A Magnet for Possibilities (news)

APA Philosophy Referee Hand Sginals (above)
Rumors that first Dark Matter Particle has been discovered
US finally to settle Native American Trust Lawsuit
What Philosophers Believe
How the iPhone could Reboot Education (which I've already seen with my own eyes at Pitt)
Tom Waits may be up for a role in the Hobbit
David Bowie and the Occult
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
The Milky Way at different Wavelengths
Don't Believe in God? Can't Hold Office in NC
MIT's Mind Machine Project takes AI research to 2.0
Dave Eggers publishes a newspaper
Casual Sex found to not be psychologically dangerous for young people
Henry Miller's Watercolors
Should Earth Scientists take a Hippocratic Oath? (I say yes)
The Mystery of the Magically Braided Horse Manes
Music for Water Bears
100 Best last lines of novels, the first of which and my favorite is from Beckett's The Unnameable:

".... ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."

Wild Things

Taking a break from such heavy cosmological topics as the Universe ending in heat death sooner than anticipated and a new translation of the Bible that shows God did not create heaven and earth but merely separate what was already there, Sophie and I went out last night to check out the opening night of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Despite reviews claiming the movie is too depressing or frightening we both found it highly charming, particularly the stellar acting of child-star Max Records, the intricate costumes from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and upbeat soundtrack from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O [Found link, for preview purposes only, buy here]. It was interesting to note that the audience was primarily comprised of young adults, who probably were raised on Sendak's masterpiece and are perhaps the intended target demographic of Dave Egger's script (the whole movie really capturing the indie spirit of the times).


[Potential Spoilers Below]

The thing that really stuck out for me though was what this movie says about the human imagination. Despite our cultural love of monsters and fantasy, the imagination here is presented in its rawest or most primal. Shaggy monsters dance and tear up the woods and throw clods of dirt at each other. Everyone howls and growls. Certainly the monsters possess some amount of adult-like self-reflection (enough to come off as rather depressed), but no more than Max himself. In fact, one could take a psychological perspective that the monsters and their land are all projections of Max's own fears and desires, for friendship, against alienation and being young and misunderstood if not ignored.

But what is interesting was the choice of not stating whether the events of Max's journey really took place or not. The final return scene has no dialogue, so we aren't asked to chose with Max over what really happened, even if with all the day to night transitions he must have been gone for several weeks. This draws on elements of the Fantastic in art, that supernatural events are left ambiguous as to their reality. This is a necessary move because the audience, instead of being asked to decide what is real here, can instead suspend their disbelief and let the monsters be real. They are reflections of ourselves. Of course, this in turn adds more weight to what both Sophie and I decided was one of the pivotal scenes of the movie, when the monster Carrol rips the bird monster's arm off, and the camera focuses on a stream of sand spilling out. Up till this point, Max has taken the monsters as real, but they are shown to be not real, and he starts feeling the need of returning home to his flesh and blood family.

What this says for me is that despite how primal and raw we sometimes need to express our imaginations as children, this rawness sometimes tears holes in the stories we make up and tell ourselves, and shows us what is more importantly real in our lives. For another example, in a school scene at the beginning of the movie, Max is told that one day the sun is going to die, which when he tells the monsters makes them even more depressed and desperate (to tie this in with the links at the beginning of this entry). I think we are encouraged to equate those kinds of predictions of science with the imagination as well, as something that must ultimately give way to the reality of the present and the more immediate significance of our families and loves.

Paprika, by Yasutaka Tsutsui

This is also exciting: Made it into an incredible animated feature by Satoshi Kon in 2006 that I longed to read the original of, Paprika, the surrealist dream/detective novel By Yasutaka Tsutsui, is finally being released in English translation!

"The setting is Tokyo's Institute for Psychiatric Research. Major breakthroughs are taking place, using new machines which access the minds of sleeping patients. A couple of top psychoanalysts are in line for the Nobel Prize for this revolutionary innovation. One is the young and beautiful Atsuko Chiba, who uses the equipment at night to cure some of Tokyo's leading citizens of mental trauma. Atsuko has to be discreet because there are strict restrictions upon the machines, so she disguises herself as an alter ego – the eponymous Paprika. Unfortunately, back at the Institute the machines are being misused by her enemies on the staff, and the most powerful versions have gone missing."

[Edit: Of course it only seems to be available in the UK so far, and they won't ship stateside...]

