“In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than “the Gods forbid it” or “that is not our Way.” They will need the knowledge to say something like:

“Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever stranger, that when any biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled back into it, the soil is weakened? And what could we do with our “saved” time, that would be more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed by hand, touching and knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that feeds us? Shall we become allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling, turning our hands and eyes to the study of machines and numbers until, severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy it as our ancestors did, making depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls and cadmium batteries that even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go back to your people, and tell them, if they come to conquer us with their machines, we will fight them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and Hopi and Nez Perce never imagined, because we understand your world better than you do yourself. Tell your people to come to learn.”

- Ran Prieur, “How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth”

Ran Prieur exists in a realm beyond awesome.  He exists in the future, and it is the kind of future that I would like to be a part of.

“The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science.  Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place:  it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture.  Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought?  Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool?  Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment & that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, That Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation; these People flatter themselves: I will not flatter them.  Error is Created.  Truth is Eternal.  Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear.  It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it.  I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action;  it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me.  “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”  I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning Sight.  I look thro’ it & not with it”.

- William Blake, talking about his painting, “A Vision of the Last Judgement”.

Yeah, mostly I think that Harold Bloom is a blowhard (Harold “I think the actual precursor to Swinburne is not Hawthorne but Twain, hmmhey” Bloom) as a literary critic, but I like his ideas about spirituality. Here’s his thoughts on Gnosticism:

” I propose a simplifying definition of Gnosticism in the apprehension of genius: it is a knowledge that frees the creative mind from theology, from historicising, and from any divinity that is totally distinct from what is most imaginative in the self. A God cut off from the inmost self is the Hangman God, as James Joyce called him, the God who originates death. Gnosticis, as the religion of literary genius, repudiates the Hangman God.

Hans Jonas, for me the most incisive guide to Gnosticism, said of the ancient Gnostics that they experienced “the intoxication of unprecedentness.” I recall remarking to Jonas, an intensely brilliant and genial person, that he had described what strong poets always sought for: freedom for the creative self, for the expansion of the mind’s conciousness of itself”

- Harold Bloom, “Genius”.

And then I read a much better book, Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool Acid Test“. It is a book which describes the possibility of being True and Vital. I kept connecting Kesey and Jack Parsons in my head, crazy prophets both, trying to destroy that, what, post-Lapsarian condition, is that what it is? When desire floods up like a crescendo, then the beat drops and it’s relief and we start again. But how to rise again from that plateau. Without repeating the sins of history. Jack Parsons wanted to bring about the Apocalypse, unleash upon the world the ultimate evil, because after that desire is spent, in that zero-point after orgasm, we will be refreshed. But afterward, we have to get up out of bed and go to work and fire people. It is a knotty one. I wonder if Kesey felt as though, here they were, given another chance, a key to the door to the garden, and they were the new disciples and, and then “we blew it”. Is that the answer to the question, the question of The Condition? That actually what it is is a stupid hunger? Or is it a massive Promethean weight of the aggregrate that pulls down the desire of the individual? Is it that Kesey, in those hazy Mexican delirium days, realised that the Garden had to be lost, that there are no singular points anymore, that we have only collections of pieces of other puzzles we jam together into a completed magic eye to be squinted and turned round until maybe we can see a whale or a pony or something.

I’ve been riffing on this one line, over and over again:  “But what to do in that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible”. The way it seems to me, and the meaning that my 1990s 30 year too late naive imagination seems to gather from all this, is that that heavy phrase “We Blew It” refers to those selves, picking themselves up from the streets after the fire and brimstone has all been washed away and they’re all blown away by that cosmic visitation of the Godhead and the notion that all will be ok:  well some fucktard is going to start up an insurance firm and we’ll be right back where we started.

Second Year English Major:  I really enjoyed “Streetcar Named Desire”.

Me: Cool.  If you liked Streetcar, you might also enjoy reading plays by Eugene O’Neill.  He wrote “The Iceman Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey into Night”, which you may have heard of.  And if you’re studying modern plays, you might want to check out Pinter and Samuel Beckett too.  Y’know, interesting thing about Beckett - he was Joyce’s secretary for a while.

SYEM:  Who?

Me:  James Joyce.  Ulysses?

SYEM: What’s that?

“This is an unusual paragraph. I’m curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it! In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out! Try to do so without any coaching!”

