Caravaggio- Narcissus, Egon Schiele- Die Tote Stadt

Fuse

"The universe can be compared to a television programme playing in a house. If a fuse blows, the programme vanishes, and all who dwell in her. And so if a fuse blows...that's all folks. "
"Ah but if there is someone in the house, the fuse can be replaced and transmission resumes."
"Yes but we're within the programme. How do we know there's anyone watching?"
"Perhaps some of use are within and without."
"I don't understand."
"I know. That's because you're too lost in the programme."

Freudianism

The Freudian vision of the human condition arose from the cocaine using Freud probing the minds of cocaine using mentally unwell bored rich folk, and then pronouncing the thoughts and imagined unifying theory that made sense of the diseased mental emanations to be the normal human condition. Some might imagine that the marriage of a highly neurotic psychiatrist, extremely neurotic client, and cocaine would most likely produce anything but sanity, but this would be a naive view. It also might be harsh to view the Freudian archetype as a pornographer of the psyche, engaged in a deeply incestuous relationship with himself.
It is surely no coincidence the nature of the very word psycho-anal-yst: the marriage of mind and arse.

Council on Foreign Relations

First the repetition of a few relevant quotes:

"We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent." Statement by Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member James Warburg to The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17th, l950

"The New World Order will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...but in the end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old fashioned frontal assault." CFR member Richard Gardner, writing in the April l974 issue of the CFR's journal, Foreign Affairs.

David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, head of CFR, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.
"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

From linked site here, dating back to Clinton Presidential era:

The CFR's claim that "The Council has no affiliation with the U.S. government" is laughable. In reality, CFR members are very tightly affiliated with the U.S. government. Since 1940, every U.S. secretary of state (except for Gov. James Byrnes of South Carolina, the sole exception) has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and/or its younger brother, the Trilateral Commission. Also since 1940, every secretary of war and every secretary of defense has been a CFR member. During most of its existence, the Central Intelligence Agency has been headed by CFR members, beginning with CFR founding member Allen Dulles. Virtually every key U.S. national security and foreign policy adviser has been a CFR member for the past seventy years.

Almost all White House cabinet positions are occupied by CFR members. President Clinton, himself a member of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, employs almost one hundred CFR members in his administration. Presidents come and go, but the CFR's power--and agenda--always remains.

Boethius wrote: "In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature: in man it is vice." And perhaps the same could be said of the political worlds we inhabit. Little point in reading this without going to the link, but another extract as a very brief introduction to the CFR:

The Council on Foreign Relations, housed in the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York City, was founded in 1921. In 1922, it began publishing a journal called Foreign Affairs. According to Foreign Affairs' web page (http://www.foreignaffairs.org), the CFR was founded when "...several of the American participants in the Paris Peace Conference decided that it was time for more private American Citizens to become familiar with the increasing international responsibilities and obligations of the United States."

The first question that comes to mind is, who gave these people the authority to decide the responsibilities and obligations of the United States, if that power was not granted to them by the Constitution. Furthermore, the CFR's web page doesn't publicize the fact that it was originally conceived as part of a much larger network of power.

As should be perfectly obvious to anyone, the CFR and Trilateral Commissions are completely contrary to Jeffersonian type democratic government. Why does one read so little about them, such as for example the great off-white hope Barrack Obama's membership of the CFR? Well, when at the site one sees the bounteous selection of mainstream media members of the CFR, itself leading to David Rockefeller's quote above about the media's discretion about the organisation and its goal of a New World Order, the question becomes a bit of an insult to the intelligence.

Language, Utilitarianism, Beckett, Borges

Excuse the sketchbook format of thought due to limits of interest in literary matter at hand.

Utilitarian language- where purpose is all-important. A path to freedom. However, the mind, or an aspect of the mind, in mistaking its produce for itself, through that very seeking fails to find itself. Being itself, why should it need to find itself in the first place? So the very seeking is self-defeating.
In time, within this self-perpetuating, self-defeating process, lost in language, with the inevitable non-appearance of the hazily imagined goal of reality and happiness, many come to be disillusioned and to doubt the very existence of the exalted goal, but hold fast to the process, but since there is no energy to fuel the process, it all grinds towards a self-consuming halt, with Samuel Beckett being the most obvious incarnation of such proceedings.
Borges as shown in the paradox pieces is an example of the gnostic position, where in the literary field, the mind is lost in the matter of words, but seeks a way out, and the schizophrenic escape route being the falsehood of language itself. Both positions arising from a self trapped within language and a false understanding of that language, and all this completely unnecessary- the mind having no reason to have to entrap itself within one of its emanations.

