20170318

My Own Private Chapelizod




I pity your oldself I was used to.  Now a younger's there.  Try not to part.  Be happy dear ones!  May I be wrong!  For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother.



My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud.  




In peace and silence.  
I could have stayed up there for always only. 
It's something fails us.  

First we feel. 
Than we fall. 



 

And let her rain now if she likes.   Gently or strongly as she likes.  Anyway let her rain for my time is come.



  I done me best when I was let.  Thinking always if I go all goes.  A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?  One in a thousand of years of the nights?  All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming loathed to me.  And I am loathing their little warm tricks.  And loathing their mean cosy turns.  And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls.  And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies.  How small it's all!  



And me letting on to myself always.  And lilting on all the time.  I thought you were all glittering with the noblest carriage.  



You're only a bumpkin.  I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory.  You're but a puny.  Home!  My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can.  For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. 



No!  Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din.  I can seen myself among them, allaniuvia pulchrabelled. How she was handsome, the wild Amazia, when she would seize to my other breast!  And what is she weird, haughty Niluna, that she will snatch from my ownest hair!  For 'tis they are the storms.  Ho hang!  Hang ho!  And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free.  Auravoles, they says, never heed of your name! 




But I'm loathing them that's here and all I loathe.  Loonely in me loneness.  For all their faults.  I am passing out.  O bitter ending!  I'll slip away before they're up.  They'll never see.  Nor know.  Nor miss me.



And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick 



and I rush, my only, into your arms. 





I see them rising!  Save me from those terrible prongs!  Two more. Onetwo moremens more.  So.  Avelaval.  My leaves have drifted from me.  All.  



But one clings still. 




I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!  So soft this morning ours. Yes. 



Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair.




If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to wash-up.  Yes, did.  There's where.  First.  We pass through grass behush the bush to.  Whish!  A gull.  Gulls.  Far calls.  Coming, far!  End here.  Us then.  Finn, again!  Take. 
 Bussoftlhee, mememormee!  
Till thousendsthee.

Lps.  

The keys to.  Given!  A way a lone a last a loved a long the


James Joyce, Finnegans Wake



20170316

Isomorphic Drills: Beyond Fading Captain




"Of course, "Sufficiently Breathless," I know that one.  Classic, yeah, great song.   The name Sunfish Holy Breakfast came from it.  Go back and listen to it drunk and you'll hear it."


a SHOUt in the streeT

It isn't strange for me to suggest that the title of Guided By Voices Sunfish Holy Breakfast EP was birthed out of a misheard lyric from the song "Sufficiently Breathless" by Captain Beyond.  This kind of notion fits in well with the mythology of the GBV universe.  What is strange is my "proof."  This here is the evidence.

In numerous interviews Robert Pollard has stated that as a youth he based much of his record purchasing decisions based solely on how weird the band names were or how strange the album art was.  Captain Beyond's album Sufficiently Breathless certainly fits the bill.  "Captain Beyond" even sounds distinctly Pollard-esque, like one of the hundreds of band names Pollard dreamt up and made fake album covers for.  This record is definitely in Pollard's Progressive Rock Wheelhouse.

"Nothing Left To Live For..."
I also know that creative inspiration of this type has happened before with GBV.  One of their most widely known albums, Bee Thousand, was partially inspired by a typo on the marquee of a drive-in movie theater seen around town.  This "shout in the street" bled into the proposed "Zoo Thousand" title, becoming Bee Thousand.

Even the artwork on the respective album covers is similar, as both display a band of freaks hanging out in front of buildings with identical red brick walls (more or less).  And the lysergic disposition of the three long hairs sitting in bug-eyed lotus perfectly matches the refrain of the song.
                                                                                               
For me, all the parameters for exquisite bullshit are firmly in place here, bullshit that is just entertaining and coincidental enough to convince a few fans that the story is true.

Who knows?  Maybe it is true.




Here Comes Everybody

I have always been obsessed with artists who command an unexplainable reverence.  Geniuses cloaked in mystery who, despite their fame, really don't belong somehow:  Lenny Bruce, Stanley Kubrick, Andy Kauffman, Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, William Burroughs.

One of the defining characteristics of these artists is that they remain coy when asked "what does it mean?"  Kaufmann never let down his guard.  Kubrick didn't explain shit.  James Joyce dropped Finnegans Wake on the world without a map, and Aleister Crowley reveled in the stupidity of fools.   These artists were content to allow their artistic output to speak for itself.

