STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #30: THE FINALE

…the subconscious seems a part of the psychic volatility escaping language’s efforts to sensibly convey useful and productive meaning. It seams a textured current of organic systems continuously bifurcating into subjective, which is to say egocentric, phenomena….Literature, like schizophrenia [see Deleuze & Guattari, henceforth D/G], frees itself from the normative grammars adhering to language’s power structures, which are also referred to here as the “law.” Thus D/G say a “desire-liberating reader, a schizoanalyst, whose task it is to convert the text into a desiring-machine, or better still, into a revolutionary machine,” seems necessary for oppression to be overcome and true autonomy, the liberation of desire, to be attained… D/G theorize that desire exists coincidentally in two forms: a “paranoiac transcendental law” signified by the oedipal system; and an “immanent schizo-law” shaping subconscious desire that ends up revealing the ineffable. In every situation the schizo-law is taking apart and subverting the paranoiac law, its method of writing deconstructing the systems of language, the universal control compositions…. Desire is essentially and primarily a social production…

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #29

…all token acts of power are insurrections [of some kind] against a higher form of order, consciously perceived by the individual rebel, or not. Sexual standards, which is to say general production standards, manifest in some way that higher form of order which we can perceive, or imagine, evolving; that which is deemed “good” for reasons that go beyond any individual consciousness or interest…

All sex, which is to say any process by which a group of something reproduces its constituent parts, and, by extension, ends up reproducing itself in its own, somewhat expanded dimension, is evolutionary [evolution is unconscious, not mindless as earlier suggested by someone else]. From this aspect, the masculine political-economic elite exact an insurrection against the rights of psyches it considers feminine and/or alien in relation to itself, exotic people of other, that is lower, social classes, as well as humankind’s general interest, which involves having a healthy environment and a modicum of justice in "human affairs" rather than the submissive stance underlings are now expected to take…the political-economic elite smother the inalienable rights of outsiders and interlopers to maintain its own privilege, a status quo in which these self-selected chosen ones alone exercise power and full personal autonomy in the social and cultural spheres...as well as their own bedrooms. There’s nothing new in this. It’s as old as our species. Both Foucault and Freud believed sex to be a strategy of power and knowledge, that sex is a human “truth” which supports power and authority, not self-autonomy or integrity.

Furthermore, I wonder if it may not be possible to view sex as a projection of the Earthling’s survival instinct, in which all organisms “eat,” “drink,” “screw” or die. Sex seems like the Earthling’s will to power, Its pleasure principle, Its reaction to the disequilibria caused by entropy...

...“Love” seems something that happens when “sex” goes well. It perhaps functions as an apparatus of social slavery. “Straight” sex [by which I mean reproduction that is exclusionary to the extreme, as in you must incorporate your business to do business efficiently, you must get married for insurance and legal rights, etc.] seems the epitome of good citizenship. Bad love, deviants, criminals who diverge from the socially acceptable forms of reproduction, who might have sex for other reasons than procreation, who as artists might produce things that are not efficient or useful or profitable…must not be allowed to exist!


...so it’s not only “sex” as we habitually think of it, but also political, economic, spiritual, cultural renewal that must be repressed and oppressed at every turn. Because these types of desire are socially oppressed [it’s bad form to be seen as overly ambitious in any of these areas], each one of us [because none of us truly belongs to the “elite” in our own minds] must repress the desire for sex, power, money, spiritual enlightenment and cultural popularity in ourselves if we want to be “successful,” and truly join the elite as something more than just some public spectacle, which is to say celebrity.

This, of course, necessitates the need for private lives in which to pursue individual fetishes [alternative forms of production of whatever seem fetishes] as part of our personal development and growth, something that’s increasingly imperiled thanks to technology, perhaps. And by fetish I mean whatever makes a meaningless social process personally meaningful…whatever it is that might turn us on about what we must do…that which we’re doing all the time…

...manifesting the general procreative drive of the Living Planet, which each of us experiences as an insurrection against decent society while in the act of copulating, participating in the general spectacle, or orgasm, for ourselves…the general horniness producing types of horninesses we can dominate, and these types producing further extended or intended horninesses that feel oppressed into repressing their own perceived “types” of horniness to avoid our oppression because we're attempting to repress the same kinds of horny in ourselves, and so on, while we also almost universally find our horniness and subsequent release or liberation the source of our greatest pleasure…At least in my opinion….So it seems “love,” or the socially acceptable forms of it in the West, according to Freud and Foucault, and I think I might somewhat agree with them in my own way, functions socially, politically, economically, culturally and individually as a slavery machine because the power structure enslaving it defines what forms of love are acceptable instead of the individual lover (or, perhaps, because of The Individual Lover)…

