lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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Matt Christman on pseudo-experience and the ‘Uncut Gems’ death drive
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Excerpted from Friday Vibestream: Alpha Sanction, Feb. 5, 2021.
Someone had a long thing in chat just now saying that we're a schizophrenic society because of the divide between our digital and real selves. And I think that's true, but I think it even goes deeper than that, because that is only a proxy for the greater, the deeper divide in the modern self between the chronologically grounded self—i.e., the body in space—and the mental, mind self that is unbounded by space or time. And the Internet is, more than anything, a tool to allow us to spend time in our bodies that is not processed chronologically, and therefore cannot accrue meaning because meaning must adhere to experience. And there is no experience to online. It is a pseudo-experience.
You get mad, and you get angry, and you get horny, and you get scared, but it's essentially your brain tricking you into feeling those feelings. And so what you assign the cause of those feelings is also made up by your brain, which is harder to do when the source of your emotional responses is a material interaction that occurs in a chronological space-time.
I was pretty old when I really got into the Internet and I think that's one of the reasons it wore off for me, because it was never as satisfying as it is for younger people because the contrast between a life that I had had or I imagine I could've had instead of it was greater. Whereas I think for younger people, the internet is taken for granted.
But that doesn't mean that a crack-up is not inevitable. We're in the process of a full social breakdown. But that doesn't necessarily mean the apocalypse or the end of anything. It means people are getting to the end of their particular ropes. The coping mechanisms we've created, they have a fuse. They don't last forever. There's only so much dopamine you can get from a pseudo-existence. And it's different for people, like some people it's longer than others. But everybody gets to a point, and I think we're all getting there.
And I think one of the big reasons that we've had this big explosion in political hysteria in the last year is 'cause of fucking COVID. And it's weird how we've normalized COVID so much that we forget that there's no way that I, anyway, can imagine things like QAnon occurring, the fucking Capitol breach occurring, without a context where our coping mechanisms have been radically reduced. The things we have had historically to allow us to vent, to compensate for the lack within our lives, are sucked in. And if that persists, it's only going to get weirder. I think we're in for weird, weird, weird times. But weird times are when new things emerge, by definition.
And that's something that—it's obviously scary but to me, it's less scary than the narrative that a lot of people have internalized of total social fixedness; of the idea that these categories are unchallengeable. And people have said that I say that, but I just mean that looking through the current structures, that is the conclusion to draw—but that doesn't mean that it's the correct conclusion. ...
The last movie I saw in a theater was Uncut Gems, which we talked about a little bit on the last episode about Trump movies, but I'd like to end here talking about how I couldn't really have picked a more perfect film becuase that movie is about the death drive of American society. I mean, I know it's specifically about, you know, Judaism and stuff and the Jewish experience, but it's part of a broader analysis of a people—Americans—who believe themselves to be eternal beings, but have physical bodies, and who can't reconcile those two things other than by subconsciously seeking death on their preferred terms.
Like the beginning of the movie he's getting the rectal exam and it's actually kind of up in the air, and I actually thought he was going to get a call halfway through that he had cancer. And then he gets the call, "Oh, I don't have cancer." Yet! Oh he doesn't have it now. That doesn't mean in five years he's not going to have it. That doesn't mean in ten he's not going to get it, and he even talks about his family history. He's probably going to get it. Does he want that? Does he want to wait around to fucking get chemo and get sick, the thing that everybody watches their family members go through with horror? Or, do you die on your own terms going out on top. And that is why that movie has a happy ending. He got what he wanted.
But in real life, you can't do that. And one of the reasons we're cracking up is that it's a society of Howie Ratners trying to dictate their end, but you can't know. You can't do it. Because you set it up and it doesn't come because you don't want to die in your conscious mind, and then it doesn't happen, and then you have to keep doing it, you keep doing the same thing, and it drives you into madness. And it's driving us all into madness.
It's especially funny seeing that movie right at the moment where Bernie looked like he might win, you know, before COVID happened. It's like oh, if you could pick a moment, wouldn't that have been the moment? But you don't get to pick the moment. You don't get to be Howie Ratner. He is a classic hero in the sense that he saw the moment, even though he didn't know he was seeking it, and he got his end. He got an end on his own terms.
