Category: Uncategorized

  • On Bach

    Cleaning is one of the most satisfying enterprises. Polish any spatula and ponder whether Frederick the Great knew the satisfaction of fishing a spoon from the bottom of a wash sink. No ability exists far away from the finest pleasures of brushing away the fixed history of cheese to a bowl. Perhaps that is why Frederick surrounded himself with peoples who had dug deep into the dirt of the human psyche. Perhaps it occurs to transcribe that idea instead of the piano motif singing the start of a canon that Bach writes or dedicates to someone before they start washing our dishes, where silver spoons and non-abilities form their analogs.

    At some point it is better to just rest and not to think, like washing the dishes is to a canon that loops in on itself, spiraling into the drains where the water mixes with every idea we drink. We want to no longer separate the singular motif stacked on top of itself but all purification processes are complex. The purposes of distillation involves finding where a single melody becomes the eternal braid, when a cockroach has fallen into your glass of water and you must rescue it from the idea that things are disconnected even though you are so familiar with the technique of creating analogies. What separates sense from nonsense or an essay from a poem is the thread of meaning that connects each sentence. It is just as easy to start discussing an entirely different concept which connects with what is being discussed and explored.

    I wonder did the members of the National Security Council could sense what their appetite was telling them to eat for lunch. Did gastronomy meet the agenda for determining the course of history? Or were they also separate from the plates that served them food? Did the secret recordings capture the grumbling of Robert McNamara‘s stomach? I learned that at a certain point people believed the Cold War ended and the current issue is that history thinks itself resolved. Like washing the dishes. Which are never clean and disconnected from the timeliness of writing an essay on Bach at the Keyboard Drinking Water.

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    Think for a moment that Bach needed to drink water. This image is hardly enough brought into mind through any biography. Bach needed to drink water and perhaps it is the essential nature of this necessity that it barely seems worth mentioning. How often are details and nuance missed in the sacrifice of being concise. And how often do people think of a moment in history, the image, when Bach needed to fill a glass of water. Just as Robert McNamar’s hunger is grumbling while he discusses the cards on the table, while someone else fills a pitcher of water in the room. What was that exasperating clanking sound Stern attributed to the venting steam ‘radiator’? How many detailed moments since then have we sidestepped complete and total annihilation every day–no, the Cold War ended long ago and we carry that into every day we polish our dishes. Am I in the radiator in that room now? In spite of the weather report outside?

    No one has any zest for how incantation or ritual functions anymore. Everyone has become bored, not realizing how exciting our war rooms of the every day are and that our very tight rope actions balance us upon the threshold of complete and total devastation. Must clean. Orderliness of mind, the stomach can wait. The melody is remembered and the movement is understood.

    “I don’t think there’s a mathematical basis for it—it’s just a bunch of overlapping triangles”.

  • On The Crying of Lot 49

    It takes time for revelation to come to light. The number in the book title aligns one day before such a thing takes place.

    Entropy is Eschatology. Further, it causes an overgrowth of information (the inversion of the second law) needed for the demon to “sort” things out (remember the segregated “hot” sheep and the “cool” goats). At the end of time there is an equivalent heat death but our blinded heroine (Oedipus/Oedipa-us) is confounded in her inability to do any more sorting work and so now waits patiently at the eschaton’s auction. Oedipa (us) are the crying Lot waiting for that moment of hierophany after the 49th day, on the threshold of the Bardo.

    The final era of history–terminal, perhaps–is symbolized by the descent of the Holy Ghost who inaugurates a politics of anarchy similar to that described in Yeats’s prophetic poems. The attempt to find some source of spiritual revelation as an alternative to existential malaise, is compromised by Pynchon’s inability-like us, at this point – to imagine a revelation uncontaminated by the paranoia-inducing mystique of cabalaistic Gnosticism. So get settled back, await Portal 49.

    To understand the message of the postal service, it is necessary to understand Joachin of Flora, the Renaissance and what happened before and after. The narrative Pynchon is explicating is still not easy to grasp.

