On structure
All structure that is concerned with conserving or harnessing energy (work) is infrastructure… Anyone involved in the production of structure, insofar as it is not pathological or “for its own sake”—anyone involved in the contestation of structure, the restructuring and even destructuring of structure—is concerned with managing the world’s energy flows...
Trellises and scaffolds, walls and towers, bridges and pillars, grids and garments—all archetypal forms of spatial structure. All support, rebuff, or channel—support, that is, by rebuffing energy-draining and energy-countering forces...
Clocks and calendars—archetypal forms of temporal structure. All coordinate and synchronize—man with the natural world; man with man... Energy is saved, and energy-saving structure produced, through measurement...
Language, taxonomy, habit—forms of conceptual structure, communicative-cognitive structure—efficiency through the elimination of wasted effort... Bicycles, windmills, cloth sails, combustion engines—archetypal structures for harnessing kinetic energy…
Art, properly imagined: structures for re-channeling energy, for intervening on the structure of the world’s energy flows... Damming, undamming, redirecting. Slowing or accelerating. All energy-saving structure requires an initial expenditure of energy. Structure is premised on the repetition of similar acts, on initial energy investments which earn their keep through time... The vortex is a metaphor for creative energy-harnessing, the energy converted into structure which is later converted into energy…
Capital (structure) is built using surplus energy… As the amount of surplus energy available increases, the system’s capacity for producing structure increases in turn…
On structure: a visual introduction
Back in his village, Vavilov had found it extraordinarily difficult to obtain a small pane of glass, a batch of factory-made bricks, window catches for the hospital windows, awnings to put over the school doors, or an iron girder for a mill they were building. Nails were in such short supply that they were accounted for individually rather than by weight. It had been difficult to obtain dry, seasoned wood, rather than still-damp spruce, for the school roof. A new floor for the village school had been a source of constant anxiety and taken an inordinate amount of time to complete. A building roofed with corrugated iron had seemed like a mansion.
The ruined buildings of Stalingrad revealed the wealth that had gone into their construction. Thousands of sheets of twisted corrugated iron lay scattered over the ground; stretches of street hundreds of metres long were covered by dead mounds of precious brick; pavements glittered, as if covered in fish scales… Wherever he looked, there were screws, door handles, bits of chewed-up iron and nails made soft by the wild, drunken flames. Huge steel rails and girders lay torn and twisted.
Much sweat had gone into hewing rough stone, into extracting copper and iron from their ores, into turning sand into glass and bare rock into rows of steel girders. Thousands of teams of masons, carpenters, painters, glaziers and metalworkers had worked here year after year, from dawn until dusk.
—Grossman, Stalingrad (via Lysford)
On papyrus
Information: something transmitted by structure (physical patterning) through time. Meaning degrades as the total context in which it made sense degrades… All computation occurs in context, the treatment of a part by a whole… We can translate a Sumerian joke word-for-word, but the punchline forever eludes us… Sapphic papyrus made newly information-carrying by the invention of X-ray fluorescence…
“A linguistic idea is not a ‘pure’ representation of reality, but an intervention in a history of discourse.” Once-novel, once-shocking ideas no longer shock. Metaphors fossilize. The idea must be made new again.
Joyce
Kenner saw Joyce’s Ulysses as progressing from 19C naturalism to a parodic critique of modernist objectivity… The novel begins in the abandoned Martello Tower…
To Eco, Joyce’s life was an ontological journey marked by belief, disillusionment, and reimagination… The young, Jesuitical Joyce of early Portrait perceives the universe as “organized, systematic whole.” Over Portrait’s course, he Falls out of faith, is plunged into crisis, and recovers into a modernist individualism of self-as-creator. (The pattern echoed half-a-century later in hippy cults of freedom…) Tradition is extended by individual talent in Ulysses—the structure is mythological and archetypal, convened and mustered by cultural participants, rather than inherent, essential, divine…
The Tower
Ford and Martel: “The Tower [card in Tarot]… encapsulates Genesis, the concept of the Fall… The Tower [symbolizes] the failure of systematizing processes, of attempts at capturing the totality in some kind of man-made artifact, whether it be a philosophical system or a civilization. The things of this world cannot contains things of the Other World, and if they try, they will eventually come up against the Real, symbolized in this card by the lightning bolt.”
