Ferneyhough & G. Stein

Ferneyhough’s pieces require of the performer a critical ken not unlike the relationship between reader & Gertrude Stein’s sparing punctuation. She omits commas with the rationale that one should pause, whenever one needs to, for a breath; Ferneyhough forces the musician through complex pieces to create elisions & omissions, whenever they need to, for fulfillment of the piece. Stein’s system is still nonetheless comparatively closed; the interpreter is bound by grammatical conventions, whereas in Brian Ferneyhough’s pieces, the the musician’s unique incapabilities determine the creative force behind the reader input.

*The white-bearded gnome donned an amanitamuscarian cap of the Phrygian mode.

While gargling, I piss—it seems like I’m waterboarding myself with my urine since I close my eyes—I spit & I cease to be the de facto Klein bottle-fountain since I open my eyes. Thinking of the liliputian with the rainbow suspenders, I recall the apparition of that subterranean white-bearded gnome; the connection? namely: respectively, two (2) owners of one (1) penis + one (1) iridescent accessory*… equal signs, arrows, mycorrhizal networks, windows, conduits, tracts, & connective tissue (i.e., symbols of relation)— quantities too many, manifold syntaxa converging emerging amalgamating into a maelstrom of multistable perceptions; consequently, a liminal headache is left… definitely not a right feeling.

Yet this is all I know (the perceptions). & although solipsism threatens mate, I love. I love though it is surreptitiously that I love best; the impression of no feeling is only because too often too much.

(The liliputian with the rainbow suspenders is the memory of my first day of school & there’s another of scholastic incontinence.)

Rant on overcoming nihilism

Following Nietzsche’s train of thought in “History of an Error” or “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth” in Twilight of the Idols, step by step, I seem to be jammed, in my own personal intellectual history (which has followed a similar path, independent of Nietzsche for the greater part), at stage five, where Nietzsche in essence adopts what is referred to as an ‘active nihilism’ (i.e., the nihilism that actively abolishes the previous lies and myths)—it is here that I am conflicted, as a writer of fiction who appreciates my Catholic upbringing (a posteriori) & who sees not only religion as “human, all too human” but the general tendency towards those paradigm which (if I can be excused in my ethnocentric generalization into Western categories) can be roughly categorized as Platonic (in varying degrees, Christianity is high up there—Augustine of Hippo sez, Christianity is Platonism for the multitude); this is not to say that we must believe in ideal worlds or the Forms, but rather it may be akin to dichotomy between the “inner exile” felt by artists, which I am presuming is hardwired in the circumstances of our inability to know anything but our own perception (however, let’s not get all idealist here) & the world in which we cohabitate, unless we are to be solipsists. That is, I am in essence viewing religion as art.

+ Art can also be used in nefarious ways, as religion has been for the most part—we must look at Ayn Rand or even a stranger case, Scientology which was born of science fiction.

… Those aren’t great examples, but there exists religions that are not so bad & also a cheap & easy way to not kill yourself.

+ Even though “God is dead” people still believe in progress, for example the fundamentalist adaptationists in evolutionary theory.

+ The predisposition of humans to view (i.e., experience) the Internet as such a Platonic world, even though it isn’t (unless you are Baudrillard)

: Work on Nietzsche & Theravada Buddhism, via Schopenhauer & a non-theistic Hindu reformulation of those ideas.

written after mark died

I once heard a Romani (“Gypsy”) blessing (for lack of a better word), intended for a recently deceased member of the community, which went: “May the earth be light on you.” This idea resonated within me so strongly, I decided that that I would approach writing about the incident (largely, the event that seemed to sum it all up; namely, the funeral) using this as a vehicle.

(Side note: A local band appropriately binge-drinks the rest of the evening & night in mourning, ceaselessly playing some of the most technically proficient and emotionally felt music nonstop till the following morning, impressively proving their talents and stamina, at least on the levels of playing music & being shitfaced. So, I note that since these two things are the two single sine qua non features of the gatherings of the Circle, the appropriation of the saying adds another parallel; although, we must admit, the Romani own us on this one. I am presuming they do this on normal days too, since it would be hard to imagine how one can only every now and then and only every now and then pull such a feat without any practice in between somewhere.)