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville

In “Our Future – Our Past: Fascism, Postmodernism, and Starship Troopers,” Florentine Strzelczyk argues that Hollywood is fascinated with the aesthetic of fascism, especially that of Nazi Germany. Filmmakers use fascist-styled uniforms, symbols, and other elements of mise-en-scène in order to create recognizable dystopian societies – science fiction fascisms. It is interesting to note however that the Nazi Party’s primary symbol, the swastika, was already a recontextualization of an ancient Indo-European sun symbol, through which they were able to express their own dystopic aspirations for the future. The films “V for Vendetta” and “Alphaville” both present dystopian societies that recontextualize familiar symbols through their mise-en-scènes in order to represent the content and style of their particular fascistic worlds, as well as the counter-revolutions to those worlds.

James McTeigue’s 2006 film, “V for Vendetta,” depicts the Norsefire party, a religiously conservative dictatorship that has taken over England in the year 2038. Beyond their Nazi-esque uniforms and Orwellian surveillance and slogans, the Norsefire Party’s primary symbol is a doubled cross, shown in red on a black background. This symbol was originally the Cross of Lorraine, used by the French to counter the Nazi swastika during World War II. In the film this symbol also perverts St. George’s Cross, a single-armed red cross on a white background that historically served as the flag of England and the Church of England, as well as distorts the more familiar Christian cross. The Norsefire party has practiced Nazi (and Christian)-style religious discrimination against Muslims, Jews, and racial and sexual minorities in order to achieve power, and in the movie’s opening newscast the Voice of the Party argues that England prevails because of its faith in a judgmental God watching over the country.

The Norsefire Party’s doubled cross appears many places in “V for Vendetta,” on the Party posters, on the fingermen’s badges, and in news clips, suggesting the ubiquity of the regime. The symbol most predominately appears though along side the massive view screen on which is projected Chancellor Sutler’s face. As the leader of the fascist party, Sutler’s video appearance next to these monstrous doubled crosses suggests that he himself is the removed and ever-watchful God of England, or at least an omnipresent figure reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian “1984.” While it is implied that the crosses are always next to the Chancellor’s view screen, we only see them in specific shots, such as when Sutler demands the falsification of news or a desire to speak “directly” to the people. What is made clear about the symbol’s appearance is that it seems to occur only whenever the government is telling blatant lies. The Norsefire Party’s favorite political technique is double crossing the English people, and the symbol of the doubled cross directly illustrates this each time it is depicted on camera. Even during the art-terrorist V’s newscast early in the film, the doubled cross is shown next to him when he suggests that the people let themselves be tricked by the war, terror, and disease orchestrated by their government.

As opposed to the Norsefire Party’s doubled cross, V employs his own counter symbol, a circled letter V. V’s V does not directly reference or distort the government’s symbol, it is instead a depiction of his historical reasons for vengeance; V was held in room five (the Latin numeral V) of the Larkhill detention center where he was horribly burned and many minorities were killed by the government. This symbol however is displayed in the film in the same red on black as the doubled cross: in V’s newscast, slashed or painted over the Party posters, and even in fireworks over the exploding Bailey and Parliament buildings. Aesthetically, the image of red spray-painted lines over the posters most directly references the pop-culture image of the anarchist symbol, a red, circled letter A. V’s revolution depends exactly on the kind of people-driven chaos discussed in anarchist theories and misrepresented by current popular media. In “V for Vendetta” it is a young girl shot for spray painting V’s symbol that pushes the English people over the edge towards anarchistic rebellion.

While V’s symbol appears all throughout the film, he also employs the V on a linguistic level, taking it out of the level of mise-en-scène. In his opening speech to Evey, V sums up his own political theory using fifty words beginning with the letter V. We also later see that V’s motto is the Latin phrase from Faust, “Vi Veri Verdiversum Vivus Vici,” by the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the Universe. In his newscast, V tells the people of England that words will always maintain their power as an annunciation of truth, and his speeches clearly illustrate this power of language. Unlike the Norsefire Party, V understands that a symbol (like the act of blowing up a building) is by itself meaningless, and must be given an actual voice by actual people in order to have a real affect on the world.

The dystopian symbols and counter-symbols in “V for Vendetta” are clearly depicted, but such is not the case in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film, “Alphaville.” The dystopic government in this movie is a technocracy run by the scientific-logical computer Alpha 60. While Alpha 60 does not employ a direct or ubiquitous symbol like the Norsefire Party’s doubled cross, a set of scientific symbols occurs that can represent the regime: Einstein’s famous formula for mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2, and Planck’s equation for the quantization of light energy, E = hf. Historically, Einstein’s equation stood as a revolution in physics, unifying specific conservation laws of mass and energy into a larger theory under the specific speed of light, though the formula is also linked popularly with ideas of scientific destruction through its use in the creation of the atomic bomb. “Alphaville” plays on this idea that light energy is a logical, destructive power, as, according to Professor Von Braun, the creator of Alphaville, they are entering a Light Civilization attempting to take over the universe.