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lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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Matt Christman on operating from love
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Excerpted from “Low-fi stream to study/relax to,” November 10, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
On what the lumpen bourgeois should focus their attention? On what’s in front of them. On their working conditions, on the lives of their friends and family. Operate first from love. Operate from love, not a political motive. Operate from love. People that you love, and if that conception of love is expansive enough to include people beyond your immediate family, well, then the ones closest to you are the ones are the ones you’re going to be most likely to be able to figure out how to help because they are actually in front of you. And then you can try to help them.
Can you still listen to podcasts and look at Twitter fights and be involved in politics and vote and stuff? Yes. But you should shave down its psychic value to you, and recognize that it is not fulfilling what the whole sensory apparatus is designed to fool you into thinking it’s doing, which is changing, in some small way, the headwinds of politics. Like you’re not even having a butterfly-flapping effect. You’re in a vacuum that you don’t know.
And so, if you have things in your life, issues like a union—maybe there is a union drive at your place of work where people are starting talking about how pissed they are. Maybe you can reach into the ether of politics to pull something to maybe bring up. But secondary. Secondary order, not bringing it down saying “Hey guys, this stuff, let’s do this stuff. Because it’s all in a language that is not meant to be intelligible. That is meant, in fact, to mystify things, because they teach you this shit because it mystifies you. It makes it so that stuff that you see in front of you that is clearly evil and wrong maybe isn’t. I mean my God, have you seen these people who are talking about food deserts and the fact that it’s impossible to eat healthily if you’re poor in this country is “anti-fat”? It’s fatist to do that? You’re taking the outcome of the monstrous pathologies of capitalism, and you’re saying that it’s actually an identity category that needs to be protected? How the hell are you so supposed to ever address real meaningful pain in people’s lives if you have that kind of thought process, which is inculcated by the college-based approach to politics? The college-based heuristic to politics: it’ll get you there.
There’s that classic tweet: “I’m a fiscal conservative, but socially liberal. The problems are very bad, but the causes? The causes are good.” Right? That’s a classic tweet. For these people, for this new liberal idenitarianism that’s around things like ableism and stuff that a lot of it is the outcome of capitalist alienation. They say, “Yes, the causes are bad. Capitalism is bad. But the problems are actually good. The problems are the good things. The problems need to be protected somehow.” How can you go through this rat’s maze to get to anything like a consensus politics that can be based around material ends? You can’t. And so you can’t bring this shit down. But when questions of like, “Alright, how do we, like do this? How do we actually do this? We don’t know. There are people who do know, and then, here’s useful information that you can pull out of the ether.” Useful information—not this whole framework that is going to make it impossible to address the question, but a directly useful collaboratively produced intellectual structure or idea or meme that can be fucking applied to a specific circumstance.
That’s more than anything what I’m saying to people, that the way that they imagine the arrows flowing in the media lived experience dynamic, have to change. You don’t spend all your time whipping yourself into being a political consciousness and then trying to apply that to the world around you. You stay there. You stay there, spiritually and personally, as opposed to vent off onto the internet that much, which you can only do because you’re filling in the part of your soul that demands changes and loves and wants to see the people he loves—which can be everyone—happier. You can to start from that premise.
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lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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Very solid explainer.
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lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society by the new.
Mao Tse-tung, “On Contradiction” (1937).
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lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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An enlightening lecture by Alan Woods.
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lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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Matt Christman on tech and transcendence
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Excerpted from "BRAIN RONIN: CYBER-GENIUS," April 28, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
[The machine] controls my life and my destiny and it's fused to me at a psychic level, like I'm spiritually fused to the machine in a way that will never be removed. That is the basis of the accelerationist insight, that we are fusing with technology. Capitalism is basically an algorithm rewriting us toward becoming robots—I talked about this with Liz and Brace from TrueAnon—and if we keep getting pulled in that direction, we will become machines. We will be stripped of all species being and flattened to be mere receivers and distributors of stimuli—neuro pathways, basically, for the great machine of capitalism. That is it's goal. But the thing is, and this is where dialectics come in: your am-prims would say, "Well that's why you've got to cut off the machine. You got to cut off the tube connecting you." But no, at this point we are Siamese twins. We are conjoined. That there's a vital exchange happening there that is part of us in a way that is lethal. We can not separate without losing all the upward, progressive, civilizational moves we've done, as a species. We can't cut off the computer. We've got to, though, control it. We've got to dominate it, and that is how you get your "fully aujumated luxury space smoshmilism." The reason I don't like that is because it is metaphysically dire. It is as metaphysically nihilistic as the eternal expansionist fantasy of capitalism that leads to the idea that one consciousness persisting eternally in the form of a technological singularity that you imagine yourself to be in command of. When those guys imagine the singularity, they do not imagine becoming some Borg. They imagine maintaining consciousness and separateness and identity as themselves. But to do that, eventually, you will be the only thing left in the universe, thanks to thermodynamics and the eventual dispersal of all energies. You will eventually just be one voice in an eternity—it won't be an eternity though. It'll only feel like it. It'll be like "The Jaunt," basically, that Stephen King story, at the end of which, when you're a jabbering, screaming mad beast, then you will die horribly and in fear as the last energy cycle ends. And it starts back up again with the next Big Bang, which comes immediately after that last one, of course. And then guess what: you get to go through that all over again, and over and over again. You are doomed to the eternal recurrence that Nietzsche and Alan Moore talk about. Congratulations, you get to relive that. You get to relive seven millennias' millennia, millennia as a pea rattling around in a can, the can being whatever techno-fantasy you imagine you're going to be persisting in . . . That's hell. That's an imagined hell, where you think you're going to heaven but twist, it's actually hell.