And what does sex have to do with writing? Well, perhaps, writing is a sub-species of sex…the way sex...may seem a sub-species of writing…each dealing with its own reproduction, procreation, re-cognition, etc., of meaning...when this could be pure fiction...or not...?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #28

And consider Foucault, who believes a type of “cultural unconscious” is subject to continuous instability and alteration, to discontinuity rather than permanence, and therefore serves as something of an unconscious archive of exclusionary rules, or grammars. This set of linguistic practices generates social and cultural activity, governed by rules that are unformulated and characteristically unrecognized by the speakers concerned [e.g.: Eichman]… Recognizing the unavoidability of the given culture’s power matrix, Foucault analyzes how the strategies of social and political-economic power have a double effect by leading to strategies of evasion and subversion….



Domination necessarily evolves the means for insurrection: “…there is no relationship of power without the means of escape and possible flight.’ (Foucault 1982, p.225) The token exercise of power is always an insurrection of some type…



Foucault believes, and I agree, that sexuality has not only dominated our historical discourse of the last five centuries, but has evolved over time to dominate our institutions and customs…The era of psychoanalysis brought about what Foucault calls the “surveillance” of the body, a textualization of confessions and self-revelations of analysts and patients alike. From all this new data emerged new understandings of the power relations between the individual psyche and the external world it’s perceiving, how the body enables a sensualization of power…

THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #27

The writer's game seems, perhaps, about involving the unconscious, narcissistic reader in a form of collusion that disturbs, twists, perverts the reader's transformation from mere consumer or audience-member into producer-collaborator...with the intention of letting meaning expand beyond the mere ideology of some individual into a feedback loop necessitating the evolution of meaning as part of the systemic stabilization process necessitated by disequilibria ["boat rocking"]...

...so books have margins for readers to write in, allowing for the development of "stories" as texts begin rocking each other's boats...stirring up the emergencies of diverse fictions--hornets from a nest/collaborators from a text...the patterns of human consciousness...apparently symmetrical with other patterns of consciousness...kaleidoscopic cognition...The writer's game seems about playing the game of human life and consciousness--the liberation and repression of psychic content--while smiting whatever might oppose it whenever its ugly head might pop up, dripping Viking blood on every page...with both I and eye wide open...but who can truly say...and how might they say it?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #26

...a form of what Federman called "critifiction," a self-reflexive, self-conscious, self-analyzing neurosis focusing on the absented mother, the blank page being an empty womb, the words echoing there like some voice in the closet imagining Balzac's Sarrasine, and how to read and write and seduce her.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #25

Also, see Game Theory.

…the canny (i.e.: conscious) imagination is what makes fiction pleasurable to reader-writers…Repression seems essential to reading-writing fiction because repression helps determine a vital aspect of the initial conditions by which reading-writing fiction occurs. These initial conditions, of course, seam rules, forming “rhetorical strategies” [playful ones, hopefully]…For the fictionist, reading-writing fictions seam the means to relive the primal anxiety of birth, the initial un-pleasure of be-ing born—our original experience with angst. We do this because at heart we are explorers. No bend in the mind can be left unturned, no twisting peak left un-surmounted, no game left unplayed…or at least beyond the reasonable effort of turning, twisting, surmounting, gaming our psyches to do so…It seems the inevitable inability to do these essential things that gnaws…the day spent not being born…This anxiety, in turn, leads to useful or what Bloom calls “enabling fictions” that result in “analysis terminable and interminable”…It seems possible that through these processes of writing and analysis reader-writers might overcome the “catastrophe” of our apparently strange attraction to what we perceive as death, and redeem ourselves for the “evil” which seems the un-atonable fact of reading-writing, the doing of nothing…

...our idle hands making the devil’s work…that said, we reader-writers might also find a better way of living decently in an indecent world than keeping busy, being useful and productive, despite the odds against it these, and relatively speaking any time, of course…if we might manage to live lightly enough to be easily ignored by the Earth Itself, each and every one of us, we just might…or whatnot…