Planck’s equation states that the energy of light is carried in discrete amounts in relation to its frequency; light is quantized, or, in popular terms, it is digital rather than containing a continuous spectrum of possibilities. In “Alphaville,” the computer Alpha 60 is described by the agent Henry as being 150 light years more powerful than any previous computer, a discrete number he returns to later in his tale about ant societies. This dystopic society similarly operates under the idea that certain words have certain, discrete meanings: any uncertain words are removed from the Bible-dictionary and replaced by more specific ones. Language, like light, has become quantized, and is used as an element of control, much as it is in “V for Vendetta.” This use of scientific equations as fascist symbols in “Alphaville” echoes the head programmer’s statement to agent Lemmy Caution that an order is a logical conclusion; the logic of science cannot be disobeyed.

The biggest challenge in interpreting these scientific formulas as dystopian symbols in “Alphaville,” and in determining the appropriate counter-symbols, is that they only appear in two specific scenes, in brief flashes during moments when Lemmy Caution is figuring out how to counter Alpha 60’s control. In the first of these scenes, Lemmy has just learned from Henry about the computer, and directly following the symbols he says that people have become slaves of probability, statistics and equations being science’s way of controlling people’s perception of what is possible in reality. Henry goes on to tell a story however about a similarly technocratic ant society that 150 light years ago had artists like those in Alphaville, and then the equations flash again, remixed into the statement hf=mc2. Several things are happening here: the equivalence of E in the two formulas could imply that the particle scale of hf, or of the ants in Henry’s story, is the same as the galactic scale of mc2, that Alpha 60 is not only killing artists in Alphaville but would do the same throughout the universe.

Secondly, there is the suggestion that artists offer an alternative to scientific-logical control of how people perceive the world. Throughout the scene and film both of the agents reference popular and artistic culture in their dialogues: comic book detectives of the time; women from French literature; and after being given the poetry book of Éluard, Lemmy says that he is going on a “journey to the end of the night,” a reference to another French novel of the same name that apparently satirizes scientific research. We see the same thing in “V for Vendetta,” where V (and other outlaws like Gordon) attempts to keep human culture alive through collecting censored cultural artifacts and referencing them in dialogue that contrasts with the fascist regime.

During the Institute of General Semantics scene of “Alphaville,” Alpha 60 says that life and death are discreet events on the circle of time. This is echoed later when the scientific equations are flashed again, while Lemmy is being shown a tour of the computer. At this point the symbols flash slower, from left to right, while the computer says that Lemmy thinks more of the past than the future, and then again while Lemmy remarks that he is too old, and that shooting first is his only weapon against fatality. This differentiation between kinds or perspectives of time echoes the earlier symbol scene, most importantly the instant when Lemmy questions the specific 150 light year time frame of Henry’s story and then sets the bare light bulb swinging. This moment suggests that instead of the discrete, logical quantities of energy or power utilized by Alpha 60 through the E=hf equation, light, and life itself, exist in a continuous spectrum that can be accessed through the illogic and uncertainty of art. The past, with its implied reference to artifacts of human culture, can become a weapon against the cultureless dystopian future envisioned by the machine. Most precisely, or creatively, Lemmy uses the culturally subjective meanings of poetic words – symbols without the fixed meanings of scientific equations – to destroy the computer and its fascist society.

There is thus no clear counter-symbol that Lemmy uses in “Alphaville;” poetry is not an emblem to be flashed quickly on a screen or be represented as a direct element of mise-en-scène. Even when we are shown the supposed copy of Éluard’s “The Capital of Pain,” the camera has to slowly pan over the text in order to give the viewer time to interpret the meaning of the words, much the way that Alpha 60 destroys itself slowly by searching for the answer to Lemmy’s poetic riddle. But, as we saw in “V for Vendetta,” it is not V’s fast, iconic V symbol that changes his world either. It is instead the meanings given to symbols and words by people themselves over culturally continuous times (or despite culturally-destroying times) that make symbols powerful, and ultimately keep us free.

