noomad

[noomad]

Hammer Down

Hammer three four five six loud in the barn Typewriter ding and murmer of farm "I can't feel this way anymore, way anymore" humans sing together as they mine for emotional ore Digging and pounding away, for another glint of eye contact junkies for the interaction of time and void addicted to the paranoid fantasy of scarcity, more for you is less than me so persona-liesd that we can't see the melody, harmony interactive unity, emerging in synergy dynamic energy unfolding relentlessly cinematic potential of lives intersecting synchronistically, mystically    the gods are here in you and me the moon and the snake and the monkey king and we're all howling and hammering down in the valley, and growling and stammering cats in an alley, dogs in the kitchen drinking up all the beer and making our bad decisions drunk like the rooster clucking at all the chickens sometime in the afternoon, when the hammers are hitting and our backs are tight from too much sunlight and the weight of our inhibitions and we fight delicately and make tiny little incisions that bleed light and joy and pain out into all of existence.

[noomad]

Winged Boots

Look at me, just sitting in a tree spitting out all of these beats for free Don't know why, cause I can't see anything but my personal Mystery. I roll and I stroll through the air on my boots winged and stringed and silver-tongued too calling through the night in my flight to you calling through the night in my flight to you. Coming in for a landing, not leaving you stranded, bringing knowledge of the future and the past in tandem. I'll show you your place in the great big race, your face as a fiber on a strand of space spilling through time and unrolling as you're growing a life unexamined is the only one worth knowing. a life unexamined is the only one worth knowing. And know as you fall through this well of Memory the nature of your station as a mirror of me capturing forever that which I can't see, of the motion in my eyes the spinning wheel of Being.

[noomad]

The year is 2013 and I am teaching my uncle about curved spacetime. He is five years old. We have just finished a fencing lesson. His name is Obi-Wan and he is five years old. When I am born he will be nineteen. When he is twenty and I am celebrating my first birthday, he will put a spell on my in my crib. My name is Max, and I an a field agent for NTIR - the Noetic Temple for Interdimensional Rewilding. I am a chrononaut. "Kaleidoscope!" Obi shouts, and pokes a cardboard tube into my eye. His Padawan braid dangles in front of my nose as I squint into the tube. Obi-Wan is not from a galaxy far far away. He lives in the morass of 21st century urban hyperreality, right in the center of the Black Iron Prison. My job herenow is to prevent his mind from falling into the clutches of the Imperium, because if he's caught by their mind-viruses he won't be able to induct me into NTIR in fifteen year's time. He told me this himself three weeks ago, on my twenty-fourth Yule. Bear with me. The timing all gets really confusing when writing in English, but four-dimensional language wont' exist in time for you to read these words. Beacuse this is not just the fate of my uncle and my employment here - everybody's past and future are at stake. It is the year 2013, and it's our last chance to save the universe from beginning to end. It is 2013, and time as we know it is in danger. It is 2013, and I need your help.

[noomad]

BEK sightings at the Monastery have significantly decreased along with the temporary emigration of many of our Monks. Nonetheless, they haunt us every which way.

Black Eyed Kids are a manifestation of hungry ghosts within us all. They may be in cahoots with the evil saw-whet owl. They manifest in the food line and i see their sharp teeth glint in the garden.

"Food time?" they ask, heads quizzical and eyes jet. "Is it food time?" They flicker behind people's shoulders, around the corners of the firepit.

They steal the tobacco out of the shitter.

Black Eyed Kids ate the raisins off the counter right behind your back. That's why you didn't hear it. It wasn't me, i swear, thieves' guild black honor. left hand sworn.

BEKs whisper in the ear of the hashishim on the porch, speaking "almond butter, almond butter for my face"

BEKs spit resentment at friends gone to revel. BEKs are not satisfied with others' lack of misery, they require schadenfreude to live.

Black eyes haunt me from behind cell phone screens, ghostly illuminated by anime.

Some of the Monks think they are free of this starved affliction, but i see their pupils dilate when they laugh snarl spit pity upon the so-called gluttons.

