sadmanbarty

Well-known member
expansion outwards in all directions. the big bang. the crucifix pose. drawings of stars (and their associations; cosmic, star of david, etc), drawings of the sun with the circle in the middle and all the rays spreading out, leonardo divinci's man with all his limbs in different directions (arm leg leg arm head), lifting hands in rapture.

One of the key binaries Barty is using is the zoom in/pan out binary and at the endpoint of each trajectory, the obliteration of self, the white light, the limit. Consciousness narrowed to extreme reductive focus on one thing or expanded to encompass Everything. This is not something which needs explaining as we are all very familiar with this process. We switch between these modes and points in between perpetually.

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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
those cosmic rave diva vocals have that effect. emanating from the narrow confines of the throat, expanding outwards and reverberating through the universe.


 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
as versh has noted before, not only are video games trying to replicate the physical world, so is reverby music (reverb being a physical signifier).

 

entertainment

Well-known member
Re conceptronica, it's a music of maps. One of the reasons why it's not interesting is that the map isn't reality. Of course you need the map to make sense of reality. You need a layout of the territory to keep things organized in your mind. Let's say that conceptual thinking is something you do to map out reality, you have to reduce and simplify. You are swayed. Sometimes, you will make impose sense upon things that have none. Reality is granular, not systematized.

Living in the map means you're living imprisoned. Your world becomes governed by concepts. You discard the reality that don't fit the sense. You reject the unfamiliar, the bizarre.

What's great about someone like Picasso or William Blake is that they de-familiarize the things you thought you knew and make you see them for what they are for the first time again. The nature of each thing individually, not how you've transfixed it in your map. Morton Feldman does this for me as well. It erases my map, liberates my reality.
 
Living in the map means you're living imprisoned. Your world becomes governed by concepts. You discard the reality that don't fit the sense. You reject the unfamiliar, the bizarre.

What's great about someone like Picasso or William Blake is that they de-familiarize the things you thought you knew and make you see them for what they are for the first time again. The nature of each thing individually, not how you've transfixed it in your map. Morton Feldman does this for me as well. It erases my map, liberates my reality.

That feeling of new interior pathways being opened, ways of seeing is the best thing about reading. Trodding around on your own map can get tedious and depressing. At the risk of sounding like a trainspotting poster on a student's wall. That feeling of not being able to connect with experience, things that you know on some level should be significant, because they're too well trodden, mediated, scripted, it's why all tourism is shit and makes you feel a bit empty, museums can give this feeling too. A kind of glazed over numbness can set in. Or just the boring circularity of your own personality and desires inhibitions, or the limits of your intelligence

Speaking of Burial I always like this bit in his interview, touches on same thing

Wire: Looking for a space away from other people?

Burial: Kind of. A portal. As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from things, without my mum knowing she’d put me out in the bins. So I'm in a black plastic bag outside a building, and hearing the rain against it, but feeling alright, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me away. It's stupid,

Wire: Did you have a sense of what it was like on the other side?

Burial: yeah. We all dream about it. I wish something was there. But even if you fight to see it, you never see anything. Because you know when you have a dream, and in your dream you have the weight of the decisions in you, but it has that kind of dream-like ease of everything, like the dream city. You're walking round London in your dreams, everything is alright, but you wake back in real life and it’s not like that. You don't have a choice. You’d be on the way to a job, but you’re longing to go down this other street, right there, and you walk past it. No force on earth could make you go down there, because you’ve got to traipse to wherever. Even if you escape for a second, people are on your case, you can't go down old Thames side and throw your mobile in.

Wire: This sounds like H G Wells’ short story ‘The Door in the Wall’. In it, a child discovers an enchanted garden hidden in mundane London streets. But whenever he sees the door that leads to the garden again, he can’t make himself go through it. He’s always dragged away by the pull of the worldly.
 

version

Well-known member

Whew! Strange days, Sorcerers. And will we claim we were ready? And will we say, "I told you so?"

I don't know. I imagine many of us feel like Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the General Semantics movement, felt, during parts of WWI, just helplessly watching the idiotic self-defeating efforts of the Russian army against the somewhat less idiotic, self-and-other-defeating efforts of the Germans.

There were other, more active moments, such as when, on an emergency retreat, he had to tip a huge artillery piece into a swamp to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. The hernia he gave himself meant he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. I sincerely hope no one is called on to make such sacrifices during the COVID social isolation period.

But maybe even this comparatively light dose of collective terror and the war experience can serve us as it served Korzybski. I don't know about you, but I can't think of a more appropriate phrase than "the map is not the territory," to wheel out in many, many different contexts right now.

Everywhere we look the terrain is unfamiliar. People are talking about months of isolation in our homes. We thought the world needed our hard work to keep going economically, and that if we didn't get paid much that just said how much we were needed. Meanwhile, the Feds have laid out trillions.

Not going to tell anyone "I told you so." But I will tell you that the etymological root of "Jubilee," the forgiveness of debts, is the Hebrew word for TRUMPet. Strange days!

The map is not the territory. We all had maps of life about a week ago. They more or less painfully pinged over to the pressure points of our lives. Some people have bad maps - they have maps that only take them to one place.... Maybe you had a good map. Maybe you had a VERY good map.

