an artist starves

In Fall 2004 I was stoned out of my gourd watching my star wars DVD collection for the nth time when it dawned on me.

I could remix the scenes from Star Wars to make it seem that C3P0 was some kind of evil robot from whom our heroes in stormtrooper costumes were fleeing.

I ran and wrote down some ideas and gave it a name: viral criticism. The point was that a viral critic uses elements of the text being commented upon to make one's comments upon that text, i.e., using the textual elements to analyze, rhetorically, the text. It's not afar from using evidence, it's just employing the text's possibility for re-assembly to conduct the rhetorical criticism.

I was a big, fat nerdy college kid at the time trying to find some semblance of a scholarly identity. I went back to that scribble when I was sober and realized that it was mostly gibberish. That ray of light that was my epiphany didn't make it to the page. Nevertheless, the remediation of media artifacts goes strong since the popularization of video sharing sites like youtube.

It's too bad that the majority of the videos on that site are filed by their makers under 'random,' 'lol,' and 'idk i wus bored.'

I became disenchanted with the notion of viral criticism and turned to a different tack: the virus as critic. Same smell basically, except the point would be to do a line by line rhetorical criticism of the code of some virus to explicate its workings and its relationship to the digital milieu in which it operates. That being said I applied to a job at A&M outlining this to James Aune.

I never heard back from him, nor from the countless job calls I sent out in Fall/Spring 2005-2006. Ball State would end up hiring me under a much more modest statement of research and scholarship.

Blah blah blah universities are mediocrity machines, and I continue to live in poverty.

It's 55 degrees in my apartment, I'm too proud to take a job working part time stacking boxes at UPS, and continue to write as if I'm some kind of artist.

I'm no artist, but I am hungry.

a soup of aphorisms

Our knowledge is a soup. We dip our ladle into a soup of aphorism and sup from our bowl.

My mind has a configuration of motor neurons and conductance amplitudes, which comprise the 'stuff' of thinking.

The rub lies in the incidental nature of this configuration. The content of the thinking that this configuration makes possible is borrowed from our world interface, our sensorium. This means I cannot copy a discreet configuration and expect to also copy the experience or the content of thinking that this configuration makes possible.

More importantly the brain is nervous activity. We should also consider the tongue-in-cheek interpretation of that statement as well. On the whole, we as humans return to familiar habits. We must. Building a home and raising a family take time. Recording the seasons takes time. Reconciling self-identity with the world is an ongoing process. It takes time. In a purely world sense of these activities they are examples of how nervous activity, mentation, interface with the world. The rhythm of this activity shows a purpose. It is a vague purpose because perhaps not all behavior appears to be contributory. A purely world sense is my attempt to treat human activity with disregard for human perspective. The arts, letters, and sciences of the 20th century demonstrated the impossibility of removing perspective completely. It also demonstrated the potential impact that perspective has upon outcomes.

The hole and the black box are a selective membrane cheat. They are how a body captures light for either nervous activity--seeing--or producing energy--photosynthesis. The plant captures light via the pigmentation of the cells associated with photosynthesis. The hole and the black box are how a specialized extension of a nervous system uses the light energy saturating our environment. The perspective, which effects the outcome of an experiment is a result of this black box interaction between a seeing organ and how an experiment registers. Some perceptions intercept light by the edges of the hole in the black box. The edge is essential to the nature of light as a wave. Light is only light because we can perceive it. The energy that gets used in having this light intercept our seeing membrane is what creates the sensation of light. Darkness, after all, is the absence of light and of nervous activity in our seeing membrane. Sometimes excitation of these nerves causes the sensation of light which does not exist. Like the ringing of our ears, our nerves continue to work in the absence of a stimulus. These nerves have become primed by how they interface with the world.

There's an incredible flatness to this kind of thinking. If the realization of both knowing and being are essentially membrane related then that interface is the key to understanding reality as perceived and reality as received.