But the other one, fully automated luxury space communism, that leads to a similar nihilistic sterility. It leads to an idea that you could ever find the meaning to continue, the meaning to find worth in yourself to continue living, in mere physical pleasure that could be extended indefinitely. That would become hell also. You need to have as your goal transcendence. There must be a transcendent end. That is why those people say that you need to have religion in politics are correct, because you need to have a transcendent end in sight. But the thing is, that doesn't have to be religious. You can believe in transcendence with every single belief system that you already have. You do not need to rewire yourself to believe in it ... The thing that matters is the goal, and the goal is everyone reducing their attachment to this material world to the degree that they can find communion with the eternal, which exists outside the material world . . . . We're stuck in immanence until we escape it, and we can, and once one of us does, we all will. That's the beauty of it. We all will. But one of us has to do it, and the beautiful part is, one of us did, because that's why we know. That's why we're here, because it goes backwards and forwards. Causality does not go in one direction. Causality goes in every direction simultaneously . . . .
Take together everyone who has had an insight into this greater reality, have had a peak past the veil basically or come close to the veil or glimpsed out of the side of their eye past the veil. You can get them together, and because of their different cultural limitations and intellectual limitations and spiritual limitations, which are all the same thing because they're all bound up in what others have done to you and your life, because all of our acts are totally determined—and you end up seeing some of the veil, it's going to be different from everybody else's because you are going to be translating it with a specific personal life, personal experience that no one else can replicate, and you have to find a translation. That translation loses, as all transitions do, as all energy transfers do, it loses power as it is translated. As it goes from the brain to the tongue into words into the ear of someone else who has a totally different life and experiences, it has already been degraded to a degree that you're only getting a bit of it. Everyone is getting different bits and if the social engine of your society is cooperation, you will bring those things together to get a greater truth than any one of them would have been able to get, or any group of people all revolving around one concept would have ever gotten. It lets the light through.
That's why materialism, that's why dialectical materialism, that's why Marxism is part of that, because Marx saw part of it. Siddhartha Gautama saw part of it. Jesus Christ saw part of it. Fucking Marx, Eugene V. Debs, Martin Luther King saw a big chunk. And it's binding them together into a consciousness that can encompass the human experience, and what is that but God? What is that but eternity?
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lysergicdialectic · 4 years ago
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Matt Christman on his satori moment and prestige TV
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Excerpted from “Better Call Saul? More Like Worse Write, Paul,” April 26, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Hello friends. So yesterday—I don’t know if anyone watched the stream I did yesterday—I was kind of tripping balls. And at the end of it, after I finished recording, I sat in my little back area, my little fenced-in area, and I looked up at the sky for a while. And wouldn’t you know it, I ended up having one of those legitimate, full-blown satori moments. Actual enlightenment, actual transcendence, like bloop. One second, one with the universe. Whatever you want to call it—ego death, blah-blah-blah—I was there.