The Tower may have a clock at the top, standardizing and synchronizing the rhythms of the city around it, a construced source of truth… The Tower may have an observatory at its top, with a telescope for star-gazing… The Tower is in the shape of a telescope, eyepiece pointed to the sky… The Tower may support a spotlight, an all-seeing eye—nefariously searching city streets for deviance, or sea-combing to steer a ship around a reef… “The lighthouse of consciousness”: body as tower.
In its modern incarnation, the Tower may be the dark and shadowy symbol of corporate conspiracy (at its top, the boardroom, whose lofty windows are scenery and symbol of power). The World Trade Center was a monument to globalization: this is why it needed striking down. The Tower may be a haunted Howth Castle & environs, home of mad scientists’ chimeras and human-made lightning harnessed in Tesla coils…
Or the Tower of Tarot is the Tower of Babel is the hope of Esperanto… ONE unified language, ONE god universe (Burroughs), ONE totalizing code and system… A transient and local max personified, masquerading as timeless global peak… A working edifice built through labor which gives great vantage in lofty airs. Which is struck down by a bolt of lightning, a bolt of reality intruding from outside the system (Murphy’s Law), a bolt of the unaccounted-for. Or which is overwhelmed and washed away by the tidal terrors of the Sea’s absolving unity. Or which is blown over by great winds. Or which is ransacked by vandals. Newsom follows Joyce follows Carroll, using the metaphor of eggshells—Humpty-Dumpty’s great Fall. The fragile, protective barrier (structure) cracks up. Finn’s tumbles from his ladder and is resurrected. Christ, mounted on the Cross, reaches the peak of his powers and reincarnates in textual form…
The lesson of the Tower: there will be no final solution… The lesson of the Tower: this too shall pass… The lesson of the Tower: all structure into dust (it is like a desert sphinx)...
The Fall of the Tower is a chance to rebuild: to erect a newer, stabler structure with the rubble of the old. The collapse of the Tower is proof that the Tower no longer stands up to the forces it is tasked with defying. Death is an evolutionary strategy for passing information through time…
On scripts
Between periods of scriptedness, periods of scriptlessness… The script is a learned pattern (structure) of behavior that conserves energy and supports its own survival… Habit is self-reinforcing, creating the conditions in which it thrives.
When the environment is disrupted, the script fails and the habit collapses… Brand’s pace layers of changes are the pace layers of reliability… A resurrection in new form is required on the other side of disruption’s canyon… Chaos must be managed using deeper principles… Adaptation is painful but necessary… The world changes and we must change with it (or not persist)... Change is attended by demons and anomie, and meaning’s disappearance, and an eclipse which darkens hope… Change is attended by blues, by burnout, by depressive desaturation… Change is attended by blanche du bois and Bartleby syndrome…
Therapeutic healing is a process of rewriting personal text. Fabrics need unweaving before they may be rewoven. The reweaving is necessary to accomodate new threads, or the tearing of old threads… Conservation of matter: There are no new materials, only new arrangements. (…everything a remix, so: this there, that here…)
On a One-God Universe
Dreyfus on Melville: Moby-Dick a “polytheistic” text, in contrast with the monotheism of a (Christian, rationalist, modernistic) One-God Universe…
This is where post-rationalism wanted to go, in discursive reaction to LessWrong’s totalizing frames, with its interest in “alternate forms of knowing” (religion, ritual, indexicality, woo). Perry wrote up Dreydegger’s interpretation of the White Whale—how this author discovered it… Truth not in a single, monologic account but in a (Vervakean) ecology of practice, a set of accounts-as-heuristics, worldviews as tools in a toolkit… Spatial fitness: a question of composition. Temporal fitness: a question of rhythm and seasons.