The Monks here are not all nice to each other and i see the Black Eyed Children feeding off every flare of hatred and spite. They are ready for us to all lose our minds. They are await in the cold larder.

[noomad]

In Liberia the Kpelle, for instance, grow rice, which is work—strenuous work—by any definition. But these “neolithic farmers” conduct their workd in a way that the organizers of our work can’t or won’t even consider. Lii-nee’, “joy,” axiomatically accompanies any work the Kpelle do or they won’t do any. Work is conducted in groups to the accompaniment of musicians whose rhythms pace the strokes of their hoes and machetes. Intermittently a woman throws down her hoe and dances to entertain her companions and relax muscles made sore by repetitious movements. At the end of the day the workers drink palm wine and sing and dance together. -- Bob Black, Primitive Affluence: A Postscript to Sahlins

[noomad]

Shake

The only defense against the archonic mundanity of everyday life is the remystification of every action.

Shake the imaginary chains that hold you struggle until they break!

Their weight collapsed rent to pieces in the face of your mighty wrath.

Inflate the air bladders in your jacket your fate to float away into a sky of black

For you are not the child of matter You are made of waves of expansive laughter Released after the Big Bang when the curtain drew and you surely knew as you grabbed your props and shackled up your chains

That this ancient play is directed by the players And we're all going to have a great laugh later when the game is played and we're all just killing time in the emptiness backstage.

[noomad]

A Christian, a Wiccan, and a Sorceror were taking a whizz in a public restroom. The Christian finished first, and proceeded to scrub his hands thoroughly, to the elbow, saying, "We Christians have learned to be clean." The Wiccan finished next, and barely wet his fingertips, saying, "We Wiccans have learned to respect Mother Earth and preserve her resources." The Sorceror zipped up and headed for the door, saying, "We Sorcerors have learned not to piss on our hands."

[noomad]

hypercontext

Conversation with Patrick

Patrick: Yeah. I want to build shit, not just roam.

I did the roaming thing

me: Okay

build shit with everybody

build other people's shit

decentralize shit-building

Patrick: ha

me: no freals

here's something;

decentralized, federated wikispace

fusion project of self-annotated hypercontexts

stories told in nonchronological format, interconnected via disambiguiation pages regarding different subjective viewpoints

we can all build a shit

together

that emerges from our collective shits

Patrick: True, but is that the shit to build?

me: hm

yep

D

metacognition

the emergent properies of inherently subjective systems

holographically somethingorother

hang on gotta pee

Patrick: Argh... but I have to become asleep soon

me: okay do it

it's cool

i'm gonna be building this metacontext shit

[noomad]

"And so it was that the goddess Maya, in her disguise as the Lord Hermes, spoke with the-goddess-Maya-incarnate-as-Eris, and he told her of the true God Max in his disguise as the goddess Maya, and the Mobious Trip that held them togetherapart. AND the words that Eris heard were not the truth, and instead she chose the path of Love and Strife. And the Agony and the Ecstasy were Hers, though she be initiated into the Mystery, for she chose the Great Ignorance. And the Maxician chose the Lightning Path to the Shining Beyond, but the goddess Maya remained; indeed she could not but follow him, as the sky to a wanderer's hat. The Shadow cast by the MoonSun Gap was wide across the expanse of Her Nave, and we all floated together through the Mirror Mirror into the Off. As we so Fell Off, the world's days were like butterfly heartbeats and the lives of men and dogs were Brief. The fall was aeons time in Middle World, and was percieved dimly as the Change or Current of Time, the great cold gasping infinity of entropic yawn. But on our Trip and Fall, all we could see was the sudden flaring of red and black, smoke and metal. It seemed that We were dying together, birthing a zombie babby, until a green quell rippled across the planet, then another! The Mobioussed rip in spacetime was turning the insides outside, as the green of life grew across the planet and deep, into the core. The fire and metal and smoke were retaken, relegated to functions in organic processes, as the entire planet did become made of bird and bee and plant and man. The Earth was born fresh, wet and dew-eyed. As the last of Max and Maya drained into the Mobius Drip, the patient breath of newborn joy floated into the rapidly closing Gap Between The Gaps and the canyons were become cracks. emergent synergy rippling the world with self-organizing global psychic intelligence, and the protagonists dubiously flipped into the background, the spacetime continuum begins to reassert itself in concrete energetic detail, none the wiser, information re-organized at all levels subtly, so instant and so drawn out, DNA and galaxies already different in the future. Now is a time for acceptance, and the activation of many energies, and preparation for all possible steps in the dance. The music begins."