I had a moment of complete identification and oneness with the universe, and then of course, the second it was over, I came back into my body and became reincarnated, reembodied as me. And of course, I started falling away from that moment as the rock started rolling back down the hill. I was Sisyphus, and I got to walk down it. And the thing about Sisyphus is, Camus says you must imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s one of those things that just sounds like a zen koan
I understand it now, because happy Sisyphus is the one who gets to the top of the hill as often as possible because being on the top of the hill is fun, and walking down the hill—it's not as fun as being on the top of the hill but it's a lot more fun than pushing the goddamn rock up the hill. So you just gotta increase the circuits. You can't keep pushing the boulder up one long gradient, which is what most people do and what we're cursed to do because of our material realities that constrain us and chain us . . . . As I was coming back to my body and I was going down the hill and falling away, the first word that came into my mind after—because obviously in that time and space there's no words because language is obliterated. It's not needed because you are one; there's no need to translate. As soon as I came back to my body, the first word, it was an image in the sky of a crashing wave and the word Yes. And I realized that a lot of the stuff I've been trying to get my head around, in terms of spirituality ad theology and questions of body and mind and all these things that I've been working on in my head, and I feel I've been making progress but I've been struggling with—the word Yes cut through a lot of it and it created a symbolic order that allowed me to make sense of everything I've been trying to get my head around. And since my specific orientation as age, race, gender, class background, language, culture, all that stuff—when I heard Yes, the first thing I thought was the end of Ulysses. And all of a sudden, I had one moment of thinking "Oh, that's what it's like to have read Ulysses," and then I was like, "Oh wait a minute," and then I thought, "Oh great, now I don't have to read Ulysses." But then I realized: I have to read Ulysses now, even if it's bad, even if it's a slog, even if it's whatever, because it will remind me of that moment, and doing it every day will remind me of that moment and keep me living in a way that gets me there, or gets me closer to it. It will inform my actions and it will inform my behavior toward the people around me, and it will make them turn toward that sound. So I'm going to start reading Ulysses.
Like I said, it doesn't matter if it's good or not. It doesn't matter if it's worth it. What matters is reading it. The reason that I'm thinking within these terms is, I did a tweet that got a lot of people mad about Better Call Saul, because I said that Better Call Saul, in my opinion, suffers from trying to be a prestige TV show, given the ingredients it has. You've got Saul Goodman here, played by Bob Odenkirk, a great character we all love, and we've got these great people behind the casts, great cinematography. And it ended up being the show it is, with its basically copying the rhythms of Breaking Bad and becoming a Breaking Bad explicit prequel filling in all these gaps of Where'd Hector get his bell? and things like that. That's inevitable as soon as it had to fit the format of a prestige show. As a prestige show, it probably is great. I've watched enough of it. Yes, it fits all the terms that we discuss when we talk about prestige television. Yes. I would say it's as good as Mad Men, it's as good as Breaking Bad or even better, it's as good as The Sopranos, whatever you want to say. Fine. It's good. But it's good in the context of a television show. I've written about prestige TV and I've talked a lot about it, and I was trying to articulate something that I've never actually been able to explicitly say in a way that I felt like I was saying what I meant, let alone if other people understood it. What I realized with this mental Ginsu now to chop everything up that I encounter is, my problem with Better Call Saul is that it is a product of the demiurge. Better Call Saul, like all prestige TV, is a product of the demiurge. Art is an attempt to reach the etheric plane. Art is always an attempt to strike at the heart of the universe, to strike God and become God. Everything attempt at art is that, in some small way, the way that the person making it can do or try to do. It's the urge to do it. But then, there's the reality, the embodied reality of being a person, being a body that has needs. Those material needs that shape the world and limit us, that's what the Gnostics talked about. That's what the demiurge, the evil god who creates the material world that is illusion below the spiritual realm. In this case, if we're talking about art, in an objective sense, television is a more degraded form of art than literature by the very simple fact that it is more commercial. And you might say, "Well, Stephen King makes a lot of money." No. What I mean by that is, the writing of a book and the publication of a book are relatively capital unintensive. Making a television show is much more, by exponential numbers, more capitally intensive than a book, which means that whatever art is in it has been constrained by being a product of a commercial enterprise. That means that television can be good. Every show could be fun. You should enjoy every program you watch. Either stop watching it if you can't find yourself enjoying it, or find something about it that speaks to you. Everything should be enjoyable, artistically. And if it isn't, find something that will, something that you can work it. Some things aren't going to work because the talent of the people involved, the amount of resources put to it, the amount of commercialism leavened within it, it's going to hit you and make it hard. That is why I see Better Call Saul, and I go egh because it just reminds me that we're all praying to this degraded version of art. And the reason we are is because we have been immiserated culturally. Capitalism has done that to us. That's not something you can argue. Our tastes are more broad, and poptimists like to say, "You're being a snob." But I'm recognizing a goddamn reality here, which is that there's a structural difference between art depending on how much they are required to make money, the degree to which a piece of art needs to make money to be worth the endeavor leavens its individual artistic expression because it has to be translatable to the largest possible group. The art, in translation, gets lost. And that's fine. You can find the sparks. You can find the things you like in anything, including Breaking Bad. But because we have lost free time, we've lost energy, we've lost the ability to take a small moment and treasure something and really dig into it, that we need our entertainments to go down easier. They have to be absorbable because we don't have the energy, the mental or spiritual energy to sit with anything because of where we are, because of how degraded our conditions are, because of our bodies essentially. All these institutions—capitalism, feudalism before it, slave labor—every class order created was created to manage the issue of keeping bodies alive, basically. That creates our structures. It creates our economic structures, it creates our art, it creates our culture, it creates our personalities, it creates our religions, it creates our ideologies, it creates everything. It creates this computer, it creates this phone. It creates this shirt, and it creates the systems that create the hyperexploitation that goes into making this shirt, the gunpoint slave coltan mining that makes this phone. Those things are all necessary to the degree to which they allow for the human bodies to be restored.