The counter-force goes by many names. Pragmatism. Metarationality. Formless empiricism. Hard-light (versus soft-heavy). Timely forms of a timeless and formless path… Every synthesis of accounts is an old joke about technical standards proliferating. “14 standards? Ridiculous. We need one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.” (Jump-cut to 15 competing standards…)
On lightning
In this mean world of wretchedness and misery, I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me. In its light, in the course of a second, of a single moment, I beheld all the wretchedness of my existence and apprehended the glory and splendor of the star. After, that brightness disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear. I was unable to retain that passing gleam.
—Sadeq Hedayat
The bolt of lightning which destroys the Tower is also the lightning of epiphany, for the structure of the local maximum has become obsolete. It is too heavy, not light enough… It is too tyrannical, too strict; it has lost all flexibility… Or it is too soft, porous, waterlogged, permeable; it has lost its structural integrity.
Its collapse is terrifying and liberating. The lightning is the epiphany that wakes the giant from its habituated, ritual slumber—from ready-to-hand sleepwalking and into present-at-hand awareness. It is the sound of the alarm, the dawn rooster, which wakes us into consciousness. (Was kykeon the lightning bolt that initiated Plato and began philosophy in the West? Sjöstedt-Hughes: “Through a cave darkly, Plato came to see the light.”) Like a psychedelic, breaking us out of naturalized norms, subliminal semaphores…
Awakening-by-novelty… that-which-is-outside-the-tower, awakening-by-estrangement… the defamiliarization of the schema creates a self-consciousness which is at once a Fool’s Fall from innocence, from hubris, and also an ascension… The kinetic energy of downward motion provides the that momenumtum which swings us upward again… Diving and floating, ascending and descending, are yin and yangs each contained in each other, and none can say where transcendence ends and death begins…
On romance
Part of the legacy of literary romance and picaresque, whereby a protagonist roams inter- and intra-world, is an adventurer unmoored and unconstrained by a single social system… This is how Joyce saw himself, first to Trieste, then Zürich, now Paris… The hero must adapt himself anew, to each new ecologic, each system of social convention… The wandering protagonist may wander because he has been cast out from a garden, exiled from the social system he calls home… Or he wanders from an unquenchable desire which leads him to renounce the garden which he cannot call home… In crossing rivers (in crossing rivals) he must build bridges; the structure perseveres long after he passes… Sciutto to bat:
Both embedded within the habitus, while also able to step out of this frame, the translator must be able to deconstruct the vortexes that funnel behaviour into compact homogeneous points... “Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”
Amidst his metaphors, our cyclical form:
The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness…
The Cycle
There is a girl in New York City
Who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I’m falling, flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
“Whoa, so this is what she means”
She means we’re bouncing into Graceland
—“Graceland,” Paul Simon
We can imagine the cycle as hill-climbing or flying; we are indifferent… Ascent (travel against gravity) is effortful, directed at desired states. Descent (travel with gravity) is dangerously effortless, happens “on its own”… A bird, flying, flaps to rise and glides its fall. (Or is raised, with luck, on karmic thermals, a causal momentum…)
Between the sinewave hills the mountaintroughs; between the local maxima of a fitness landscape, local minima where the water settles… Pulled and trapped by gravity, “islands” they’ called, ecologically speaking… Island: any strongly bounded subenvironment… It can be a body of water stranded in land, or a body of land stranded in water… Desert oasis as island.