— From the Book of Doubt and Self-Loathing

[noomad]

The Mad Monk of Earth

It was my eighteenth birthday, and I was about to drop acid for the first time.

    Up to this point, I’d never had the opportunity to try LSD. I was no stranger to recreational drug use – I’d try anything anyone handed to me, and my friend Casey and I had spent the last year spiraling downward through the catalogues of our local pill-pushers and sticky-flower salesmen. We were both highly intelligent, artistic, passionate young men stuck in a backwater town where the only social scene was the shopping mall and the height of culture was the new movie theater (the seats tilt backward!). This was a recipe for delinquency.

    So, after narrowly avoiding a crippling opiate addiction, navigating the rapids of an ecstasy binge, and smoking ditchweed until I coughed up blood, I ran into a long-lost friend at a party. In high school, Chris and I had been two angry peas in a punk rock pod, both of us frustrated with the restrictions of adolescence. Unfortunately, there’s only so many niches in any given clique, and the two of us had always aimed for the same girls, the same jokes, the same shoes. Naturally this led to rivalry and discontent.

    But now things were different! We had each drifted off into other social circles, developed our own respective personalities. When we ran into each other at a post-graduation party, we bonded quickly over a cigarette. Chris told me of his plans to move to Oakland and become a black-metal drummer. He also mentioned his newfound ability to see auras.

    “What?” The contradiction short-circuited my brain.

    “Yeah, man, auras. Like, I can see yours right now. It’s sort of a turquoise-green. And that girl over there is totally orange. Haven’t you ever taken acid?”

    I hadn’t.

    “Oh. Come talk to me once you’ve tried it, man. It’ll change your life.”

    Armed with this seemingly iron-clad recommendation, and with a pocketful of graduation money ripe for the squandering, I spent the next couple weeks leveraging my black market contacts to find some of this philosopher’s stone. The Guy finally came through on my birthday. I decided to buy four hits – one each for Casey and his girlfriend April, the other two for me alone.

    It was a hot night in July, and we drove to our favorite outdoor parent-free zone: the elementary school in the ghost town up the highway. The school was still active, and had a decent variety of silly playground equipment and large grassy fields for running in, with a significant lack of drive-by traffic or personnel. Besides, it was summer – who cares about an elementary school on a summer night?

    When we got to the school, we entered our sanctuary under the playplace, where the plastic had been molded to look like a dinosaur fossil. We opened the crumpled aluminum foil to discover four sugar cubes, looking no different from the ones my mother would stir into her morning coffee. Presumably the drug, in liquid form, had been carefully droppered onto each little absorbent piece. We looked up at each other’s faces, excitement and uncertainty gleaming in our eyes, and popped the cubes into our mouths.

    I didn’t know what I expected. Fireworks, maybe? A drum-roll straight out of a Kubrick flick? Something more climactic, at least, than the sweet dissolution of a cube, followed by a half-hour of waiting. Oh well – in the meantime we swung the swings, aped the jungle gym, and slid the slide.

    It was on the slide that I noticed something interesting. The smooth green fiberglass had always been a miniature power plant, throwing static sparks wherever it contacted denim. But tonight it seemed to be magical, the sparks visibly stretching between my body and its surface, the crackling sound now suddenly apparent as tiny thunderclaps.

    “How long has it been? Do you think it was bunk? It should have kicked in already, right?” Casey was always neurotic about the drugs. He couldn’t just have fun, let the experience be. He had to measure it, grade it, rate it. I suddenly realized how annoying that trait was, and decided to wander away.

    I found myself on the asphalt basketball court, the blacktop so dark and the sky so moonless that I seemed to be standing on an invisible surface in deep space. I turned back to see if Casey had followed me, but the lights of the school buildings were hazy and obscured all detail. I dropped my little blanket and lay down on the ground, staring at the stars, spread-eagle on the warm tarmac.

