That poor French chap who jumped off the roof of his Paris apartment block, Gilles Deleuze, he had it nailed, I realize that now more than ever.
This ‘thing’ called a self is a conglomeration of velocities, accelerations/decelerations, brief assemblages and dissolution's - a trillion conscious and unconscious momentary desiring machines that glitter and spit like photons off these green waves on a summers day.
Society and culture has a necessary and very specific gravity that coheres and fixes certain assemblages for longer durations. Indeed, some of these socio/economic desiring machines whilst having a functional and organizational use, tend to drown out the possibility of other assemblages by their incessant imperialistic white noise.
The mythologies and linear narratives of our human cultures act as brakes to decelerate and solidify the fecund wave potentialities of our being into ‘particular’ characters that have discreet boundaries. We read our lines and play our parts, forgetting that we are implicitly connected to everything, we are everything, there is no transcendental Platonic essence, no final signified’s shimmering just out of reach.
Everything that has ever existed, exists now, simultaneously.
It is the perceptual apparatus of our physical embodiment that engineers and edits time, space and causality - the great decelerator or personal sequencer. Another machine, alas, but a most necessary one, for now at least.
The patterns sculpted by wave and sand on my little beach have always fascinated me. Like a beautiful golden fabric, perfectly pleated and folded, like an exquisite blanket for a sea god to recline upon after his daily swim.
This natural enfolded pattern always brings to mind Aldous Huxley’s musings in the ‘Doors of perception’ about the Renaissance artist’s obsession with luxurious fabric enfoldments.
I feel that if these fabrics were unfolded, flattened and smoothed by a great hand – maybe the sea god? – Reality or the noumenal would resolve into our perception like a vast and intricate medieval map, and we would roar with laughter at our previous inability to see the myriad roads, rivers and pathways that connect all with all.
Enough, this old fart has rambled too much already.
I feel a bowel movement brewing up. Alas, the passage of a stool is one of the few physical pleasures still permitted by that cruel puppeteer father time.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Saturday, 27 March 2010
The Great Enfoldment of Being (Part 1)
As I get older, I feel a growing disconnection with the wider society and all its digital trinkets and baubles. Sometimes I will stand in the cold tingling surf on the beach across the field, mesmerized by the tide as it pulls and enfolds its liquid tendrils around my scrawny white ankles.
And it is at these moments that this particular thought often floats into my mind…what if the rest of the world has ceased to exist!
As far as I remember, there are no houses, shops, businesses, pubs etc within 6 miles of my home. No roads or any other such man made graffiti. The hills that I can see behind the house are un-scarred by the usual dry stonewalls that lace the region.
As you can probably imagine, this allows for an uber-solipsism, and, dare I say it…more than a dash of sophism too.
Without the distractions of family or neighbors I am free to commune with nature and self at an elemental level. My psyche is uninhibited; it can seep into the darkest fissures and crevices of human ideas (including my rectum), and then dissolve into the wind, the waves, that oddly shaped pebble on the seashore. Sometimes, when I hear the scream of a gull, I know it is me screaming.
My consciousness becomes a pan consciousness, my mind is in everything around me, it creates everything around me.
In this place, narrative and discourse have been exorcised, the spirit is emancipated, the demon has been victorious. It has conquered conditioning and memory.
A nice cuppa is beckoning.
And it is at these moments that this particular thought often floats into my mind…what if the rest of the world has ceased to exist!
As far as I remember, there are no houses, shops, businesses, pubs etc within 6 miles of my home. No roads or any other such man made graffiti. The hills that I can see behind the house are un-scarred by the usual dry stonewalls that lace the region.
As you can probably imagine, this allows for an uber-solipsism, and, dare I say it…more than a dash of sophism too.
Without the distractions of family or neighbors I am free to commune with nature and self at an elemental level. My psyche is uninhibited; it can seep into the darkest fissures and crevices of human ideas (including my rectum), and then dissolve into the wind, the waves, that oddly shaped pebble on the seashore. Sometimes, when I hear the scream of a gull, I know it is me screaming.
