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Monday, December 20, 2010

SP 13 Erich's Response: Duensing's Macroscope

c. 2010 Xantipa2
It's hard to use straight science to imagine living in simultaneous possible universes, but at the same time once you go 'fiction' it's no longer 'truth.' The only way to deal with these issues is to try and re-align the hemispheres, merge science and art back together and not in some concrete geometry/architecture way, but in the surrender of all labels and methods, the letting go of language and time, meaning and space, the whole idea of possessions and of death, the end of seeing dichotomies and movies, all difference between here and there, the printed screen and the living page of the moment. In other words, we should work to incorporate the ficciones of Borges, the deadpan satire of The Onion and the reckless rhetoric of the schizophrenic curbside prophet. If we can imagine it, we can visit it, as in dreams. Even if we can't imagine it, we can believe it, as in faith -- or vice versa, as in Hollywood.

I salute Duensing's 'letting it all hang out' approach to this issue, his essay incorporating dreams, videos, tangents, Shakespeare and Eliot allusions, etc. Approaching these topics in any single way, i.e. via straight science, psychoanalysis, fiction, philosophy, etc. is to eventually get bound up by forms. You have to kind of outline these things by backing into them sideways, numerous times, from different angles... this is the "only" path that shuns any discrepancy between path and pathlessness. We are our own jailers, our own prisons, our own terrorists, Duensing's dream detective, lawyer, suspect, connects to ours... the detective of our dream always winds up realizing that the solution to the puzzle is buried the clang of the prison alarm, the freedom train leads out of the tunnel to the showers and the alarm get clock dressed breakfast punch-in... endlessly repeated. 

The question is, do you have the time to deflate time, and the space to deflate space, and so experience all there is was and will be, all at once, in a yowl of "I'm alive, baby!" style pain? It's not easy, but on the other hand, there is nothing, NOTHING, easier.

Imagine a library, a big one, or your ultimate DVD collection. Imagine intense 3-D movies that suck you in, but there's 345,000 of them, and every month, a shipment of 200,000 more arrive. Luckily your library is vast enough to hold them; it grows exponentially. There is however only one pair of eyes, one pair of ears. You can try to watch more than one screen at the same time, but you can't follow all the stories simultaneously without getting bored, lost, overwhelmed, shifting in your covers. The only way to watch them all it once is to leave your eyes and ears behind.



Which one to watch first? And how can you just enjoy and totally lose yourself in one measly movie, knowing there's sooo many left to go through? There's a whole infinite row of lifetimes of options. There are more games and movies than a lifetime can ever hold. Without selective amnesia to curtain off the infinite, we'd be like that guy paralyzed in the video store, unable to decide as he has so many options... forever. True surrender is to let your girlfriend just pick one. Be enthusiastic about whatever crummy film she picks and that is how you will know joy. Wait eternity to make up your own mind and you become like the dog chasing his tail. The student who comes to class sure of what he wants to learn, dismissive of all else, learns nothing. If you can become deeply interested even in the tedious prattling of morons, then you are God's own chosen fool.

To me, the multiple dimension theory is like that. We're so wrapped up in our current book/movie, that arc, that story, "what are you reading?"-- that we forget there's an array of options, and effects. Once we get too curtained off, we forget there's more to life outside the TV of our one movie-at-a-space-time-continuum. Why just experience one life at a time with new multitask cleanse! Look at that sparkly shine... you can see four lives ahead, and behind, and plan accordingly! Isn't that better? But it's not. It's a trick. What's important is to forget all the other options and just be 100% into the book you're reading. As in the acclaimed poem "The 100 Year Long MP3, or "I, Pod:"


If your iPod has 20,000 songs,
how much less joy
than if it has only one?

Only that one song 
will you ever hear,
just as only that one breath
will you ever take,
and even that you must exchange,
give up, and
throw away.

Collectors pay top dollar for what is rare,
just to feel that one breath,
that currency.

Music lovers choose their 
“top ten records for a desert island,” 
hoping for a flood
to wash the rest away.

But the music lover with only the one song
hopes for nothing,
pays only attention,
loves without limits.
That one song
engulfs his senses 
it obliterates identity.
Separateness 
ceases.