    The stars – they’d never danced this way before! It seemed that if I looked at one, the others would all flicker and move around a little bit. I tried to quickly swivel my eyes, to catch one in the act of sneaking away, but any that I stared at directly would freeze in place while my previous target began to wander.  Eventually I managed to relax my eyes, focusing on the empty space between the stars and planets. The sky became a diorama, three-dee, the brighter stars obviously closer to me. I realized that I was not separate from “outer space” – Earth was floating in the same nothingness as all the gas giants and dwarf stars and black holes. I wasn’t laying down, I was stuck to. My body was like the figurehead of a massive space-boat, attached to the side, miraculously formed from the same materials as the rest of the planet.

    I lay there for what seemed like hours, weeks, days. Eventually I remembered that I could move of my own volition, and I tried standing up.

    What’s that light? Car! Trouble!

    I noticed that I was crouched, a panther on the blacktop alert for any sign of motion. Without conscious effort, my survival instincts had kicked in and my animal nature was revealed. Of course, the car was just waiting at the stoplight, with the conscientious patience of a drunk driver fearing an unlikely trooper.

    I began to drift back towards the playground. The lights were no longer just hazy: now they blurred, smeared, stretched as I attempted to orient my vision to a now-unfamiliar horizon. Everything was the same – no purple elephants here – but somehow everything felt different. I realized the difference between an oak tree, growing into its own unique shape, and a streetlight, molded by human intention for a lonely purpose. I saw the tiny plastic hut that I had walked past so many times before, dressed as it was in gingerbread colors, and realized that it had a tiny working door. Presumably, tiny people could live and work inside of it! Maybe elves lived here, and I had never noticed before. I leaned forward and pushed the door open with a finger.

    Inside, no elves. In fact, the toy house was an empty shell on top of the bark mulch, barely big enough to fit a curled-up teenager. I know. I checked.

    After a nice long rest in the elf house (during which I realized how truly strange bark mulch could be), I remembered my friends and decided to find them. I extricated myself carefully through the front door, although I could more easily have lifted the whole structure aside and stood up. I had not seen Casey and April on the playground, so I decided to go check the car.

    As I walked to the car, it appeared to be moving while sitting still. I rationalized this as the aerodynamic look of a sporty Grand Prix, and admired the rainbows around all the streetlights and the way tree bark looked like Escher lizards. I was so joyfully distracted, in fact, that it wasn’t until I was reaching for the door handle that I looked through the windows.

    The steamy, steamy windows.

One glimpse of pale, undulating flesh was enough for me. In the state that I was in sex seemed unthinkable, just as my sober mind recoils at the thought of a human being splitting down the middle like an amoeba. I whirled around and hurried away, thinking to myself I must forget that I saw that. I must forget. I MUST FORGET.

That was when I forgot everything.

Okay, not everything. I still remembered how to walk, for instance. But my identity vanished in that moment as a form of sudden amnesia took hold. As I walked towards this strange conglomeration of buildings I began to question my situation.

    Who am I? What is this place, and why am I here? Why do I have this blanket wrapped around my shoulders in the heat?

    For some still-unknown reason, the answer to all the questions became obvious (although quite wrong): I was the Mad Monk, this was my Mad Monastery, and this was my Mad Robe. I was here to meditate and contemplate my way to enlightenment. I picked a likely tree, and sat down.

    As I sat, wrapped comfortably in my blanket and my delusions, I watched the sky lighten. I surely sat for at least three hours, motionless, watching.

The trees rustled. Were they being pushed around by the wind, like an invisible painter’s brush blending greens and browns? Or were they waving their arms insistently, pushing the air until a slight breeze brushed my face? It seemed I could see the wind itself, ripples of energy like waves in a pond, changing constantly with the inescapable momentum of time.

I began to see cars trundling down the road. I was quite visible, of course, sitting cross-legged under a tree at the front of the school, but I felt no fear. These people were in bubbles. Each had their own little climate-controlled environment, with their own preferred radio-host blithering, and their own worries and stresses and goals. None looked any direction except forwards, intent on their destinations. Each was already living in some future or some past, none aware of their current surroundings.