So that for example a rock formation, protruding from a crater lake, is an island within an island, doubly separated and doubly bounded… And species’ genetic pools, parted mitotically and held separate by mountain range, begin their algorithmic divergence—similar to the way a river, splitting a valley's people, creates rivals—as, for instance, iguanas might & have when castaway a thousand kilos from mainland, washed from mangrove to on magma de Ecuador…
Conventions differ—is optimality an minimum, or a fitness maximum—but here we’ll call a peak a stable equilibrium… Skymountain like a Tower… A functioning and compressive structure, a system of strategies fitted and tailored to its environ… To stand on an observatory deck; to soar in the upper atmosphere… Heaven to a Christian, or Eden—but we, in the middle, on this earth, never accomplish such perfection…
Complexity and disruption cast us out—topple the Towers of our labored-for structures… We plunge from sky to sea and mud, garden to wilderness… From such great heights we fall to the chaos of the trough… The middle way that is media res—where only with labors may we ascend—modifying, experimenting—searching for a new peak, a new temporary stability… And the road to the summit, unreachable yet ever-sought, is littered with bodies (as evolution is a process of learning through death)... And they are the bodies of our family members (as all evolved species are brethren)… And they are the bodies of failed regulators, corpses of disproven hypotheses…
We are Icarus, our wax wings melted at the moment of our greatest (manic) joy—or dissolved at our moment of greatest ecstasy—plunging us into the Sea below. (Another of Father’s experiments…) From light into darkness, thin air to heavy water: crashing and diving into underworld… From Heavenly faith to the Hellish infidelity, a crisis of consciousness. Pulled by gravity, sucked by downdraught, whisked by whirlpool drowned. The heavens are a high-flying mania, the ecstasy of low entropies and immaculate conceptions—the world simplified, seeming (as a crack of light between the darkness) to fit a simple model—while Pluto mans the melancholia entropy reasserted, never defeated, the Pit of all that which escapes our models…
On species of cycle
At the top of the cycle is Love: Plunging into hell, the periods post-breakup, between relationships, the death of a child, entre deux amours.
At the top of the cycle is Faith. At the top of the cycle is Order. At the top of the cycle is Pleasure. At the top of the cycle is whatever your heart desires…
A dopaminergic cycle…
On faith
Fidelity, like stability, questioned gives way to plummeting, plunging into faithlessness. Godelian incompleteness: the premises which undergird a system cannot be proven by that system, they must be taken on faith. Enchantment gives way to disenchantment, soaring peak to sucking pit, religious ontologies to depressive ontologies, whose ashy empty space clears way for new religion. Meanings explode and are reduced and explode again, the world compressible but irreducible, and every compression falling out of fitness.
James Wood:
Soaked in theology, Melville was alert to the Puritan habit of seeing the world allegorically, that is, metaphorically. The world was a place of signs and wonders which could always yield up its meaning like a secret ink... [Moby-Dick] is a book in which [this] habit of of... seeing stable meanings... is mocked by an almost grotesque abundance of metaphor... The Godhead is indeed broken into pieces. Truth is kaleidoscopically affronted... The whale is 'inscrutable.' It is so full of meaning that it threatens to have no meaning at all.
And James Joyce answers:
…the Stephen Dedalus of earlier portions of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man embodies the young Joyce for whom the universe was an organized, systematic whole in which lists, inventories, keys to symbolic interpretation, cyclical conceptions of nature, and hierarchical chains of events demonstrate a “medieval disposition” in the aesthetic principles of the author. Stephen’s subsequent loss of faith in the course of the book creates a significant break with his medieval forebears and produces a crisis in which individual consciousness must ultimately take philosophical primacy…
In the absence of God, Joyce offers the presence of art filtered through the individual consciousness in the nature of the epiphany. More than a way of discovering and understanding the world. the epiphany reveals to the poet "the profound soul of things, and it is he who makes them exist solely through the poetic word.” ...[F]orm constitutes the essential meaning of Ulysses, a book which exemplifies the chaos of life yet uses structural order and coherence reminiscent of medieval models [to organize that chaos]…
Where do these systems come from; where and why does the author project them? Bourdieusean habitus responds, echoing the American pragmatists' habits of conceptualization: These systems are cultural schemas which are structured and structuring, designed and selected for their accomplishment of practical tasks. And the practical tasks and purposes which underlying these schemas are themselves contributory to the survival of the organism. All myth and archetype, all religion and worldview, may be traced back to this evolutionary origin—even if their present branch is a cul-de-sac, evolutionarily speaking.