Is this line of thinking warranted? I'm unsure about the nature of flattening as a way to reduce everything to that metaphor. From the subatomic level to bodily existence this membrane notion holds truck.

At the subatomic level one recognizes that electrons continually pop in and out of existence in our world. What causes such a thing to occur? We could consider that electrons possess some kind of extra-dimensional velocity, which allows them to traverse a membrane separating this reality from another into which an electron from our world passed. What grants this electron the ability to pass through the membrane? I suggest that it is an imbalance between the two universes connected at the membrane. The membranes have a very different reality from our notion of physical ones. They don't exist in space. This membrane is of a very different dimension, one that strains our concept for space. Nevertheless, electrons which can occupy our space enter into that place and ours. What makes that place with perhaps a different set of physical principles a compatible place for this electron? Will we ever be able to track one single electron from our world into another? Are all electrons created equal? There's only one electron perhaps. The vast number of existent electrons in our known universe comprise the superpositions of this single electron.

intelligence

Intelligence has become a cognitive concept. The study of intelligence historically sprung from epistemology, a post-Kant Newtonian professionalization of philosophy.

Intelligence is not between our ears. It's out there in the stars, in the ocean, on the ground, in the world. Intelligence is in the interface between out and in. The basis if intelligence is in the selective membrane. This selective membrane is also a prerequisite for life. With a selective membrane an out and an in become possible, separating a cell from a soup of organic chemicals, replicating proteins bathed in the radiation of a young sun.

Our sense of consciousness is merely epiphenomenal to a network of specialized motor neurons whose connections in three dimensional space provide the conditions for memory. And our odd behaviors, our repetition, our culture, our memorializations fit a cyclical process. We return to the same over and over for the sake of our brains. Cultural activity is neuronal consolidation: it allows us to return to familiar features continually. It's the basis of our memory. We have events that continually serve as signposts to a life lived serially from start to finish.

Those are my views. The basis of intelligence is merely a selective membrane.

utter disappointment

Today is one of those days when I'm utterly disappointed in my life. I recall that I once had a future. Now it seems that I only have a present. Dreaming of a possible and brighter future was my source of hope, my source of happiness, a container for my dreams.

I still dream of a brighter future. I am utterly disappointed with my current condition. I'm becoming increasingly selfish. I am becoming increasingly jealous. I want what I don't have and I'm willing anymore to destroy friendships in the pursuit of what I don't have. In the end, all I really want is some kind of affirming presence. Right now, it's a lot of me hamming for attention, and my god an I am an obnoxious prick in the pursuit of this.

I'm done making calls after a night of drunken debauchery and requesting forgiveness from others. I don't know if I need to apologize. I probably should see it that way. I grade crappy papers. I post crappy responses. My current occupation is so utterly unfulfilling that I dread returning after a few days away. Those days away I spend spinning in my heels, drinking, and trying to charm every girl with a pulse. I repeat myself. I think I anger people as well. Sometimes my regret at angering others shouldn't be entertained. Some people just aren't worth my concern. I need to extricate myself from social situations that I feel that I'm poisoning. I cannot stand that.

I tell myself that if I had a job that kept me employed full time, I'd be happy. No, I'd just be preoccupied. If I'm lucky I'd be too preoccupied to worry about my life. In the absence of continuous obligations and duties I worry. I worry that I may never find a mate. I worry that I may never find fulfilling work. I worry that anything I write will mean nothing. I worry that I'm in a situation where I don't have as much control as I want. I worry that I'm ruining others' impressions of me. I have tested these at least. I spin things over in my head, over and over and over and over. I'm living some kind of loop of remembrance, guilt, shame, sorrow, anger, jealousy, resentment, resignation. Right now, I'm depressed at the start of a new day and my obligations to work to some measurable standard of adequacy. I'm not feeling up to it. I dislike the work that I do right now. Sometimes I accept it and the freedom that I have. Not now, no, now I hate this work.

