Where the Blogger Experiences A Paradigm Shift

Worldviews have ways of taking over one's brain like a virus. When one becomes particularly obsessed with something, every conversation seems to be composed of or diverted to the object of one's obsession. For instance, a cousin of mine could not speak without somehow passing his words through a Van Halen filter, sufficiently infusing his words with enough Van Halen to make the conversation worthwhile and sensical to him. 

I, myself, have had numerous obsessions over my life installed in my mind that colored every conversation I would have. Imagine a man who always brings the conversation back to hot buttered toast, ska music, drum-and-bass, omelettes (cooking, not eating), Tallinn, saunas, and, as you can presently see, Jorge Luis Borges. 

As a librarian, Jorge Luis Borges was compelled to always bring his stories back to something related to the library.

One of the clues from his story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,"  that signaled the existence of the imaginary world, Uqbar, was an entry in an encyclopedia that was stumbled upon by the narrator. It appeared only in only one edition as a footnote that was not in the editions previous or after.

This resonates soundly with me because of a chance discovery that I fumbled upon  between six to ten years ago. 

My mother had a particular fondness for whole-set Encyclopedia Brittanicas. She would find them at yard sales and thrift shops. Her requirements for purchase were that they had to be ancient, leathery, and smelly. Because they were so old, they were a fascinating read. 

One day, I was researching fairies. I don't remember why. But in the 1911 edition of the Brittanica, there existed an entry after fairies titled "Fairy Pot." It was a paragraph of roughly 300 words describing a fairy pot as a cauldron used in fairy rituals, but in a way that never strayed from the assumption that it was REAL.

I was flabbergasted and so I looked in the next edition of the Britannica, which, of course, my mother owned, only to find it expunged from the volume, leaving only the pedestrian entry "fairies" - levelheaded, rational, and drained of excitement. Returning to the 1911 edition, I read that a fairy pot actually existed in Fresham Church in the town of Farnham, England, which was TEN MINUTES away from my mother's house in Alton, England.

Fresham Church in Need of a Sound Scrubbing (1910)

On researching this fairy pot, I could find absolutely nothing about it anywhere. I even called the Fresham Church to satisfy my curiousity, but they were useless and annoyed by a grown man calling and asking about fairies. Finally , I e-mailed a Librarian in the town of Farnham to get some answers. He knew nothing about it either. But after some research, he found that the pot was most likely not a fairy pot at all, but a WITCH pot. The witch in question was a lady named Mother Ludlam and she actually lived here:

Someone thought it wasn't cavey enough.

Her pot was a cauldron that she loaned to a chap who took too long to return it and hid in Frensham Church for the rest of his life, fearing her anger and clutching the pot until the monks decided to use it to make beer. 

So, mystery solved. Fairy pots = superstition. Witch's cauldrons = our new reality.

That's better.

Transparent Tigers and Towers of Blood

Remember when the substitute teacher would come into class and everyone would switch names?


The substitute would just teach away, completely oblivious to the HILARIOUS trick played on him by all the fifth graders. 


But all that did was prove how nouns can betray you in a way that adjectives never will. 


Nouns are the paper bills that represents the gold bars at Fort Knox. A noun sits back and takes all the glory while the adjectives do all the heavy lifting. 


If I might reference the movie Inception again, the images that were created in the mind of the dreamer were without substance and were the manifestation of the brain's description or projection of what that object was. 

One of the most interesting things about Jorge Luis Borge's "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is the language of the invented world. They spoke without nouns in order to solidify the fact that they were a world based on an idea rather than on material. 

What is our engagement of this world without language?
It may or may not be true that Hellen Keller's memory only stretched as far back as to the point that she learned language. But it does seem that our collective memory as humans (which we would call recorded history) only goes back to when writing was invented.  The point being is that language and memory (or the mind) are connected. A word has no correlation anywhere in nature, except the human brain. Nouns serve their purpose, yes. But they are standing on the shoulders of giants.


If you want to understand what it's like to live in a world without nouns, I have translated my first blog entry on Emily Dickinson into one without them for your consideration:


Writes-that-you-are-reading just found out that Wrote-against-the-times had shakes-from-within a more-than-theoretical that left her imprisoned in her squared-above-below-and-around to singlehandedly invent modern sings-off-the-rustles. This was a mixed gracious-willing. The surges-through-darkness to this was, of course, shakes-from-within. But the imagine-through-lightly was that the resulting sparks-in-grey-gathered-in-unison gave Wrote-against-the-times the right kind of creative cradles-all-diversity to fully plumb the depths of her lifts, pulls, thinks, and makes. Wrote-against-the-times was free to write whatever Wrote-against-the-times liked at her own tastes-as-sweet, answering to cold-and-empty. Imagine if Wrote-against-the times had an slices, slashes, burns, and yells constantly looking over her connected-angular-fleshy to tweak and revise her proudly and manifested.  Do you think Wrote-against-the times ever would have came up with:

    The Frightening Inevitably's Sparks-and-Surged Softly-grips-the-furthest 
    That very sliver-of-waking passed-
    On a strange coagulated socializing of panting growing wooden
    And Upright dividing fled away?

