Z E RS E TZ U NG
$2.50 // JKJ ATL 06.01.14 //
1
ALL ARE WELCOME
J.K. JOHNSON © 2014
ZERSETZUNG ZERSETZUNG: germ. (obv.) Means, like, to decay & shit. But ALSO: means to neutralize a threat by way of mindfuckery, as made manifest by the East German secret police during the Cold War, and later by the K.G.B. ...............(and more recently by Êtâts-Unis(?¿
4-10.......... 11-17........ 18............. 19-22........ 23............. 24-25........ 26............. 27............. 28............. 30-31........ 32............. 33-37........ 38-39........ 40-45........ 46-50........ 51-52........ 53............. 54-59........
Portrait of a Landscape (a portion of ‘Screenplay,’ a novel) Revelations; or, There’s No Future In Futurism Game Pieces [4 written bits] Darker than Dendrites [c. 1987] Infancy De-Emulate (I) & (II) [c. 1987] Please let my people go… [found & lost text] Untitled [c. 1987] Beauty Thank You Five Titles for Unwritten Pseudo-Country Songs Zersetzung, or: The Snuggie Stasi Squint Particles of Incorporation I Remember Form & Void A Zed & Two Nuns Pensées
2
3
View of Atlanta’s skyline from the corner of Murphy St. and Shelton Ave. in the West End. The city sits atop an anthill, upon which an arrangement of vertical real estate blinks a thousand windows into the sun on this cloudless spring morning. This is the highest elevation from within the urban perimeter—a distinction as yet unacknowledged by its property value.
4
Our subject is walking home. As he rounds the corner, he surveys the vista and thinks: “Given the right conditions, we are inevitable. Given thumbs and books, we inevitably cede mortality for more.”
As he proceeds downhill on Shelton, his gaze drops down to fix on the hexagonal sidewalk. This two-dimensional plane suggests a third dimension, as a hexagon suggests a cube. From years of weathering, the pattern has been broken, here and there, into irregular polygons; time has trampled its surface into fractal clockwork. Subject : “As we see patterns, so do we impose those patterns upon the world around us. As we organize our thoughts into solid architectural form, we shatter the glass of the material world. From this fine powder we engineer machines of animated matter that mirror our every 5 movement; and these devices we marry.�
[Along with the above, we see a montage of images: a stew brewing; the ascent of life from goo to Google; a left hand holding a book and a right hand masturbating; hipsters in dumpsters; two silhouetted profiles mouthing phonemes at each other like that children’s show The Electric Company—the one on the left says, ‘So,’ to which the right replies, ‘Up,’ and then they both say, ‘Soup’ with a lilt of satisfied consensus.] Subject: “What is the issue thereof this union?”
6
[Left lips: ‘Duh;’ right lips: ’No.’ Together: ‘Dunno.’]
Subject: “In order to walk on land, creatures born of ocean had to learn how to carry the ocean inside of them.” [The vessel of man is exploded for our eyes to see our inner workings as so many diversionary rivulets designed to make water stand upon two feet.] Subject: “Time is our medium, as water is that of fish.”
7
[Kids in the back of a car ask, ‘Are we there yet?’ over and over again as a painted landscape loops mileage. A ghost image in the driver’s
seat does whatever pops first into your {the viewer’s (the reader’s)} head, then disappears as we diagonally zoom out to show a stationary car-husk with no driver—we see that it’s a set, whereupon a television commercial is being given its one and only day of principal photography.] Subject: “What would it look like to us, if we could poke our heads above the surface of time?” [We see the neon effigy of fire flip back and forth between the only two states its designer was budgeted to animate.] 8
Subject: “And does not the analogy suggest that we must first learn how to carry all of time within us in order to survive without its vast, deep liquidity?” [We see the form of man like a cookie cutter slicing all the way back to its birth and all the way forward to its death, and we see the various branches of possibility made available to this living form in the span of its tenure. In its past we see the tangled root structure of its forebears reaching fingers deep into dim millenia; in its future we see the bold, violent sport of fleshy investiture as it dashes hopes as soft as infants’ play-doh skulls against the jagged indifference of mother nature.] 9
10
Subject: “Well may the marrow among us moan against growing, for what does it portend but pain and a further fall from the grace of animal bliss? No wonder the righteous hide their faces from the sun—a climb up from the bodies and minds of primates has not wiped the land clear of our primal progenitors. We’ve winnowed their number and worsened their lot, to be sure; but what suppurations of fear must have presaged every incremental milestone along biology’s blind generational grub towards the light? Yes, our inmost ossified recalcitrants may well spend their waived adulthood knelt prostrate before the toys and totems of golden childhood. Of form and void we all are made, but more shall side with void by far than suffer form’s thankless drive.”
