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.


          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"

Watching the Detectives Part 4: Coal Slaw, or Fire Walk With Meme

After a moment Emmanuel said, "Then I can do nothing regarding the universe without consulting you."
     "And you can do nothing regarding the universe that is contrary to what I say," Zina said, "as you yourself decided, in the beginning, when you created me.  You made me alive;  I am a living being that thinks.  I am the plan of the universe, its blueprint.  That is the way you intended it and that is the way it is."
     "Hence the slate you gave me," he said.
     "Look at me," Zina said.
     He looked at her--and saw a young woman, wearing a crown, and sitting on a throne.  "Malkuth," he said.  "The lowest of the ten sefiroth."
     "And you are the Eternal Infininite En Sof," Malkuth said.  "The first and highest of the sefiroth of the Tree of Life."

Philip K. Dick

The Greater Adept's mundane consciousness is portrayed by the yellow of Atziluth. This symbolizes that the person is living through the Individuality instead of being ruled by the Personality. 

Freud wrote, mystified, "The unconscious is not aware of its own mortality," and Aleister Crowley, more perceptively wrote, "The unconscious is aware of its immortality."

Robert Anton Wilson

It should never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. 

Aleister Crowley

Cohle describes the possibility of other dimensions existing, and he says that’s what eternity is.  He says that if somehow you existed outside of time, you’d be able to see the whole of our dimension as one superstructure with matter superimposed at every position it had ever occupied.  He says that the nature of the universe is your consciousness, and it just keeps cycling along the same point in that superstructure: when you die, you’re reborn into yourself again, and you just keep living the same life over and over.  He also explains that from a higher mathematical vantage point, our dimension would seem less dimensional.  It would look flattened, almost.

Nic Pizzolatto

The kabbalists insisted that the Ein Sof and the sefirot formed a unity “like a flame joined to a coal.” 

I plan on writing an epic poem about this gorgeous pie.

Gordon Cole

I see dead people.

Cole Sear

It's like, in this universe, we process time linearly.  Forward. But outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage, could we attain it, we'd see our space-time look flattened, like a seamless sculpture.

Rustin Cohle

C:\>(MYTH)>RELIGION>(POLITICS)>
SCIENCE>(SCHIZOPRENIA)>MAGI

The Zohar rarely describes the entire sefirotic system.  It even avoids the term sefirot and instead speaks of lights, levels, links, roots, garments of the King, crowns of the King, and dozens of other images for the individual sefirot.  The reader must interpret the symbolism and identify the corresponding sefirah.

As noted above, the term sefirot originally meant numbers or numerical potencies, but in medieval kabbalah the sefirot became stages of God’s being, aspects of divine personality.  Their pattern and rhythm inform all the worlds of creation.  Prior to the emanation of the sefirot, God is unmanifest, referred to as Ein Sof, Infinite, God as Infinity cannot be described or comprehended.  A fourteenth century kabbalist writes “Ein Sof… is not hinted at in the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, or the words of our Rabbis, may their memory be a blessing, but the Masters of Service (the kabbalists) have received a little hint of It.”

Critics charged that the theory of Ein Sof and the sefirot was dualistic, that by positing and describing ten aspects of Divinity, Kabbalah verged on polytheism.  The kabbalists insisted that the Ein Sof and the sefirot formed a unity “like a flame joined to a coal.”  “It is they, and they are It” (Zohar 3:70a).   “They are Its name, and It is they” (3:11b).  From the human perspective, the sefirot appear to have a multiple and independent existence.  Ultimately, though, all of them are one; the true reality is the Infinite.  Nevertheless, the mythological character of the system cannot be denied; it is a prominent feature of the Zohar.

The sefirot are often pictured in the form of Primordial Adam or a cosmic tree growing downward from its roots above.  As the kabbalists were quick to point out, these images should not be taken literally; they are organic symbols of a spiritual reality beyond normal comprehension.

Daniel Chanan Matt and Arthur Green

PORTRAYING THE DEVELOPMENT OF EGO CONSCIOUSNESS

The colours for Malkuth on the Qabalistic Tree given by Gareth Knight in A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism and Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah are:

Assiah: black rayed yellow

Yetzirah: citrine, olive, russet & black, flecked gold

Briah: citrine, olive, russet & black

Atziluth: yellow

Of the four worlds we will look at Atziluth as the highest world and Assiah as the lowest. Thus the development of the ego would be from Assiah to Atziluth. In the Assiatic world the colours of Malkuth are black-rayed yellow. When a baby is born it comes into the physical world in an egoless state. The child's mundane consciousness is a blank slate on which the impressions of life will be written. This is symbolized by the black colour. Also black is the colour of Binah in Briah. The child's first impressions of the world are through its mother (before and after birth). The yellow rays are the Spirit which maintains and supports both mundane consciousness and the physical body. As the child starts to mature it comes into contact with the Yetziratic World. This is its own inner world and the desires and needs can be identified. Then an effort can be made to fulfil them. The citrine is a Yesodic colour and shows that the child needs to be nurtured and to develop its imaginative and intuitive faculties. The infant then starts to explore its feelings. The breast feels good and so does sucking on it. Being left alone is painful.

