The Literal Truth

Early period Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.

The Adventures of Odysseus are better than The Adventures of Bilbo Baggins.  Flat cartoons are better than three dimensional …

Why is it more interesting to say “There you will find the desert” - the void - than “There you will find djinns”? 

The mirage condenses into a - fantasy.  Towers, castles and princesses.  The intangible is literalised; anthropomorphised.  Nothing that isn’t part of the human image remains.  The ‘escape’ is only an escape back into the human image.

The first Pink Floyd is just psychedelia.  No image condenses from it.  Sense is suspended in the intangible inordinate.

Early Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.

The Face of the Absolute

The Virgin looks at the Child.

The face of God: the Absolute.

The Truth is Fictional

“Where we get into trouble is with the absolute.”

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The “absolute”: one way or another it confronts us with infinity.  That is, with a decision that’s irrevocable: forever.   Say that we can say that the absolute is infinity’s illusion.  The Truth.  (If nothing is irrevocable except death.) … There are inadvertent consequences to supposing that something is what it is absolutely, without dilution - forever.  In these terms such an absolutism can only be interpreted as an intention; rather than an investigated fact it represents a decision about the way something is to be seen: a decision that is apparently unalterable but on the other hand may eventually change.  This kind literalisation of ‘the real’ therefore creates problems of reality.  If I say that God exists for example (or for that matter “God doesn’t exist”) then the statement takes on an appeal that contradicts its seeming sense for it inducts us into the world of the fantastic - : a world that hinges on this absolute so that it takes on an occult or life-bound resonance: literally it says that it is from this that life originates.

(Thus: either, Life originates from God or: Life does not originate from God.  One thing or the other; never neither.)

The absolutism promotes the idea that we can make the truth into whatever we like, to this degree: for it makes truth a matter of decision, which of course is the object, but inevitably given the mystical nature of this strategy it is possible only to encounter problems in this world, not the truth itself.

Much the same sort of inference is created by other absolutisms.  By its nature this is what each such ‘truth of reality’ accomplishes: a window onto the fantastic is opened that can close only slowly.  For what could be more appealing to the congenital fantasist?  To the Nazi, for example.  The main virtue is the absolutism.  The absolutism attracts us because it inducts us into a world of infinity because the world that is described can exist only mystically.  On the ground of a decision.  A fantastic world is therefore proposed - a world that exists without limits.  And where it is only in the context of the absolute that we can enter such a world  - and this world cannot exist normally.   Normally we are alive only in a world of limit.  That is, Nazism proposes: if limit is not limit.  So: the doctrine’s emotional authority; it is an authority born of a conflation.  Of a mystical decision based on the hidden righteous prejudices of nightmare dreaming alive. The absolute is a truth twisted, without any safe fictional pinch of salt to obviate its foolishness.   (Scientology.)

The Deal

Money stands as the measure of the distance between the actual and the human unreality that we actually occupy. 

Its logo should be the image of a mouse on a wheel.

The Internet

The internet: is a kind of inadvertent information infinity. 

It renders the mundane finite definite world indefinite -

Everything is nailed to the floor but it all shifts about still.

It has the clarity of fog.  But you are not clear there is fog.

Each of us is given a new pair of eyes.  But these eyes are also blinkers; fogged glasses.  The fog gets thicker; it gets thicker but slowly.  Without seeming to do so, by degrees the world through them appears fainter and fainter, until finally - absolute invisibility.  A whiteout.  Nothing is detectable at all.

A Modernism

If Modernism represents a split between worlds, as between the objective and the subjective, then Postmodernism represents the re-fusion; the unwieldy rejoining of these ‘two’ halves of life - which is the same as saying that it shows there were never - really - the two halves to start with.  There is no hermeneutics of a world that interpretation can merely duplicate - it irreducibly already being an interpretation.

The TV

They knocked down Logie Baird’s house last week, subliminal vengeance perhaps for his visiting tv on the world, since inter alia the advent of tv is associated with alien invasion.  The tv is the ’foreign house’ in the house: unlike the box of the washing machine, dishwasher or fridge, the tv is a box of indeterminacy, increasingly rude and mannerless.  But make friends with it and it will be friends with you.  Be angry with it, and find yourself forever shunned by human society, afraid to walk out the front door for fear that a dalek or something will be standing at the end of the garden path waiting to spray you with deadly fizzle, never mind the flowers or trees.   

The Washing Machine

The ‘river’ has disappeared into a ‘washing machine’. 

The glass porthole.  The electric slurp.  The feeling that things are going forward, that life is in motion, the feeling of a gently rocking boat on the flat shiny surface of a smooth flowing stream finding its way to the sea.  Something is taking place; just as Mrs Tiggywinkle did once in expunging the world’s stain, so too does this imperturbable machine clean all. 

The Fridge

One of life’s essential luxury items.  It conveys the glamour of a fifties America, an open plain, there where the Thunderbirds reign: open the door and the future also opens; the light of permanence that your eyes wonderingly find illuminates the frosty body of perfection.  A fridge is a box of weather.  The first truly climate-controlled zone of the house, antecedent to air conditioning and the climate-controlled car.  Edenic snow.

One end of a conversation

The mobile, the cell phone, displaces the speaker from their, from his or her, immediate environs.  It does this to the extent that in projection the speaker seems to inhabit a kind of ’elsewhere’ nowhere, a kind of interstice that exists somewhere between the two in conversation, and so by this token not a place anywhere in actuality.  It is perhaps some sort of reflex ideality that the two speakers compose, a sort of amalgam bubble of talk, or alloy speakeasy; a place that both would rather be (sometime).  Someone walking a dog in a woods in Dulwich is speaking to a friend in north Italy (somewhere).  The friend is driving her car through mountains, so that a zone neither woods nor the car on the Italian road exists but in that alloy of the ideality.  Perhaps it most resembles an idyll - an ‘I wish I was there and she wishes she was here’; a but-yet-neither place in reality to satisfy that call into electronica and greet it with dismay.    I speak into the phone and so am not here but somewhere on the way to the person to whom I - .  And I do this not from a fixed address but from within myspace, which is wherever I happen to be.