    There is a narrative and the secret societies know (or knew– are there anymore secret societies that have(gnosis) without wanting to Control?) the cradled ideas relevant for the cosmological cycle. The message can only be read by people experimenting to see if they can perceive the pattern’s caused by time’s arrow. That’s why Pynchon is so difficult, but so is understanding Entropy. That’s why they call it a trumpet. which signals the apocalyptic event.

    I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read. […] But the qualities and quantities will not come together to form a unified notion in my head. It is cold comfort to find out that Gibbs himself anticipated the problem, when he described entropy in its written form as “far-fetched … obscure and difficult of comprehension”. When I think about the property nowadays, it is more and more in connection with time, the human one-way time we‘re all stuck with locally here, and which terminates, it is said, in death. Certain processes, not only thermodynamic ones but also those of a medical nature, can often not be reversed. Sooner or later we all find this out, from the inside.

    Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

    Pynchon is an erudite writer and even when he was a Slow Learner his characteristic concern was with what we might call the cosmic context, with intimations that the characters and plots of earth must somehow answer to a mysterious teleology of extrahuman forces. His disdain for the post-structuralist/modernist thread shows and we prove the truth of his narrative’s metaphors that to our surprise occurred in history. Thus, secular history is a diversionary tactic, not useful to us. This must be understood. Otherwise we are wasting our time to sort out the information.

    She is 28 years old but Oedipa Maas is terrified that she cannot see her face in the mirror. This happens in San Narciso. Here’s a new riddle from the Sphinx that spoke to Oedipus:

    What do you get when you cross a narcissist that can not enjoy their own shattered reflection?

    A paranoid schizophrenic with a spray can. Is the joke that these narratives can (such as The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick) but need not create the cycle of history and destroy our pregnostic harmony and rapport with the order of nature? What is Thomas Pynchon’s Apocalypse? It might be as simple as the dualism of choosing between becoming a donkey instead of the gnostic/knowing/controlling asshole.

    …And destroying all computer technology.

    “In the beginning, for Pynchon, was the malaise, and in the early stories its matrix is a Weltanschauung shaped by existentialist premises: mankind alone and alienated in a indifferent cosmos, vulnerable to entropy and nihilistic despair. This sense of a sterile, enveloping neutrality is challenged almost at once, however, by a paranoia of religious dimensions-the increasing suspicion, suggestive of ancient Gnosticism, that humanity is trapped in a history increasingly manipulated by antihuman forces. It is this dialectic between the concepts of cosmic indifference and quasi-demonic conspiracy that generates the larger significations of The Crying of Lot 49. The latter unfolds as an explicit analogue of Pentecostal revelation, with the difference that what is to be revealed is tinged with the moral ambiguities of the animating conspiracy.”
    Dwight Eddins
    Hardcover, 9780253319074

  • What is an Essay? An ESSAY CLUB Overview

    What are essays or what is an essay? Unfortunately, a huge part of our exposure to the essay arises from within academic context, conflating it with argument, analysis, hypothesis, thesis. This is very narrow, institutionalized, association constricts and chokes the full meaning and potential of what an essay can be.

    The essay is not limited to an article that proposes an argument, or perspective. In fact, essays can be unbounded, creative, personal, often humorous and sometimes meandering. In reality, it’s form is hybrid, amorphous. In the words of Robert Johnson, an essay is an “irregular undirected piece” and not a regular or orderly performance. Professor Hugh Walker offers the following description of meandering: essays are a relatively short composition and something incomplete, unsystematic. Essays have a creative capacity that is fundamentally connected with exploration and experimentation.

    Is this a failure to determine the qualities or taxonomy of an essay?— ambiguity is in fact the genre’s strength, literary or not. ESSAY CLUB is real and celebrates the following types of essays:

    • Written essays
    • Video or film essays
    • █████████ essays
    • Poetic essays and poetry essays and cryptographic essays
    • Life essays
    • Strobe essays for ESSAY CLUB

    Perhaps to define and better understand the nature of the essay, it could be helpful to excavate its historical origins and discover from where and whence the essay arose. Exploring these origins could reveal the mercurial nature of the essay, or in the words of Aldous Huxley, the essays ability to say “everything about almost anything”. In fact, as we continue our dive, we will continue to see the essay represented as an associative and open-ended process of exploration.