How many parents have had sleepless nights due to babies discovering this fact? This is symbolized by the olive colour which portrays Netzach (instincts, feelings and emotions) coming into consciousness.

As the child grows it starts to learn mobility and verbal communication. After a few years the child becomes a pupil at a school and the years of education begin. Russet is the colour applicable to this phase of consciousness and it symbolizes the Sephirah Hod (communication and intellect). The fourth colour of Malkuth in Yetzirah is black which in this world represents Binah the All Mother. This suggests that good mothering (whichever parent does it) is crucial in the balanced development of the child, especially on all the inner levels of being.



The circle of Yetziratic consciousness starts again at puberty, represented by the citrine of Yesod which starts the full flowering of the adolescent's Netzach with the onset of sexual feelings symbolized by the olive colour. Late adolescent and early adult intellectual maturation is again represented by the russet of Hod. And the Yetziratic wheel spins on. This cycle can occupy the whole of a person's life. How many elderly people have we met who still show this juvenile psychological make-up of Malkuth in Yetzirah? Some people even regress back to infantile psychology through senility. Thus for a lot of people the upper worlds exist only in their unconsciousness.

Before I discuss the Briatic level of ego consciousness, I would like to illustrate the common way that Western Qabalists draw Malkuth in Briah:

The first symbol that struck me was the quartered circle: a sign of unification and balance. The black quarter is at the bottom. On the left is the russet quarter at the gate of the 31st path leading to Hod. The citrine is at the gate of the 32nd path and the olive quarter relates to the Sephiroth at the end of these paths. I think and feel that the energies of these paths flow freely and with full consciousness into the mundane consciousness of Malkuth. Thus the person who can achieve this level of consciousness would be extremely aware of him/herself.

Before the Briatic level of consciousness is opened, the person must go through a crisis. Our Western mythologies support this fact: Christ crucified; Odin hanging on Yggdrasil; the Mad Merlin of the Vita Merlini; and the wounded Fisher King. For a lot of 20th century people, the mid-life crisis can be the impetus to find themselves. For men, it should be the start of raising into consciousness of the Anima (their unconscious female Self). For women, it is the acceptance of loss of fertility due to menopause and thus the integrating of the Bearded Woman who is an aspect of Binah. The black is this crisis and it is at the bottom of our diagram showing that Briatic consciousness is achieved by passing through the Dark Night of the Soul. In the lower worlds I likened the black to Binah; here it is the awakened Shekinah (and it doesn't matter what sex the person is) preparing to meet the Divine Bridegroom.

The spiritual crisis when successfully resolved stops the cyclical pattern of Yetzirah. The inner tides are subdued and brought into balance. Thus the symbol of the quartered circle: this shows that the elements are in harmonious conjunction within the consciousness and are working at optimum levels in the Ego as represented by Malkuth. This is the level of the Lesser Adept. The Greater Adept's mundane consciousness is portrayed by the yellow of Atziluth. This symbolizes that the person is living through the Individuality instead of being ruled by the Personality. The person is consciously living according to Divine Will or, to express it another way, this person is living his/her Dharma. 

Chris Scott

Watching The Detectives Part 3: No Noose is Good Nous

The Hanged Man of the Thoth Tarot still symbolizes the descent of the light into the darkness in order to redeem it, but the word "redeem" no longer implies an existing debt that needs to be paid.  Instead, redemption in the Aeon of Horus is the noble duty of the enlightened to bring enlightenment to the unenlightened.

Lon Milo Duquette

The Hanged Man:  Noose

"I saw you in my dream.  You're a priest too.  I know what happens next, you're in Carcosa now."

Reggie Ledoux

In the Old Aeon of Osiris, The Hanged Man represented the dying God, the formula of the crucified Christ, signifying sacrifice and redemption.  

"I contemplate the moment in the Garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion."

Cohle

Lon Milo Duquette writes that "the gesture of Sacrificial Suicide is not only obsolete, it is counterproductive".  This is what keeps Cohle asleep at night:  not only will suicide not work, it is a step backward.  He has no choice but to forge ahead.

