The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Can we still remember what it was like? What the fuck is a protest song? We live in the world of Eternal War, where Demons in the Night come to crash jetplanes into our skyscrapers, where muggers without souls stick knives into soft flesh, where no one is safe, where we die in hospital beds, painful tubes shoved down up and into our orifices — painful — dark – black & bleak, bend and break, crack winds, I am Young, Young Tom O’Bedlam, Methinks its not a journey —

Karl Marx was a law student too, once. Famous law students who left to do some thing better. To stand against the abyss, eyes open into the storm, and face it — pure courage, eyes open — the strong death — without regrets — accepting the truth and denying all falsehoods — singing lyrically — not yet cynical about the heroic path you still might tread — living in this artificial world — constructed out of what, wattle and daub? The roads are paved with boneskulls, says Zeddicus to my right. There to my left sits Michael II Transfigured, Metatron. He cannot talk. He is not there. He has been silenced. There is no comfort. I am other people, I say to myself. You know it don’t you — when you dream, you slip into other people’s minds — I don’t know what time it is; I don’t know what day it is; I am losing my mind; slipping, slipping, falling, slipping, down down down down down — dancing with the words to the music — I’ve strung them on a wire, and pulling it this way, make them dance.

What does this have to do with Nixon? says Jehosophat, sitting above me. There is a whitebearded frog floating in the far left upper corner of my room, hovering just there right beneat the sealing. Wait no — that it isn’t happening now — that happened some other time — impenetrable, they will say this — incommunicable — it is communicable to me — this sick sweet madness — this unrepentant lucre — flowing flowing words — wrestling, dancing with these soft and plastic words and thoughts — the word adorns the thought and the thought adorns the word, coming forth, summoned from memory and thought, two crows on my shoulder, play a game of free association, play the game of ring around the rosy, write to music, wheelwright, craftsman, shipbuilder —

Go down to South Ferry and remind yourself its an island. How many beautiful offices of servants have I been to this sad fall while the world collaspes all around them. Glad I’m not in your seat, says I, America America, this Swan Song’s For You — Dance the Dance of the 21st Century, Shiva. Dance the Dance of the 21sts Century, Shiva. One foot front, then one foot back, kinda like the Electric Slide, or 1990s bar bitzvahs, or 1980s danceparty, a genre of music, Chromeo, who needs that, I need a bassline, an electric guitar, and a song that never ends, no rockstasr pretension, just don’t stop playing — don’t stop playing now — we’re jamming now, brother, we’re jamming now — just sound sound and sense and sound without sense rhyme but no reason — be here now — music perfectly duplicates imitates represents the dimension of time in our lives — but if the speakers are good enough, and your eyes are closed, you can see it, see the different strains of music , see the different instruments, lick of electric guitar, drums, bassline, I am the Great Procrastinator

Ironic, considering the nature of my thoughts these past several days, and chilling, the language of the visual cortex, bright and bloody, glowing on computer screens, placed there by layer and layer of electron combs and filters — I can see what you’re seeing —

http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(08)00958-6

When we see (to pick one sense out of many) we do not see what is seen but rather see what we see. That is, we do not see the object standing or the events unfolding before us, but rather we see our vision of this object or these events. Our vision is chemical, the intricate workings of soft & spongy clockwork (the eye is not just a gelatinous ball of goop), twisting and turning beneath the “light of other days” — old light, stale, shining down — and somehow this chemical vision produces within our heads the illusion of vision — we think we can see the world — but in truth, we live within our skulls.

Even so, we must accept there is most likely some truth to our visions, that these chemical apparitions summoning the outer world must bear some close correlation with the spatial objects beyond our actual perception — refined into something useful by the generations of competitive dying of which we are the heirs.¹

 

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1. Isn’t it strange that we’ve now short-circuited this process by not dying quite so quickly — what does this mean? That natural biological selection has slowed, and that our improvement now lies within our own hands and responsibility.

Language that reveals and obscures, or in obscuring revealing. Some relevance to Plato and Aristotle’s different conceptions of art and the cave — in terms of the motives and outcomes.

stephoscopes: i am not on facebook so i cannot be your friend there

Did I remember what I think I remember? What is the process of the self-authorship of memory? These are the movies in our head, purporting to be the remnants of our lives — when I try,  I can remember carrying my uncle in his coffin to his grove through the snow — I remember his funeral, sitting next to my cousin Jacob, sitting next to his grandfather Dan — (who had the face of my uncle grown old, my uncle whose face would now never grow old — oh memory, oh sadness)

The fuzzy trace theory model canl help explain how false memories are created. According to Reyna and Brainerd (1995) the fuzzy trace theory states that the processing of items is determined by gist traces or verbatim traces.  The gist traces are general senses and meanings of presented items that consist of rational information.  Gist traces are pieces of information that closely match the event, while verbatim traces are item-level data, which is specific detail of item (Neuschata, Lampinen, Preston, Hawkins, & Toglia, 2002).  Reyna and Kiernan (1995) found that participants sometimes falsely notice verbatim traces, although they had better remembered gist traces. The fuzzy trace theory theory will help in deciphering the cause of false memories in the photographs that are shown in the present study.

http://www.anselm.edu/internet/psych/theses/2005/creaser/Introduction.html

 

Band, named after pickpocket academy in South America in the 1980s, that led to pickpocket epidemic on easts coast in the 80s.

Influences: Dreampop, 4AD Records, M83, David Archuleta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Seven_Bells

However, it was at one of these balls that I first saw the cake-walk. There was a contest for a gold watch, to be awarded to the hotel head-waiter receiving the greatest number of votes. There was some dancing while the votes were being counted. Then the floor was cleared for the cake-walk. A half-dozen guests from some of the hotels took seats on the stage to act as judges, and twelve or fourteen couples began to walk for a sure enough, highly decorated cake, which was in plain evidence. The spectators crowded about the space reserved for the contestants and watched them with interest and excitement. The couples did not walk round in a circle, but in a square, with the men on the inside. The fine points to be considered were the bearing of the men, the precision with which they turned the corners, the grace of the women, and the ease with which they swung around the pivots. The men walked with stately and soldierly step, and the women with considerable grace. The judges arrived at their decision by a process of elimination. The music and the walk continued for some minutes; then both were stopped while the judges conferred; when the walk began again, several couples were left out. In this way the contest was finally narrowed down to three or four couples. Then the excitement became intense; there was much partisan cheering as one couple or another would execute a turn in extra elegant style. When the cake was finally awarded, the spectators were about evenly divided between those who cheered the winners and those who muttered about the unfairness of the judges. This was the cake-walk in its original form, and it is what the colored performers on the theatrical stage developed into the prancing movements now known all over the world, and which some Parisian critics pronounced the acme of poetic motion.

— James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912, Chapter 5, page 50

Desire is the memory of desire. Before — one would have thought they would die as the desire is leached out — but we never die — not till we die — I fade into the machine — I am hungry — or long to hear music — let the sickness pass — let the fever reign — old loves — I am delayed — caught waiting on the deck of the Titanic —

We are all children of the universe, made from the same starstuff, emerging from the same singularity, carrying within us the fundamental rules of chemistry and physics (one the subset of the other); we are organized water carriers, flitting around with rudimentary programming which emerged organically though the process of wind blowing across the sand and forming castles –

two million years later we sit here in our sand castle wiling away the hours wailing at the lookingglass, in mad love with our contingent flesh — the magic of our coming is real but contingent — we are surrounded by magic — the world, grass poking up from the earth — magic — a tree grows out of my belly, when the privileged observer looks at it sideways —

let go of the contingent, and hold the absolute, and do no violence to each other —