Then there is the temptation to seek pleasure, and pleasure always comes at the expense of someone else. Pleasure always comes at the expense of us—always. All pleasure is at the expense of others and at the expense of ourselves—karma. And so these institutions get warped. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." What that means is, the crookedness is the fact that we have bodies. That's not a sin, it's not bad—the Christian thing is another mistranslation from the initial true divining of reality. The material world gets in the way, and it gets baffled, and so Christianity gets muddled up with all this stuff. When you say, "The body creates this world," it's not bad—it's inevitable. It's inherent. We have to deal with it. We have to create a society that minimizes suffering by spreading pleasure out as broadly as possible, not concentrating on any individual because doing so creates a situation where you cause misery to all the people whose exploitation goes into the pleasure of that one person, and that one person's pleasure is fleeting. It's going away. They're going to face the flames of judgment, which is the coming of death, with the terror of hell in their heart. There's no stopping it. And so no one has gotten any sort of benefit out of that arrangement.
We have to have some suffering and pleasure just to keep the bodies going, but it should be spread out. That's where the dialectic comes in. Somebody said, "Go back to Marxism." I'm sorry, but this moment made me realize that these are nesting series of thoughts, ideologies, and structures, and guess what? Nesting in here is dialectical materialism. Maybe Gnosticism or Buddhism or something or The Dark Tower or I was talking about Infinite Jest the other day and maybe Ulysses, those things help structure your thoughts and make it easier for you to behave in a way that reduces suffering. But then you need structures within other people, amongst people in the social realm of economic production and political economy, that need to serve those ends as well. Dialectical materialism is the drive toward that. It is the drive toward a world where everyone is free of the bodily temptations and distractions to reach full enlightenment. When people talk about "fully automated luxury space communism," there's a lot wrong with that notion. But the truth thing that's reckoning with is that the only way for universal human enlightenment—which, if enlightenment is the individual goal, as it well should be, then presumably it is the universal goal for all humans—then you need some sort of taming and instrumentalizing of technology toward the goal of human enlightenment as opposed to the dark singularity we're moving toward, where the machine takes over and totally annihilates human spirituality and turns us into machines. We don't want that. It requires a lack until you get to the top, and you don't get there and stay there. It's a process. You go back, and you come back. And you go back and you come back. It's pushing the fucking boulder up the hill. That's why it's compatible. If we want that version, universal enlightenment, then it requires, in my view (and I am wrong, at some point in time in the future I am wrong. I think I'm right now. I have enough history around me and I think I'm smart enough and compassionate enough together to figure out broadly what's right. More specifically, as it gets drilled down, I don't have the information or the intelligence to specifically answer technological questions, social questions, whatever. Broadly, I think I'm right, but I'm not right forever. At some point in the future, at some point in space time, everything I think is going to be wrong. Every single thing, and that's true of you too. Every human being. Every single thing you have ever thought, every decision you've ever made, has been wrong. We are all, in fact, the sum total of our wrong choices. This is all a way of saying you can enjoy Better Caul Saul. To enjoy Better Call Saul, of course, it doesn't make sense to watch it if you're not going to enjoy it. Watching it to get made at it, you're getting pleasure somewhere else. And at the end of the day, the pleasure's at others' expense because what are you going to do? You're going to go online like I have a million times and kick people in the dick and say, "Ha! Fuck you. This show is stupid, and you're dumb for liking it." That's the pleasure I get out of it, and that's at someone else's expense as all pleasure is.