Jefferson & Corpocracy

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Thomas Jefferson

Victor Pelevin on the Media

"The dog watches the stick, but the lion watches the person who threw it. By the way, when you understand that, it makes it much easier to read our press."
Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Mind & Produce

Which would be considered more of an existential reality- a work of art or the mind which produced it?

Honesty & Language

If language possessed a self-awareness and sense of honour, then the endless insults to her integrity would surely have culminated in catastrophe long before now- the mad-house or suicide being the obvious destinations of the outraged sensibility.
One sample outrage being "The Christian Right."

Cynicism

"You're very cynical."
"You mean I'm honest about the nature of false, cynical forms."
Emm...perhaps."

Literary Assignment

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

Rearrange the above letters to create a literary work of some 500 pages about the human condition and the act of literary creation itself. Individual letters may be used more than once.

Genre

"I'm thinking of becoming a genre writer."
"Really, what kind?"
"Neurotic."

Vanity

Where the mind creates two imaginary selves, and one admires the other.

Progress & the Word

Just in my local library and a thought must have wafted its way from the numerous tomes, and that thought or vision was of a world where, on a variation of the traditional olden monastery where a monk as penance might be given the task of writing out the entire bible several times, a modern such spiritual environment where the god-seeking but stumbling soul is given the penance of creating several manuscript copies of David Beckham's autobiography, or some such.

Infinite Thought Again

Obviously I can't see into the minds of any of my hypothetical readers, except perhaps my own, and even that is debatable, and so maybe I should expand a bit on the Infinite Thought post, and its claims to include exactly that- a thought whose logic cannot be constrained within the finite, even though capable of expression, and that thought being:

This is a translation.

The idea being to treat this as a logical statement...There is an infinite regress here if one tries to pin down the thought to a definite starting point, where, like the paradoxes, the statement can then be examined and found to be false, as in, for instance, "this statement is false" which is obviously not a meaningful line- if unaccompanied by an actual statement- as it isn't a statement. There seems to be nothing, however, in the line, "This is a translation," that contradicts linguistic truth. The line can exist existentially as a meaningful sentence. But it is in treating it as a logical truth and searching for itself at its original source that it becomes so interesting. If it is as it claims a translation, we go to a language- say French- and have the identical statement stating itself to be a translation, and so to a previous language with the same result, and on if desired in a loop of all the human languages ever conceived and back to English again and endlessly onwards. Given its nature we cannot get to a starting point or linguistic first cause, where we then say, "Now it is not a logical statement, as it is not in fact a translation." In response: "Show me that first point." This point, reiterating, can never be reached.

With any rational line the mind attempts to rest on it, to view it as a static form. "This is a translation," however, eludes such a form of mind that regards the external world and its forms from its own static point of perspective. The line and its meaning slips away from it, evaporates at the touch.

But, just in case, it is not a paradox, which is simply a meaningless concept whose existence would imply the falseness of reality and language within it. There is nothing being contradicted with "This is a translation," and is an endlessly more subtle thought. With the paradoxes, which are simply errors of thought, the mind gets to reach a conclusion and satisfy its rational nature, and while it may superficially seem that the conclusion is to damn reason and this its anti-rational substance, it is still an exercise of the reasoning mind which lives on, its processes uninterrupted. Whereas there is no such point of rest with this thought. The reasoning mind itself dissolves if able to properly view this thought and melt into its substance, though, of course, all this explanation is as likely more self-defeating than anything else.

Obama & the Council on Foreign Relations

Short video here, obviously relevant to the recent posts on Machiavelli. For anyone gullible enough to imagine cracks in the edifices of political control permitting liberators to seep through, anyone remember the naive and embarrassing euphoria that greeted man of the people Tony Blair's triumph over the Conservatives in the 90s?

Greek Chorus

A useful literary device- long unfashionably unfashionable, though given the Heraclitean nature of fashion, not unlikely to become fashionably unfashionable, and even moving onto fashionably fashionable, before once more returning towards the present state of affairs- is the use of the Greek chorus who can add their collective voice to proceedings at highly charged moments, thus adding an unusual point of perspective to the unfolding literary events.
However, it should be borne in mind that if one isn't relatively fluent in Greek oneself one should make use of a reliable interpreter, as otherwise, in your ignorance, your Greek chorus may be spouting utter and inappropriate nonsense.