On koans and rotting dogs

Erik Davis of Techgnosis on Jodorowsky's Spiritual Memoir:

"A friend recently asked me if I though Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain was a “good” movie, and I had to answer that, in the case of this surreal mythopoetic masterwork, the usual good/bad categorization does not apply. The film is truly beyond category; or rather, it is “terribly good.” While the first half of the movie—which was definitively released on DVD within the last year—is perhaps the greatest sustained expression of visionary psychedelic filmmaking ever, I can understand why people also find the exploding frogs repulsive and the mystagoguery redolent with all the erratic indulgence and hierophantic pretension that mark the more wayward domains of Seventies spiritual counterculture. But even that’s as much a plus as a minus, especially if, like me, you believe that the peculiar genius of this era provided mystical and hedonic conundrums that are still worthy of study and exploration.



"So it was with great excitement that I read the recent translation of Jodorowsky’s spiritual autobiography, entitled—hold onto your hats—The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like his films, it is a puzzling, wonderous, grotesque, and sometimes tedious book, but it does confirm the sense I get from his films that he is not fucking around with the mysteries. In the Sixties and Seventies, Jodorowsky was a serious practitioner of Zen, studying and meditating with a Japanese priest in Mexico City named Ejo Takata. Their koan combat is the most steady thread of this book, a male-buddy-cognitive conversation that forms a counterpoint with the other figures in the book, all of whom are women who offer Jodo various modes of initiation—artistic, sexual, magical, energetic. These women include the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who sounds as wacky brilliant as Dali, and a goat-killing silicone-implanted Mexican actress known as La Tigress."

Review: "Youth Without Youth" by Mircea Eliade

When I saw the Coppola adaptation of this book I somewhat understood why the movie had received so many negative reviews: it was not the action-packed, World War II movie that it's setting might have lent itself towards. Instead, and in true fashion to Eliade's work, the movie dealt primarily with the metaphysical, spiritual, and even paranormal possibilities lurking behind every age, when the aging Romanian professor Dominic Matei is struck by lightning and suddenly rejuvenated, not just physically but with an hypermnesia that allows him to know anything he desires. However, I was somewhat displeased, as much of this came off as slightly removed from the action of the story itself, as if the plot was but an ill-fitting coat hanger for the ideas presented.

As far as Eliade's novella, there is perhaps even less action and drama, and more focus on the possibility of ideas, including a random side adventure into Ireland to witness the Committee to Celebrate the Centennial of the Commemoration of the Death of Irish Poet, Magus, and Irredentist Sean Bran, a scene that seems entirely unrelated to the rest of the book, was dropped from the movie, and yet is one of the more enjoyable sections. "Youth Without Youth" reads more like a synopsis than a fleshed out work of fiction; one could easily imagine it expanded into a tome much like his masterful "Forbidden Forest." However, it also seems possible (the notorious "death of the author" aside) that as this was written at the end of Eliade's life he may have been slightly more concerned with getting the ideas down rather than developing them. If anything it could be a dying scholar and storyteller's wish to have one more chance at life to complete his work, while at the same time realizing the futility of that desire, here cast in terms of Chaungtzu's butterfly parable. Dominic Matei, perhaps Eliade himself, is an old man dreaming that he is a young man dreaming that he is every man, eventually falling into Eliade's spiritual catch-22 of the Eternal Return, bringing the still youthful Matei full circle to die where he had originally desired to commit suicide, having still not completed his life's work but learned to love life in the process.

Metaphysical Gangsters

David Lynch will be working on a film with Alejandro Jodorowsky. Best known for his series of surreal, mind-bending Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky hasn’t made a film since 1990. Jodorowsky certainly shares a lot more common ground with Lynch, but hearing of any new project by the Chilean 79-year-old is a bit incredible.

Jodorowsky’s film will be the metaphysical gangster movie King Shot. Already guaranteed to be NC-17 (no surprise given his earlier works), the film features Marilyn Manson as a 300-year old pope and will star Nick Nolte.

From an interview between Jodorowsky and Manson (in which Manson says "wow!" a lot at all the profound things Jodorowsky has to say):

J: You, Manson, you are a symbol. You always wear make-up, no-one knows who you are… Christ is a man who became a symbol, you are the opposite. You are a symbol who is in the process of becoming human. When you say ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’, you prove your love for the world. You offer yourself… you are food for the vampire cannibals. That’s what I feel. Talking about you personally: you are a mythology, but back to front. Each new era needs new mythologies…

M: I completely agree. You understood that so much better than anyone… yes.