Revelations; or, There’s No Future in Futurism I. truth, we become a landscape of Given: Man is the microcosm.
B
II.
y reading, thinking and observing we elevate our minds to planes of lessening noise; by conversing with anyone as if each were rival lovers of a jealous
portraits. Every dialogue hides your own face behind the face of the foil in front of you. You must engage everyone without playing favorites.
T
III.
ruth will avoid you until you’re so wrong you’re loathe to live. 11
E
IV.
ntropy increases as a function of our narrative coprophagy. Everything happens for a reason because we write the things that happen into our minds using the language of reason. The solipsistic conceit (that we are each unique) binds us to one another in a blind network of equidistant, nonrepeating points of view. (Picture a transparent globe covered with
12
people, each looking around and reporting what they see.)
T
V.
his is how we establish the protocols by which our cognitive houses open their doors and we meet our neighbors: Sometime in the (near?) future, when our passion for pathologizing every inconvenient aspect of ourselves has adequately identified every part of us that arises from our
arbitrary, given set of biochemical and sociohistorical variables, our collective thought-balloon will be debrided of all flesh and only the structures of our various coping mechanisms will be left standing. At this point, we cease to be solitary servants to our hungry bellies and will wake, as one, to the higher world of Platonic essence elsewhere referred to as ‘the kingdom of heaven.’
T
VI.
he Anthropic Principle refers to the self-answering question: ‘How is it that this universe, with these precise physical parameters, has come into being to support our existence, when with one slight variance we would never have been?’ This idea is more potent than has been realized, and it extends in the other direction. The other end of the Anthropic Principle is: ’The Best Story Wins.’
13
W 14
VII.
e constitute, as a species, a disco-ball of irreducible narrative approaches. When (if) our minds transcend the grey substrate it currently inhabits within the cramped efficency apartments of our skulls, our particulate models of the world will be synchronized, as our system of measuring time is now. When (if) our
world of mud is draped with a layer of informational kudzu (an invasive vine that covers everything and kills what’s underneath by stealing all the sunlight) that sufficiently maps the terrain of the real, this super-model (forgive me) that we collectively hold in our collective consciousness will, in conjunction with the aforementioned kudzu, allow for‌
VIII.
...an
effect not unlike that of an EinsteinBose Condensate (a recentlydiscovered ‘new’ state of matter, formed of particles which have been aligned in precise lockstep, and in which small-scale quantum effects are magnified; within such a plasma, light has been made to crawl). Bear with me.
W
IX.
e all carry a model of the world within our minds. In this model, we run simulations of possible outcomes to various actions before we execute them. And the accuracy of these projections depends upon the fullness of detail and scope with which we’ve vested our world15
model. But if our model is errorcorrected by way of a global, humanity-wide superposition, our simulations of plausible futures will, within the human scale at least, be accurate enough to effectively substitute for ‘reality.’ And...
16
X.
…if
our Googleearth mapping of the physical world is effectively indistinguishable from the terrain itself, then we have the ingredients for a state change in the causal computational consciousness that constitutes our relationship with time. We will wake
up from the seas of incrementally myopic, four-dimensional trialand-error and discover we inhabit a mind as mad and bold as the one which (so to speak) made us.