The Neurotic

Neuroticism is where the mind becomes a vortex of trapped false thought, and can afflict individuals and cultures to greater and lesser extent, modern imposed mass "culture" having particularly parted ways with reality. The collision of such vortices tends to be the domain of 'history'; ie the abstractions or alleged abstractions from reality that become the subject matter of the history books, which, given the sanctified hallucinations of today's public realm, are often alot more self-contained in their abstractions than imagined. In other words, as expected, just extensions of the applied neuroticism that is the natural domain of power-politics.

Economics of Literature

The great thing about literature is of course in relation to the economics of scale. It is just as cheap to write a great battle-strewn epic involving the displacement of entire peoples as it is to write a minimalist work of an elderly woman living at home with her two cats. Special-effects simply the cost of ink and paper, or perhaps of electricity. A truly democratic art-form.

Infinite Thought

This is a translation of an imaginary work by a fictitious author in a non-existent language. It is self-evidently a very short work, which, even if it did exist, would most likely achieve little renown.


More prosaically:

This is a translation.

Hole

"There's a hole in my sock."
"Of course there is. Otherwise you couldn't get your foot into it."
"No, I mean a second hole."
"A second hole? Then throw it away."

Parodox Parody?

Below might seem a parody of the recent debunked paradoxes, but is in fact entirely faithful to the spirit and standard of reasoning in Zeno's and Epimenides' famously alleged paradoxes, where the intelligent understanding of words and what they stand for breaks down.

"I am here. You are there."
"No, I am here. You are there."
"No, I think you'll find that I am here while you are most certainly there."
"Bullshit. I am definitely here, while you are there."
"Are you calling me a liar? I am most certainly here, while you are without a sliver of doubt over there."

And so on.

Waiting For Moro

A man at a crossroads, shabby, impatient yet bored. Waits.
Enter another man, equally prosaically insignificant.

First Man: I thought you'd never get here.
Second Man: Sorry bout that. I got delayed

Exeunt.

Perhaps the Final Paradox Piece

As said at some point in the earlier posts, the mental urge towards the existence of the paradox or/and the worldview arising from belief in its existence amount to gnosticism, reality divided against itself, and as Borges says, false, though the very word 'false' should have told Borges all he needed to know about the falseness of this vision. Ultimately a schizophrenic universe. But as shown all the given paradoxes are not paradoxes at all, but are either illogical at source or seen as paradoxes as a result of false views of the reality mirrored by the logic of a mental set-piece.
The paradox is itself, obviously enough, an exercise in language, and here the senselessness of the very concept of the paradox becomes clear. The entire basis of the correct use of language is its meaningfulness, and as a reasoning tool all language properly used must be meaningful. The paradox seeks to meaningfully use language to create a meaningless result. This is self-evidently impossible, and makes as much sense as to imagine one can get a wrong answer within mathematics. And if you do apparently get a wrong answer, then that's the problem. You've gone wrong.

And knowing there must simply be an error, the given paradoxes were shown to be childishly easy to unravel. The error people make is to leap aboard what is imagined to be the ensuing logical train, rather than looking closely at the alleged paradox precisely as an existential language construct. If an example of the simply meaningless construct, there is no way out of the resulting train of logic. Being meaningless it contains no meaning, and one is lost within the enclosed loop of the labyrinth.
The most elegant 'paradox' I've come across and the most subtle to unravel is below, and its elegance of construct and deconstruction lies in its being so purely a matter of language.

A famous idea or paradox is that God could not conceive of something of which he could not do. God of course being used here in the sense of an all-powerful entity, and so since he could not do the above, then he cannot be all-powerful.
I have no idea to what extent this notion has been examined and what excursions of reason it has involved, but a possibly unexamined view is that the thought is being looked at from the wrong linguistic angle. The usual emphasis being that God could not conceive of something of which he could not do.
However, the same sentence can be looked at from a slightly different perspective offering a radically different significance.
God could not conceive of something of which he would not be capable, and he achieves this by not conceiving of it. Thus an all-powerful entity's absolute mastery is maintained.

Again, the error we make is to rush to examine the logic, while it is in the linguistic structure where the truth lies.
Though come to think of it, this will probably not be the last paradox post, since as reason, or what is imagined to be reason, is usually set in motion in the service of already imagined and desired 'truths,' then why this gnostic divided worldview occurs in the first place should be looked at.

Nabokov's Aesthetic of Literature

Nabokov's aesthetic of the novel is shown in his words on Gogol:

His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not of ideas.