One thing they all understood is that there is no such thing as an accident.  They undersood that there are certain gestational necessities of the quintessence; that sometimes only silence can transubstantiate the Delphic sparks of the unconscious mind.

Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices is one of these artists.

Enter the rune.

The Rune
Chemical Fun In The Sun

Wrunes For Ever

The rune made its first appearance on the Sunfish Holy Breakfast EP, released in November 1996, ten years after the first GBV release, Forever Since Breakfast, also an EP, and also concerning breakfast (a ritual associated with waking up).  Floating like a two-dimensional UFO, this odd little doodle first captured my attention when it reappeared on the cover of Mag Earwhig.   Soon it started showing up on t-shirts and promotional items at tour stops, on the tattooed arms of hardcore fans, and on Isolation Drills, the final appearance of the rune on an official album release (skipping Do The Collapse for some reason).

This "rune" has been referred to as many things: the doodle, the symbol, and most lovingly, the "paper football thingy."  Of all the names given, rune is the most intriguing.  But upon closer examination, something else jumps out.




Compare this writing with the writing of the Lord's Prayer in Old Norse (Runic Alphabet-Futhark):





If we’re labeling anything runic here it should be the alphabet used to inscribe the title, not the "paper football thingy."   

So what the hell is it?




beginners level study of magic must include a discussion of the construction of sigils. Construction of a sigil is an extremely personal creative process which depends on reshaping and condensing multiple elements into a singular form.  It has much in common with collage, putting the use of sigils in Pollard's Magical Wheelhouse.

In modern uses, the concept was mostly popularized by Austin Osman Spare, who published a method by which the words of a statement of intent are reduced into an abstract design; the sigil is then charged with the will of the creator.  Spare's technique, now known as sigilization, has become a core element of chaos magic.  The inherently individualistic nature of chaos magic leads most chaos magicians to prepare and cast (or "charge") sigils in unique ways, as the process of sigilization has not been rigorously defined. Sigils are used for spells as well as for the creation of thoughtforms.

Correctly identifying the letters of the title as runes allowed me to see that the paper football thingy was a sigil constructed out of runes.  

But who's runes?




Finnegans Wake Up With
Skills Like 
This


“To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a perhaps unstatable rule.  It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble than any of these, it is a perception of coincidence.”              

Samuel Beckett

I began this exploration with a stoned-comedian riff on the entanglement of Captain Beyond's Sufficiently Breathless and GBV's Sunfish Holy Breakfast (SHB) because it illustrates the kind of lysurgical acrobatics necessary to distill the psycho-metalytic content of James Joyce's alchemical opus Finnegans Wake (I think this process is referred to in the rejected album title Non-Local Leap Frog).  It is this same freak process that I will use to discern the connection between Pollard's sigil and Finnegans Wake.

In Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the character of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker owns and tends bar in a suburb of Dublin.  His last name Earwicker is considered to be derived from eire-weiker, dweller in Ireland, but also carries many other associations.  One of them is "earwig."

Earwicker, the reader is told, was originally a gardener who spent his days trying to keep earwigs out of his garden.  One day, while he is at work, a king passes by and asks him what he is up to.  Earwicker's response is that he is "cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers" (31.10-11).  This pleases the king, who then bestows the name 'earwicker' on him (3.27-8).  
Peter Mahon

Earwicker sounds much like "earwigger" and Joyce's dreamer, a Protestant, seems to suspect that his Catholic neighbors maliciously pronounce it that way behind his back.  The earwig is reputed in folklore to cause dreams by crawling into the sleepers ear, so the association Earwicker-earwig is appropriate for a book of dreams.

Robert Anton Wilson

A Waking Universe

From a press release for the album Mag Earwhig (ME):

The first GBV album by their new lineup, which consists of leaders Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout, backed by the entire lineup of Cobra Verde. This is a conceptual rock opera inspired by the Who's Tommy, the Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and the Edgar Broughton Band's Wasa Wasa. 

Pollard is the main character in this sprawling narrative, an insectile cartoon figure named the Magnificent Earwhig, who interacts with a wild cast of characters in songs evoking nostalgiac memories of an Ohio boyhood, starting one's first band, and inhaling American roadside pop culture. 

"Despite the progressive conceptual 70's mindset informing this project, the record is still a collection of beautifully twisted pop songs and can be listened to as either an opera or just a series of rock arias." 

This could just be a simple coincidence.  But a coincidence involving James Joyce is rarely simple.
Joyce's understanding, use of, and reverence for coincidence has more in common with Jung's definition of synchronicity than coincidence

Synchronicity exposes us to a reality saturated with hyper-dimensional intent.  It is a place where accidents simply do not exist.