All that is up to us is the extending of these schemas, and the realignment of these schemas, so that they are not degenerate, do not fall apart, are not suicidal.
Icarus
At too high an altitude… in the vacuum of space… the water pulled out of your cells, tearing the cell walls’ structure. Ebullient, evaporating, desiccating. Oxygen expanding rupturing the lungs; blood boiling and bubbling (the Bends—like rising too fast from the depths of the Sea). The body exposed to extreme temperature fluctuations, where skin melts and freezes. We men are fitted to the mesa-, and are mesa-optimizers; the great heights are not ours to inhabit; in their polarity is their similarity.
Crashing early crashing often
Fearing a crash we cling too long… We are so busy holding together we do not notice the structure is not worth holding together…
If we cannot return, perhaps we can lean into the crash. So says Venkatesh: “It is one of those counter-intuitive things, like turning into a skid while driving, getting an airplane out of a tailspin by pushing the stick forward instead of back… or emptying your lungs when exiting a sinking submarine instead of exiting with a big lungful.”
At the beginning of our fall: compulsive tics, denial, delusion, the false half-bliss of aspired ignorance. To accelerate into a crash: to regain, perhaps, some modicum of control.
But none of this is what a pilot does when the power is cut to his propeller. (When the power is cut to the wind turbine which keeps him aloft.)
The Sea
Again and again I must submerge myself in the water of doubt.
—Wittgenstein, “Notes on Frazer’s Golden Bough”
The Sea, the Sea—the unmarked and unstructured, the ever-shifting, the renewing chaos from which all life is born and into which all life dissolves. Violent uterine of blood… Blood is the Sea taken inside ourselves, the ancestral environ replicated within skinsuit… Here in the trough where water has settled—the unsimulatable Sea—is the opportunity for rebirth… Menace and carress. Ashen-faced and animated by water. Only in storing up energy, and devising a new form, can combat gravity again, tame entropy again, reach such great heights again… Here at rock-bottom, some Pearl of insight must be retrieved, some realization about the raw reality one has been exposed to. Perhaps with such a shining Pearl’s light will we rise again—ascend, awaken to higher faculties and upper airs…
Undersea, the weight of water crushes us to death, crumples our lungs, forces water into us until our cells split. In the dark and the cold, homeostasis approaches hypothermia.
The Hero
The Hero ventures deliberately into the trough, the underworld… Dives into the deep Sea… Exchanges garden for wilderness… Descends from the tower into the canyon… He does this to find a Pearl… The Pearl will renew the Garden… This is why the pearl is a fertility symbol… The pearl is the little moon at the bottom of the ocean…
The Hero’s circular journey transforms identically onto the sinewave cycle of Fall and Resurrection…
On cycles’ progress
A wheel, if it keeps contact with a surface, will move forward linearly as it turns… A windmill, as it turns, produces an accumulating stock of grain as byproduct… The gears of a clock, as they turn, track of time, and toll the hours across town…
The basic human cycle is day and night, labor and rest. Awake, asleep; “living,” “dead.” Across these cycles, structure accumulates: cognitive structure, behavioral structure, social structure, physical infrastructure… The Tower is built across cycles of exhaustion and recuperation. The Tower evolves, and progresses, across cycles of construction and destruction…
New structures must be built by cannibalizing the materials of previous structure. New patterns with old materials. Eliot: “Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.” For our purposes it is the opposite. The same parts recycled, but their composition evolving toward complexity… Every work of art is a model… Every biography is a parable… Learning across generations, an accumulation of information stored in structure… This is not just art’s arrow—it is life’s arrow, evolution’s arrow. There is progress through oscillation…
On calibration
Progress through cycling: linear change through repetition: modeled through the feedback of a sine wave…
Crashing out: a self-stabilizing, negative feedback. No longer shall Icarus ascend to great heights, but choose more modest elevations…
A conceptual structure, a theory, a hypothesis (like a propellor airplane…) is sent up into the air with great hopes. It fails (some unanticipated error, Murpy’s Law, Gödelian incompleteness…) and must be rebuilt. It is sophisticated by failure. The repairs and evolutions are a process of learning through time.
