The quantum leap in brain-function is when you go from thinking, “These two spatiotemporal continua resemble each other” to “They are one and the same, expressed at two places and two times.” And you can only do this if you have experienced anamnesis, because if you have not recollected (recovered) you can go no further than seeing that the two continua resemble each other; you cannot make the leap—which is up out of the spatiotemporal universe. Because within our spatiotemporal universe it is impossible that USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 could be one and the same . . . how could they be? They are at two times and two places. The only way they could be one and the same would be if time and space were somehow not real; or, put another way, if something about the two continua themselves were not real. That is, if Rome was not Rome; USA was not USA; but both were a third thing, the same thing.

This is why I call it a meta-abstraction. USA 1974 and Rome A.D. 45 are two ways of looking at the same thing: two aspects of the same thing.  And the only way you are ever going to realize this is if you literally actually see the two of them superimposed, commingled.  This will only happen if you experience anamnesis; and you will only experience this anamnesis if something stimulates—releases, actually—your blocked memory.

I am saying, “One plus one equals two,” to people who are saying, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples. One table plus one table equals two tables.” It’s not their fault. I’m sorry but the difference between my meta-abstraction as a brain function and their abstracting, their brain function is that great. I’m lucky. Because of the sodium pentothal and the Christian fish sign my blocked memory of my prenatal life was disinhibited.  After making the initial leap in meta-abstracting my brain drew conclusion after conclusion, day after day; and I saw world more and more in terms of conceptual or morphological arrangement and less and less in terms of the spatiotemporal.  I continued to abstract reality more and more, based on the hierarchy of realms (each higher one possessing more unity and ontology than the lower) that Plotinus describes.

In a way I feel really bitter: because I can’t tell anyone or convince anyone of what I saw.  I’m afraid iAhuasca won’t convince anyone. I feel like joining them and saying, “When I played The Kubrick Transformer last night the performance was a lot better than when I played it last week.” They’d think I was a lunatic.  That’s how I feel about them, in a way.

Philip K Dick on Valis, October 1980