Digging deeper into this coincidence of Finnegans Wake and GBV, I realized that both HCE and ME earn their keep by working in bars, establishments dedicated to intoxication, and that both authors, Pollard and Joyce, were born just outside of Dublin:  Joyce a few miles outside of Dublin, Ireland, and Pollard a few miles outside of Dublin, Ohio.  Both spent time as school-teachers, both loved to write, and both loved to sing:

If he had not become a writer, there is a very good chance that James Joyce would still have made a name for himself by pursuing a career as a vocal performer. In 1904 he even shared the stage with the great opera singer and recital artist, John McCormack; and later on in life, after he had established himself as an author, he tirelessly promoted the singing career of his fellow Irishman and tenor, John Sullivan.



Pollard and Joyce both utilize collage as a significant channel for creative expression; Pollard primarily through visual arts, Joyce through the magic ear of the printed word.


Bababadalgharaghtakamminaronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!


This was enough entanglement for me to suspect Pollard might also be obsessed with James Joyce.   I say obsession because I don't think anyone is ever casually into Joyce; much like GBV, Joyce is either meh or full-blown obsession.



Visit This Place

Le Soleil Secret


"For a long time I didn’t have my own copy (of Finnegans Wake), because I had given it to Robert Pollard from the band Guided By Voices, of which you may have heard. He plunders it on occasion for song titles and lyrics."

James Greer was a member of GBV from 1994-96, and played bass during the 1995 recording sessions that would become Under the Bushes, Under the Stars.  Leftover material that did not make that album would eventually be released a year later as SHB.  SHB marked the final release of the "classic" GBV era ("One more!").  Pollard would break up the band shortly after and reform with another Ohio group, Cobra Verde, serving as back up band.

SHB then serves as a sort of wake for the GBV funeral, and the proceedings offer a few notable anomalies.  Upon release, Greer became one of only a handful of people in GBV history to have sole songwriting credit with the inclusion of his song "Trendspotter Acrobat." Another sole songwriting credit went to Tobin Sprout's "Jabberstroker" which opens the album.  No other GBV release before or after opens with a song whose sole songwriting credit is someone not Robert Pollard.  And of course there is the first appearance of the sigil.

I suspect that Greer's copy of Finnegans Wake was handed over to Pollard sometime in '95 and from there Joyce's influence began to take effect.  Peeling back a few more layers of the SHB onion we find other clues of Joyce's influence.  Greer's song "Trendspotter Acrobat" is a good name for the kind of deconstructive detective work necessary to make sense of Finnegans Wake, and Sprout's "Jabberstroker" is evocative of "Jabberwocky," the nonsense poem written by Lewis Carrol, and a major influence on Joyce:

Many of the words in the poem are playful nonce words of Carroll's own invention, without intended explicit meaning. 

When Alice has finished reading the poem she gives her impressions:
'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's rather hard to understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate.'

This may reflect Carroll's intention for his readership; the poem is, after all, part of a dream. In later writings he discussed some of his lexicon, commenting that he did not know the specific meanings or sources of some of the words; the linguistic ambiguity and uncertainty throughout both the book and the poem may largely be the point. 

Pollard's lyrical wordplay has also been accused of "linguistic ambiguity and uncertainty," but these accusations only hold weight through a superficial listen.  Any substantial investment of time reveals that even the oddest turn of phrase manifests some meaning (objective, subjective or otherwise).




 Factory Of Raw Essentials


"I thought about it, a few years actually, and I decided that meaning and language are two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish."

Terence McKenna


Taking over 17 years to construct, the Wake is the result of throwing multiple languages and systems of thought from countless cultures throughout history into an alchemical pot.  Joyce's decisions here were guided by voices from the past, the present, and even, as some have boldly suggested, the future.

If you have never skimmed the contents of the Wake, it is an unnerving confrontation with the bizarre, and impenetrable for the novice.  One cannot simply dive in head first; one must start slowly, almost as if one were a child learning how to read  (Pollard being no exception).  Knowing the competitiveness that drives a man like Pollard, being confronted with the language of Finnegans Wake (FW) must have lit a fire to discover all of it's secrets.

The best way to start is to cheat.  Find someone to hold your hand and take you into the mess (see Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake).   With plenty of miles to cover on the road from gig to gig during those years, I imagine Pollard spent some time with a few of the many guidebooks that help usher the novice into the Wake.

