Mediated|Medicated

will, it is hard to read yet it is enticing , i was drawn in like a moth to light and while fluttering about i am reminded how much power words carry..your abililty to call it a bluff, to see the king has no cloths, it is truy precious!
shana tova and keep on beating the drum loud and clear, blow the shofar, we are coming to hear, the decipher the code.

Brilliant - stunning. Brian Eno meets Ted Hughes in Samuel Becketts brain. The piece is too complex to fully comment on after a single reading. Yet, the resounding sense of dissolving reality and emerging doubt/disgust.
I want to go and read Beckett after reading this. The disintigration of self and the reconsititution of the personalty.

I
Will starts us out with a sweet John Cage quote that comes from the composer's febrile fertile random compost period, when he discovered the "happy accident" of chance sounds, and just allowed the music to happen around him as pure sounds, cymbals clashing in the wind, the atonal unthinking pluck on a sitar, even breaking wind in the silence would do....and so became an unwitting precursor of chaos theory, and America's answer to Shoenberg's serial music and the later madness of composers who followed (like Berg) dissonantly but mathematically precise in his wake. The formal grip of series on music, and indeed on writing through analogy, was broken. Cage made his discoveries in the late Fifties and early Sixties. approximately when the Beats were doing the same thing with hep language in books like Kerouac's THE SUBTERRANEANS (my personal favorite), violating every canon of diction, change in linguistic register, grammar, punctuation, you name it. This would, of course, drive the current amateur grammatician enforcers, as well as the professional postmodernist grammatologists on Gather crazy, as it did most prescriptive types in a still uptight America that was beginning to develop a counterculture, as well as a nascent peace movement. So much for continuous human progress in the arts and humanities. Cage was considered a pariah by many in the music world, just as Allan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlenghetti, though darlings to the new generation, would not be recognized by the groves of academe until twenty years later, and only so that they could be 'appropriated' and 'deconstructed' as signifiers of chaos, rebellion, loss of control, an entropy in the semiotic universe (by American professors enchanted with a different kind of newness, French post-structuralist thinking (or nonthinking hyperbolic rhetoric, in the pre Sim view, that fragmented the Logos as a scrabble game and treated authors like broken toys, in a sense taking chaos in thought to a meta-level where it was more congenial to PHd types who didn't need or want to rub shoulders with beatniks, hippies or other sacred fools.)

In a sense, Brownian motion in word and syntax. The wandering soul in words depicted sans punctuation, as a Cage song, medicated to insulate from pain and suffering, yet mediated by that pain and suffering. Here, as Nathan intimates, is the soul screaching in search of self, a Siddhartha under earth-weight... a subterranean metaphor, pressing ever upward as the dirt is shoveled on top... pressing by the mediated word and image, pressing into meaning.

My dear Will,
You sorely need a vacation.
Come to California and I will nurse your angst
with soothing sounds of Gypsy Jazz
while you laze in the haze of the foghorn mist
of the city by the Bay.
Then we'll trip the light of Yosemite
and ponder the ponds of Symmetry
in Aptos by the Sea.
The next delight would surely be
to hug a tree in Muir Woods with me
and then quench our thirst at the British Pub nearby
Oh, I read the whole thing and like every freakin bit of it.

Thank you Jan. First I read. Then I thought, poor Will. His brain needs a break. Then I read John and Ed and thought, what do I know? Then I saw Jan's comment and thought - perhaps this is a distinction between men and women? Still, what do I know? Shutting down the brain is a near impossibility for some of us, and I suspect that is so for Will. "Drifting," allowing the sights, sounds, sentiments, to wash past us... this IS a vacation of sorts for the overactive mind. I wish you a temporary peace, Will... from which will emerge the next direction.

yes

You totally lost me - Take a break, man.

How much coffee did you drink??? I read it all, but you will have to explain it to me after I have been medicated.

I felt as if I could relate in some way to this, and at the same time most of it I didn't truly understand. Isn't that strange? I did sense confusion, scattering, and an anguish on a very deep level. Very intense, and powerful.

Every neuron rapidly firing in multi-fractal implosions that speckle my mind with the pure and perverse bliss of engaging your every sound and sometimes even weaving a linear sensibility from them (although that is not important). I just like drifting along in your stream of "bizarre congruent furies" letting me nuzzle your nuances with unrelenting affection and awe at your gifted and unfettered wanderings into the anything of everything to never be assembled with glue so that the fragments might always slip around in your dreams and tickle each other's aversions to clarity.