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #24

According to Elizabeth Wright, Freud’s major contribution to literary theory was his view of “id-psychology as focusing on the return of the repressed, ego-psychology on the return of repression, and object-relations theory as uneasily trying to reconcile the two”… Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice,..., Methuen & Co. Ltd, New York/London, 1984, p. 138

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #23

...looking for the ways that literature and writing--by which I mean a specific type of deadly serious laziness and evil--can playfully confront certain kinds of useful, industrious work ethics and all their efficient and productive effects, revealing or concealing our irrepressible unconscious, which is to say the truer or, perhaps, more powerful intentions of literature and writing...to see the psychonautic, word-being self through the textual "I" the same way the Earth sees Itself through the eyes of an astronaut looking homeward from his base on the Moon...it seems getting there always requires a going beyond...a breaking of taboo...the eclipsing of once necessary cultural evils...doing nothing, even if it's wrong, when everyone else wants you to do something they think is useful and productive...or not...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #22

Literary application[s] of branes as texts...M-theory as "ultimate textuality?"



...by writing/imagining a text in a manner intended to mediate between the subconscious and conscious minds, by nurturing the emergence of a text that serves as a feedback loop esemplasizing the functions of unconscious and conscious into a single entity--much like the post-Freudian ego-psychologists merging of the reader/writer--the writer allows formation of new meanings by making previously unconscious content perceivable. It is the text's "strangeness" that attracts the reader/writer and brings them together on a narrative or text--that psychic membrane mediating various perceptions.

Please see "The Secret Life of Chaos," especially part 4.

The trouble I have with the documentary linked to above, however, is its denial of mind, its concluding statement that "evolution is mindless." The film makers seem to ignore the nature of their own curiosity...the possibility that their mind needs chaos...that chaos itself, as a higher form of order, requires mind...If no mind perceives or conceives chaos, does it exist?

I'm more uncertain than these chaps about these things...their idea that evolution is mindless seems, somehow, a comfort to them, as if they were relieved. Why? What types of "Dangerous Knowledge" might they be avoiding? Why do they seem so afraid of the marriage of science and mysticism? Are their imagined excuses justifiable if they claim "truth" as their ultimate aim? Does it take too much courage to be a "psychonaut?"

I'm not sure I'd know...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #21

The fear/greed dichotomy seems a symptom of a matter-based reality as opposed to a consciousness-based reality...We are "consciousness conductors."



Fiction...transcends...wish-fulfillment, exceeds mere daydreaming...the fictionist relates fantasy to time by using, according to Freud, "an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future...pleasure...[is] connected with the dynamics of the work of art"...While the daydreamer's fantasy succumbs to egocentric opposition, the fictionist devises strategies to transcend mere ego through writing by using the same methods the subconscious uses to subvert egoistic intent...and so the fiction/reality dichotomy dissolves and consciousness expands accordingly...ego may be at the helm, but a much wider and deeper awareness captains the ship.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #20

My fiction seams an awareness that we feel alone amid all the togetherness, longing for the true togetherness of a lone...It seems the autonomous sensitivity of interrelatedness...a longing for a "return of the repressed"...to atone with the actual universe...if my fiction has any intent, it's this.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #19

My fiction reveals the emotional fallout and alienation resulting from the individual human being's cognitive confrontation with an apparently meaningless or absurd modern and/or postmodern civilization...It's the "nausea" of one who's derived deep meaning from Nature via a complex understanding of language confronted by the asininities of those in political-economic power, who seem to be forces of entropy, agents of that strange attraction toward death...It is the feeling of being Eros in an age of Thanatos.



As nuclear physicist Nick Herbert asks: "If they trusted me with Plutonium, why not LSD?...Why has our society decided to promote the worst possible drugs [alcohol, cocaine, tobacco] and persecute those who use the best?"

Is it because we live in a culture of death rather than one of love?

I actually think I know the answer to those questions. So do you if you're not deceiving yourself...

THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #18

...the apparently clear separation between humankind and Nature is made ambiguous by the apparent randomness of individual perceptions over time...yet, perceiving this cleavage or bifurcation between humans and Nature seems to, perhaps, necessitate an evolution in language allowing us an adequately complex sensibility to consciously rub up against Its membrane ["M-theory"]...which is to say mind...or Nature.



Humankind and Nature seam, in reality, useful fictions--wet surfable waves we catch on the ocean to ride for awhile...heading, perhaps, to shore...or home...

