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It’s less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out.
The absence of meaningful novelty doesn’t help the boring catastrophe of modern times, congested with old deception. Let’s blow our noses. Life is a moment to respond before we are repaid into the unknown. Find the strongest gravity, fold the world’s edges into it and flip it inside-out like a dog’s strange ear. Energy is merely the intermediary of oblivion’s smithereens. Write every story as if it was your last, whether suicide note or proof of life.
To the short of memory everything is unprecedented, and the rest are pressured to pretend.
O’Nolan was a cast-iron genius and master of the Irish art of falling sideways into a sentence. He was also one for the time-honoured practice of inventing an author to provide commentary and to comment upon, a great way of getting rid of dozens of ideas per page – though for less ambitious writers such as Nabokov it merely creates one meaning inside another, like being dead inside a hospital.
Those who mistake their religion or profession for full human identity are surprised when people treat them accordingly, though the benefit of the doubt is often granted. Many otherwise sensible people anthropomorphise the police.
Outside of present time, it’s easier to see reality is a constant, not an exception or interlude. Those who lobby for one mistake or another to have historic landmark status are wasting their energy.
It should have become easier to recall past errors since we began storing information outside ourselves in order not to have to remember absolutely everything internally. In the days when homes were heated by specially-installed swarms of bees, Saint Ambrose’s ability to silently read and remember was seen as proof of his enhanced powers, and early attempts at mobile devices in the form of portrait miniatures thrived for centuries despite a marked lack of fresh content.
The owl, too, has been a symbol of wisdom and doom, causing civilisations to furtively fear that wisdom entering by one door will push them out the other. Real owls are not very clever, however, and compensate for this with eyes the size of intake fans and huge bodies filled mostly with air. The truth of their condition allowed the city of Leeds to feel safe in sticking three of them to their coat of arms, along with a dead sheep in chains.
Creative efflorescence itself is muted for centuries at a time. Such conservative, bland periods of culture are presumably meant to serve some purpose, like a sort of fallow period between crops. But it looks falsely imposed, unnaturally extended and applied with aggression, a famine as deliberately engineered as those of Lytton, Stalin and the World Bank. It seems a lot to do with fear, and not a justifiable fear – a shame because it wastes years of people’s lives.
A message requires intelligence in the receiver. Whatever the process, just as the established speed of light is not accelerated by the speed of an object emitting it, civilisation is not automatically affected by the simple existence of an idea somewhere within it.
Admiration can be informative and useful but awe shuts down creativity in a stunned white-out. For instance the compelling value bestowed on a piece of art when it’s suppressed can slow down the speed with which it’s digested, acted upon and moved beyond. The awed mind enters a sort of tonic immobility, as some animals do when threatened or stroked on the nose.
The gargantuan quantity of fact and consequence denied and evaded by human beings must go somewhere, and may constitute dark energy, the mysterious gear thought to compose 70 per cent of the universe. Thankfully most of the universe contains no pain receptors. These exist in great density on Earth as either deliberate torture or a measuring station.
A system is never so good that it couldn’t be improved by a hen on the rampage. A hen displaying sustained rage and destructive disdain amid any human circumstance – though not toward it – is a hectic gift from Mother Nature.
The super-conservative Marvel movies rewrote Loki as a villain so clueless his greatest achievement was to make the Hulk seem interesting.
We’ve seen that the command that there must be nothing new under the local sun has even led people to blame their own ideas on external forces, in the same manner that people are expected to ask themselves ‘Who am I?’ and earnestly pretend they don’t know.
In the middle of the 20th century, palaeontologists found a small dinosaur fossil Coelophysis inside a larger fossil Coelophysis, and wondered whether it was a case of gestation or cannibalism. The same question will occur to those who find human fossils in the ruins of our cities.
Lazy obedience is a unit of entropy. Entropy is high because there are countless dismal acquiescences to fall into and only one or two very focussed and specific manoeuvres by which to maintain yourself. Those who burst out thinking in public encounter not only sarcasm and physical aggression but a total lack of legal recourse.