The Yellow King:  Nous


In the New Aeon of Horus, The Hanged Man is a card of sacrifice and duty.  On the Tree of Life, The Hanged Man falls on the 23rd Path, that of Mem, the path of the mystic, the annihilation of self.   This is not a journey to the great beyond, but rather a journey inward.

Mem-Brain Theory

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each 
somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody.

Cohle

The formula of the old Aeon is LVX as found concealed within the keywords INRI-IAO… LVX, lux, the Light of the Cross: the dying and resurrecting god-trip, which formerly opened the Gates to the Temple of Initiation, as seen in the Adeptus Minor ritual of the Golden Dawn. It has been superseded by a new formula: NOX, the Dark Night of the Soul, the Night of Pan…

L.V.X.

“The Night of Pan is the Annihilation of All.”

Further still…

“This is the Night wherein I am lost, the Love through which I am no longer I”

Beth Kimbell

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

"You're a Priest too."

Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt.  For every star possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage.  To do this, it is necessary to behave as must be done in order to get on good terms with animals and children: to treat them with the absolute respect; even, in a certain sense, with worship.  Note on the Precession of Aeons:  "The Hanged Man" is an invention of the Adepts of INRI-IAO formula; in the Aeon previous to the Osirian, that of Isis (water), he is "The Drowned Man".

Aleister Crowley

Watching The Detectives Part 2: Form and Void

"People out here, it's like they don't even know the outside world exists.  Might as well be living on the moon."

"Can I ask you something?  Are you a Christian?"

"No."

"Well then what do you got that cross up there in your apartment?"

"That's a form of meditation."

"How's that."

"I contemplate the moment in the Garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion."

"But you're not a Christian.  So what do you believe?"

"I believe people shouldn't talk about this shit at work."

"I tell what I have seen and what I believe; and whoever shall say that I have not seen what I have seen, I now tear off his head.  For I am an unpardonable Brute, and it will be thus until Time is no longer Time.  Neither Heaven nor Hell, if they exist, can do anything against this brutality which they have imposed on me, perhaps so that I may serve them….Who knows?  

In any case, in order to lacerate me.

What exists, I see with certainty.  What does not exist, I shall create, if I must."

Antonin Artaud

HBO's True Detective premiered on January 12, 2014, 42 days before the 25th anniversary of Laura Palmer's death on February 24th, 1989.  This is appropriate because True Detective works like the magical child of David Lynch's strange and mystifying masterpiece.  And just like Twin Peaks, everything that happens in True Detective takes place within a dream.  A nightmare.

The mystery before us then is whose dream is it?

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

James Joyce

Why should I live in history, huh? Fuck, I don't want to know anything anymore.
This is a world where nothing is solved.  Someone once told me, "Time is a flat circle.
Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again."   

Rustin Cohle

in eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow.  Nothing can become.
Nothing changes.
So death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into.  I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life.  You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into.    

Rustin Cohle

In 1995, a young woman is found murdered, and two CID homicide detectives are called in to investigate a crime scene that suggests ritualistic intent.  The case of Dora Kelly Lange is officially opened.

Our first clue that we are in fact in the world of the dream is that the case of D. Kelly Lange is reopened 17 years later.  This not only mirrors the 17 years it took James Joyce to write his epic book of dreams Finnegans Wake, it also mirrors the structure of the book, as the final sentence on the last exhausting page of FW does not bring closure, it simply reopens.

Coincidence?  

Our second clue is embedded in the title of the first episode,  "The Long Bright Dark".  This is a pretty decent description of a dream.  It also includes the last name of our victim, as "Lange" is German for "long".  "The Lange Bright Dark", maybe this is simply Lange's dream (maybe TP was Laura's dream?).  If I was murdered, I would hope that my life warranted a thorough investigation, and that brave individuals would risk their lives to bring my killer to justice.  Let's look a little closer before we close this case.

Our next clue is the spiral symbol painted on the body of the deceased.

Grand Guignol

Where else have we seen that symbol?

Log Boy

The spiral symbol painted on the body is the same spiral symbol we find in front of another haunted detective (also hunting an underground chemist), and is utilized as a kind of logo for the 'Pataphysics of Alfred Jarry.

This term 'Pataphysics first appears within the text of Jarry's play Guignol, and the most direct definition is "that which is above metaphysics" (or shit you don't talk about at work).  The killer's use of the symbol is odd.  The murder scene suggests the use of sympathetic magic, a work that is "below metaphysics" (below not in a critical sense, but in a directional dense).  Something very bi-polar is going on here.