Maybe our minds are parallel universes forming a universal mind participating in a symphony of universal minds...vibrating the brane.

...or not. What do I know?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #17

The apparent "evil" among us, that malignancy haunting our every action these days, which seems possibly the result of acting on our superficial desires for temporary security and comfort for ourselves at Nature's expense, a symptom of which might be seen as an increased delusion of ourselves as chosen people equating Nature with wilderness and irrationality...and that which must be tamed and reasoned away for holy land profit maintaining the promise of Empire...



and so our waging war among ourselve seems like It at war with Itself...perhaps even suicidal and riddled with self-loathing, calling Death Its "manifest destiny" in the note Its leaving behind, something It might have called "history" had It survived Itself...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #16

To be deeply spiritual in the ecological sense is to perceive one's place and function within the organic system, then be it, and the only way to be it seems to live in communication with Its mind and seam with It, nostering with Its being. Otherwise, one might function differently, serving other purposes...



...Human desire reflects and manifests Nature's desire...our desire appears an extension of Nature's desire, a natural intention...dissolve concepts of self and other, humankind and Nature, ego and id, as unnecessarily distinct categories...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #15

The deeper one's understanding of language, the more deeply one might perceive Nature's cognitive processes and realize we are not the world's supreme consciousness when it comes to percipient contact with others.

Happy Thanksgiving!

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #14

The more that humans produce meaning in Nature by languaging, ever-honing more precise and complex descriptions of It, the more aware Nature will become of Itself, as the perception of humans communicating with other humans can be imagined as Nature communicating with Itself...or "thinking"...It be-ing mind perceiving matter and energy organizing Itself...



...so, the quality of our communication will seam the qualities of Nature's thinking...as It is, the planet seems depressed, suicidal...how do we heal It and ourselves?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #13

Grammar is the imagined and thus usefully fictive communication rule book by which these [autopoietic] systems maintain themselves, at least as we can perceive them, making their feedback loops possible. This understanding or sensibility, however, only exists in the cognitive dimension, as one must be aware of the constant uncertainty regarding the adequacy of description for what's actually going on, as opposed to what's really going on. What's really going on is what we imagine, or what we think and feel is going on; and what's actually happening is beyond that...inside or outside, but elsewhere nonetheless.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #12

...an autopoietic system undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its weblike pattern of organization. It couples to its environment structurally, in other words, through recurrent interactions, each of which triggers structural changes in the system. The living system is autonomous, however. The environment only triggers the structural changes. The autonomous living system also specifies which perturbation from the environment triggers these changes...and by doing so, the system "brings forth a world..."



Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system [a biological entity] with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself a process of cognition. In the words of Maturana and Varela, "To live is to know"...likewise, perhaps, language selects what is expressible and gives shape to the ineffable, or inexpressible, in a figure-ground relationship that seems the expression of awareness. Cognition is the continuous bringing forth of awareness through the process of language. The cognitive interactions of a living system with its environment are linguistic interactions, and the process of languaging itself is a process of cognition. In other words, language seams to know...

But I know nothing, perhaps. Maybe I'm nuts...somewhere beyond this language...like you.

Is that OK?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #11

...that if "we" seem to be conscious beings aware of each other as separate biological entities and that together "we" are functionaries cooperatively forming, via language, a psychic ecosystem that, on the global scale seems, in part, Nature's cognition, then Nature seams Itself, composing Its own awareness as the supersitial mind composing/thinking/dreaming-nostering/minding/feeling/obeying us into be-ing existent. This seams a psychic form of recursive symmetry across scale, functioning to maintain an equilibrium/meaning amidst the perceived chaos/confusion of Its own processes.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #10

...if one begins writing fiction with a few basic rules [the idea being for a "plot" or phase-space mechanism to emerge over time and pages] in sync with a "chaos game" of random limits, various meanings will begin arising from the text, moving toward a visible spectacle proportionate to scale, lured by some "strange attractor" across the textual "event horizon" toward some "black hole" singularity that's always ineffable to the individual human being...experiencing itself, for what seems like the first time, alive in something else...this seams the faith one starts with.

Thelonius Monk: Blue Monk

DH Lawrence has much the same view of women as Stephen Fry

"Pornography is the literature of prostitution. Prostitution and art have always lived together." Germaine Greer.