W
XI.
hen there is no difference between the realism of the footage and the simulated CGI crystallized in the
collective mind’s eye of geometric vectors, we will be like an Old Testament infant god in a sandbox of terrible imagination. And no mother will be around to call us in for dinner. And our bellies will never grumble in hunger. And this will be a dangerous time.
17
GAME 1. Map of area: buildings, roads. 2. Index of desire x pain in 16 squares. 3. Displacement map of arbitrary associations.
18
4. Random non-iterated method of stacking these maps together.
5. Make five characters. 6. Storyline of 7 parts. 7. Play the game.
Game ends when the key locations of the living game board are seeded (bury or hide totems of self-abnegation).
R
emember the time I was spirit entombed in stone, and you were pure, furious entropy aloft upon the feckless froth of plaintext? 19
A
ll scripted realities are more or less endurable, and are each denuded of complexity in more or less the same dull manner. The mode of edit determines the mood. The ratings play happy families with unhappy family members.
T
he only way in which the single player may distinguish themselves from the seeping
damp is to endure a breakdown of supremely unscriptable design, inappropriate for any or all viewers. Or to steal enough sunless solitude from the rut and gut of life to craft a brick of war to lob at peace—to tattle on all mankind for all its horseplay throughout history. 20
D
aniel wore his dirty soles the way they wore his floor. Grit and glitter gilded his singular room’s dark cement foundation; over this, papers of all sorts lay strewn, as if in the aftermath of disaster. The collateral of forty-two years’ parley with the infinite page filled the room like undefragged memory—drawings, printouts, manuscripts, archival copies—each wearing the patina of the floor just as the floor wore Daniel’s dirty soles.
T
he room is like a cube trying to flatten itself into a hexagon. The walls are cardboard, water-damaged and torn. You are behind a pair of eyes that blink a few questions into the squashed spacetime swiftly running out of breathable air molecules: 21
a.) How long is this going to take? b.) Can’t I just click ‘like’ and get out of here? c.) Will I ever hate myself enough to fall in love again? d.) Where did the water come from, and why is the world collapsing?
a. )
Another way of asking this question is: Is is possible to tell how long something will take other than actually doing it? Which is similar to the query about whether a problem may be deemed solvable prior to its being solved, which didn’t do very well at the box office. But you’re nothing if not doggedly capricious, like a cat. 22
d. )
Alas! Sadly for you, Fido, your nine lives are merely a figure of speech whose etymology is not compelling enough to research. In the time it takes to stipulate a thesis, staple together a proposal and read it to the class wearing only your underwear, you have run out of oxygen 99 times.
DARKER THAN DENDRITES
23
Making no objections the partridge-man stumbles out the door, fingers crossed and flailing; he dances lost position. In his crowd giants eat like survivors, there are no fortunes to smile at or oceans to save. Listen, darker than dendrites the black & white whalers misstep on jewelled feet tasting life preservers and navy ambience. Deserved but conditioned for disenfranchised lovedrugs pillow pumping charcoal into major arteries.
Infancy De-emulate (I) Knowing there was no answer, f eeling it somehow as I lef t my body hanging; swea t ing against the sun. Normalcy without policy dissolves into dry f laking skin whispering goodbyes f rom heavily veined lips, juicy like grapef ruit: a distract ion unkempt, plagued with neglect. This this splint ered gender 24 this burning wood erase a policy forgives erase apoplect ic f a t igue
crimes of dist ance. erasing voices, erasing memory, calculat ing imagery crying inf ancy lost like unkempt bed, creeping in like dist ance like similar circumst ances. De-emula t e. Derive derive derive, God’s sickly syringe 25 unwashed and rust y drives into the bone. Infancy De-emulate (II) Dimness unapologized, unapoplexed, screams and runs f rom silver af t ernoon. Ushered in like inf ant swea t, called to my analysis like dog dragged in the door, tongue hanging, t eeth unopposed in parallel rows go on forever.