J: To express ourselves as artists in the world, we can no longer destroy it. It is ourselves that we have to destroy... And that's what you have to do. There isn't time to behave like normal people. You have to have the attitude of the old wise man who says "Make construction from destruction". Animals have ways of defending themselves. You can choose to change things, you can choose to save yourself, you can choose to attack. But there is a way of winning against the world, and it's to go into yourself very deeply.

[via technoccult]

More news of the word

I'm always glad to see news about literature and narratives out in the world, even if they are often cast in other mediums then good old paper.

Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," a father and son bonding story set in an ambiguous and bleak apocalypse, was arguably the best book published this past year. It has just finished filming [via reality sandwich], mainly around the Pittsburgh area (which of course to me is really the perfect post-apocalyptic landscape). The movie adaptation of McCarthy's "No Country For Old Men" was also pretty stellar, so I'm quite excited to go see this when it comes out.



In other news, Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing reports that the Stormworm computer virus is now inventing fictional events to entrap people, playing on such natural disaster and celebrity fears as 'Eiffel Tower damaged by massive earthquake' and 'Donald Trump missing, feared kidnapped.' It would be a rather interesting twist if some of these events started to become true...

For Sophie, here is a great collection of links on the writing of and critical controversy surrounding the poet Anne Carson for her birthday, whose novel-in-verse "Autobiography of Red" recasts the mythic monster Geryon as a a modern photographer and lover of Herakles, and really shows some of the ways that old stories can be recycled to reexamine their hidden themes.

And finally, laser-cut typographic scarves!

A Stop Motion Day

I've been having an incredibly déjà vued day, starting with dreams about certain books I should read, wandering down to the Strip to do some shopping and seeing two aging hippies smiling with wonder and glee at the origami in the dashboard of Sophie's car, and then after a nice walk along the river and some writing, this insane stop-motion animation done as paintings entirely on public spaces. Not only do I feel like I've seen this before but I feel that everyone else really has to watch it as well, immensely incredible stuff!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

[via Boingboing]

Spring Cleaning

I generally dislike posting only links, but right now all my original content is wrapped up in school and in other creative pursuits. Thankfully the end of the semester is soon, and I'll have more time to write some of the curious pieces that have been floating around my head this last month or so. But until then...

Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy' [via Boingboing]
Where angels no longer fear to tread: science's search for God [via The Daily Grail]
An upcoming lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on ritual and the spectator
The continued battle between atheism and magic and between science and religion
The mythology of eucatastrophe (that sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist’s well-being )
Living Monsters and dead ones from the deep
D&D Character Alignment as a child's introduction to moral philosophy [via Technoccult]
The Fantastic in art and fiction[via Technoccult]
The Art of mazes
R Crumb's 'The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick'
Myth and Science Fiction [via Technoccult]
Art made from Books



And lastly, this video of Korean Shamans from youtube, in order to encourage me to finish writing my paper on the subject for class :

The Death of the Future

Earlier today I was thinking about a short story I've been working on, in which a robotics engineer who has reached the edge of his career decides to create a magical golem. There's actually a lot more going on that I won't get into, but the important thing is that I considered having the character muse on the quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The originator of this quote, and another great gem, "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible," the science fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, died today at 90 [via technoccult]. I had never really considered Clarke to be one of my bigger inspirations, though I can still vividly recall the awe I felt watching this scene from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" when I was a child:



and the wonder I felt when I finally read Clarke's original novel, as well as his "Rama" series. Unlike the many of these twenty sci-fi novels that will change your life that actually changed my own life, I had never considered "2001" such a world-shaker. And yet... Clarke's philosophical perspective of the near identical nature of technology and magic certainly stuck with me, and perhaps with countless others who went on the take both science fiction, and real science, from the magic of dreams to the technology of reality. In honor of the passing of one of the world's great visionaries, I will go downstairs and grab the nearest sci-fi anthology from my bookshelf.

[EDIT: I hadn't read this one before, but "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps one of the most brilliant sci-fi short stories ever written, about Tibetan monks using a computer to print out a copy of all the names of God.]

The Angel as Absent Narrative: Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"

Last night Sophie and I watched a movie about an angel that falls in love with a human woman. From the title, "Wings of Desire," I thought that it might be a piece of romantic schlock, but I was quite surprised to watch what is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece. Set in Berlin in 1987, this movie is shot in a stark black and white that is reminiscent of early silent films. The "plot" focuses on a group of invisible angels wearing beat up trench coats who live in a public library and spend their time listening in on and sharing with each other the thoughts of the humans around them. One of these angels, in his wanderings around Berlin, discovers a circus and falls in love with the trapeze artist, a woman wearing chicken-feather wings whose thoughts are constantly filled with existential angst, and decides that he wants to become human in order to understand what it is actually like to feel, touch, live. Along the way we meet a comic film star who is an ex-angel, and an archangel who ruminates on the dying art of storytelling while searching for neighborhoods that were destroyed in the war.