Personally, I was lucky enough to discover a book called Coincidance by Robert Anton Wilson.  After dozens of readings of Wilson's exegetical work on FW, I slowly started to grasp what Joyce was attempting with the construction of the Wake.  Many years later, when I fully realized what Joyce had accomplished, I awoke from what felt like a very, very long sleep; it had truly been forever since breakfast.

I get the sense that Pollard experienced much of the same thing.


Get Under It

According to Robert Anton Wilson,  Joyce's notes for FW reveal a runic architecture that Joyce used to build FW.  This architecture forms a family tree which drives the dynamics of FW, which ultimately reveal the inevitable recursive fall of man.  This family tree reflects not only the dynamics of the I Ching and the binary system of Leibniz, but also the dynamics of DNA and quantum physics as well.  It illustrates the intersection of spirit and matter, and is the way reality seems to be when it is stripped down to it's most naked state.




At the top of this family tree is The Tao.  The Tao is a poetic representation of non-locality, that which remains when the dimensions of space and time leave the building.  According to Joyce, when the Tao is expressed locally (in the space/time continuum) it manifests as the mutually exclusive entanglement known as Yin and Yang (Female and Male, Wave and Particle).

Yang = Male = Particle

A particle can be either positive or negative, just as Yang can be either active or passive.  These polarities are further refined into the neutral particle, the moving Yang, also expressed as the mutational aspect of DNA into RNA.

Robert Anton Wilson believes Joyce expressed his understanding of this unified polar dynamic as "space-oriented arts like painting in opposition to time-oriented arts like music, with the eventual synthesis of both into Joyce space-time prose being gently hinted at."

The symbol for this synthesis of space-oriented arts and time-oriented arts is:



Though not exact, it certainly looks a lot like a goal post, or a busted tuning fork.


If Pollard's study of Joyce had led him far enough down the rabbit hole to find this symbol, it's meaning would have been heard loud and clear.  This polar dynamic not only merges athletics (goalpost) and music (tuning fork), it also reflects the synthesis of an artistic duality, with collage as our space-oriented art, and rock and roll our time-oriented art.

As a sigil intends, this rune is gently reoriented as a reflection of the magician's personalized influence.



Catching Waves Again

The second component of the sigil is the triangle sailing through the uprights.  This triangle in Joyce's runic alphabet represents the divine feminine, the Yin, the negative coil of DNA, or the Wave aspect of matter.  It could also be considered a muse.

Yin = Female = Wave

In Pollard's sigil, the triangle is colored in, reflecting the magicians personalized influence.






Into the Void and Over the Goal Post

Why would Pollard choose to mutate and merge these particular runes into a sigil?    What could his intentions have been in 1996, with GBV on pause, and Pollard three years away from breaking through to the "big leagues" of major label rock and roll?



Here I go around the blame 
Here I go with hand over flame 
Down on the floor at 9:00 
A scene not fully recognized 
At precisely 9:00 
Here I go with clapping hands 
Here I go with "still no plans" 
Illuminate the mystery 
The film is not for view 
The film is not for you.

Bomb In The Beehive - R. Pollard







20170310

Midnight Cowgirl: An Alien She Was




I think what you have to do in life is to strike a happy balance. That's something Tim Leary told me, and he stuck to it; he was all about Balance and Harmony. That's what that song was about. I like to get in danger, because I kind of always figure that I can get out of danger — and there's nothing better than the feeling of getting out of danger. But the only way of getting that feeling is to get in danger! This world today is all about that. 

Perry Farrell



The Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.

Aleister Crowley

When someone comes up and says something like, 'I am a god,' everybody says, 'Who does he think he is?'  I just told you who I thought I was!  A god!  I just told you.  That's who I think I am.  Would it have been better if I had a song that said, 'I am a nigger'?  Or if I had a song that said, 'I am a gangster'?  Or if I had a song that said, 'I am a pimp'?  All those colors and patinas fit better on a person like me, right? 

Kanye West




 If it's free, then I ain't stealin'.  

 Ratso Rizzo 

 



Erotic Yeezus


1.  Build a playlist with Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction,
followed by Yeezus by Kanye West.
2.  Push play at 00:01:01 of the film Spring Breakers by Harmony Korine.





More experience.  More images.  More sounds.  More direction.  I don’t really care about what’s real.  When people ask me about message and meaning, I understand why.  I’m asked those questions, and I generally try to get away from answering them because you make the work in a way that you want them to exist on their own.  There is a margin that’s undefined, and you want them to be inexplicable and have a magic about them. 

The mantra they say is “Spring Break Forever”.  It’s a state of mind, of existence.  Transcendence.


