Category: Uncategorized

Social media has brought new disadvantages as well as certain advantages to certain people’s lives. Imagine that on a Friday evening, you are eating spaghetti, alone, at a newly opened restaurant in the city, that you have been eager to try for years. Would your awareness of alternative activities affect your dining experience that evening or your restaurant choice next time you dine? Would you be looking over your shoulder? Of course not… No, an individual’s subjective assessment of available alternatives could not possibly influence their scanning around, presuming that there is something else happening around them at all times, constantly, above and around.

FOMO is a kind of paranoia–the compulsion to constantly monitor channels of information to know what others are doing, an exhausting, depressing inability to concentrate on the present, a feeling that wears one down, the continuing attempts to be everywhere at once—two eyes, on all eyes. We have to be everywhere and so become no-where (which is not bad, but the accompanying anxiety of checking over your shoulder is so detrimental to peace of mind).

Connect connect connect, connections–but only possible with the tracking device in your pocket, or anything with a chip to the internet. No presence, needing to continuously be aware of other’s activities. Yes, there was a time when certain happenings remained a mystery. We, or they, want the system to extract “knowledge” and “predict” events concerning people. Now the pleasant neurotic imaginings. Wherever the camera is, wherever your phone is looking–yes, social comparisons predict addiction to surveillance technology. Selfie. The Courting of Echo and her wailing cries of love for Narcissus. The issue is that blue light dulls our ability to monitor ourselves in reflection but heightens our receptivity to see the other.

With love, on constant look out for the Anti-Christ.

FOMO
Fear of Monitoring Other

(“London”)
(“PERSON #1”)
(“Prediction:Identity Theft”)
(“10-10-2026 EVENING”)

You can tell a lot about a culture based on the subjects it will not ascribe to it’s authors. Yet, what is culturally marginalized is not without good reason. All forms of dissidence and witchcraft take place without participation in a wider spectacle, yet pervade throughout history due to their accidental success or eccentricity, maintaining the still hidden nature of their embedded images (or myths). What is most deceptive is not against that which is most true. Indeed, the aim is not to lie, but to veil in themes obscure or universal so that the possibility of identity is never apparent, yet it pervades. A universal solvent cannot contain any single definition of itself.

Were not the early avant-garde appropriated against their purposes, whilst clearly being against art, Anti-Art (if not, merely Human, a breather)? They were not even interested in being classified. The wish is still “burn all Art silently and ecstatically, that is, without knowledge.” Avant-garde, to sweep behind the front lines directly into institutional territory–so, perhaps appropriated within their purposes. Like a great fisherman, Hooke, Lyon and Cinquer. How surprising is this though, since most art is a practice of a memetic, rather than initiative. The roundelay remains to not act insensitively with a Witch.

It struck scholar William Camfield, that studies of “artist” Marcel Duchamp were not subjected to rigorous exploration from the alchemical angle in spite of the fact this was a sincere interest of the Symbolist movement of which Duchamp emerged from. This makes sense because our “Art” is sedating and religious—we hesitate to associate our pure, albeit eccentric Scientific and Artistic heroes with deeper, darker waters and substitute it for rationalizing them (didactic, white walls of Institutional “Art” or “Artists”). We hail identification with it and halt weighing our reverence through the same trials that the alchemists would subject themselves, which they called Ars Magna (the Great Art).

“Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.”

Marel Duchamp, 1985

In 1970, bio-acousitician Roger Payne produced an album of recordings that publicly demonstrated for the first time the elaborate vocalizations of the Humpback Whale. The whale song became recognized as one of the most complex in the animal kingdom. While on first listen, the structure may not be obvious amidst spiraling, modulating frequencies, grunts and siren howls, yet the Whales demonstrate precise reproduction that admits mnemonics and order.

No one really knows what the songs are about. They are heard and not understood. It always depends on the model you are using (and many artists do not use models, preferring intoxication in submersion).

Because we never saw Duchamp at work in his laboratory, the evidence is still circumstantial. Yet Duchamp was astutely aware that you could not ‘practice alchemy’ by throwing words on the surface in full consciousness. How ambiguous. Nevertheless, he is still heralded as the Modernist Artist of the Century. Yet still—no one understands this song, what it is about. That’s the genius of getting behind enemy lines though.

Names of Invocation
S
G
B
C
L
M

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 enough 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 (to Frederick) 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 an eerie canon that loops in on itself, spiraling into a drain 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 everything, 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 an invisible (perhaps empty) thread of meaning that connects each sentence. Isn’t that a correspondence? It is just as easy to start discussing an entirely different concept to see what is being discussed and explored.

I wonder did the members of the National Security Council 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 (there is no separation).

BKDW

Think for a moment that Bach needed to drink water. This image is hardly enough evoked 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 of survival 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 to emphasize it’s necessity. 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, scrambling the future mission of hidden tape transcription. What did he have for lunch? Or did he suppress, bottle up his hunger like he did his emotions? Then was that the exasperating clanking sound Stern attributed to the venting steam ‘radiator’? How many detailed moments, actions since then have we taken and 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 pressurized room now? Am I the steam of the water? In spite of the weather report outside, what were the conditions of his stomach?

Few of ever enjoy a new zest for how incantation or ritual can function yet they can sing through language at a moment. Everyone has become bored, uncomfortable with irrationality, 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. Even Crowley became systematic in name of love for the glory of it’s rocket child but he ended up a sick, poisoned and demented man. So now the melody is remembered and the movement is understood. Why did he do it though? What did it mean to him? The proportions are not measured by the clock, but the closer to the unity the more perfect. There’s nothing approximate about the numbers: 2400 bars, 1:1 proportion, 1600 and 1800 bars, 800 bars, they continue throughout the works, seen as the most beautiful, most perfect glorification of the divine. Because of precision and surrender. Are our clocks now measuring entropy or our triads oscillating in symphony?

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

Four:Sixteen:Eight:Fourteen:Fourteen:Ten:Ten:Eight:One:Bindu

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