The streets were tubes along which the bubbles slid smoothly. The boundaries of fence and curb defined the Somebody Else’s Problem fields of property, so that the residents could safely ignore their neighbors’ lives. Nobody was going to school today, so the school was Nobody’s Problem, and my monastery was safe.

I could hear birds beginning to chirp, greeting the day with their usual bicker and squabble. The pattern became more complex as more birds awoke, and as the sun crested the pines it was announced by a chorus of roosters. I could hear every little sound, for miles it seemed, the cars and the birds and the wind and the stars and my own breath, dancing in a perfect rhythm.

Suddenly my perception flipped inside out. Instead of hearing sounds, I could hear the profound silence, the space in which all the sounds resided. Like a Necker cube suddenly facing the other way, like the stars in my diorama, the sounds were just infinitesimal blips floating in an infinite nothingness. But this time, I didn’t feel at one with the Earth. I didn’t feel at all, in fact. My sensations of touch and smell, light and sound were also just waves in this sea of emptiness. There was no “me,” there.

There was no “there,” there.

Pure consciousness resided in this infinite void for eternity, and Max was part of it.

But life as ALL is no fun. It’s also no pain, no suffering, no love, no tree. It’s not loneliness: there’s nothing to miss. It’s only-ness. Eventually, pure consciousness decided to play a game of hide-and-seek with itself, and split a small part of itself off to be trapped, once again, in the bodymind called Max, the Mad Monk of Earth, to discover itself again later.

I regained myself shortly after dawn, with the blissful feeling of transcendence still lingering in my cells. I remembered my personal history, and yet I remembered my true nature. I rounded up Casey and April – sweaty and exhausted and silly by now, and mostly clothed – and they decided we would head for the coast. I didn’t care where we went. I was free.

Not free as in speech, mind you, or even free as in beer. I had broken through the illusion of self and found it to be as ephemeral as spiderweb lingerie. Once I realized that I was no more and no less than a diamond cog in a manufacturing plant for light, once I had found my physical body and mental ego to be emergent properties of ultimate consciousness, I was in free-fall and had nowhere to be.

I phoned my parents and told them I was going to the beach. They were surprised, especially because I hadn’t been known to even get out of bed at that hour of the morning, much less travel three hours on a mountain road. I didn’t mind. Their confusion would arise and pass, as eventually they would construct a mental model to explain my behavior. Consequences, should there be any attached, were inextricably linked as the future to the past and were therefore already suffered and transcended. Parental restrictions, in fact all of society’s norms and regulations, were like the plastic elf house: open the door, look out the window, play the game of custom and habit, but at any moment shrug! And the whole structure sloughs off.

I knew, too, that the game Casey would want to play after our drive – colloquially known as “let’s get high, look, I bet that guy’s got a hook up,” was equally mundane and superfluous. I had no idea, when I first tongued that sucrose prism, that it was the high to end all highs. In fact, in later months I would even lose the illusion that LSD was the philosopher’s stone. It may have been the trigger on the gun that blew my mind, but the bullet was pure meditation. When I sat down that July dawn, with nothing to do, I stumbled upon the way to do No-thing.

I would later have to leave Casey, after many attempts to open his eyes found me drained and dull. I found new friends and new paths, new games to play, but I play differently now. Whenever I get too serious, whenever my mouth purses and my head aches, when the weight of the elf house sits too heavily upon my brow, the Mad Monk returns to me with a laugh of delight and a joke or a rhyme: Forget! Now sit! Don’t worry about it!

[noomad]

Exchanging information: we do this after a car crash, but not after a one-night stand.

[noomad]

The medieval Assassins founded a “State” which consisted of a network of remote mountain valleys and castles, separated by thousands of miles, strategically invulnerable to invasion, connected by the information flow of secret agents, at war with all governments, and devoted only to knowledge.

-Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.

[noomad]

You’re out of your element, Donny: Toward a theory of n-dimensional time

Last night, my friend Lloyd and I had a debate a bout how long The Big Lebowski is.