Please let my people go the minimum and change convertible about buying play the magic word to put in the chicken way to put in chicken worrying put the butter and chicken with a Hello item I have to have diarrhea in this bucket. Sadie fucking stinks Litica Cole hopes Sciole Bubu Vidur Jaago whole when you lose some you doing I no hello Stephanie 26
UNTITLED
27
Dark-doored, moon-flowered, sorely mist: crayoned farmlands; the light at the end of the day. Too borrowed, elected and synthetic: a face caked in pollen, blameless or frightened. Coded lisps crumble the savior masked like a sinner drained of pattern.
BEAUTY
vulgarized becomes anĂŚsthetic.
Æsthetic ayes pit the donutholes of our specious selves.
Tear the faces
off the screens.
Cry.
28
29
30
THANK YOU.
O
ur mothers a.) give us life & our fathers b.) deem
whether or not we are worthy of life. Every child c.) is a blessing & a comeuppance to his or her parental pair.
I
love my mother for taking my childhood seriously, as a sacred charge. I love my father for teaching me how to bend without breaking. I love my brother for showing me inclusivity.
I
love my grandmothers for their blinding, binding love. I love my grandfathers for their rough inscrutability.
W
hen I was a child, I went camping with my Dad. While he was in the toilets, I whiled away the
time, throwing a new knife in the mud, for play. It broke upon a rock. I ran crying into the bathrooms and found his stall.
“D
ad, I broke the knife. Please don’t hit me.” Now, there was absolutely no pretext for my idiotic expostulation. My father’s never hit me in my life, even when I’ve warranted worse.
T
here was another man in another stall, I remember. What a treacherous little asp I must’ve seemed, though haloed in a nimbus of blonde. What a little fucker of a cheubim was I.
T
he transparency of my manipulative gambit as a seven-year-old is painful to behold; no less for its direct lineage to the obfuscatory machinations of
conditions we first encounter at this age. We open our eyes to the opaque crystalline wheel upon which our world cycles, and whomever is nearest will always be
diversionary virtuosity employed by the present-day mirage of subterfuge I pass off as my self. The most generous (to me) explanation I can muster is that I was making an early attempt at managing the emotional state
closest. I’d like to believe otherwise.
of someone else by using words.
I
31
think there is a crucial moment, sometime around age seven, let’s say, when we begin to store our memories in the same format used by our adult selves. The database of our senses’ causal reconnaisance goes digital. Perhaps there’s a certain sensitivity to the initial
N
onetheless, there is a terrible rending pendulum that tears scythe-like through the seasons, through the
generations, through the genders, through the ages. It threshes past from future as we harvest the present.
W
ish it into the cornfield with me for a baleful barrel, won’t you, of high fructose sacrifice and sweet, myth-riddled syrup. Because, you know, tomorrow’s gonna be a real good day!
FIVE TITLES FOR UNWRITTEN PSEUDO-COUNTRY SONGS
32
1. IT WON’T HURT UNLESS YOU MAKE THEM HARD 2. YOU CAN’T EXPECT ME TO LISTEN TO YOU WHEN YOU WON’T STOP TALKING TO ME 3. SOMETIMES AT NIGHT I LAUGH AT YOUR VAGINA 4. IN THE FUTURE, SOMEONE’S GOOD OLD DAYS WILL INCLUDE BRONIES 5. SCIENCE HURT MY FEELINGS BY GIVING ME A BETTER BONER
ZERSETZUNG or: The Snuggie Stasi
33
TV: “You, you can. Yeah, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Hey, Paul. It’s beautiful. Hello. I think. This is not that if possible, width. Hello, alright. Bye!”