It’s been said that a tree is known by its fruit, and this has become a world where it is a risk to be known. Keep the light behind you and they won’t see you’re thinking. You might also pass off an original notion by prefacing it with ‘It’s an old idea that…’ or ‘It’s a cliché that…’. You’ve shunted it into the past, rendering it presumably banal. Hoaxers used to pass off narwhal horns as those of unicorns. A greater gift would be a unicorn horn passed off as that of a narwhal and the subsequent realisation of its worth as it turns gold over the fireplace.
Take fear, as when an insect starts to bulge.
Do not accept responsibility for their impression of you and don’t overturn the whole scheme to accommodate their theory. It’s useful to remain silent when someone wants to be interrupted. To the commercial doctrine that a person is a territory with no worthwhile exports, only imports, the individual who does neither is an abomination – the human equivalent of a Dyson Sphere.
For many, school is an experience of such toxicity and destructiveness that it is merely a thing to spend the rest of their lives recovering from. It serves as aversion therapy or a system of encapsulated samples introduced to stimulate antibodies against creativity or knowledge. The antibodies cover koans in commentary, exclude the wrong-note realities of life and seal the spirit against brilliance. Teachers who present the promise of a full-blast-on-all-cylinders nerve array prove as disappointing as ornamental berries.
Instantly thwarted upon deployment, some theories can survive only in a place where there are not any circumstances. Like a scale model, the theory does not behave like the real thing – the weight, speed and density are off. It’s not exactly a lie but at best a slant rhyme. Parables work something out in the privacy of another problem, while children’s cautionary rhymes exaggerate consequence so that, for instance, patting a stranger’s dog will surely make your legs explode. The feeling of cause-and-effect power this gives a child is short-lived. Rational motive also misleads. An adult learns
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We learn early that apparent opposite extremes are often the same actions performed by different bastards. Some cultures cut off the hands of thieves; Columbus cut off the hands of the Bahaman Indians he stole from.
Write three sentences and remove the middle one – often the deleted sentence is implied by the remaining material.
Partial knowledge can polarise opinion. Scholars insist St George didn’t kill the dragon, which means either it never existed or it’s still out there.
Schematic art informs the sort of book which, rather than being read narratively, is viewed in one hit from above.
Space has no edges and no use for calculation. But as a point in space, a book which is an example of its own arguments is a good use of the dimensions available.
There’s a limit to the number of times a piece of paper can be folded but not to folds of information.
Society’s harassments are not always deterred by death – some of those guillotined in the late 19th century found their heads being hectored by scientists eager to see if the victim’s eyes would swivel at their tormentors. The eyes did respond, fixing the scientists with a stare of stony resolve as if at the last straw.
The future is obvious. Escalating suicide, the 20-year real-terms recession, the blackout, the plagues, those people falling onto the tracks, microhomes and governments’ continued abuse of ‘emergencies’, are obvious. Yet many feel it a duty to portray shock or surprise when it comes along.
It’s been argued that audiences do not appreciate some art for what it is until at some point in the future they blunder into the mindset in which it was created. This can also operate against the work, as in the worldwide instant when everyone realised Jeff Koons was shit. There may come a future where human beings have been eroded smooth like the face of a coin and a hero unearths a fossilized moped in ruined centigrades. There may even come a time when authorities cease to pretend surprise and disappointment at the results of their policies. What would be the first clues that this had
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In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn’t know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich.
Capitalism is not a symmetrical affliction. Too often it depends on coincidence and a justice we know of only by report.
Sustained resentment was a precursor to the modern calendar. Revolutionaries have been putting on preparatory warpaint for so long, many have suffocated. Most elect to keep their rage safely online, just as the most innovative and beautiful architecture is allowed expression only in videogames. Others pretend they are being merciful to their oppressors – better that than acknowledge impotence. Debord settled for telling the truth above the roar of luxury. Many make do with China Mieville, quite simply one of the science fiction writers in the UK.
Not everyone has the patience and mental fortitude to struggle and organise over a lifetime for something that should very obviously exist already.
The ancient Greeks called the avenging Furies ‘the well-wishers’. Art confers no power but can express truth, which persists irrespective of mood or law.
