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Acid | The | |||
Tuesday, November 30, 2004 |
Giants |
source: Polo Grounds dumpster
posted: Nov 30, 2004, 3:01 PM by: djs |
Intellectually, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Unfortunately they were all wrong about everything.
So now we're left hanging in the middle of the sky as chunks of huge body parts break off and disintegrate below. Are they waving good-bye to us, or is that just an illusion formed by their ash and dust wafting around in the breeze from their departure? Whatever, here we are now, utterly abandoned by someone else's error, in a vast ignorant vacuum of another someone else's making. Fortunately we have learned to not give a fuck about anything. Like, for example, today. See, by putting off the first day of the rest of our life till TOMORROW, forever, we are able to not have to give a fuck about TODAY. So today, instead of trying to do what's known facetiously as "life", we can spend the time trying to smash life's founding lie. We do this the old-fashioned way, by theorizing so hard that objective physical reality can't avoid our conclusions, regardless of their tenuous relation to fact or proof or reason, and even though we don't move or say or write a word about them. If we theorize hard enough and long enough, objective physical reality will, finally, simply crack open from the strain of trying to accommodate our stupid ideas about it, and out will pop the products and situations, which are the children of these ideas -- and the dreams, which are the children of the products and situations, and thus the grandchildren of these ideas, though they are marketed as their foster parents. Today's idea is for an action-packed religio-philosophical adventure story. This idea is so perfect and complete, that the details of the story itself can be absolutely anything. It doesn't matter what the action is. It doesn't matter what the religion is. It doesn't matter what the philosophy is. It doesn't matter what the adventure is. So, like, it could be a car chase through underground tunnels by Nietzschean Buddhists trying to recover a valuable family heirloom from unscrupulous international cartels of Hegelian Episcopalians who've joined forces to steal it because of some mystical magical world-controlling power it supposedly possesses or its possessor will supposedly possess. Or it could be about Zoroastrian Pragmatists chasing each other across the desert in pickup trucks, but then, as they approach the border, they both get into the hot air balloons they have in back and lift off as the trucks go off the cliff in perfect time together so they crash in midair on the way down, and then their broken off chunks careen and re-careen into each other again and again off the narrow canyon walls, while the balloons float across the border, dodging small arms fire from customs and border patrol agents on both sides, below. Eventually, however, all possible stories created from this one idea, regardless of detail, ends with the protagonist recovering in the hospital following the harrowing events that nearly took his life and DID take the lives of everyone ELSE involved. Then as he lies there in his hospital bed, heavily bandaged, heavily doped up, everything suddenly gets all touchy-feely, and he begins to unload an uplifting but not entirely uncynical stream of bourgeois sentimentality about pain and grief and redemption and healing. Then there's a very slow fade-out of artifice in all sense modalities so people in the audience just keep sitting there listening, afraid for a long time to get up and go slam their fist into a wall. When they do finally realize it's really over, it's already BEEN over for 15 minutes and so it's too late to slam anything into anything. Instead, they get up and wander back out into the street in a daze, questioning all knowledge and understanding. Questioning human life. Questioning all motivation, rationality, and irrationality across all populations and each individual. They question all of philosophy, all of science, all of literature.1 Life can still go on like this but can it still go on once this questioning of everything finally reaches even Yahoo?!! Even Amazon?!! Is it only a matter of time before some young hotshot, looking to become the Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch, and Pitts (1959) of Internet-Brain interface, war drives his way through the Fourier transforms of millions of users' wi-fi wafted EEGs, and reads in them their cognitive systems' unmistakable doubt as to, like, whether Yahoo Weather isn't calling it a lot fucking warmer than it feels like right now in this fucking little beach town or like whether the 20 or 30 Russian revolution titles Amazon recognizes is some kind of front-end pre-filtering to save the back end selection software all the work of dealing with, for example, the several hundred titles Powells shows for the same fucking topic? And if so, does this mean that the books of the giants we used to stand on the shoulders of until they were proven wrong by lesser minds, will only be available from sites where it takes a $50 order before you get free shipping, while never again if even ever before, being available from a site where it only takes an order of $25??
Notes: 1. Questioning music doesn't come up because it isn't possible. |