A Goldilocks zone… The Cybernetic Tao of steering through Scylla and Charybdis… These are the metaphors which three millennia of accumulating cultural structure have provided us… Dualisms are useful but false. Dichotomies are crude synopses. Through trial and error, an excluded middle is walked.
Communal discourse dialectically evolves through the peaks of positive thesis, and the troughs of antithesis. In the process, language and ontology emerge as byproduct. Institutional structure (conceptual structure, organizational structure) is not a “pure” enactment of intent, but a historied process of evolution… Clauses are tacked on a contract as amendments are tacked on a Constitution… A linguistic idea is not a “pure” representation of reality, but an intervention in a history of discourse… The “sense” of the sentence is a product of total context… All computation requires context insofar as “context” is a grammatical abstraction resulting from the isolation of a part within a whole system…
On dry brain and wet
Peak and trough alike make claim to reality. “In reality,” each is an equivalent and inverse picture, yin and yang.
Here is Mark Fisher on depressive ontology—the ontology of the Pit:
[Depressive ontology] is, after all and above all, a theory about the world, about life… Depression[’s]… difference from mere sadness consists in its claims to have uncovered The (final unvarnished) Truths about life and desire… there’s no point, everything is a sham… A student of mine wrote in an essay recently that they sympathise with Schopenhauer when their football team loses. But the true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart’s desire—and feel cheated, empty, no, more—or is it less?—than empty, voided. Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse… Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of Spinozist dispassionate disengagement, it is half true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the Lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any One. No flow, no connectivity in the depressive’s nervous system. It is a ‘dry brain’ (Eliot) condition…
Manic ontology—the ontology of the peak, as opposed to to the trough—is the opposite. It is a “wet brain” condition. Meaning flows through every stimulus. Even losses carry a felt sense of their own momentum, their larger perspective within a narrative of annealing…
Peak and trough bothmake claim to reality; peak and trough are equivalent inversions… Lucas’s THX 1138 encodes this in its mythic structure, a hybrid of Plato’s Cave and the Biblical Fall… In a classic midcentury depiction of future dystopia—clonal, insectoid unity, vaguely oriental—top-down, drugged-up, and deindividualized—Eve’s LUH ceases THX Adam’s sedative regime. Having bitten-by-unbiting (it is like unclenching a muscle) THX no longer fits within the system; even as he is “awoken” or “enlightened” he becomes maladapted. “I can’t work this way… I can’t go on like this…” (It is like the attention-deficient off his stimulants; it is like an acid dropout…) Cast out of the underground garden, exiled in the wilderness of the outer shell, he eventually climbs endless rungs (the manhole-like hatch, from underground, resembles a tower) until he surfaces. Light streams in from the dark, as THX emerges from steel and concrete caverns. Above ground, the sun beats hellish and orange. A bird (is it Noah’s dove?) flies across the screen, before the film cuts to black… Flood and fire are the same… Forms of renewing the Earth…
On epiphany
Enthusiasm waxes and wanes, a time-lapse moon. Davis citing Joyce: The Dedalus-patented alternating current of “soaring in an air beyond the world” and “Oh cripes, I'm drownded.”
The moments of great compression and epiphany we so desire are the culmination of long slogs. Output synthesis of so much input. Trees grown (rooted, erected, watered by the river) and felled (the tower collapsed) and thrown in the woodchipper (destructured for parts). When we mistake the heights for the climb, we forget how to reach the heights.
It seems to me that instead, the moments of angelic clarity tend to overrepresent themselves in my mind. It seems to me that a person might be tempted to live by these moments too much; one might hold too hard to them, wanting to have scales forever falling from one’s eyes and lightning forever striking... (Emily Ogden)
As charisma is routinized, in the Weberian cycle, so too does epiphany give way to the mundane:
That leveling away from (uplifting or negatory, peak or abyss) enlightenment to routine, chores, collaboration can be described either as a retreat and a betrayal or as a fulfillment and a tribute. At any rate, earthbound but no longer buried and not yet buried. If Apollo's missing lips whisper “Change,” its torso broadcasts “Persist.”
