Frigidaire
What is it that flies out over the valley? Is it a word on the wing?
Trailing haze, the skywriter heads toward the edge of the atmosphere. Air is the scaffolding that bears the burden of smoke. And though it is a drag, it also gives a lift. Yet our high scribe needs new heights for new words though they be his last. Running out of air, and then fuel, and soon, altitude, he finishes what he came for. His smokey epitaph:
“Icarus may have melted, but I'm freezing my fucking nuts off.”
Butt. Butt butt butt butt.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot
stamping on a human face - for ever.”
—George Orwell, _1984_
“Hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does. Indeed, we do not even say enough when we say only that much.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_
“I admit it is difficult to even think encased in this rotting piece of meat. The stink of it filling every breath, a suffocating cloud you can't escape. Disgusting. How pathetically fragile it is. Nothing this weak is meant to survive. . . .Look past the flesh, look through the soft gelatin of these dull cow eyes and see your enemy. . . .Can you feel it Mr. Anderson? Closing in on you? Oh I can, I really should thank you after all. It was, after all, it was your life that taught me the purpose of all life. The purpose of life is to end.”
—Agent Smith, _The Matrix: Revolutions_
“That Man is the product of causes which had not prevision of the end they were achieving; are but the outcome of accidental collocation of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the age, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.”
—Bertrand Russell, _Why I Am Not a Christian_
Olaf Stapledon and Stanislaw Lem have described in admirable detail the possibility of an intelligent star: a sapient mass of incandescent gas. Lem provides certain details of how the creation of such a being might be effected. The basic gist is outlined in the story of a super AI, Golem XIV, who alters his own circuits to become ultra-minuaturized and ultra-energy-efficient to the point where the basic computational operation is a hydrogen-to-helium fusion reaction. Thus a star is born. Further improvement involves squeezing electrons into the atomic nuclei thus turning Golem’s brain into a small neutron star. Lastly, Golem bids adieu before taking the final step: astrocollaptic cognitive engineering. Further progress involves densities that eventuate in a singularity: a black hole. When Golem’s mind falls over the edge into the inescapable gravity well, not even he knows whether this is suicide or the next step in the evolution of intelligence.
The real truth is that for all the awesome power of gravitationally ignited fusion furnaces, they are utterly stupid. Not a single thought transpires between what they swallow and what they shit.
I love and find eerie the images from NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. They render Sol into a brooding molten beast, not so much the source of our light as a super-heated blind idiot God of the darkness.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
What follows is excerpted from Georges Bataille’s essay “The Solar Anus”
“The sea continuously jerks off. Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish. The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars. Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes. Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions. When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery. . . . The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back. . .spreading death and terror everywhere. . . The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface. . . This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below. . . .The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens. As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity. In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror. Love then screams in my own throat; I am . . .the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun. I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night. The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray. The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.”
Warning: click on the following link only if you want to see the above solar anus logo tattooed on some dude’s butthole. http://www.kapelica.org/athey/main.htm
Be a Drug
I'm building a big machine. It is wet. It is weird. It is plugged into my forehead and it is kicking in. . .
. . .now.
I'm talking fast like a biker broad: “Quiet! I'm nursing a coma.” Sprayed with Raid I'm a walking bug-bomb.
“Have you ever followed someone who's driving behind you?” Seduction through a rear-view mirror: “What's the difference between a paranoid and a mystic? A mystic never looks in the mirror - never looks behind.”
A cow walks in front of the car while I'm absorbed in the mirror. No time to react. Suddenly: a chaotic display of butchered bovine. I walk around to the front of my vehicle and scream at the beef:
“What kind of demented monstrous gaping freak are you?!?! Are you really some kind of lame yet antagonistic servant, hungry for punishment yet quick with disdain?!?!”
Years from now the death of this cow will be boiled from the basin of my brain-pan, but today it disturbs me to my core. Once I was so brilliant I could build a fully functional guillotine out of a single paper-clip. But now grief makes me stupid. I don't want to go retro, but sometimes I miss her.
Enter two old friends. Soul mates. Amigos. Not just joined at the hip, but sewn together at the navel.
The Reverend and The Squirrel are plowing the tarmac with the dangling muffler of a red '64 Chrysler convertible. They are both wearing enormous prosthetic Breshnev eyebrows. Additionally, the Reverend is wearing a big black pompadour with an antennae poking out to monitor the alien menace. The Squirrel is wearing a big red beehive. They call each other “Ricky” and “Lucy” and slap each other with fish and sacks of liverwurst and gravel.