    Join ESSAY CLUB, as we travel down the rabbit hole on the history of the essay.

    Definitions and Etymology of essay – In the beginning was the word.

    A definition essay is an essay where you take a term and work to define it. How is it possible then to define something that cannot be defined? By searching for it’s origin. What does the history of language, or etymology reveal about the nature of ESSAY CLUB?

    The word essay has it’s roots in the French essai, trial, attempt. We can understand this as a trial to explore and test an idea, to attempt to seek the fullness of truth to the best of our current ability. It is related to science and experimentation, as a trial or process of testing; a putting to proof by experiment, the act of examining or testing something, such as a metal, to determine its quality or validity.

    But this definition is not constrained the medium or ‘apparatus’ used for testing. In the weighing of the heart rite, the heart of the deceased is weighed on the scale against the feather of the goddess Maat, who personifies order, truth, and what is right. If the heart weighed more than the feather of Maat, it was immediately consumed by the monster Ammit. Essays are related to the Maater of the heart’s being in the world. To be human, to live here in this world, is to be put on trial. Therefore, a new form of essay within ESSAY CLUB that is currently being trialed is called a Life Essay.

    Words in our language change and evolve, because language is unreal but alive. There is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words). ESSAY CLUB reveres this idea.

    Before and After Montaigne

    It could be considered that Michel de Montaigne was the “father” of the essay, with his ‘Essais‘ being very popular in the french Renaissance and becoming some of the most influential writing in Western Literature. However, we propose that the essay as a form could be traced to some of the writings of Plutarch and certainly the writings of Seneca, which took the form of letters or epistles. Montaigne was a classicist, familiar with these writers and would quote heavily from Seneca. Francis Bacon’s Essays or Counsels Civil or Moral were also inspired by Seneca’s Letters.

    In Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, we are confronted with a clear personality–an aging man, his intolerance of noise, his asthma, his dissilussion with public life, his everyday life, his meetings, his visit to resorts, his reporting on the deaths of acquaintances, his comforting image as one who enjoy restings and to stay in bed wrapped up, spending most of the time reading. Montaigne found the structure of these writings attractive because of their brevity, personality, treatment of moral topics and portrait of the author’s times. Like Montaigne’s Essays, the Letters are of a variable length and are free to discuss a variety of topics within on Letter. We arrive again at the winding course that the essay follows.

    In his essays, Montaigne would often arrive at a totally different place than where he started his subject matter. The reader can notice the required acceptance for exploration to understand the nature of the quest for truth. The center is unknown in the Labyrinth until arrival.

    In fact, it was Montaigne’s skeptical outlook that lead him to suggest that human beings are unable to arrive at knowledge or truth. His belief was that reason is incapable of demonstrating the most profound, ultimate truths or natures of things and we must rely on spiritual revelation and faith. Montaigne relied on divine revelation, denying the rationalist or speculative way of philosophizing that prevailed under the Scholastics since the Middle Ages. He viewed this practice as gibberish discussion, proselytizing the domain of science to be attached to the thinking of Aristotle and Galen. This outlook makes clear Montaigne’s influence of the Moral writings of Seneca and explains the commitment of ESSAY CLUB to Philosophy as a way of life.

    bibliography

    The Ultimate Derivation of Essay by J. P. Postgate

    Roundtable: The History of the Essay by Milton J. Rosenberg, Joseph Epstein, Thomas Kaminski and Robert Root

    A Puzzling Literary Genre: Comparative Views of the Essay by Richard M. Chadbourne

    SENECA’S LETTERS TO LUCILIUS AS A SOURCE OF SOME OF MONTAIGNE’S IMAGERY by Carol E. Clark