But I doubt that your map (march 12, 2020) is really all that applicable to the territory (march 20, 2020). Oh, no doubt there are portions, maybe large portions, that still correlate. But the territory has shifted, and it will shift again, I imagine, in the coming weeks and months.

General Semantics was a movement of map-makers - of CONSCIOUS map makers, of people who desired to be aware of themselves as map-makers. With Korzybski's leadership they had digested the discovery that a map, by its nature, is an ABSTRACTION from what is going on. An abstraction is a simplification of the territory which is nevertheless similar enough in structure to the territory that it helps us get around.

Or, in fact, what is to say the same - the very fact that our map can help us get around is how we can tell it's similar to the territory. And per contra, if our map is not helping us get around, if it is leading us into a stupid lemming death trap, just for example, that tells us that there is something in the map which does not fit with what is going on.

The General Semanticists had the temerity, the audacity, and the coherence of mind to accept that we never for one minute of our lives ever see the territory for "what it is." "Whatever you say it is, it is not." All we perceive through the senses, and all we analyze in our language or thought images and memories, is an Abstraction. A map of what is going on, not identical to what is going on,

The map is not the territory, and all we have are maps!

A story is shared among the GS shamans, of a high school in the 1950s in the Midwestern United States, wherein a science teacher named Mr. Mats began to teach his students General Semantics. His students, taken no doubt with the audacity and the coherence of the ideas, formed "The Mats Patrol." This was a student organization formed to spread "consciousness of abstracting." They would attend high school sporting events, all saturated with patriotism and the claustrophobia of the 1950s (which seems somewhat to have returned recently, no?), and produce incomprehensible and confusing (to the assembled crowd) cheers. For example, if the referee's shoe was untied and he bent to tie it, they would cheer. If a basket was scored by the home team, the Mats Patrol would erupt in jubilation: "The Map is not the Territory! The Map is not the Territory."

The danger with jubilation over the fact that the map is not the territory is that it can lead to a kind of slack, crass indolence of mind; tired, stale habits. It's a bit vague as a statement. After all, if all we have are maps, if we never contact the territory, then every territory we have experienced is a map - what's the difference, then?

As I will explain in the following post, to make the structural differences clear, Korzybski developed a special 'tool' or 'meta-model', a tangible diagram of neuro-linguistic process which he called the "Structural Differential." It is not enough to throw away the map. You will always already be working on another, possibly worse map. We need to examine the mapping process on its multiple levels. For this, we need to use the Structural Differential.
 

luka

Well-known member
Not going to tell anyone "I told you so." But I will tell you that the etymological root of "Jubilee," the forgiveness of debts, is the Hebrew word for TRUMPet. Strange days!

Perfection!
 

luka

Well-known member
Another big one going round is
CORONAtion virus. The lead up to the CORONAtion of King William.
 

sus

Well-known member
I like the idea of zooming in far enough that it becomes another world/landscape. Worlds within worlds. The grooves on a record become valleys.

View attachment 1821

Me n the missus keep noticing this too... I think it was first when we were watching Even Dwarves Started Small, the Herzog film, and the strange volcanic rock that surrounds the institution... Also, the bacteria and algae and minerals at Yellowstone in all the hot pools... really something

1597785706563.png1597785722476.png
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Me n the missus keep noticing this too... I think it was first when we were watching Even Dwarves Started Small, the Herzog film, and the strange volcanic rock that surrounds the institution... Also, the bacteria and algae and minerals at Yellowstone in all the hot pools... really something

View attachment 3976View attachment 3977
human-eye-extreme-close-ups-macro-photography-8.jpg

TDz4bxS.jpg
 

sus

Well-known member
Yeeee, map and territory distinctions have become a big deal in philosophical literature the last century since Korzybski popularized them, but obviously Borges was a big part of that
 

sus

Well-known member
The Borges actually comes originally from Lewis Carroll:

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
 

sus

Well-known member
Peter Turchi argues in his book “Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer” that all writers are mapmakers and that all writing is like a map. For Turchi, the map is more than metaphor: it is an organizing principle of narrative. Language is like a land, paragraphs are districts, sentences are streets, and words are only lines and curves constructed the way maps are made of lines and shapes. Letters are like wild canyons and chaotic seas that the writer maps into words and then into sentences and then into scenes.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
This is part of why I was interested in mapping out logos, be it by means of discipline or something else. The whole realm of word/study/discourse, and how there might be some underpinning pre-logos subterranean layer that would grant insight into the manner in which logos is expressed.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Nootopology, was the working title, even though logotopology (logos + topos + logos; the study of the placement of studies) would fit the above bill a little neater. Opted for nootopology because the nous ("understanding") is what the underpinning stratum would consist of.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is part of why I was interested in mapping out logos, be it by means of discipline or something else. The whole realm of word/study/discourse, and how there might be some underpinning pre-logos subterranean layer that would grant insight into the manner in which logos is expressed.

My schizophrenic friend is devoted to this study. He thinks it reduces down to a few key sounds which are synonyms with gods. Something like that anyway
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
That could very well be the case, as far as I know. It would be the radical connection that grounds the ideal in some more physical, EM wave modulatory organ. Something to that effect.

And it could also let us better understand our understanding, and thus how to carry it further, optimize it, etc.
 
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