My consciousness becomes a pan consciousness, my mind is in everything around me, it creates everything around me.
In this place, narrative and discourse have been exorcised, the spirit is emancipated, the demon has been victorious. It has conquered conditioning and memory.
A nice cuppa is beckoning.
Friday, 26 March 2010
The Divided Self
All my life I have felt ‘split’, fractured and tossed by the currents and riptides of this vast ocean of experience called human life.
I believe this sensation of perpetual bifurcation and chronic desire for psychic exploration is deeply rooted in my identity as a writer and artist – indeed, it is why I am an artist and a writer.
I was ejected at a very tender age into a very strange and illusive attractor that threatens to tear my soul apart at every moment. Its gravity is immense and often terrifying.
I remember vividly even now, as a child of 5 or 6, lying on my parents bed, deeply relaxed, half asleep, late summer afternoon or evening, when suddenly I experienced my first ‘vision’ – for want of a better word.
I felt a warm shimmering glow wash over my prone form, and then I absolutely knew I was both very old and very young simultaneously. I know how strange this sounds, but it is the only way I can describe it.
I also knew EVERYTHING during those few moments. I knew that I had a place in the cosmos as everything has a place, and all is truly one. This sense of vast connectivity was so beautiful and intoxicating I felt like bursting into tears. But all the time I was aware of lying on the bed in that room at a certain time, in a certain place.
I now realize, that all my life I have been attempting to discover a psychic trigger, an exotic little butterfly that flaps its diaphanous wings for a brief moment, to release and explode that fractal landscape of connectivity once again.
My journey has been one of interrogation, the deconstruction of archetypes, the search for Hermes, the messenger, that sneaky little trickster who leaves briefly scribbled notes in my dreams and eerie synchronicities in this so called ‘waking life’.
If I do finally confront Hermes, stare him/her/it in the face, then this particular journey will be over. I know that now. But then I see a bifurcation once again, a fractal cascade into other islands and estuaries of baroque complexity.
The tunnel at death is the Jungian Mandala, the universal symbol of psychic wholeness, as above so below, the circle is complete…for now. The lesson is learned.
Hermes only allows glimpses of the great elsewhere and otherwise. He is the creature of masks, the figure in the crowd with the beckoning finger, the odd graffiti scrawled on the bus shelter, the brief epiphany in the banality of the life-world.
Once you’ve been shown such riches, once you have been sensitized to this possibility of wholeness, most of this human life is empty triviality and artifice.
I have a compulsion to write and paint, because I am so desperate to experience that psychic melt of connectivity that I felt as a child. I want to dissolve into everything and return home. I wish to be an ‘aspect’ of the cosmos, not a lonely, discreet object for someone’s subject. Maybe God collapses the wave function?
I catch glimpses occasionally, and I try to join the dots, become an architect of my own soul. But I realise it will only be finished at my dissolution and ‘graduation’.
The journey has been fascinating but often painful and absolutely terrifying at times too.
I am the divided self, torn by civilization, the Id, Ego, Superego, the aesthetic impulse, Eros/Thanatos and the overwhelming drive for connectivity and communication - Gnosis.
Like Nietzshe’s Zarathustra, once you have been to the mountain top, life in the valley is a trifle dull. Lets hope for an Eternal Return, but with a fractal aspect – self-similar but not identical.
parallel worlds anyone?
I believe this sensation of perpetual bifurcation and chronic desire for psychic exploration is deeply rooted in my identity as a writer and artist – indeed, it is why I am an artist and a writer.
I was ejected at a very tender age into a very strange and illusive attractor that threatens to tear my soul apart at every moment. Its gravity is immense and often terrifying.
I remember vividly even now, as a child of 5 or 6, lying on my parents bed, deeply relaxed, half asleep, late summer afternoon or evening, when suddenly I experienced my first ‘vision’ – for want of a better word.
I felt a warm shimmering glow wash over my prone form, and then I absolutely knew I was both very old and very young simultaneously. I know how strange this sounds, but it is the only way I can describe it.