Daniel: “My goals are as follows. I intend to:
a.) save the world from its endless wobbly spin upon the broken axis of western solipsism; to b.) break the spell of the bathroom mirror and the magazine page; to c.) sever all contact from the reiterative shriek of amplified narcissism which
panders to our vanity at the cost of our collective dreamtime, then trades upon our petty fears for pennies, merely to feed the belly of the bestial market; to 34 d.) shatter the centuriesold mirror wherein the cultural I of narrative imperative has been cultivated from a wee cogito
ergo sum; to e.) snuff the flame of the once-brilliant promethean conceit of the genius, the artist, the prophet, the leader, the EGO to lead its lesser egos through the desert to the promised land; to f.) sin so deeply in self reflective self discovered
self helpless self abnegating self surgery that the sins of the society at large at this node of spacetime will be absolved and the metastasis neutralized.” The Goddess Tripartite: “And how do you plan to pay for 35 all those letters?” Daniel: “I will enable myself
to actuate the above items by implementing a few disciplinary methods to reroute the geyser within, diverting its flow so as to avoid either bodily sphincter. These include: a.) dodging the calls of nature; b.) ignoring emotion, doing violence to the param
eters of self to stave off the paralysis of normalization; and while
36
c.), finding alternate avenues of respite so i don’t fall off the edge entirely, yet also d.), forging a fake map to fool the god’s-eye monitor of apparent self; all of which sets the stage for a
spiritual rejiggering designed to e.) obliterate the kernel of self through expensive particle-accelerator selfharm and an occult cultivation of perverse delusion designed to derange and unhinge me dangerously; and ultimately The Great Work is
f.), to thwart the adversary ‘nature’ and twist this loathsome flesh into a bonsai tree of painfully-attained beauty.”
[variant: ...of beautifullyattenuated pain.]
37
SQUINT 38
SORRY JUST RIGHT AND PUT ON YOUR FOCUS
INTO RESOLVING THE PERIPHERAL VISION THURLES YOU MAY FIND BRIGHTSPOT WHICH HERCHER HAVE TO DEFINE PAID VACATION BUT INSISTED FURTHER CONTEMPLATION OF THIS NEGATIVE SPACE WHICH WILL GROW IN CHICAGO WITH THIS BLACK HOLES BLOSSOM INTO A REASONABLY CORRECT CIRCLE YOUR FELCH APPOINTMENT. HERE’S WHERE THE
CURE HOURS OF TRAINING TO BE PART OF LATERAL ANALOGY PUTS THE TEST IF YOU WERE ABLE TO PROJECT YOURSELF INTO THE ASTRAL FORM WHICH IS THE SOLE OF ALL ASTRAL FORMS BEAUTIFUL THIS FORM WILL BE EXCESS OF THE BEST SUSTAINABLE PATH AVAILABLE. CRITICAL OF THE CYDEWAYS EDGE OF CONCEIVABLE THEOREMS AND SLOWLY... 39
PARTICLES OF INCORPORATION pieces of electronic correspondence contextually displaced ::: I need an app to slap me; I actually saw this a while back, told myself I’d come back to it. I’m sure you know, one is not always equal to the catchup dance and its attendant 40 psychic expense (mostly the cost is
Ohhh
in translation—my honey-bee wiggle has changed as I’ve moved from one area to another; the honey is no less sweet for its varied particulate load, but of course, a savvy cross-pollinator can read between the bees’ knees). I’d like you to suss out that I’m still ‘crazy’ and yes, I still strive to be seen as clever. And yes, I will dance a precious little tap
BY WHICH
routine when I wish to impress. So, nothing different on this end :)
how I managed to channel that kind of style—I absorbed a huge range of influences and managed to look a little bit like any of them And I’m glad you got something out but, somehow, mostly like myself. of them. Lots of ink, yes—the collec- I’d always made jagged marks and tion would be called Horror Vacui 1, dense crosshatching in the margins because I had (and to a varying of my notes in school, so I guess extent, still have) a compulsion to they were somehow innate. A lot of 41 the textures over which I labored fill every inch of space. didn’t show up at all, whether in a photocopy or a published book.
THANK YOU!