From Antonin Artaud's The Alfred Jarry Theater:

Our inability to believe, to accept illusion, is immense.  Dramatic ideas no longer have for us the brilliance, the bite, that quality of something unique, unprecedented, whole, that continue to characterize certain ideas in literature or painting.  The moment we introduce this idea of pure theater and try to give it concrete form, one of the first questions we must face is the question whether we will be able to find an audience capable of giving us the necessary minimum of confidence and trust, capable, in short, of joining forces with us.  For, unlike writers, or painters, we cannot do without an audience; indeed, the audience becomes an integral part of our undertaking.

To entertain pataphysically, to take an audience's thinking beyond metaphysics, requires an absolute shit-ton of confidence.  This is why I consider David Lynch to be the consummate pataphysician of our time.  He bravely recognized that the American television audience was ready for the pataphysical mind-fuck of Twin Peaks (bi-polarity) in 1990.  If True Detective really is the magical child of Lynch, it makes sense then, at least for me, that the best way to approach True Detective is pataphysically.  Like a true detective.

In The Alfred Jarry Theater, Artaud insists that the audience plays an integral role in the success of the show.  He demands that for the theater to work, there must exist at least a "minimum of confidence and trust" within the audience.  The bare miminum of this confidence and trust is represented in the character of Detective Martin Hart.  His shallow, hypocritical defense of the sanctity of marriage and his eye-rolling disdain for anything beyond his ken will clearly not solve the case, but his participation is still essential.  As much as they would like to believe, pataphysician's do not exist within a void, even they require someone with heart, someone a little more grounded in "reality" to make sure that they don't go too far off the rails, and Woody fulfills his role admirably.

The person closest to our Tall Man, our true detective, is the one with the tall boy, a Lone Star trekking across the desert abyss with his trusty Camel.

"I don't sleep.  I just dream."

Detective Rustin Cohle can't sleep.  He can't sleep because he already knows he is in a dream ("a jury rig of presumption and dumb will . . . it was all . . . a dream you had inside a locked room.  A dream about being a person").   He continues to search for clues because he isn't quite sure the dream is his or the killer's, or someone else entirely.  If he was sure it was his dream, he would just put a bullet in his head and end it.  But if it is indeed the killer's dream, a bullet in his head won't solve a thing.  The nightmare won't end until he puts a bullet in the killer's head.

As Cohle searches for the killer, we realize what he is really searching for is salvation.  Not the kind that is promised by ordinary metaphysics, and not the kind delivered by sympathetic magic, but the kind that promises the total annihilation of doubt.  The answer not to "what?" but to "why?".

We are told that you're supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet it's…..The felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.  I mean we fall in love, make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland, we lose everything, we get terrible diseases, we're cured of them, or we die of them, but it all has this sturm und drang aspect to it that physics is not supposed to have but which literature always has and I think, I don't know if it's true, but what I think Joyce believed and what I'm willing to entertain at some depth is the idea that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing comprehension.  That salvation is an actual act of apprehension of understanding.  And that this act of apprehension involves everything.

Terence McKenna

Dale Cooper played the role of our true detective in TP.  He spent two seasons searching for the killer of a young woman.

Salvation?

There was also a physician in TP, Dr. Lawrence Jacobi, played by Russ Tamblyn.  

RussT.

It is no coincidence that Dr. Jacobi looks like Terence Mckenna, because the character was based on Terence McKenna.  McKenna is most widely known for his views on psychedelic drugs, but for those who really spend time with his work, you will find him to be one of the more astute pataphysicians around.  His examinations of Joyce, coincidence, and the plain old weird happenings of life in the twentieth century led him to a pretty bold conclusion:

I think that the whole of the twentieth century is informed by this hyper-dimensional understanding, and that, you know, Jung tapping into it in the twenties, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the surrealists, even earlier the Ecole de Pataphysique, Lautréamont, Jarry, all of these people…it’s what it’s about.  

Terence McKenna

We are asleep in a nightmare called history.  We will never achieve wake up until we solve the mystery before us, until we catch the killer whose crimes keep happening over and over and over again.  Joyce, Lynch, McKenna, and now Nic Pizzolatto, are compelling us to join forces with them, because even they can't do it all by themselves.

A.A.:  Lone Star In Sight

For a long time I have felt the Void, but I have refused to throw myself into the Void.  I have been as cowardly as all that I see.  When I believed that I was denying this world, I know now that I was denying the Void.  For I know that this world does not exist and I know how it does not exist.  What I have suffered from until now is having denied the Void.  The Void which was already within me.

Antonin Artaud

"You ever heard of something called membrane theory, detectives?" 

 "It's like, in this universe, we process time linearly.  Forward. But outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage, could we attain it, we'd see our space-time look flattened, like a seamless sculpture. Matter in a super-position—every place it ever occupied. Our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension—that's eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it's a sphere. But to them, it's a circle."

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 and focus.  And make sure you have a strong sense of humor.