He swims in a single note for eternity
until the next note comes
a half of a second later,
and then the next, and so on -
each note more precious than the last -
and each let go of,
instantly

So is not the mechanism that lets us lose ourselves in books and movies not the same as the one lets us forget about our reincarnations, our alternate realities? The passing from this life to the next; is it not as easy as waking up from a dream to begin a new day at school, or rising from your movie seat to head out the door and go home--and if you're lucky--it's the weekend and you can sleep in--and if you're really focused, you can sleep in without thinking about what's coming Sunday night. When you dream, do you ever judge? Or compare? Do you think "oh this dream is so much less vivid than the last"? We need to constantly move ourselves from the position of the jaded shopper to that of the consumer who craves naught else, who is forced to reckon with something other than want, longing, fear, desire.

When we vividly imagine something, or share an experience, feel someone's pain, we experience around 10% of what it would be for us were we to actually experience that thing or be that person. That's a pretty high percentage. And it also means that the person stuck actually experiencing the thing in real time only experiences 90% of that.The audience steals the other 10%, the empaths, gadflies and gazes, the lookers, the rubberneckers, die schadenfreundin. So, taking this into account, even if it's not exactly correct, what does this mean?

You guessed it.

Our senses are under contract to ghost talent agents.


These are migratory souls or rather the migratory free floating narrative identification macroscope perspective. Consider the migration of our attention along the line of a sexual narrative... do we not split our id between male and female, yin and yang? The passing spirit on this scene lingers with both, freed in general but sometimes, let's say, his picture is taken in the flash. suddenly, without warning, the giant crane machine grabs him and lowers him down the metal gullet to cold clear light of the delivery room, the doctor's hand spanking him back to life, caught in the web... a passing ghost gawker at an orgy suddenly finds himself stuck on the womb flypaper.

Forgive the sordidness of the following anecdote, but let's say you're a lonely soul drawn to the comforting din of an XXX movie house. You go in, sit down, watch the couples onscreen, and man, you are deep into identifying with it, you are so into the action, you're 'feeling' what each participant onscreen is feeling, in a sense you are 'feeling' for them. So maybe the actors shooting that scene felt used, cheap, empty, hollow. Here's the reason! They had a good chunk of the gross of sensation skimmed off the top for broadcast at this more convenient time.

So now there you are, in the theater, totally into this onscreen copulation and WHAM - you're stuck.

  

What? How did this happen. You're not in the theater anymore, your attention and the actor's orgasm through the screen have merged and trapped you in the DNA nebula of rebirth. The theater, you realize, was in a different dimension, outside space and time: you were 'dead' and now you're 'reincarnated.' By the time you leave the theater you will suddenly remember you're someone different altogether.

There are all sorts of portals between dimensions we can access. The most common one is fire. If you look into the flame you can see right into the other dimensions, and they can see you, so be careful not to look too close, and don't make faces at the demons. Another portal is the orgasm / conception moment, the biological equivalent of a flame, or match being struck; portals exist throughout the world in the form of magnetic ripples, often near caves, canyons, and power lines; another  is the third eye / pineal gland, activated through Kundalini or Robitussin-based meditation. Go too far too fast in your meditation and you can bring home a demon, which is why sage is so important (the sage burns intra-dimensionally and sticks to the spirit's 'skin'. )


With all these portals around, you'd think there'd be more pandimensional voyagers. But society, as ever, runs on fear, ostracizing the one that's different but doesn't yet have a focus group or hate crime law to protect it.... You know those mobster films where the head mobster is all like I have enough money and now I just want to take a trip and not have to kill people and deal with y'all? And the mobsters kill him cuz they're mad he wants to leave? Like, as soon as I think I'm out they pull me back in? It's like that, daddy, don't go.... don't go unless you're called. And if you're called, leave a trail... breadcrumbs, words, paintings... anything, so you can make it back, and tell the timid all about it. And when they move to burn you, tell them it was all a dream, all a story, just a myth, only a shadow on the wall of their nice, safe cave. They may still burn you, but years later their kids will hear your story and decide to make the journey themselves... and your picture may end up on their wall, replacing Britney Spears.

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