We had just watched it, the first time for him, and we were discussing the merits of basing a joke religion on something as brief as the 90-minute Coen Brothers film. That argument was tabled in favor of a better point: how long is the movie, really?

For Lloyd, it’s an hour and half. Beginning, middle, end. Pretty simple.

I, on the other hand, have seen this movie five times. Each time I watched it the scenes were the same, but the newer contents of my brain interacted with the film to derive new insights, scry new patterns. Every viewing is essentially watching a new movie.

I suggest that this means the movie has at least two temporal dimensions: on one side, it’s 90 minutes, and on the other it’s seven and a half hours. And that’s just between me and Lloyd!

When the Coen Brothers were in post-production, the editing team probably had many takes for each scene, and watched all of them in the effort to find the perfect one. It may have taken thirty or forty hours to piece the movie together in this fashion. This gives us another time axis, like a “depth” of the movie.

Of course, we could continue expanding this theoretical timespace into a new dimension for every person who’s watched the movie, not to mention all the time spent acting and writing it. That’s why I’m calling this “n-dimensional time” — it seems to allow for an infinite amount of different timelines, spiraling outward in a strange loop.

I’m curious if this is just an effect of recorded media. Every time I watch the Big Lebowski or listen to Creedence, I’m reiterating the exact pattern of photons and sound waves. But when I sing a song, I’m doing it differently every time. Does this mean I’m extending the song into another temporal dimension? I think so — I think it’s another strange loop pattern, feeding back based on what I’ve done before. Maybe that’s why music is so powerful. It’s always activating a feedback loop, stretching and bending time.

I’m not sure about a lot of this. It’s a totally new way of looking at “the fourth dimension”, at least to me. There’s a lot of ins, lotta outs, lot of what-have-yous. But I think this n-dimensional viewpoint might be like a good rug, and tie the room together.

Anyone have other thoughts on this, or leads to other theories? I need more input to synthesize a theory.

[noomad]

Short-Range Time Travel

I thought Portland was a city for time travelers.

Portland’s Saturday Market circa 1975

The deliberate, self-aware culture of iconoclasts allows for the time-traveler to easily pass unnoticed, and the environment and planned sustainability make it one of the more habitable (and desirable) climates in this era.  Travelers from alternate timelines where Terra isn’t as badly scorched might still find Portland attractive.

I saw lots of them when I was there. The early 20th-century jazz band marching down an empty alleyway, a danced-out futurepop girl with skin implants snoozing on the MAX train, the mad shaman smacking his drum in a vacant lot in the middle of suburban wasteland. They slip through the crowds at the Saturday Market, wide-eyed, entranced but not hypnotized by the spectacle of creativity and consumption.

How do they get here? I wondered. They came from different worlds and clearly use different methods of travel — the shaman was riding the dreanms of a nearby wino, if I’m not mistaken — but how can they slide through the spacetime continuum?

Then I remembered William Gibson’s famous words : “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” It all started to click. Given Einstein’s curved spacetime, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the Everett-Wheeler-Graham multiverse, the astute observer should be able to travel short distances in both linear and perpendicular time.

This seems to connect to the concept of n-dimensional time. If each observer (each sentient life-form, say) is affecting their experience by observing, and their movement through space affects their movement through time, we’ve got unknown amounts of subjective timeleines. Everyone’s a time traveler — it’s not just Portland. Of course, the durationdistance of travel will be relative to the observer’s belief system. Believing is seeing, in other words.

Once I got a handle on the theory, I decided to test it out. I’d been tasked with delivering a letter in Redding, CA, so I had an opportunity to push the horizon of my journey and see what timelines I might trip through on my way.

I reset my belief system, turning the quest knobs toward smoky Redding but leaving the probability throttle wide open. I found an unlikely hitching spot (the better to have an unpredictable journey) underneath the swooping branches of the I-5 bridge, and put my thumb to the sky.

Within ten minutes — an astounding surprise in that part of Portland — my ride came, headed for California by way of the coast range. Having seen a few alternate-reality versions of myself in PDX, I wasn’t too surprised to find that Dan was a lot like me. A slightly older version, and a photographer rather than a writer, but we recognized the same patterns in our lives and he had some stories I would have gladly claimed as my own.