I’M NOT SURE
1. New title for this inevitable collection: Negative Space
I’VE BEEN
42
unemployed for half a year, and i spend far too much time alone, in my head. Which is great, and I’ve taken advantage of that time productively, but I’m not getting anything but the minimum of ‘social animal’-level interaction; I have a small support system of loved, long-term friends, inexplicably indulgent and forgiving. But they’ve mostly partnered up,
kept jobs, made kids. I’m suddenly made to feel the sort of loneliness that calls for just the exact, specific kind of companionship that you can never find by searching. It comes to you on its own terms, if at all. make it to the post office today. Didn’t even make it out of my room, actually. Yeah, ‘Filth’ is an anomalous offering, largely unfiltered from the right brain.
DIDN’T
I’m not sure who wrote it, really. ‘The Garden’, which runs through ‘Nurture the Devil’, is a more carefully considered ‘family romance’, better-looking but not necessarily better. ‘Filth’ is my personal favorite of my comics (it’s taken me a long time to be able to say something like that without a tiresome preamble of abject self-deprecation).
The attraction
of bdsm is, I think, in part a rejection of sex as something ‘nice.’ The bedroom is a stage wherein the burden of consciousness can, within a context of mutual accord, be shed; being able to play at being predator or prey seems, to me, essential to being able to fuck meaningfully. Alas, despite a healthy sampling of partners from every gender, I’ve yet to trust anyone to fuck with me the way I fuck with myself.
43
One of the
44
most beautiful works of art ever, to my mind, is Oscar Wilde’s play, ‘Salomé,’ considerably enlivened by the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (and which, according to a biography by Oscar’s friend Frank Harris, seems to have profited more considerably than I realized from its translation, from Wilde’s French, into English by Alfred Douglas—the dude whose
father put Oscar in Reading Gaol). I was on hormones, my visual reaction to porn evaporated. There seems to be a very real difference, in essence, between what we mean by ‘male’ and what we mean by ‘female.’ These polarized words, like any simple binary we too often find ourselves tripping over, are much like the words ‘north’ and ‘south’— most places are north or south of
When
another location on our globe, but nevertheless there is a polar North and and an antipodal South. if people actually knew how to talk to each other, a lot of therapy wouldn’t be as necessary (I’ve had mixed experiences there). Your email came at a low moment, and I’m very grateful. I need to take a walk :) Less than three, more or Jess
I think
45
I i
remember looking through my senior year high school yearbook and wondering why everyone mentioned REM in their wordbox;
t was 1989, so it figures they might merit a smattering of nods from the more modish crowd–but not this lockstep ubiquity right down the line, cutting in front of each delimited self-eulogy,
46
E
ven headlining the teased-up wistful f akewit from bighaired do-me’s and the bloody-rare slabs of thuggish sentiment endzoning a big sweaty win from the sinewy louts who’d bullied the halls from the first day of freshman year
U
ntil the last fuckoff bell tolled the start of my screaming meltdown summer, which was started off so promisingly by a dash to London and Paris
47
(
for a blitzkreig audit of cultural collateral in the old stones and living oils torturously preserved by the patronage of f airweather f ascists),
b
ut which abruptly tanked when the boil I’d built bubbled over at ahab’s hatespat point, and I ruined the party because I slurred a vicious stream of sardonic derision at some poor idiots all post-rockshow glow having genuflected with extreme whiplash at the f eet of their idol (haha) Glenn Danzig.
48
[
illegible] was sirens screaming ‘the boy with the thorn in his side’ all the way to the psych-ward where I read ‘the bell-jar’ for protection against the more legitimate pain of others (which trip, heil whomever, graciously pre-empted my ritual of camera-ready red-eyed graduation assrape of shit-tongued killfuck suicide rampage cumgunked in razorwristed acidwash teenage hateache, stinking of f eelings and crotchsore crusty for creamcentered rage [which is loneliness spread thin and shitted all liquid pain from a cultivated skinnerbox soul of airless solipsistic evil]) 49
O
50
who can endure this wretched boring snob, with his loveless squinting mask all set against it, how can it even live, this mouhless pool of waste, this spineless clench of pickles, cheese and arrogance all pouty and special and spoilt rotten ego worn raw and flawed?