I never was content with how anything I wrote turned out, but I suppose that the unpolished texture of the writing is telling of the incongruous state of mind such events prerequire of us in order to experience them. I do not consider this any more than a prose fragment, unfinished in all senses of the word, but in a sense this is symbolically apropos. Embedded clauses are everywhere, which are in part intentionally meant as a medium to ambiguously convey an idea; consider it some sort of controlled chaos of interpretation.

One last thing, beforehand (and I apologize for so much prologue, you can consider this as a folkie’s habit or a symptom of a writer’s neurosis). The word exuvia refers to the remains of an exoskeleton that is left after an arthropod (insect, crustacean or arachnid) has moulted.

And it goes a little something like this:

May the earth be as light on you as we were when floating above your casket; we compacted the soil when we landed to tuck you in. Or, perhaps since you are dead, to tuck in your decaying exuvia (by this I mostly mean the memory of you—also decaying, via natural processes, against our wills) with the blanket of layer upon layer of soil, having properties which erode more slowly than we, of the Eternal Valley, which is naturally just a name.

May the Earth be light on you, because, when living, it wasn’t so on you; and, while we’re at it, may this frail thing be light as we were…on us too; albeit one force has already brought us back to the earth—you are under it without the anxieties & dread & nauseating despair which are become our quaint life as human beings, something that will no longer weigh you down. But the earth, the Earth, taking itself lightly, will house what remains of that which once housed you.

Adam Numbers 1, 2 & Me: With 123 Words & 666 Characters (Rube-Goldberg-Practical-Joke-Machine #3)

Constraint pieces, such as this one, I suppose merit a few prefatory notes about their construction as a useful adjunct for reading—if anything to add some irony (which I understand to be an essential mineral in all organisms) with a preface longer than the actual body of work. Caveat Lector: These remarks are NOT intended to be consumed as instructions for use & therefore the author is hereby not liable for any bias or miscellaneous side-effects incurred by the reader.

The constraints used are conveniently based on the word & character count (which considers spaces as characters) that OpenOffice & most other word processors have in the Tools drop-down menu. I began with the underlying concept first, opted for 123 words because of the inclusion of one, two, three words (or ideas thus connoted), & finally went with the 666 characters because of the tacky, ridiculous pun—which, like the release of flatulence, is exclusively pleasant for the source and, when detectable, generally not-so for those remaining.—Safety! (But, in any case, let’s just say I’m currently touching a door-knob.)

Lastly, I would like to thank god & Queneau for their influence; may they both rest in peace. Without further ado, I present machine number three:

I remember being furiously irate at Adam—well, first when I was young, at the first man; then when I was old (and no longer believed in the first), at my best man—but I’ll start with the first Adam who really fucked it up for all mankind; who, statistically, could overshadow Stalin, Mao & that other vegetarian guy combined. It would somehow be easier to do this thing, life, if Adam hadn’t screwed it all up, I reasoned then. Now for the other Adam, he just embarrassed me at my own wedding—a time when your wracking nerves make you more sensitive than erogenous zones—when he could have made that thing somehow easier to do, the wedding. (I got over the wedding.)

Art, Engineering, Genetic Algorithms: an Eternal Yellow-Tube Braid

Theo Jansen (here’s a link to video of a speech) is a Dutch artist who creates kinetic sculptures out of plastic yellow tubes and lemonade bottles, that resemble large animals able to walk on the beach, using only wind power (some “species” able to store this energy as potential energy), and whose highly-capable skeletal structure has largely been determined by genetic algorithms that simulate evolution, impressively including a fair amount of its manifold constituent agents and variables—all calculated on an Atari computer. The kinetic binary, the efficient distribution of weight (with the two-ton transport vehicle), the different simple-but-effective pneumatic organs… pretty impressive.