I also knew EVERYTHING during those few moments. I knew that I had a place in the cosmos as everything has a place, and all is truly one. This sense of vast connectivity was so beautiful and intoxicating I felt like bursting into tears. But all the time I was aware of lying on the bed in that room at a certain time, in a certain place.
I now realize, that all my life I have been attempting to discover a psychic trigger, an exotic little butterfly that flaps its diaphanous wings for a brief moment, to release and explode that fractal landscape of connectivity once again.
My journey has been one of interrogation, the deconstruction of archetypes, the search for Hermes, the messenger, that sneaky little trickster who leaves briefly scribbled notes in my dreams and eerie synchronicities in this so called ‘waking life’.
If I do finally confront Hermes, stare him/her/it in the face, then this particular journey will be over. I know that now. But then I see a bifurcation once again, a fractal cascade into other islands and estuaries of baroque complexity.
The tunnel at death is the Jungian Mandala, the universal symbol of psychic wholeness, as above so below, the circle is complete…for now. The lesson is learned.
Hermes only allows glimpses of the great elsewhere and otherwise. He is the creature of masks, the figure in the crowd with the beckoning finger, the odd graffiti scrawled on the bus shelter, the brief epiphany in the banality of the life-world.
Once you’ve been shown such riches, once you have been sensitized to this possibility of wholeness, most of this human life is empty triviality and artifice.
I have a compulsion to write and paint, because I am so desperate to experience that psychic melt of connectivity that I felt as a child. I want to dissolve into everything and return home. I wish to be an ‘aspect’ of the cosmos, not a lonely, discreet object for someone’s subject. Maybe God collapses the wave function?
I catch glimpses occasionally, and I try to join the dots, become an architect of my own soul. But I realise it will only be finished at my dissolution and ‘graduation’.
The journey has been fascinating but often painful and absolutely terrifying at times too.
I am the divided self, torn by civilization, the Id, Ego, Superego, the aesthetic impulse, Eros/Thanatos and the overwhelming drive for connectivity and communication - Gnosis.
Like Nietzshe’s Zarathustra, once you have been to the mountain top, life in the valley is a trifle dull. Lets hope for an Eternal Return, but with a fractal aspect – self-similar but not identical.
parallel worlds anyone?
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Artists in Pursuit of Death
I’m reading a really interesting book at the mo called ‘Short Lives’: Portraits of Writers, Painters, Poets, Actors, Musicians and Performers in Pursuit of Death, by Katinka Matson.
Matson doesn’t attempt to theorize as to why these people appeared to be haunted and hounded by the black dog of self destructiveness and depression all their lives, she just gives a concise biography, and lets these people talk for themselves through her superb selection of quotes.
Artaud, Lenny Bruce, Chatterton, James Dean, Billie Holiday, Kerouac, Modigliani, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas – all the most notorious iconic cadavers are there. As the book was printed in ‘81 a new edition may include Kurt Cobain, and of course, most recently Michael Jackson and many others.
All these people created beautiful artworks, poetry and music, entertained and educated the wider population to other ways of seeing the world and themselves. They made a lot of people very happy by spending most of their own lives very unhappy.
We seem to have a very weird relationship with artists in the West, we feed off their disaffection with life, their pursuit of death. They appear to be necessary human sacrifices, the acceptable casualties for the overall stability and psychic evolution of society. They appear to be condemned to articulate and universalise our suffering.
We are often suspicious of artists who haven’t paid their existential dues, who don’t appear to suffer for their art. I suppose we’re all still a bunch of Romantics at heart, or is it something deeper?
I think its interesting that Damien Hirst has been the most successful artist on the scene for a number of years now, and although he is very far from the traditional stereotype of the tortured soul, his work deals explicitly with death and decay. His greatest influence, Francis Bacon is also notorious for describing the human form as a dismembered slab of meat in a butchers shop.
Picasso lived until he was 93, pleasured a shed-load of women half his age, was the richest artist to have ever lived, but hey, at least he had his Blue period and later Guernica: women and children being annihilated by Nazi bombers – his trademark piece so to speak.