I
t took me much longer than it should have to realize REM was an abbreviation for remember. Fortunately no one was around for me to ‘think out loud’ to.
51 91mg m: 00R (LowbŒ? vr/wfwª§l” A L060 Array/as 4N 5¢@€€/\/,I7’i.§ A 1 ‘$6164.11’ wmd a Sazup§é ¢N§u>e n’. _ v stiLow Mu, w (ape/ewe ‘NM, w”: M} J (zaasnc_em) we MAM? W191 qqsvw. w; *°‘M?*“%‘**WLw/}(»ir’vnm/M?’~+m* aw rm T, W? P43711311’ WH£¥/f Hm/ Mppg u; Hg ‘” ‘ ; ~E¢¢¢>NMM ‘s, w mmw, A Mmsnuw ‘ g ejwezewég j , _ . ‘:.;‘.-”,.-’v.;‘,m-lß.”fQZqfQf ~. . ‘ , ;»./,?1;Li I. _ “GVQUW. ‘:”|’\,.:»Q_\J§V3;I?Q5Y._/l “N. - _’ ‘ _ _.
.- - ‘- n ‘_ , - “ , _ 1 ~ ~ “- . m, _ . ‘w: , , .
* zw-Ua“. ~»’-2’ ‘ -‘ e:;-+-u.~‘>~1>* “a 3 ‘ 1 , “wit; ‘ “~¢’~_’Z~‘i‘;§§ Mglq.» Q » i‘ ,i»(4’;i?“ F“ ‘ \ V» ~ , v11». ∫ » I ~ 4» * i A 7v f? 2. 1 ‘ T1; u, Q- O . _ “ § 0! » V W cu ‘ 1* §IT“*§3:’~ p” a
‘ ~ ._ =;3?;c’_L:;»“§;<=r m ’ - .. .\ 5 ~ ~ - . . 21;: :15‘ ‘ “ “t, Q ‘ » ‘ ‘ “ti HQ“ a
Ea - .’ I f ,;j’~ , p4zl:;$7 ‘ ~ ( * 1” 3a‘ 3 ‘ ‘II? “‘§?i»r= w é m, x ”~I‘ 1“ 7’‘-‘ »,_.~1 _ w“ , ‘ > { ‘ v ‘»»\:”A‘TI,”
V. “ ? - ~ ‘ ‘ _ » ~ ~ A 5’5» y w» »-..-.» , , u 1:;¢-”_~~.;»~’:~i . 42f‘ ‘
‘ t‘ Ivlrhlm vmlhMalonLOnl 1mm hand mend nlalognl鉓 ‘ j‘ Qdnpulh∞hlna bmmaa “ma. mm Annmlliinlu annual-m’ > “ t; ran. lillllllhOlhlnuhckvdu!lus#wquvhpsnnddmcednnonVuschu! Anmulvnum vpvB-nu-svumnnu aiulks&lhebuast Hsrveeledespvn/r$él‘rips‘ w mp” duzlmpwululhi Mung a. p°;””’- v, » m. moms! 1...“. o1 skyhgmsand m é! 1
J M01n\n@cumu.|ndVruw\ hedhesunevedl‘vr‘avvv.v> _\ M,52 - . _- mm- “ r mlllmwhuccmd2hesszvawd m! .‘,<‘VV¥->y w. ‘ ‘ , _ ‘ ‘V m,
MAGARNEMCNL UNIV] H11 M ,M~-,~\ H ‘M 1Y Hescvalchedhwvswhvudepwrexhmw‘\ w ‘ ~- ‘ . w “d, dQWHagaw mcew w“ .1.» xmmH \ Y‘~\~m\ ‘ Neieh9venwywuuawvcmȺw C.‘ w“. < ~ ~. \
a ZED & 2WO Nu NZ wal k into a bra .
A b arn h ad a b alef u l ‘ hey ’ sp ayed on its spider.