These two are crazed geniuses for sure: memorizing entire crossword puzzles; beating the Russians at blindfold chess over the cell phone; driving all the way to Harmony, Illinois just to sing out of tune; pulling old notebooks out of dumpsters behind grade-schools to cut-and-paste into screenplays for post-literate Japanese media moguls. (Excerpt follows.)
The Reverend: To rant impudently explores your medium.
The Squirrel: You mean my ability to kick ass?
The Reverend: No, Lucy, your ability to eat your own pain and scream for more.
The Squirrel: But why, Ricky? In order to freak out my torturers? To make them give up for loss of pleasure?
The Reverend: No, you do it to build a damned callus on your pineal gland - A clear callus that acts as a lens to amplify information yet thick enough to insulate you from annoyance.
The Squirrel: Hmmm. [Scratches wig. Fidgets.] Oh, Ricky!
The Reverend: Don't become frustrated. Let the pins and needles of stimulation-overload work you into an ass-kicking frenzy, not a migraine. [Cut to voice-over.]
Narrator: The car speeds on, trailing angry sparks that kill nothing. Stop-motion photography turns the sun into an enormous curved tube of neon - a monochrome rainbow that burns the twin images of the amigos' prosthetic Breshnev eyebrows onto their laps.
Nancy Reagan is gently kneading BetaCarotene saturated pumpkin pie filling into my wrinkled museum of pain. A Japanese unicyclist is calculating blink-per-minute ratios extracted from old video footage of Ronald Reagan, ripe for the bulk eraser. The unicyclist resembles my mother to such a degree as inspires me to warn her that post-feminist dissertations on analytic geometry won’t find their way onto the pages of the Christian Science Monitor this year.
Last year I received an eight page love letter from Maddona. This year I’m finally writing her back.
Dear Maddonna,
If you really did care about me, you would help me erect a monument to myself so that sturdy cockroaches can worship my likeness after the holocaust.
Love,
Snak Dugbeets, Garbage Man and Visionary Extrordinare
The man in the bus seat in front of me has an earthworm. Or perhaps, one might say, the earthworm has him. It all depends on whether the earthworm is growing out of the top of the man's scalp or burrowing into the man's brain.
Alternatively, one might say that I am simply being snarky about this man's ugly little ponytail. I sprinkle salt on this so-called “ponytail”. It shrivels up, so I'm still thinking earthworm. I jump into the seat next to him and shine a mag-light into his eyes to begin a quick neuropsychological assessment. The man exhibits 3 of the 5 classic diagnostic criteria for unilateral earthworm-ectomy: aversion to light shone in eyes, reluctance to interact with strangers, and eagerness to stand up right. Bingo. He had earthworm. Or should I say “the earthworm had him”?
Caption Contest. Beat me.
Dr. Smax: “Turkey awarded medal. Weapons of Mass Destruction located in President's trousers.”
Memo to myself:
Is my life a novel or a movie?
My life is a novel. A novel based on a movie. The movie is a Viet Nam war epic like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. Charles Bronson is cast as me wandering through the jungles of North Vietnam.
Violins build tension in the background. The audience knows something scary is about to happen, like when a cat jumps out of a refrigerator in a horror movie. But this is the jungle. There wouldn’t be a cat – there’d be something exotic, like an armadillo. And there wouldn’t be a refrigerator. Charles Bronson would have something more organic. Like a cheeseburger
Okay. Violins build tension in the background. Charles Bronson opens his cheeseburger, and the armadillo jumps out.
Wait a minute — how did Charles Bronson get a cheeseburger?
Take two. Violins build tension in the background Charles Bronson goes to McDonald’s, opens a cheeseburger. . . Wait a minute – it wouldn’t happen like this. Not in North Vietnam.
Take Three. Violins build tension in the background. Charles Bronson goes to McDonalds. He gets a bowl of rice. The armadillo jumps out.
I am Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Coordinator of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at William Paterson University in New Jersey. This blog largely concerns my interests in the Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Neuroscience, but also contains evidence of my messing around with art, photography, fiction, and robotics. Find out way more about me and my work here.
Brain Hammer is also host to PMS WIPS, the online works-in-progress forum for researchers in the Philosophy of Mind, Science, and related areas. Find out way more about PMS WIPS here.