What makes a decision right or wrong? It's not defined until afterwards. It's only retrospectively known because all time has already happened. Everything has already happened. Everything has already happened. And when I say everything, I mean not just in your life, I mean the lives of all beings to exist or ever will exist. So you can enjoy Better Call Saul, but you see the way people are defensive about the show and see the way they get mad about it—and even if they're not mad, the way they insist on its greatness. It's because they have decided that instead of acknowledging the lack at the heart of prestige as a concept, instead of saying, "Aw, this is sad that now we have to get our real artistic nourishment from something this banalized"—It's banalized! It has to be, because it's commercial. It has to be banalized—"I have to try so hard to squeeze meaning out of it not for my enjoyment of the show but to convince other people and myself that watching this is actually good." It's not necessarily bad. It's not going to doom you to like it in that way. But it implies attachment to something that is degraded without acknowledging and recognizing the degradation. And without the ability to recognize the degradation, you cannot act in a way in your life to move away from degradation in your interpersonal relationships, in your preferences, what you do with your time, and what you think politics should be and how you should act on political beliefs. If prestige TV is good enough, then why do you need to change anything?
So commercial art is bad?
No. No art is bad. Every individual's relationship to a piece of art is completely individualized, and it's a result of translations. All art is translation. All existence is translation—your brain literally translating to you through language what is happening to it, first in senses, then in symbols, then in words: words to yourself and then words to others. At every level, the translation breaks down. There is loss between every level of translation. By the time you're trying to express an idea through art, you're way down here. You're so degraded. But if you're talented enough and enough people see it and you're collaborating with others and you make something together, because collaboration, depending on the art form and the project, helps signal boost and bring together individual insights and individual talents, and it creates something.
There's something to it. There's a spark to all art. It's just either the talent was not there to express it fully, or it was a piece of cynical dogshit. But even the cynical dogshit will have things in it that might be enjoyable. You can watch a piece of cynical dogshit with the right frame of mind and enjoy it. The danger is when you mistake the shadows for the figures, and that is what prestige television does. If we just accepted, "Yeah, TV, it's the idiot box," the shows could be the same, have the same stuff, and it would be fine. But a culture that requires television to be good is one that has not acknowledged its barriers . . . .
Plato's stuff, I never really got until now. Now I get it. Gnosticism, I never really got. I feel like I get it. And of course I get it less now than I did yesterday, and I will get it less tomorrow than I do today. My task is to get back, to remember that moment, remember what I knew then, and try to find it again. The way to do that is by daily acts by the Eightfold Path, by the Path of the Beam. What that really means is not just I'm going to say, "Epic path of the beam," when I see a fucking Stephen King reference. It means my every action informed by the knowledge of what is there—the imminence behind reality, the real universe beyond the demiurgical one—and then trying to get there. That means these reading projects are not about learning something. It's about re-learning something, because you don't know anything. You only have echoing, clanging notions in your head. A lot of them contradict each other. The only way to thread them together in a way to make them useful is to sit with them. And that is not something that anything we do encourages. Not something anything in our culture encourages, is sitting with these questions. Existential materialism, whatever you want to call it. Gnosticism, whatever you guys want to say . . . .
Gnosticism says this is a degraded shadow realm. It is. It's a degraded shadow realm of material reality, but we have to work with it. How do we work with it? How do we thread it? How do we push it in a direction that leads toward the chance for as many people as possible to achieve transcendence and direct it back to themselves in the future and to everyone else who can hear them in their lives and people around them? It's by resolving contradiction, because contradiction is at the heart of existence. No and yes. The universe is yes, and it's always there. It is outside of space and time. The world is no, and we are all—every person, every being in the universe, every photon, every chain of chemicals, anything—those things are all no's. Those are different levels of rejecting. And the thing is, there aren't that many of them. But there doesn't need to be, because yes exists outside of space and time. It is the accumulation of no's over this endless expanse, they are accumulated in actual reality, this world. And you've gotta get back to yes.
I say that and you hear it, and it's like, "What does that mean?" And for me, these words, "getting back to yes," they're freighted with my memory of this experience. You are only hearing my words retell it, which is fraudulence, as Nietzsche points out. All language is a lie. All I can do is use my talents—to such extent that they exist—and my will, my morality, my intellect, to try to push in the direction of the good.
So that's Better Call Saul.
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