S o m e P. i . g . m o r e l i k e . All of them phonies by J . D. M a l i n g e r e r, h a n d wringer of ever y-(extra sp ec i al ly p erceptive)m an’s sm anow . I. a s ©ured al l right . Alonzie! Bar(e) b a c k C l o a kwo rd D ro p s ; E - t at s — U N E E D ?
53
PENSĂ&#x2030;ES
54
1. Stop caring so much about being right; nor fear to be wrong. 2. Argue positions other than your own sometimes, just for fun. 3. You spend all your life in your head; why not make it liveable? 4. Fear certainty more than death. 5. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t let distributed tribalism drag you down. 6. Be the least likely possible self you dream and fear to be.
7. If you can’t be bothered because you don’t like how it feels to contemplate the uncomfortable unknown, LET IT BOTHER YOU. 8. Trust yourself to know how to live with all you don’t know. 9. Let your chief tenet be I don’t know.
55
10. Be humble as you survey the new; be undaunted by experts when you assimilate the new into that provisional set of causal fables that drywalls your world. 11. A nimble mind plays agelessly within the cradle of wisdom.
12. A happy elder childhood is one spent wondering with humble, childish awe at the wild, unkempt world. 13. Will answers ever fail to hide more questions from us? 56
14. Such an unknown quantity of unknown things there are, in this plurality of mind-crashing phenomena we but dimly perceive. 15. We vainly congratulate ourselves when our species learns another way to trick the world into doing what we will it to doâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re but young adults, stabbing with rudimentary skill at the structure of what we are. 16. On the cusp of uncovering the secret steering
mechanism of probablistic risk management that will mark our graduation from the harrowing happenstance of the merely human, we’re still blinded to the bare, mass face masked all around us in ubiquitous loopy liquid blueprint. 17. If a word you’ve never run across makes you feel like the user of the word thinks he’s better than 57 you, or if the construct of an idea intrudes upon your range of vision and your kneejerk reaction is to contain and neutralize she who words it, take a breath and think of your favorite moment of learning from life, from school, from strife, from faith. 18. The human conversation vitally needs your input; it doesn’t need dismissive arrogance and it doesn’t
need a shouter; wrongness and a or feel the way can tell us how
all that’s required is the presumption of willingness to think about why you think you do; after all, you’re the only one who things look from where you’re standing.
19. Love the truth enough to frisk it at the door. 20. The cause of truth trumps your own interest. 58
21. There is a greater good that trumps the human good; let it usurp your allegiance when it appears. 22. Your fellow man is a fellow survivor of history. 23. Your fathers’ fathers hunted legendary game together; the mothers of us all cooked up the secret family recipe of our lineage from some cast-iron stewing pot, long before days had names, in the immemorial pre-verbal dawn of germinal thought.
24. From one single question does all our science, magic, religion and philosophy descend: What causal chains bind our innards to this earth? 25.We choose animal nature over human when we break our brothers and burn our sisters upon our common tree of 59 life. 26. Do better by caring enough to keep it in mind that doing better matters. 27. Losing that, you lapse into a loop of behavior and thought that belittles you. 28. Your life and your actions are only as meaningful as you are willing to believe thay are.
29. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve charted a globe of polarized variety in our rude history; every set of opposites co-exist in conflict meant to give birth to a dialectical heir.
60
30. Christians, stop letting divisive politics play you for Pharisees; leave the chest-beating for sporting events. 31. Stop smirking into the shadows, Enlightenment stooges. 32. A higher reason hides in the storied catalogue of consensus psychosis; our primal Eden is restored to us when we waken the fabulous monsters of fundamental myth and, mastering their once-omnipotent fury, we will play like godlings in an endless cornfield of wish-fulfillment.
“Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.”
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
ZERSETZUNG:Unabridged version . June 2014 © J. K . Johnson . This pamphlet longs to be free, but (alas!) costs $2.50.
jess.johnson.1970@gmail.com http://bestillkeepmoving.blogspot.com/