- Georges Perec

“Having recognised that, in perception, our knowledge is not caused by the object percieved, it is plain that, if perception is experience, so is any other genesis of time, due to whatever cause, of knowledge not obtained by inference from any other knowledge.” - Bertrand Russell

There’s a lot of controversy in my hometown of New Zealand concerning the death of a woman hooked up to an oxygen machine who couldn’t afford to pay her power bill. Consequently, her power was cut off, the machine went blooo, and she stopped breathing. Columnists are outraged that a corporation can be so coldhearted. Ho hum.

I’d be suspicious of a corporation that wasn’t coldhearted. Being cold and impersonal is the oil in their cogs. A day in the life of a customer service footsoldier is mostly made up of petty, desperate pleading for special favors and privileges from customers who don’t deserve it. It’s pretty hard to give a shit. If you want to communicate with a soldier, you’ve got to know how to make them listen. Be articulate, straightforward, to the point. There’s people out there who have contracts with the power company to, in the event of power failure, make sure that this particular customer on life support gets either a generator or an ambulence within an specific timeframe. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been too hard for the bereaved family to sort out something in advance, or to make absolutely sure that the power company knew about her situation. If the footsoldier doesn’t care, you demand to speak with a supervisor. If the supervisor doesn’t care, you drive to the HQ and make enough noise until someone listens to you. It’s also important to remember that corporations are made up of lots of incompetent individuals who only care about paying the rent and making it through their day painlessly. If the diplomacy I hinted at above doesn’t work, you make them listen. You’ve got to struggle to survive, y’know? Nobody wants to hold your hand or care about your problems.

So the contractor turns up and he meets the woman hooked up to her oxygen device. She pleads with him to not turn off the power. He probably thought, If it’s so freaking dire, why didn’t she arrange for the company to not switch it off? She’s had notice? If it’s a life threatening situation, surely they’ve got a contingency? Regardless, yeah, he probably should’ve called up his boss, but if it’s anything like my evil corporate, I probably wouldn’t have bothered either: I’d have guessed the answer. The sons also ask him not to turn off the power. The contractor ignores them, and cuts off the power, and goes about his way. I personally would’ve thought a large knife would be a pretty good way of discouraging him. Get the cops involved: the story would’ve blown up as it has regardless, and woman would still be alive. But anyway, woman (did I mention she’s in his position in the first place because of chronic obesity?) proceeds to die. Her sons want to call an ambulence, she refuses, doesn’t “want to cause a fuss”. To which a thoughtful reply would be “Fuck you, you’re not dying on my watch”, and to call the ambulence anyway. One son actually said, and I shit you not, “I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but I knew it would be bad”. So after Einstein here fails to call the ambulence, woman falls unconcious. Sons, ignorant of CPR (fair enough, most of us are) start slapping her on the face in an attempt to wake her up. Pathetic. And then he calls an ambulence.
Blame seems to be pointed solely at the power company, and the contractor. The family are innocent victims. Sure, but the family set themselves up as victims. They did nothing to help themselves at all. They expected the corporation to be sympathetic, to somehow divine exactly whatever the hell was going was going on in their heads. Given their behaviour, would you, gentle reader, suspect that they were at all coherent in their dealings with the corporation? The poor footsoldier they talked to probably had no idea what was going on. As I said above, do whatever it takes to make sure you’re listened to. If they don’t understand you, get an advocate! Make noise! But above all, think with your fucking brain!

So Ragnar Tornquist, the guy who wrote Dreamfall, is making an MMO which features the Illuminati and Knights Templar.

So I guess I’ll be hibernating this winter.

I was reading a PDF when suddenly, an error. My first thought was “Caroliner Rainbow Bad Object Type Within a Text Operator Array”. Wait, what am I talking about?

Words: Interview (check out what Sore Pony Lore has to say!)
Alex Ross’ fairly non-comittal review

Pictures: 23 Years of Caroliner

Sound and Vision: Caroliner Rainbow Bluembeigh Treason of the Abyss

Inspiring enough to give me The Fear!

Mate, I like this guy Marshall McLuhan.  I want to buy him a beer - especially because I’d have to drink it for him.  Anyway:  a good answer from “The Playboy Interview”:

“PLAYBOY: Despite your personal distaste for the upheavals induced by the new electric technology, you seem to feel that if we understand and influence its effects on us, a less alienated and fragmented society may emerge from it. Is it thus accurate to say that you are essentially optimistic about the future?

MCLUHAN: There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ–Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man’s destiny–if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image–tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I’ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.”