The returned-on-purpose to that stabbing-through-darkness is no. Slices, slashes, burns, and yells don't understand sings-off-the-rustles that doesn't rhyme or make sense on a carried-and-glanced. In fact, her first posthumous bounded and considered had a lot of her sings-off-the-rustles re-written to make "sense."

Anyway, all Writes-that-you-are-reading is saying is that Writes-that-you-are-reading thinks Writes-that-you-are-reading is far too healthy to make up my own pushed-together-for-clarity of anything and far too social to turn off the inner and outer decrees-as-ascends. Writes-that-you-are-reading thinks Writes-that-you-are-reading may have a form of Beyond-Second-Guessing only with my frontal special-and grey as the resented perfectly normal segmented-and-fleshy.

The Gories: Boogie Chillun.

These are pictures from the July 31st show at the Bowery Ballroom.

WSD7VSDVAY2K

Inception - A Movie Only A Dead Argentinian Librarian Could Love

Have you seen Inception?

I saw it the other night and all I could think was "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

That is an exaggeration. I did think of other things, like how much I liked the vintage urinals in the movie theater and where my carb count was for the day and would a small movie popcorn have that big of an effect on it.

But the movie did remind me very much of the first short story from the Jorge Luis Borges collection Labyrinths. 

In particular, the concept of complete world invention through thought.

The dream creation and construction that Leonardo DiCaprio and his revue were involved in was equal to world-building but the people who experienced those worlds were only living them through sensations, not through actual objects. This addresses the concept of idealism, an theory that our true reality is solely made up of the mind and not through material things.

In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", a large group of intellectuals and philosophers sought to create the world of Tlon through pure thought and insert it into society. By rewriting history and planting it in the libraries and encyclopedias of the world, they started to change the way people actually thought about the real world and they began to change what the world was.

Borges was aware of his influential place in society because he was a librarian and a librarian is an information specialist, acting as the arbiter of knowledge for their community and planting ideas in the populace, which is something I now appreciate as I used to think that a librarian's purpose was served in handing out the bathroom key, explaining why my glossy picture of pro wrestler Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka wouldn't properly be photocopied, and acting as a low-level authority in regional record bin disputes.

I think that what drives Wikileaks mad with paranoia to become a chronic version of your Mom looking under your mattress is the idea of institutionalized idealism on a larger scale. If our realities can be dictated and changed by information, then we may be (or already been!) subjected to a false version of what our world already is. That's exactly what every fascist government has tried to do - re-write history to make it your new reality. Take the example of Leon Trotsky, who was erased from Soviet History until 1989, despite being one of it's creators:

Here is Lenin and Trotsky having a grand old time ringing in the Bolshevik Revolution:

And here's Trotsky being "extracted":

Of course, it's not going into your dreams to fiddle with things but you don't need to physically be there to put something in it.

More on Borges later, but in the meantime, allow me to make good on some unfinished business:

  

Wikileaks is Gladys Kravitz.

A lot of hulabaloo has erupted over Julian Assange's hacker-journalist masterpiece Wikileaks in the past few weeks due to the release of hundreds of thousands of confidential war documents from Afghanistan.

This is a radical publication that solidifies the existence of Wikileaks as an organization that can force the U.S. government to be more transparent and accountable in its actions. 

However the U.S.. is not alone in being under the intense scrutiny of the Wikileaks machine. Every major government that wishes to cover something up attracts the attention of this institutionalized whistle-blower. Also, secret Mormon and Scientologist documents and rituals are exposed. 

In the end, Wikileaks turns out to be the old lady behind the curtain who can't bear to leave her window because she might miss a scandal flare up on her street. One of the unfortunate occurrences of obsessive-compulsive stalking (as any victim of a spurned boy/girlfriend will tell you) is the paranoid conspiracies that emerge in the head of the obsessed and compelled. Wikileaks seems to be addicted to being in other people's business and can't help telling their secrets.

A case in point is this unexplainable pedestrian entry that I stumbled upon that is merely a recorded telephone call between two Italian ladies that Wikileaks doesn't even understand.

http://www.wikileaks.com/wiki/Italian_mother-daughter_telephone_intercepts,_2008

While I respect the need to shine a light on powerful secretive organizations, publishing private conversations between family members shows that Wikileaks may be developing its own particular version of Complusive Hoarding.

While your personal conversations may not personally be on Wikileaks, there is an extremely good chance that people are looking at your private information here.