Does the most cathartic and influential art, especially in the modern era (subjective I know) have to involve some kind of personal suffering on the part of the artist, does it have to be in pursuit of death in an explicit way to resonate with something deep inside us?
Van Gogh painted nature and people in vibrant rich colours, exploding with the life force, but would we just say: ‘that’s a pretty picture’ if we didn’t know he cut his ear off (well the lobe), and remember Kirk Douglas’s hammy ravings in the movie ‘Lust for Life’?
If Prozac had been invented a few centuries earlier, would Romanticism and Modernism have happened at all?
I do wonder if a large number of these notorious sufferers were in fact driven by an interior aspect of themselves. A naughty Demon or Daemon who from childhood onwards, tossed them a few juicy carrots of universal enlightenment, from which they were enslaved until death. (Nod to Anthony Peake here.)
They knew at a conscious level, what most people only sense at the most subliminal level – death is a transition, a consolidation, a graduation to another state of experience.
Do they, and did they feel a sense of urgency? Their lives appear to be an exercise in perceptual and emotional ‘cramming’. They’re like precocious students lost in a sea of books the night before their ‘finals’. The hour is always late.
If Rolf Harris had been born with a death wish wouldn’t his work be on permanent display in Tate Modern or MoMa? Or does ‘Two little boys’ really indicate a preoccupation with the existential emptiness of even the most personal of relationships?
Matson doesn’t attempt to theorize as to why these people appeared to be haunted and hounded by the black dog of self destructiveness and depression all their lives, she just gives a concise biography, and lets these people talk for themselves through her superb selection of quotes.
Artaud, Lenny Bruce, Chatterton, James Dean, Billie Holiday, Kerouac, Modigliani, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas – all the most notorious iconic cadavers are there. As the book was printed in ‘81 a new edition may include Kurt Cobain, and of course, most recently Michael Jackson and many others.
All these people created beautiful artworks, poetry and music, entertained and educated the wider population to other ways of seeing the world and themselves. They made a lot of people very happy by spending most of their own lives very unhappy.
We seem to have a very weird relationship with artists in the West, we feed off their disaffection with life, their pursuit of death. They appear to be necessary human sacrifices, the acceptable casualties for the overall stability and psychic evolution of society. They appear to be condemned to articulate and universalise our suffering.
We are often suspicious of artists who haven’t paid their existential dues, who don’t appear to suffer for their art. I suppose we’re all still a bunch of Romantics at heart, or is it something deeper?
I think its interesting that Damien Hirst has been the most successful artist on the scene for a number of years now, and although he is very far from the traditional stereotype of the tortured soul, his work deals explicitly with death and decay. His greatest influence, Francis Bacon is also notorious for describing the human form as a dismembered slab of meat in a butchers shop.
Picasso lived until he was 93, pleasured a shed-load of women half his age, was the richest artist to have ever lived, but hey, at least he had his Blue period and later Guernica: women and children being annihilated by Nazi bombers – his trademark piece so to speak.
Does the most cathartic and influential art, especially in the modern era (subjective I know) have to involve some kind of personal suffering on the part of the artist, does it have to be in pursuit of death in an explicit way to resonate with something deep inside us?
Van Gogh painted nature and people in vibrant rich colours, exploding with the life force, but would we just say: ‘that’s a pretty picture’ if we didn’t know he cut his ear off (well the lobe), and remember Kirk Douglas’s hammy ravings in the movie ‘Lust for Life’?
If Prozac had been invented a few centuries earlier, would Romanticism and Modernism have happened at all?
I do wonder if a large number of these notorious sufferers were in fact driven by an interior aspect of themselves. A naughty Demon or Daemon who from childhood onwards, tossed them a few juicy carrots of universal enlightenment, from which they were enslaved until death. (Nod to Anthony Peake here.)
They knew at a conscious level, what most people only sense at the most subliminal level – death is a transition, a consolidation, a graduation to another state of experience.