A very brief summary of the butterfly killer Nabokov's feeling for literature and aversion to the dark matter of ideas entering this domain which, it is claimed, is purely a phenomenon of language. Dostoevsky, for instance, especially met Nabokov's disdain. Well, it is self-evident that literature is a phenomenon of language, but rather than simply stop there, the issue then becomes what is language. Language is something which intrinsically involves the creation of meaningful structures, such as sentences, and which sentences may transmit the substances called ideas. Nabokov's notion that language is something distinct from what language creates and embodies is nonsensical.
Here someone will say, perhaps, that Nabokov is talking of the aesthetic grace of language, and the point of the superiority of good over bad writing obviously needs no debating.
Another point, however, is that if one pulls back one's view far enough, Nabokov's "non-utilitarian delight" in pure aesthetic form is itself an example of the novel of ideas he disdains. This aesthetic self-containment being an idea of a novel, of which persumably his own work is an imagined example. It's the application of an intellectual concept, though this overarching idea involves a schizophrenic and castrated understanding of what language is.

The earlier mention of Nabokov's pathological addiction to the killing of butterflies and preserving their now dead forms was not meant to suggest that his sense of literature could in any way be equated with this preference for beautiful dead simulations over messy truth- elegant sterile abstractions pinned harmlessly on a page.

Progression of the Real

It has come to my attention, by what means is irrelevant, that a certain Plato is arguing that this world is but an imperfect 'digital' copy of another universe- an analogue being of far greater authenticity, though this analogue version is in itself not entirely a true representation of the Absolute Truth. This 'universe' by contrast is hardly worthy of the name, so degraded a simulation is it.
Others claim that yes, this is a poor copy of a copy, but an almost perfectly faithful one of the analogue, and only the most refined of perceivers could notice the difference.
Another view is that such is the resolution being employed in this version of reality that this copy is a positive improvement on the analogue, while later versions of same will come ever closer to the perfect truth, with some extremists even claiming that eventually simulated reality will come to replicate Reality with absolute authenticity.

Perpetual Motion

Scientists have been surprised by new images obtained from their technological instruments of perception which appear to explain the massive clockwork mechanism of the universe's refusal to show any signs of winding down. Where is all the energy coming from, accelerated expansion of said universe, etc.
It appears that all the fibres of existence do converge upon an ultimate centre of energy, and in this centre appears to be, surprisingly but unmistakeably, a rather small middle-aged man, respectably but a little shabbily dressed, seated upon and pedalling a bicycle. He, and this has upset some of our scientific minds, doesn't seem to be particularly exerting himself, sometimes even free-wheeling while he rolls himself a cigarette. Whether the man and his bike are actually in motion or static, as with an exercise-bike, is as yet uncertain, but evidence is starting to hesitantly lean towards actual motion. What motivates this individual is pure conjecture.

Spirals Good and Bad

Genuine healthiness and sanity of mind is a virtuous spiral extending outwards- rather than a circle of fixed diameter, while unhealthiness and insanity of mind is a vicious spiral narrowing inwards. The spiral inwards contracts ultimately to an insupportable point of concentration, while the spiral outwards is infinite. And so, on a simple intellectual level is seen the truth of an opened mind and love and the falseness of ignorance and hatred. One leads to greater and greater reality, the other to a finite point and self-annihilating unreality.

An inevitable metaphysical question then becomes how long this concentration, which is the existence of evil, can be sustained. Can it be infinitely extended, just this terror-stricken side of total annihilation? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that it doesn't exist within infinity. That is the very reason it 'exists', or sustains the illusion of itself. It can only exist within the temporal domain.
And so maybe the troubling answer is evil will exist as long as time exists- which isn't as absolute a statement as might seem to those who imagine time and reality are inseparable. It is outside of this matrix that one experiences the living answer. But the man trapped within the matrix, again as with the 'paradoxes' lately discussed, imagines there is no truth outside the matrix.
An interesting line from the Book of Revelations goes:

Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

To leave the matter in suspension, it is perhaps an insoluble question as to whether intentional evil exists as long as time exists, or whether it has a finite duration within the temporal. And the question also would need specifying, as in the above quote what is referred to is the conscious union of men specifically devoted to the 'good' of evil, or ego worshippers, such as these men of worldly power. In any case, the idea of a Manichaean struggle between good and bad, light and dark, is ultimately a bit of a non-starter, as how can unreality battle reality, which is what this can be genuinely reduced to on an mental level. What is it unreality or insanity could win, even if it could win, but itself? But even that, pushed to its logical destination, must be lost.