Synthetic Emergences

sus

Moderator
This is a bit of an odd thread premise, perhaps it'll be a serious dud, but I think it could be interesting if it works

That is, I think Dissensus is at its best when there are several swirling threads that relate to one another, that build off each other, that only make sense in light of what's come before. I don't mean to demand that things 'add up' and 'produce' something greater. But just observing that this happens naturally on its own, and it's my favorite part of the board.

So I want somewhere we can talk about the invisible connections between threads. The underlying assumptions or beliefs or fears or longings.
 

luka

Well-known member
teasong out thought convergence is key to understanding and identifying group mind convergence and the synchronisation of distributed minds
 

sus

Moderator
Whites among the barbarians:
"Lawrence flees modern civilization on horseback without any military training whatsoever to live among primitive peoples in a strange desert land. After proving himself, he ends up leading them to victory, becoming somebody else entirely."
Banks is the only member of the crew to really integrate with the Tahitians. They let him in on their religious rites. Speak to him freely. He's not really part of the Endeavour's command structure, being a botanist. Neither an officer who needs to maintain appearances or a sailor who needs to follow orders. It's like the doctor in Master & Commander. There are always these scientist/doctor/anthropologist/bard/philosopher figures in these stories, yeah?
 

sus

Moderator
Self-creation through prophecy, self-myth-making:
"The real-life LAwrence felt ever since his childhood that he was born to lead a people to freedom."

I'm envious of the way some people create these prophecies for themselves, in childhood. Again, a vision. or imaginary. that is slowly made real by will and other magical arts
Dylan:
[Destiny] is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your mind of what you're about will come true. That's kind of a thing you have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, you put it out there someone will kill it... Life isn't about finding yourself. Or about finding anything. Life is about creating yourself. Creating things.
 

sus

Moderator
There was the nice Prynne/Wordsworth emergence earlier


mid that giddy bliss
Which, like a tempest, works along the blood
And is forgotten;
grow giddy heart our tempest agree

From the prelude thread
Yeah, amazing. I started browsing that thread cos @sus mentioned it here. Then I saw 'alpine' and 'elude' and it all just came together. There's no such thing as a coincidence.
 

sus

Moderator
This isn't a very good thread yet but I'll keep trying new angles we'll see if anything profitable comes of it
 

sus

Moderator
In many ways, everything I've ever accomplished in life has been fueled by negative energy. Conquest, spite, competition, angst, boredom- rarely do I feel like the love of something is ever enough to propel its practice forward, and what pushes something over the top is negative energy. Is this just my personal framing of indifferent forces or is there something to negative energy? What is your relationship to negative thinking?
But when you let a demon infect you you start wondering what it wants, what it's after.

Some people go to therapy to try to figure this out and then purge their demons

Some people who achieve excellence wouldn't have gotten there if they'd gone to therapy and questioned their underlying desires

They'd say maybe tryinig to become a tycoon is a bad strategy for feeling loved

So we wonder as Harold Bloom wonders whether the Ghost wants to use Hamlet merely "as a sword of vengeance: no more nor less."
 

sus

Moderator
@sus recently mentioned that thing that happens from time to time when several threads start to converge on a single territory and I think it's been happening again across the Elm Street, Dunning Kruger, and Liberalism threads. All three are at least partly dealing with the necessity of illusion to functioning, whether it be the illusion of control in one's private and social life, or the illusion of a neutral society governed by reason.
 

sus

Moderator
I am traveling so can't be online much rn but I will try to trace out these things more once settled
 

sus

Moderator
I'm picturing the stuff discussed in 'dematerialistion' and 'morphosis' re: crossing a threshold and things sprouting, the violence producing a sort of wild growth into the psychic and symbolic realm, tendrils flying out all over the place. The end of Akira comes to mind, Tetsuo's body mutating out of control in response to what happened to him.
 

sus

Moderator
the connection between psychology and landscape in this book is beautiful. most importantly, the “triassic sun” looming above and the “time sea” lying below. at first i found this duality a bit confusing: is it the ocean or the sun that’s making them crazy? but the magic image (appearing on the first page, and near the end) is their interaction: the sun igniting the water, illuminating its depths and reflecting off its surface. the water being, as kerans realizes in a dream, his bloodstream; the great murky repository of “pre-uterine” memories. and the sun being, you know, the sun: an incomprehensibly vast and powerful nonhuman force. the lizard-populated max ernst jungles are the eerie and beautiful results, the world/worldview arising from this confluence.
>

Dawning of a new age. Twilight of an old. The West is the Best.

Jim Morrison, the Lizard King himself:

>
"The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous, evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun."

Just like Kerans in Ballard's Drowned World.......
> When I turned 16 it was 1966 and the San Francisco Bay Area was sizzling with new visions of the Age of Aquarius. Like a young Persephone, I ran off to The City every chance I had to be part of this dance of the dawning of a new era. Along with so many of our sisters, we left our poor Demeters mourning for the loss of their innocent children.


Connections between Sun/King/Reptilian (cf Reptile-Bug Matrix) & notions of rebirth as shedding skin, setting and dawning of suns
 

sus

Moderator
There's something compelling about the net having been around long enough to merit its own field of archaeology, gives me a similar feeling to Scientology establishing itself as a religion within a lot of people's lifetimes. The sense of a process you'd associate with the ancient taking place before your eyes. There are vast structures within individual Minecraft servers which people talk about like they're excavating an Egyptian tomb. The game's thirteen years old and already has its own storied history and buildings and monuments whose makers have been lost to time.
In his essay about tiki culture, "Taboo: Time & Belief in Exotica," the musicologist/magicologist Phil Ford talks about how the Beat were really geared around re-attaining primordial vision, or in particular, of viewing the modern as if it were primordial. Viewing oneself as if one were a "primitive of some future culture unknown."
I think there's something really interesting about this kind of imaginary self-conception. There is a whole space geared around the juxtaposition/resonance between the modern and the ancient: post-apocalyptic films, life after humans CGI docus on History Channel, treating decaying infrastructure as ruins.
There's a picture book I read as a kid called Motel Of The Mysteries and it's about archaeologists in the future who are excavating an America that's been buried underneath junk mail. And they're just excavating a Motel 6 but they have no idea what anything is so they assume the toilet seat is an altar, and the shower cap is religious costume.