Do they, and did they feel a sense of urgency? Their lives appear to be an exercise in perceptual and emotional ‘cramming’. They’re like precocious students lost in a sea of books the night before their ‘finals’. The hour is always late.
If Rolf Harris had been born with a death wish wouldn’t his work be on permanent display in Tate Modern or MoMa? Or does ‘Two little boys’ really indicate a preoccupation with the existential emptiness of even the most personal of relationships?
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Matrixial Deja-vu - sort of.
I have recently stumbled upon a curious tract by some character called Anthony Peake.
The title - "Is there life after death" - is somewhat misleading however. Mr Peake (no relation to Mervyn I believe) hypothesizes that our brains on the brink of a knowing dissolution, project a premiere of our lives via some kind of neurological theatrical contraption which he calls the 'Bohmian IMAX'- after the quantum theorist David Bohm.
Interesting stuff, I'm sure you will agree.
Mr Peake proposes that every single perception - audible, sensory, olfactory, visual and so on - is recorded in its entirety during our lifetimes, and at the penultimate moment of brain death, we experience our lives again in their minutest totality.
In a similar fashion to the idea depicted in the Matrix movies, when we experience Deja-Vu, we are in a real sense feeling the resonance of a perception that has been lived out once before, or indeed, many times before.
Drawing on the experiences of certain epileptics, who's experience of time is extraordinarily extended during seizures, Peake proposes that on one level, what appears to the near death subject as a 'flashback' is experienced on another level/subjectivity as a real time life experience again.
There is an allusion to Zeno's time paradoxes here of course, strengthened and developed via bringing quantum theory into the hypothesis.
Everett's 'Many Worlds' theory of quantum mechanics allows a certain amount of free will to intercede into the experiential prison of Nietzche's 'Eternal Return'.
If consciousness is depicted as a fractal landscape, then our lives over many returns may be seen to iterate and bifurcate to infinity depending on the choices we make at each possible branch.
We are still uniquely 'us' but each life is subtly different on recall, and eventually radically different, although we would be unaware of course. The only clue we have to our regenerations are the testimonies of 'Flashbackers' and our common experience of Deja-Vu.
I find the theory fascinating of course,and it does resonate with a feeling that has always occupied my mind since childhood - the feeling of connection, and the vast subliminal knowing of the secret of being and nothingness and my place in the cosmos.
The title - "Is there life after death" - is somewhat misleading however. Mr Peake (no relation to Mervyn I believe) hypothesizes that our brains on the brink of a knowing dissolution, project a premiere of our lives via some kind of neurological theatrical contraption which he calls the 'Bohmian IMAX'- after the quantum theorist David Bohm.
Interesting stuff, I'm sure you will agree.
Mr Peake proposes that every single perception - audible, sensory, olfactory, visual and so on - is recorded in its entirety during our lifetimes, and at the penultimate moment of brain death, we experience our lives again in their minutest totality.
In a similar fashion to the idea depicted in the Matrix movies, when we experience Deja-Vu, we are in a real sense feeling the resonance of a perception that has been lived out once before, or indeed, many times before.
Drawing on the experiences of certain epileptics, who's experience of time is extraordinarily extended during seizures, Peake proposes that on one level, what appears to the near death subject as a 'flashback' is experienced on another level/subjectivity as a real time life experience again.
There is an allusion to Zeno's time paradoxes here of course, strengthened and developed via bringing quantum theory into the hypothesis.
Everett's 'Many Worlds' theory of quantum mechanics allows a certain amount of free will to intercede into the experiential prison of Nietzche's 'Eternal Return'.
If consciousness is depicted as a fractal landscape, then our lives over many returns may be seen to iterate and bifurcate to infinity depending on the choices we make at each possible branch.
We are still uniquely 'us' but each life is subtly different on recall, and eventually radically different, although we would be unaware of course. The only clue we have to our regenerations are the testimonies of 'Flashbackers' and our common experience of Deja-Vu.
I find the theory fascinating of course,and it does resonate with a feeling that has always occupied my mind since childhood - the feeling of connection, and the vast subliminal knowing of the secret of being and nothingness and my place in the cosmos.
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