Dan told me of Slab City, a free city near the Mexican border, an anarchic desert haven perched on the edge of the Sultan Sea. I heard the rockslide tones of destiny in his words, and accepted it when he told me I really had to go there. He told me to travel there in the winter, so I’ll have to find other quests in the meantime. After the day’s travel we parted ways, with a solemn promise to contact him if I survive Slab City.

When I woke up this next morning in the great redwood forest of Arcata, I realized just how powerful this short-range time travel could be. I found myself in a foggy mystery-town, familiar and yest surreal. The streets are filled with migratory hippies and the haze of pot smoke clouds the psychosphere as thick as ocean mist.

This is small-town America behind the Redwood Curtain, where elves and wizards walk among the college students and retired hippies. It’s a far cry from the caffeinated bustle of Portland; not so sardonic, more earnestly liberal and spiritual. It still feels like Cascadia, not yet the firey good humor of the Bear Republic. More the earthy, damp politeness of an old-growth forest town.

Cop on a bike rolls through a stop sign. Greybeard environmentalists grumble amicably from coffeeshop porch. Arcata.

So now I’m a time traveler. I’m going to push this as far as I can in both parallel and perpendicular time. I just hope that when I find a really good timeline I can settle down and stick with it. The temptation to leave again could be tremendous, and I’m not sure yet if I can get back to a reality I left behind. This could get addictive.

[noomad]

Culture in Zero-G

Over at SpaceCollective, Renata Lemois-Morais interviews Bruce Sterling about atemporality:

The time compression is certainly part of the issue, but there are also time extensions in network culture. For instance, what is the difference between “the year 1955″ and “the year 1955 as revealed to me by a Google Search”? Analog remnants of 1955 tend to be marred by entropy, but digitized clips of 1955 will load with same briskness and efficiency of digital clips from 1965, 1975, 1985 and so forth. In this situation, our relationship to history feels extended rather than compressed, because data from the past feels just as accessible as data generated yesterday.

According to the eight-circuit theory of mind, the freshly-developing “fifth brain” is designed for zero-gravity future evolution. The space-cadet mindset of hippies, potheads and ravers has subtly reorganized our entire society, through the psychedelic effects of globally networked communications. We are entering the age of atemporality, where our culture has entered 0G. Everything is an equal distance away (ie “1 google”), so there’s no sense of gravity, no sense of history.

photo by Sander van der Wel

A Facebook friend recently posted an essay by Mao Tse-Tsung regarding the evils of “liberalism”. I won’t quote the whole thing here, but here’s the conclusion:

We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative. A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.

All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.

This encapsulates the essential attitude of a historical theory. Marxist philosophy is so rooted in dogmatic materialism that it permeates all aspects of their culture. But their historicity is almost comforting, giving a sense of superiority and inferiority, a ssense of moral up and down that allows our monkey minds to go about with our thoughtless lives.

The liberal and the Communist, in this sense, are both working in a cultural-gravity situation; their hills just slope different ways. Contrast this with network culture, where the ahierarchical interconnectivity  creates the sense that “everything is at our fingertips” — nothing is harder to climb for than anything else. Just aim, kick, and whee! Sail onward to your cyberdestination.

If our minds are evolving to cope with this cultural freefall, maybe the best thing to do would be to float off into space. Not leave the earth entirely, you understand, just really focus on our capacity to live in space. The difference made in a person’s mind when they spend a week at Burning Man or the Rainbow Gathering or any other Temporary Autonomous Zone — those spaces where cultural freefall and economic-political zero-G can be found on Earth — is so drasti, opening them up to the power inside them and freeing their human creativity from its materialist constraints. Imagine what a week at a Space Station could do.

Astronauts consistently tell of spiritual awakenings found in space, revelations and euphoria and awe. Maybe if we could go to space as easily as, say, Denver, we’d be able to get the perspective we need to start acting as one planet. We could see the Earth again, without the constraints of gravity or history, and gain a true appreciation for this great living spaceship we inhabit.