The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley Online

From the University of California Digital Library.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #9

Supersymmetry is the grail of string theory, addressing the vision of multidimensional feedback loops that also include quantum mechanics. The "string" is the feedback loop, fascia, membrane stitching/joining these dimensions together as they flow through time [or as time vibrates them in its passing]. The ultimate particle has been replaced by the image of a vibrating string whose pitch varies and harmonizes with the pitch variances and harmonizations of other strings [remember Emerson's "Nature?" Now keep going], which ravel together forming an infinitely large string and infinitely small strings harmonizing one to the others, and vice versa. It's the difference between music and noise, language and gibberish. It's a unifying theory, a titillating big picture and useful fiction.

SIMPLE COMPLEXITY

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #8

...consider how, as the human mind has evolved, its imagination and potential of perception has expanded into increasingly larger and smaller scales, as if perception were a simultaneous ripple effect inward and outward. At one time we were mentally stuck on the scale of things we perceive with our naked senses, but now we've left Earth, entered space and looked back at Earth, we've struggled to survive and thrive, examining the depths inside the atom and the expanses beyond our solar system...Since we are Earthlings, when we look at a photograph of Earth from space, the Earthling, or Earth Itself, looks with us, seeing an image of Itself recorded elsewhere. The Earth's biological system has possibly reached [if It wasn't already there and "we're" just catching up] a level of complexity where It's experiencing the first glimmers of sentience, or global consciousness. In theory, this planetary cognition seams an aspect, scale and/or dimension of cosmic psychignition, an awakening self that seems to work--in each dimension to the infinite micro and macro scales--at perceiving Itself as a unifying, and therefore by intention [as opposed to extension], rightly or wrongly, universal order...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #7

Literary texts apparently emerge from cognitive evolution, which seems a localized creative awareness. Languaging seams their most essential processes. Texts exist as the skins of reading/writing, and might even be considered "alive" if they were taking part in Life's evolution by writing, reading, thinking-feeling about and discussing whatever [on the externalized or extended page or screen] by manipulating various symbols within themselves [on the internalized or intended "mind's eye"]. While actively, selectively engaged by reader/writers, texts maintain their scrabbling, subjunctive fluidities, serving as flexible, permeable membranes vibrating meanings between one consciousness and another, evolving evermore complex we/ouis: Systemic cognitions [which some might call, rightly or wrongly, "singularities"], etc. & et al...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #6

...the concept of cognitive equilibrium among autonomous functioning entities that are forming, and being formed by, their common and particular ecosystems across scale and over time.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #5

Evolutionary theories seem those that might try showing and telling the multidimensional grammar which, over time, produces complex systems producing a likely more complex system elsewhere, demonstrating some form of transdimensional functioning or, perhaps, recursive symmetry across scale...the arabesque as opposed to grotesque, or not.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #4

...attempt to help recalibrate American thinking so it can better cope with these dangerous, even apocalyptic, which is to say revelationary times. My aim is not to suggest what to think so much as how one might think. My focus is on process, fluidity and change as opposed to outcomes because process seams the perceivable effect. The ends will take care of themselves if we focus on the means, excepting unforeseen events...that require reflexive responses to stimulating obstacles which enable the formation of shared realities, provided the randomness that's occuring seems a knowable variable...falling within the parameters of human perception, language and thought.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #3

...how to find our way out of this mess?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #2

What do most Americans need more these days than to grow up, think and act freely and be less rigid, to bravely assert themselves in the face of systemic crises?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #1

Whenever I start a new writing project I jot down the main ideas then print them out. I end up re-reading the highlighted and bold stuff repeatedly before work each day. The eventual effect--theoretically/hypothetically--might seem uncanny.

Anyway, the "worry" part comes from it being related to the working title of a fiction piece I'm doing.

My idea is to share this list with you via daily excerpts. The list of "worries" is culled from a short "book" I was writing in 2007 called "Nature's Ching." This litany will take about a month of daily postings to get through. Please feel free to comment, either here or on Facebook. I'll read every one even if I don't respond.

Topping the list is everything we perceive, think and do is fiction. This is a lot like Richard Rorty's idea that science and philosophy are essentially stories or "literature." I say human life seams fiction...

Here's the opening quote:

I am quite willing to give up the goal of getting things right, and to substitute that [with] enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions. The point of philosophy, on this view, is not to find out what anything is “really” like, but to help us grow up—to make us happier, freer, and more flexible.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy As Cultural Politics