I'm thinking too about how the Romantic era is about vastness, and spanning great distances in time and space. Ozymandias, the watcher in the sea of fog, Wordsworth hiking mountains, crossing the Carpathians, visiting Tahiti, staring at the stars through telescopes, staring at bacteria through microscopes. It's all about lenses and the imagination and visiting other worlds. There is maybe something Romantic even about TikTok. There is a reason the board's resident Romantic poetshaman watches weird YouTube videos, they are windows into other worlds.

And it strikes me that these are all exercises in re-contextualizing, re-framing, re-situating your existence in a larger scheme. And so of course archaeology is about this; "the past is a foreign culture." But also these apocalyptic films or the Beats trying to defamiliarize their own self-image, trying to see themselves through the lens of a future culture looking backward at them. To imagine a watcher, and to re-imagine yourself through the eyes of that Watcher.

And I've noticed too that if you spend a lot of time in the archives of artists and writers--reading diary entries, correspondence--nd if you are a writer or artist yourself--then it gives you a kind of self-consciousness, you can almost feel or imagine yourself being watched. Sometimes in classical music studies, academics will argue about which composer was the first to have this sort of self-consciousness, to realize that his compositions would survive into future centuries, and to write for/keep in mind an imagined future.
 

sus

Moderator


The problem with dwarves is they're going the wrong way. Fool's gold is to gold as gold is to sun. It is a false idol to worship. You n eed to transcend/ascend to the heavens. Commune with the sky god. The dwarves keep digging digging digging burrowing. They get deeper and deeper til they burn up in the heat of the core, i.e. find the Balrog. I think Wagner's Rheingold is about this

Everyone remembers the opening of Frankenstein: a ship sailing through ice, the story told through letters sent home. Nosferatu is narrated the same way. The poet William Cowper coined the phrase "armchair traveller" to describe the pleasure of reading accounts of foreign journeys:

Turner: ‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like. I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture’.
 

sus

Moderator
he is a bit like the robinson crusoe of an abandoned planet, sifting through the refuse

At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army's return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. . . . There is only one rule. You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can. So began Onoda's long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades--until eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making.

In The Twilight World, Herzog immortalizes and imagines Onoda's years of absurd yet epic struggle in an inimitable, hypnotic style--part documentary, part poem, and part dream--that will be instantly recognizable to fans of his films. The result is a novel completely unto itself, a sort of modern-day Robinson Crusoe tale: a glowing, dancing meditation on the purpose and meaning we give our lives.

very funny, sort of parody retelling of robinson crusoe, but with theory philosophy sexual perversion skew. sample quote from early on, where he regresses to his animal instincts in terms of walking/eating/shitting

"His hands had become mere forepaws used for walking, since it made him giddy to stand upright... Exiled from the mass of his fellows, who had sustained him as a part of humanity without his realising it, he felt that he no longer had the strength to stand on his own feet. He lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face to the ground. He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement."

It's great there are like the neanderthal and ape skulls in the glass getting shattered because Hyde is a regression, it's like the reptile brain thing in Ballard or Altered States

It's interseting, I'm trying to draw some links between that and Ballard's DW and John C Lilly's work on dolphins and Fred Neil's "Dolphins" and all these ideas of regression to primordial ooze, to some lost reptilian or pre-mammalian brain stem, or some pre-modern eden, or

So I've been reading about Joseph Banks, the British botanist for Cook's Endeavour.

And his trip to Tahiti, the time he spent there, feels very storybook archetypal Romanticism. And is very much a foreshadow of 20th C exotica, American attitudes toward Polynesia. So I'm going to write a few things up

Artist enacts the monomyth. Journeys beyond the walled garden into the wilderness. Literal wilderness, shamanic psychic wilderness. Sees wonders uncharted. Goes back home with a map.

The poet William Cowper coined the phrase "armchair traveller" to describe the pleasure of reading accounts of foreign journeys


> Robinsonade (/ˌrɒbɪnsəˈneɪd/ ROB-in-sən-AYD) is a literary genre of fiction wherein the protagonist is suddenly separated from civilization, usually by being shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island, and must improvise the means of their survival from the limited resources at hand

The term inverted Crusoeism was coined by English writer J. G. Ballard. The paradigm of Robinson Crusoe has been a recurring topic in Ballard's work.[5] Whereas the original Robinson Crusoe became a castaway against his own will, Ballard's protagonists often choose to maroon themselves; hence inverted Crusoeism (e.g., Concrete Island). The concept provides a reason as to why people would deliberately maroon themselves on a remote island; in Ballard's work, becoming a castaway is as much a healing and empowering process as an entrapping one, enabling people to discover a more meaningful and vital existence.

Sears List of Subject Headings recommends that librarians also catalog apocalyptic fiction —such as Cormac McCarthy's popular novel The Road, or even Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers—as robinsonades.[9]
 

sus

Moderator
Also I have to log off and read this paper on Weapons Research Ethics before my German Foreign Office deep state sponsored class on strategy & intelligence/deception.
 
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