From Wikipedia entry:

Genetic algorithms can be modified to solve a variety of problems including circuit design, and in the case of Theo Jansen’s creations, complex systems. Some measure of “fitness” is introduced into the algorithm; in Theo’s case it is to survive on the beach while moving around within two enclosing lines on the wet sand near the ocean, and the dry sand at the edge of the beach. Those designs best at the assigned task within the modeled beach environment are bred together and graded again. Over time complex designs emerge which sprout wings and flap in the breeze pressurizing what look like plastic 2 liter soda bottles. Articulated legs sprout and scuttle across the sand like those of a crab. Theo uses plastic electrical conduit to make some of the computer’s most promising designs. He then lets them roam free on the beach, measures their success, and updates his model.

Some Squids Brood (video)

the semicolon

I have heard many of the writers I esteem bash the semicolon—an argument I can understand and follow, for the most part—yet when it comes to my own writing, I am pretty fond of it; in my mind’s eye it exists as a grammatical superposition, which also carries the paradox of being punctually awkward, but oh so expressively unique.

The Speciation of West African Music and the Convergent Evolution of “Duende”

This is an I.O.U. for a short treatment of an idea that I have of analyzing the folk of the Americas that has maintained a great degree of hereditary influence from West Africa, via slaves (including but not limited to Delta blues, Appalachian polyrhythms, Afro-Peruvian music, even perhaps the Chilean cueca); so much so that I have a sketch for a cladogram in my head . Along with this I have, on a less scientific and more romantic, considered treating the convergent evolution of the “duende” in—well naturally, firstly flamenco and what I have above defined as the descendants of West African music. Alan Lomax has already noted much of the similarities between delta blues and the music of West Africa.

Since, as far as I know, nobody reads this (but in writing this acknowledging the possibility that you are reading this, please see explanation page for more on this, or alternatively, if you are/is me, please disregard this.) I am allowed to make an IOU.

Beginnings of a Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of Economics, maybe

Shit: Edit (9.14.07): To my chagrin, I have found a passage in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory where he goes so far as to state that evolution is the extrapolation of Smith’s Scottish school of laissez faire to biology. Of course, Gould was the main influence in my original formulation of this idea, if the “punctuated equilibrium” didn’t give it away (my respects to Niles Eldredge who co-wrote the famous paper, however the weight of my reading has been Gould’s writing).

Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand (though I duly acknowledge that he only used this term a meager three times in his writings, I refer mostly to the literature surrounding him), born perforce largely of the zeitgeist surrounding him, effectively presumes a simple system with the relevant variables operating gradually on a small-scale level, driven by the force of supply and demand, thus adopting a reductionist framework in much the same way as the Darwinian fundamentalists carry on the similar functionalist framework, sired by the Victorian spirit, that is Darwin’s single causal force (namely, natural selection) acting through a single locus (namely, the organism, which now following the advancements in scientific understanding, has been replaced by the gene, nonetheless maintaining the same position and role in the set-up), so on and so forth. In other words, I find there exists an interesting analogy between natural selection disposing what the gene, through “random” genetic variation, proposes and the supply and demand paradigm.

A side note: my aim is not to undertake the fool’s errand of disputing natural selection, nor do I mean to downplay Darwin’s main thought (and what a revolutionary thought it was!); the “Darwinian fundamentalist” shibboleth might have given my inclinations towards punctuated equilibrium in the Darwin wars away.

On a tenuously relevant note, to me the long-term speciation that made way for the panoply of taxonomic diversity we now witness (I’m evidently speaking in geologic time) seems a beautiful manifestation of entropy in the realm of biology that seems much neglected to me. Admittedly, I know little and am outside the biological community, but as far as I know biology exempts itself from the idea expressed in the second law of thermodynamics by summoning the evident degree of order that exists in the natural kingdom. I haven’t thought this through too much, but I’m thinking of genetic information becoming more convoluted and of viruses and phages. I dare not venture into flirting with the implications of information entropy because I’m referring to the second law, but I could if I so cared to.

To really hyperbolize this idea to the fantastically unrealistic extreme, one can imagine the static analysis logic applied to this long-view of speciation, which would conclude that species will “inevitably” infinitely branch off.