Pseudopodium
The greatest self-love becomes the greatest self-loathing. Violent delights meet violent ends, so love moderately. A description of mania, or “wet brain”:
“Well, the only moments I've had of freedom, where I've done what I wanted, were when I was manic... It wasn't so much what I did as how I felt,” she said. “The feeling that anything was possible. That there were no hindrances. I could have been president of the USA, I told Mommy once, and the worst of it is that I meant it. When I went out, the social side was not a hindrance, quite the contrary, it was an arena, a place where I could make things happen and be completely and utterly myself. All my inclinations were valid, there wasn't a speck of self-criticism, there was a sense of anything goes, right, and the point was that anything also became true. Do you understand? Anything really did go. But I was incredibly restless, of course, there was never enough happening. I had a hunger for more, it mustn't end, it was not allowed to end, because somewhere I must have had an inkling it would, the trip I was on, that it would end with a fall. A fall into the absolutely immovable. The greatest hell of them all.”
Wet brain: the condition of Fool’s Gold.
Dud, our Holy Fool, enchants everything he touches; he’ll step off a cliff because he’s busy starting at the stars; he embodies an eternally optimistic, energized and eager belief. (See e.g. the gorgeous golden Volkswagen he drives, which lacks both seatbelts and airbags.) “I kinda feel like I’m floating on air,” Dud tells surfer-girl Alice; while Dud speaks, in the backdrop, we can see the enforcer for local loan-shark Burt, patiently waiting for him. Liz is terrified that Dud will get killed, or kill himself, the way Dad went. That the compound interest of living inside a fantasy will keep on piling, til it buries him alive.
The Pit
The Pit is a perfect inversion of the Tower. It is a photonegative, a platinum print, an underworld. It is a black star. This is the descent into the Pit, as described by Dillard:
Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The alpenglow is that red light of sunset which holds out on snowy mountain tops long after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.
I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.
I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist’s version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day. My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. Gary was lighters away, gesturing inside a circle of darkness, down the wrong end of a telescope. He smiled as if he saw me; the stringy crinkles around his eyes moved. The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: yes, that is the way he used to look, when we were living. When it was our generation’s turn to be alive. I could not hear him; the wind was too loud. Behind him the sun was going. We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was pleasant; now there was no stopping it. Gary was chuting away across space, moving and talking and catching my eye, chuting down the long corridor of separation. The skin on his face moved like thin bronze plating that would peel.
From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.
The Pearl and the Eclipse
In the Pit is the Eclipse. In the Pit is a Pearl. Retrieve the pearl; swim to the surface. Not quite. The pearl is not appraised below sea. Gastropod shells are chosen for their surrogacy, their concomitance with pearl quality—namely size. Only back on the surface is the shell prised open…
The Snake and the Eagle
The eagle, soaring in the airs above this world, is a symbol of Apollonian self-discipline and heavenly order. The snake, slithering in the mudded tall grass, a gnostic worm, is a symbol of chaos and Fall… The Eagle claims the truth of higher perspective, the elusive, “objective” bird’s eye view. The Snake claims the ground truth, the lived experience, the thing up close… They are merely perceiving from different heights…
The triumph of Eagle over Snake is a symbol of Humanity overcoming Animality… It is the logic by which an Atreides, having mastered self-control, might graduate to control over others… So Theseus, coming to the aid of the Lapiths, defeats and exiles the centaurs, their bestial and Dionysian course flowing with wine…
Vico’s giants began as animals—creatures of the mudded earth—and are touched by a piece of the sky… The sky is a shard of mirror, giving them self-consciousness… In this enlightenment there is also a Fall, a fall from the garden of unselfconsciousness, a fall from the grace of ignorance, awakened by the pomegranate of truth plucked from a Tree of Knowledge… Man is a skytouched claymation mobile. His chaotic impulses are ordered by the civilizing process that begins with consciousness (an awareness of time).