I am fearful that my feelings will get the best of me. I am fearful that I may eventually snap. I am fearful that I am killing myself in order to find some kind of happiness. I am uncertain that I will find any happiness that is long-lasting. I think I like some people, but when I pursue those people I am fearful of their otherness. I grow disgusted at silly things. Why should I judge? What gives me that right?

I'll keep plugging away. Mentality is an affliction. Reflection is the precursor to my own disgust. To know oneself outside of time, to regard oneself according to some standard, to some measure only leads me to measure myself short nearly every time. That's the source of my affliction. I'm so damn stuck in my head. I've made strides to extricate myself from that, but I'm beginning to feel that my attempts are all false. I'm beginning to snap under the weight of so much silly returning to the same issues.

I'm about ready to give up on this life, but this isn't a cry for help. This isn't a suicide. This is me killing my social life one friendship at a time. This is me realizing that my actions can and will have lasting consequences. This is me wishing that this network of thinking neurons around which my identity sparks would disappear. John Lennon mentioned LSD leading to ego destruction. I am unsure if I could achieve such a thing, but to me it sounds like a wonderful proposition. I try, I try, I try, but I have yet to achieve freedom from my own surly self-identity.

tempted by fate

Do you press on the threads of fate?

I am unsure what these are, but I recognize my quiet entrapment in incidental matters. It's an unavoidable consequence of our thinking as means of 'fixing' time, fastening it to a context, while the rest of the world continually challenges this assumption. Certainty is our mode of reasoning. That which is certain can be done again and again, neuroconsolidation. Repetitive behaviors. We become unstuck in time culture provides us with a will have had-ness, which adds a hermeneutic sheen to our relations. We see it and lose track of the reality fragment. We are driven by our genre commitments to our own hermeneutic sheen. I already know you is what culture provides. Do people actually act according to a presumed entity that they'd wish to represent them.

Communication challenges authenticity. It is our cultural condition; we can only pray for madness as a means of escaping it. Communication is the symptom of our universe. Culture has depth, wisdom. It is bigger than us. We concede to its given-ness; we embrace the oceanic sense of being there as being there, and marvel at how a word we use hides the meaning of the object that it describes. Strange really that we fool ourselves right at that crease where word and thing collide.

Because of its depth and complexity. Because of our situatedness within it that standpoint which provides us with a loading program for reality; we cannot escape it. What are its intentions? I can only suspect that it is an alien entity. The language is a false consciousness. It is more genre commitment than program for living freely. We concede to its rules. How real is it? I cannot fathom this question. I only believe that which repeats itself. Does our nervous matter require this form of stimulation?

Our sense of existence is epiphenomenal, merely incidental. It is the accomplishment of a reflexive circuit of motor neurons. The logic of three dimensional space. The logic of off and on circuits. The logic of amplitude modulation. These are the things which comprise thinking--the bare matter of existence. What's missing is a world, a world that these parts call home. A world that causes these parts to spin and whirl and spin off configurations that fix meaning in that world. Strange when you lay it out to its bare essence. Is that it?

That's it. And here's the rub. Our thinking mechanism requires it. It's nature dictates the background to our reality, and its formalities. Why do the old remember their youth? What makes early formed memories more resilient? I shouldn't ask these questions willy-nilly. This has been studied. I'm lost in the ether, regarding myself as a thing and as a such.

Strange that we don't trust the media through which we know the world. Is the medium really there? Communication is a symptom of cultural activity, its politics, its social organization, its way of being. We manifest these symptoms as we negotiate our self with the dictates of a group through which we realize much of our living. We work. We marry. We join clubs. We play sports. We visit family. We are of a group. Yet we are separate of the group. We identify with ourselves, and we identify with a group. That's the wrinkle, which causes the logic to come out broken, perchance to fool us into believing fate or believing in free will. It's broken and that's how realize the logic of existence.