Dedicated to JFWalter, who understands the Ecstacy of the Extreme, as well as a re-centering of the decentered, and to Laura, aurora musis amica, who is helping me to find the quiet, the sublime. So let it begin:
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Second cup of coffee, digital clock flashes 5:00am, or as my father used to say "O-dark-thirty," to describe anything most unholy, most slipping from the center, should we not wait until the sun chooses to rise before we do? Hubris of humanity to awake before G-d deemed it necessary. We killed G-d, and replaced him with technology, and then bitch like children that we have lost the center. The phenomena of this inertia accelerates this morning, frozen forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in my excrescence. This is my form of hypertely, which goes further than its own end: I am the crustacean that leaves the sea far behind (to what secret ends?) and will never have the time to come back. The growing giganticism of the statues of Easter Island.
I am tentacular, protuberant, excrescent, hypertelic: this is the face of my inertia in a media saturated world. To deny my own end through hyperfinality - is this not also the process of a cancer? The revenge of growth in exscrescence. Revenge and denunciation of speed is my initia. The mass hypnosis of my selves insomnia is also swept up in this gigantic process of initia by acceleration. Mass is this excrescent process that hurls all growth to its doom. It is a circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality. The holy sacrament of the extreme experience. So cue up the music, cause we are going hypnotic, spinning faster, dancing like a dervish, becomes patterns, sliding through these patterns of fractal thought.
**Dead Point Alpha** the dead center where every system crosses a subtle limit of reversibility, contradiction and doubt and enters live into non-contradiction, into its own exalted contemplation of the sublime - into
Ecstacy & the Ascent to Extremes!
I would not write of this compassion
as I would not calculate the consciousness
of these lines in crippled geometries
calibrated up for another part
somatosensory plea to G-d.
True, there remains in all
this a civil simulation though
perhaps one without absolute mapping,
a simulation of the terrain,
a plunder of concentric betrayals and
mimetic impostures; I will surrender new material
and, some say, it is my own ghost lyricist,
un-spooling secretly among the marginalia of
my manifold instantiations, folding myself
into a repertory of nocturnal maneuvers, and
refiguring, rethinking, reviewing and reconstituting
what it means to be I.
As for my own incidental involvement here,
I could say only that selves are suspended
Outbidding themselves in an ascension to the limit
An obscenity that becomes their immanent finality
And senseless reason. But I am sworn to extremes, not
To equilibriums, sworn to radical antagonisms,
before the gravity of your aesthetic as mist the
solemnity and censure of limestone statues of past.
We imagined here certain immodest claims
about the rivers in our history, the turn of
forgotten grace in the last instant before
a boat drifts too far from my safe shore,
spinning, as we all must, on chance
operations flooding through
our sacraments of symbolic logic.
It is a failed subroutine and defiled poem,
which, for now, we will keep from our other selves.
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Patterns Re-Mixed:
My mind is constantly involved in the unintentional bringing forth of patterns, even, as this darkened morning slips into dawn, and caffeine sweeps through my circuitry, without stimulus (Constant over stimulation numbs me/But I wouldnt want you/Any other way(Just, not enough/I need more/Nothing seems to satisfy/I said, I dont want it./I just need it.To breathe, to feel, to know Im alive.). It was S.T. Coleridge who famously identified this ability to create something out of nothing as the source behind 'imagination' as opposed to mere 'fancy'; a distinction between copying existing patterns a little different and recognising entirely new ones. Over-stimulation leads to this inertia of patterns. But also finding some meaning in this?
"Something kinda sad about/
The way that things have come to be./
Desensitized to everything./
What became of subtlety?/"
A new pattern recognised is my little revolution of the ecstacy of the extremes: it enriches my contemplations of self, recursive and self-patterned to make sense of it all. By repairing and augmenting the my senses, I have always sought to create new tools to improve the ability to recognise patterns. Science and culture introduced spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, x-rays. and statistics as scientific examples of such tools; Walter talks to me of altered states, dream interpretation, cybernetics, the cut-up and the smart drugs which I think are just a small collection of methods to recognise patterns or create whole new worlds of phantasmagoria.
Small changes in my self can lead to accelerated means in perceiving the world which can cascade into large differences when acting upon it. The ability to recognise patterns that others miss will influence my decisions for the future. When my predictions turn out to be accurate it is called intelligence in yourself and luck in others. The paranoid is on the pathological side of this continuum. I will step away from that precipice. Time to pour another cup of coffee, shower, and put on some clothes. No extremes of existense today. But no inertia either. Today is about the center.
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Comments: 5
A complex piece, great for all that and worthy of reading again and again to get the message or messages - how I receive it.
I know we are all trying to make sense of what we see, hear, understand. It's part of our human curiosity, inquisitiveness and developement of knowledge. I wonder if a curiosity and even obsession with patterns will be liable to cloud the thinking about what we see and know. Isn't intellect beyond the realms of trying to understand confusion?
You caused thought in a new way. Good!
Peace!
Iteration of Nietzchean meme to zoom into the postmodern frozen moment: hypertentacular grip on the world through technology yields inertia.
The amplified self finds a necrophilic equivalent in the vanity monoliths of the ecologically disastrous Easter Islanders. The minimal self finds its place in the acceleration/growth/speed metaphorical conceptual handle of telecommuting life. The social emotions directed outwardly turn vicious: revenge is the feeling loops' internalization of this stoppage of growth, denouncement of velocity.
This serves as booster fuel for the hyperreal extreme experience that is neuropeptide triggered and endorphin releasing, seen as unified digital interface awareness field lifted from the trances of fragmented selves into "dead point alpha."
The poem itself: Structured with metrics and hard consonantal alliteration, Ecstasy & the Ascent into Extremes" begins as a negation of its actual praxis as a mapping of where innate and archival mind in neural form emerges as sentience—"I would not write of this compassion," "I would not calculate the consciousness."
The speaker is aware of his third order relationship to his own core consciousness through self-representation in different modalities (and selves inhabiting like other beings these forms of life) through discrete interaction events—"some say, it is my own ghost lyricist, un-spooling secretly" –but he cannot be and name an 'I' simultaneously, only "seem" both predications as enacted actions (to do—"refiguring, rethinkikng, reviewing, and reconstituting"—is to be.)
So, multiplying selves as homunculi performing different acts of persuasion on the displaced center—"outbidding themselves in an ascension to the limit"—to convince at least the notion of self to place attention on the extremities where extreme thoughts, images, behavior takes place (transgressive in relationship to an idea of a center) en potential and therefore worthy to take center stage in consciousness. This, posed against a vision of a single heroic self striving to integrate itself, a hopeless immortality project invalidated by consciousness' tardy arrival after the reaction or reflex, as well as its positivist failure as "limestone statues of past."
Patterns Re-mixed
Now the motif of the "ecstasy of the extremes" is seen in the essayistic mode, after more coffee, as an "inertia of patterns." Romanticism invoked in quest of the essence of this ability, and over-stimulation interrogated once again, this time as de-sensitization.
Will synthesizes his "experience" of meditating about rising above the selves and the ascent to extremes as a pattern, and rejoices in it. One more cuppa joe to go.
And centers as he walks off the page.
An invigorating read, a superb pre Sim poem.