Besides these and other revealing scenes, including the final meeting between the angel and the girl at a goth club where Nick Cave and the Badseeds are performing (!), the movie was made more poignant through the director's commentary, which to our delight revealed that the movie was conceived during a period in which Wim Wenders was reading Rilke's poetry every day as the ultimate expression of German Romanticism. What was really interesting though was that the whole movie was shot without a script, using a series of existential monologues, which mirrored one of the primary points of the movie: that the angels were absent from reality and the flow of time. Though they were able to look into the flow of humanity from their eternal vantage point, they could only experience this life second hand, and that in order to be part of the narrative of history they had to enter into time, into human emotions, bodily concerns, etc., raising the question of how much we humans are really a part of our own narratives. Are we responsible for our lives or just living out the stories that have been woven for us in our thoughts?

We are the heroes of our own dreams

A recent article at Psychology Today suggests that dreams may serve the function of training us for how to deal with threats. Citing the vast number of nightmarish and negative dreams over fantasies and problem solving, researchers believe that dreams may be a practice-place for understanding how to respond to real-world difficulties, even to the point of suggesting that all those nightmares of zombies and aliens are really misappropriated imagery that fills the old evolutionary role of running from the saber-tooth tigers.

Robert Stickgold however, holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. He points, for example, to the ability of sleep to allow us to integrate and consolidate knowledge, or to come up with novel and artistic solutions. During sleep, our brains are making sense of the world, discovering new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. "That's how we create meaning," says Stickgold. "Our brain puts things together."

Personally I agree that dreams can help us deal with threats, and help integrate our knowledge about the world, but even still there is some element of the fantastic, the joking and playful, the absurd, that dreams can always present to us, even in our most "realistic" dreams, that suggests to me something above and beyond a mere flight response. Perhaps dreams allow us not only to integrate our knowledge of the world, but articulate a deeper sense of personal relationship to this world, and everything that may or may not happen in it.



Last night I watched Paprika for the third time, which, in the opinion of someone who admittedly has been paying attention to the depiction of dreams in media since about third grade when I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland, is a rather stunning depiction of the sheer insanity, intricate symbolism, and metaphysical speculation that I have always associated with dreaming. In the chaotic parade of all things under the sun, the use of Jungian archetypes fighting against Freudian repressions, imagistic leitmotifs that accompany each character, or the final idea that perhaps all our dreams are connected, this movie, based off the book by Yasutaka Tsutsui (that was apparently based off the authors own dreams and I desperately wish was in an English translation), certainly does not depict dreams as being a mere "threat-evasion" or problem solving technique, but a true reveling ground of the psyche and all that is possible in the human imagination.

on the climb

Wandering around last night decided to stop by sarah and alberto's to tell them of my absurd revelations and see how his art is ticking along. without knowing it i was jsut in time to watch one of my favorite movies ever, alejandro jodorowsky's "the holy mountain"...



Filmed (and set?) in mexico in the 70's, this is the surreal tale of a jesus coming back from the dead and fighting off his personal monsters and the horrors of the modern world learning the secrets of self-transformation from an alchemist and going on a quest to the holy mountain in order step out of time and become immortal. not only is this movie incredible for its use of disturbing sound collages and almost no dialogue, but the symbolism! my gods is just too blatant, nothing couched or hidden and drawing on so many sources at once it hits like a ton of gold bricks, especially the scene where the romans get jesus drunk and he wakes up in a warehouse surrounded by a thousand plaster copies of himself. simply harrowing in the best way. i'd recommend this movie to anyone with a keen eye, but forget that so much of it draws on occult literature and shamanic visions that not everyone can relate to or even has experience of. nevertheless it is a brilliant surreal adventure.

choose your own life

Sublime coffee shop chaos. Wet weather’s so thick I’m still picking up the wifi single from my house several blocks away. I finally slept, and dreamt last night dreams that seemed almost innocent and pulled from life compared to the others of late; sneaking into festivals, playing music with gypsies on rooftops, saving lovers and loosing them again, swimming through piles and piles of books. Dreams that don’t have to mean anything.