On Vico’s giants
Dansereau, word-dancing cannabaceae, namedrops McKenna’s stoned ape: Man, the psilocybe-touched animal… Jack trips over a candlestick, hits his head, enters a golden eternity…
Me, I’m a Margulis guy—stoned ape sounds a lot like “endosymbiote,” and the illicit science of self-improvement which alchemists call transhuman, and Viennese analysts call alchemy… Prophets always seem to end up stoned—which is a great cope if you’re primed for a pile-on or just like getting loaded…
On vortices
What pulls us into the pit? Gravity, yes, but also vortex…
As to Fuller and Pound, so to Kenner: the vortex a patterned energy, much like a knot. “Imagine, next, the metabolic flow that passes through a man and is not the man: some hundred tons of solids, liquids and gases serving to render a single man corporeal during the seventy years he persists… recycling transformations of solar energy.” An echo of Joyce, on the poet Mangan: “taking into the vital centre of his life ‘the life that surrounds it, flinging it abroad again amid planetary music…’”
Pound himself a vortex, an organizing energetic force which pulled in proximate materials to its still-eyed center. This is vortex from the perspective of the artist-as-worldbuilder, theorist-as-worldbuilder. (Like Pound, like Kenner.) Dispersed structures and disassembled and compressed into dense internality. From the perspective of an individual pulled into such a whirlpool, description differs. The vortex is a wormhole, a Lewis Carroll rabbithole; funnel and tunnel; tractor beam, attractor field; black hole with an event horizon. The whirlpool sucks you in, tears you up, spits you out in new form.
Cue Dylan: “Girl by the whirlpool / Lookin’ for a new fool / Don’t follow leaders / Watch the parkin’ meters…” Dorothy was airlifted (in her dreams, naturally) by a sky vortex til she wasn’t in Kansas anymore…
Eddies and counter-eddies
Fry-Richardson: “Big whirls have little whirls / That feed on their velocity, / And little whirls have lesser whirls / And so on to viscosity.”
As flowing water encounters an obstacle, friction slows “inner” particles, nearest the obstacle, creating a vacuum or void where “outer” particles rush past and in… Each obstruction to flow creates an eddie, or whirlpool. The eddie is a counterforce, outer flow rushing up to fill the space left unoccupied by slower inner flow—rushing upstream. This rushing-up creates further frictions, and a counter-eddie which flows downstream. This continues, a quasi-fractal, until the energy in the system has dissipated… Gooley: “Leonardo da Vinci was entranced by these smaller eddies and likened them to the flowing curls in a woman’s braided hair.”
Other metaphors for vorticism
The metaphor of gravitational force… the force which we have been using to understand falling, crashing, flying… Pound is a large body pulling smaller bodies into orbit; a sun organizing planets, or a planet organizing moons. The sun-charisma of prophets and artists—charismatic worldbuilders—pull you into their world-logics, pull you out of previous social orbits… Their lackeys, priests and bureaucrats (charisma cyclically deadened, routinized) initiate outsiders into structure-systems… The liminal periods between world-orbits—entre deux mondes; entre deux étoiles—when one is just drifting, floating off in time…
Magnetism, a metaphor for Falling in love… Love is prohibited by the state, in dystopian sci-fi, because it poses a threat to the state. To fall in love is to fall out of primary loyalty to society “in general.” Every family is a scandal, the scandal of valuing a few members of the superorganism over all others…
Metaphor by of The Matrix (a modern adaptation of Plato’s Cave…): the pill. Not quite Lucas’s waste chutes in New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. A traversal from illusion to reality, figure inverted from Greek classicism—breaking through surface, diving into depths. “The real” that underlies simulation. The Internet has appropriated the pilling metaphor to describe any process of disillusionment, any fall from belief to disbelief (or rebelief, more usually)… The Internet is an Internet of Tunnels… One takes a pill, plunges down a tunnel-chute (a rabbithole), and ends up a Type of Guy…