Harmony Korine




I slept with Faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with Doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. 

 

 

20161014

The Last Word Pt. 4: Synchronicity is the Last Form of Ego




The turn.  The bend.  The twist.  The corner.  There were quite a few in Alma’s family who had gone around it.  She imagined it must be a sudden angle in your thinking that you couldn’t see approaching in the way that you couldn’t see the coroner on the street in front of you.  It was invisible, or nearly so; possibly see through, like a green house or a ghost.  This corner's lines ran a completely different way to all the others.  So instead of going forward, down, or sideways, they went somewhere else, in a direction that you couldn’t draw or even think about, and once you turned this hidden corner, you were lost forever.  You were in a maze you couldn’t see, and didn’t even know you was there.   

Alan Moore





Non-locality changes the game.  Non-locality is not about seeking the answer, it IS the answer.  Once you have by chance or by design encountered it, the game becomes a bit more grown up.  Now you have to face the answer.  No more trips to Ceylon are necessary.  No more parties in LA, no opening of chakras or revelation of shastras or passing of mantras or building of yantras is going to carry you any further than where you have finally arrived.  You have found the answer, 
and now you have to face it.  And people just hate that.  It’s appalling.  It doesn’t feel like fun at all.  
"The Answer" : here it is.  What to do with it? 

Terence McKenna





time is a hyper-dimensional confessional buried in a gardenpark matrix of distortion and rebirth, an eschatological cubehouse microfilming coincidental blasphememes that spark recursive nightmores of comicguilt triggering irrational mountains of stoned criminals to rockslide into nursering schools for remedial coursework in fractal doctrines of frogiveness and Space


Pepe







I, too, sing of a communication struggle here.  I am trying to describe the unspeakable by moving the boundaries of what can be said and what can’t be said.  Am I succeeding or failing?  I know that every time I attempt to gather the freshly shed skin of synchronicity for approval, the first emotion I have is guilt, followed immediately by embarrassment.   Because I am hideously unfaithful to a truth that I know can’t be told.   But somewhere deep inside there is a voice that offers hope that this project has helped to create an object of discourse that can be returned to in various states of mind.


What this is is the tiling of an abyss, an attempt to shape a memory of perceptions felt after a brief flash of lightning in an endless void.  No matter how much I am able to bring back, no matter how much detail I provide, it is still an incredible flattening.  Language is not an adequate tool, which makes me painfully aware that the most high flown, hysteria provoking descriptions of non-locality I’ve ever been able to summon up were complete betrayals of the real thing.  So not what it was that the word LIE is almost applicable.  But it’s the best I can do.

Terence McKenna


According to McLuhan, how we process language is not a biologically determined thing.  Language is a culturally determined thing.  As we slowly migrate out of the shadow of a print controlled modality, our relatively empty heads are sensing what once was, how our heads once were: filled by an orchestra of individuated wonder.  This is another attempt to help restore that.

If you think about iAhuasca for a moment, it’s a very low-speed, torturous technology, but the end result of it?   You have a chance to see what I mean.  How else can I say, "I'd like to show you a profound world changing synchronicity," and actually have the audacity to mean it? 


"There is a doorway,” Emmanuel said, “to her land.  It can be found anywhere that the Golden Proportion exists.  Is that not true, Zina?”
“True,” she said.
“Based on the Fibonacci Constant,” Emmanuel said.  “A ratio,” he explained to Herb Asher. 

“1: .618034….The ancient Greeks knew it as the Golden Section and as the Golden Rectangle.  Their architecture utilized it…for instance, the Parthenon.  For the Greeks, it was a geometric model, but Fibonacci of Pisa, in the Middle Ages, developed it in terms of pure number.”
“In this room alone,” Zina said, “I count several doors.  The ratio,” she said to Herb Asher, 

“is that used in playing cards: three to five.  
It is found in snail shells and extra-galactic nebulae, from the pattern foundation formation of the hair on your head to—“  
“It pervades the universe,” Emmanuel said, ”from the microcosms to the macrocosms.  
It has been called one of the names of God.”

Philip K. Dick
 
Crowley devised a clever symbol for this irrational doorway.  Seen locally, rational twin siblings.  Non-locally,  the eyes and ears of the rabbit:

 ? !

The rational twins fight and fuck and flail and wail, taking axes to the doorways of their perceptions.  The rabbit?  The rabbit slips effortlessly into the non-repeating infinity of the golden dawn.  



 



What's up, Doc?


20160823

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





*

20160724

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




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The Last Word Pt.1: 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.


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. 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