Last night finally watched "I Heart Huckabees." Someone’s been snooping around in my subconscious again. I thought my life was the existential detective comedy. Wait, or was it a tragedy? I can’t remember anymore. The meaningful interconnection of all things, vs. the inevitability of human drama. Does it even matter what is true? Only if we want it to. My dreams, the deer and the helicopters, picking up my collapsed bookshelf and finding that the two most prominently in the spot where everything fell apart were Crimethinc.’s anarchist cookbook "Recipes for Disaster," and a book on chaos theory, playing viola on the roof of that party and remembering that the first major role I acted in high school was in Fiddler on the Roof as Perchick the student revolutionary who upsets everyone’s simple lives and is banished to Siberia before everyone flees the pogroms, my family fleeing the pogroms in Russia centuries ago and me becoming an anarchist, the growing police state here and the war everywhere else, people asking for prayers that Hurricane Katrina doesn’t destroy New Orleans and everyone’s lives there but no one mentioning that it could destroy the oil and gas pipelines in the gulf that supply thirty percent of the country’s fuel, making new friends and wondering what their lives are like when I’m not around. Do these things matter, is their some subtle thread that connects them? Yes. No. Maybe.

Nothing is true unless we want it to be, everything is sacred unless we choose to ignore it, we are the only ones who can give ourselves permission to think or feel or act in any certain way. We are the authors of our own lives after all, and as some famous writer once said, what makes a story is not the plot or characters but the specific details that the author finds important enough to include, and the connections they make between them. What is important to the party and festival hoppers whose faerietale lives consist of getting drunk and laid as often as possible? What is important to the middle class Americans caught up in working to survive and wondering how come they are not rich and famous and important like all the politicians and pop icons? What is important to the artists and revolutionaries and all those who pay enough attention to the world that they feel driven to change it, even if in some small subtle way? What is important to you? Are you the hero of your own epic world-shaping story, or just a minor character in someone else’s cosmic barroom joke told so many times that it’s not even funny anymore? There is no such thing as fate, only giving up control and succumbing to random external events as if they mean nothing.

What adventures do you choose to live, what dreams do you choose to make real? When you reach that dark night at the end of your life will you be able to look back in satisfaction and say that it was the greatest story ever told? What about at the end of the day when you lay down to sleep, will all the trials and triumphs of a lifetime be crammed into those waking hours, crammed into just one hour, crammed into every single moment? This is your life after all. Are you living it?

verbal corrosives

I wrote a poem earlier. The first one in about a month now. It was ghastly, and terribly depressing. Then after a drastic change of mood, Neil Young's Deadman soundtrack, a fascinating essay on Chinese characters and the poetics of language that my twin brother sent me (whose going to be in town next week!), and the first few pages of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, I wrote a completely different poem, which is much more to the point, and thankfully not influenced by Joyce's more peculiar word choices (just what are bidimetoloves anyway?).

***

Dead men sense
raindrops on borrowed smiles.
Fall's first tears
joystrike midair explosions.
Feelings? Buried
under God's unmarked tomb,
hollow deer
flyby helicopter stoplights.
Radio tower stars
blink back yesteryear's blues,
whistle slick street
train tracks till tomorrow.

You never come,
home to hungry ghosts in time.
Halfmast eyes
peel off finite consuming:
wretched earth
spit sick break cycle breaths.
Laugh clench teeth
ride skincrash through brainshower,
crumble heavens
to concrete soaked dust prayers.

Taste one now
or never taste again.

In the Realms of the Real

Last night I saw In the Realms of the Unreal, and it was incredibly inspiring. The story of outsider artist, Henry Darger, who lived as a recluse for most of his life and after his death his landlords found he had produced a 15,000 page novel fully illustrated about the world that he lived in in his head, filled with whimsical creatures and an eternal world war over child slavery, constructed from newspaper images collected through his lifetime. What a fascinating look at how the sometimes small experiences in a person's life can build up into an epic internal story. And at how the need to express that becomes all-consuming.

Fucking intense. Makes me feel like the work I've been doing is nothing. Of course I don't live in complete isolation from the rest of humanity, but still, it makes me want to throw out all the ideas I have for my next five novels and just start from scratch, clean and honest and fully intimate about the life I live where no one else sees. Already I hint at it, but that is nothing compared to what it could be. And even that is just hints. 15,000 pages, damn. As inspiring as this is, I am still more concerned with uniting my waking life with the world of my dreams than opting out of living all together to pursue some all-consuming internal vision. I still maintain that my life is my art, even if I am still coming into a full realization of just what that means. It takes a lifetime of practice, and I'm still young, but I fully belive that anything is possible.

Perhaps my favorite quote from the movie was when one of his neighbors was saying that they called poor artists like this crazy, and rich ones eccentric, and since Henry was poor they called him crazy. At least I have some close friends to support me in my own aesthetic madness.

a scanner darkly and other strange tales

Stumbled upon this preview for the movie version of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly through the blogosphere. It looks fascinating, not only because Dick was one of the most brilliant scifi writiers of our time, but also because it is directed by Richard Linklater, who directed Waking Life, which is inarguably one of my favorite movies ever. It changed my life when I needed it in just the right way, and its visual style of animated film cutups is more appealing to me than any other film style. And A Scanner Darkly appears to be animated over in the same way. This leaves me tingling with excitement.

In other news, a star three times bigger than our sun decided to high tail it out of our galaxy, at a speed of something like a hundred and fifty million miles an hour. I read it in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this morning but I couldn't find any good articles about it online, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.

We also got our copy of the latest issue of Adbusters, which is one of the best issues so far, because besides their regular denunciations of the corporate spectacle, including articles on brand logo tattoos and designer vaginas, a good bit of the issue was spent focused on issues of a more metaphysical and futurist bent, including an article they posted online about art and spirituality.

And a big old RIP for Hunter S. Thompson, a man who truly went over the edge.

plucking the strings of the soul

Yesterday I finally got around to watching "The Red Violin", which is an engaging tale of a 17th century master violin-maker who creates the perfect instrument for his soon to be born son. But his wife dies in labor, so instead he takes he takes all his love and anger and channels it into the instrument, varnishing it red with her blood. Just before she dies, their witch tells her fortune, and reads in the cards that she will go on a long strange and complicted journey, which turns out to be the journey the violin takes as it gets passed from hand to hand throughout history, up till the present day, and all the love and anger (and misfortune) that this magical instrument brings to those who play it. As a magician (and musician) the idea that an object can be imbued with such power, and its history told before hand, resonates with me, escpecially when the descendents of all those it touched converge in the present to try and buy it at an auction (which is played out again and again from their different points of view).



Afterwards I took out my viola, which I haven't touched since the circus ended in October, and let its song sweep me away. Now, my instrument is not nearly as magical (or old), but it still has great power, and playing it requires me to give myself over to the world in a way that nothing else can. I have been playing it since I was a child, and though I also have played guitar for the majority of my life, I play the guitar more intellectually, consciouss of scales and melodies, whereas the viola is a gate to my heart and to the universe. No wonder I haven't picked it up in a long time, it takes tremendous courage and strength of heart to remain on my feet with such ecstatic depths of emotion and soul coursing through my fingers, and for many months now I just haven't had that in me to give. But now things have changed again.



I decided the other day that it was time to regather and refocus my energies, in order to live more honestly and clearly, which has meant questioning a lot of my habitual behaviours and directing my will to those things that will only further my steps on my path. So for the past couple of nights, while relaxing my body and offering up prayers to the gods of sleep that I might better remember and control my dreams, I have started reviewing my days in light of the yamas (worldly restraints) and niyamas (personal observances), the first two paths of Patanjali's eightfold limbs of yoga (from his yoga sutra).



With my own understanding of them, the yamas are:

ahimsa- compassion for all living things (caring)

satya- commitment to the truth (honesty)

asteya- not-stealing (honoring or letting be)

brahmacharya- merging with the One (trusting or letting come) (also translated as commitment)

aparigraha- not-grasping (giving or letting go)



The niyamas are:

shaucha- purity

santosha- contentment

tapas- burning enthusiasm (focus or will)

swadhyaya- self-study

ishvarapranidhana- celebration of the spiritual



Now, I don't claim perfection in any of these things, far from it, but paying explicit attention to them has already broken me from several undesirable habits and has fostered a sense of lightness in my heart that has been mostly lacking since my samahdic experience of god (the axis of universal consciousness) over the summer. While that moment brought me back to the spiritual and magical path I had lost sight of over the years, it has been difficult to rekindle the clarity and intensity I found there without the aid of San Pedro to guide me back through the gates of heaven. But having that experience has shown me it is possible to be there at all, and is what keeps my feet sure, despite winter's interference and my previous lack of intentional energy.



I also watched the movie adaptation of Hesse's "Siddartha" yesterday, which was incredibly good and contained many wonderful ideas. I haven't read the book in a long time, and will have to (or watch the movie again) before I can make any comments on it. Further transmissions impending...