“Mutiny of the Bountiful”

letters from a depressed garden flamingo painter

Dearest Mia,

I lie and hear in a state of delayed orgasm, strapped and permanent in a coffin of
thought, inside of an inside of an inside of pleasure and horror. Iʼm a Matryoshka
Doll of bad ideas. I look out at an ocean of my own cells, blood letting where blood
cannot flow. I digress for I am ahead of myself. Thank you again for the Venmo of
hundred bones to avoid having my thumbs cut off by the local Baccarat experts.
Your questions about Cheryl must go unanswered for now, and I do agree with
your decision to represent yourself in that upcoming traffic violation court hearing.
Smart move! Spin those barristerʼs heads like the soft kittens they are.
These days the currency of the realm is loneliness, but on the currency exchange
is fear. I was speaking to my friend Art the other night. I have told you about him,
an ex highschool history teacher who was fired for breaking a parentʼs nose with a
cellphone in the parking lot of St John the Baptist prep. We were sharing a scotch
over at the Rogers Park Social, he could not stay for long, it was Motherʼs Day
tomorrow and he had to be back in LaGrange. He had enough time to tell me his
theory about the American phenomenon known as the soap opera. I figured you
could relate, you do like telling me about “Eastenders” even though I keep telling
you I have never see it. Now, of course every culture has its version of this genre,
but he was particularly focused on the American soap. The first of which was
actually a Chicago radio show called “Painted Dreams” started back in 1930. The
term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored by
soap manufacturers because they were listened to by housewives cleaning. He
wanted to compare the evolution of these shows with the superhero genre today,
the open narrative in which characters go through an endless series of conflicts,
pains, losses and melodrama that never seem to crush their spirits or at least
convince them to find a new group of friends. If you look up Luke Spencer on
wikipedia, one of the main characters from General Hospital (who apparently was
finally killed this year, I assume by atom bomb) you will see the endless list of
bizarre death-defying things that have happened to this man, good grief, I would
have dropped dead of PTSD sometime after getting caught in the avalanche of
ʼ83. Now, the idea that this ridiculous suspension of disbelief was a necessary
aspect of womenʼs tv story choices is both sexists and stupid. If anyone really
thinks about how many times Spiderman has almost been killed saving the world,
Peter Parker should be on Haloperidol 24 hours a day. Comic book characters also
have this same soap opera-like ‘comicallyʼ endless parade of conflicts and pains
that never deter them or degrade them. And although comic books were mostly
marketed to young boys to sell bubblegum ads, here in 2023 the new soup opera
that attracts all genders, all ages and all inclinations is the Marvel Cinematic
Universe: a seemingly endless billion dollar regurgitation of struggles, deaths and
resurrections. Art pointed to Robert Downey Jrʼs role in the 1991 movie “Soap
Dish” as a perfect psychic bridge to the Marvel Comic Book Industrial Revolution.
Hell, Iron Man doesnʼt start getting PTSD til the third film, he should have had it
right after getting out of Afghanistan. Comic Book movies have become Americaʼs
soap opera, tales of heroes who endure, who solve unsolvable problems only to
replaced by new unsolvable problems, pushing boulders up a hill and oceans back
with a broom. I find the whole genre quite tiresome. I admire a lack of ambition and
as a coward and a layabout, taking risks and facing fears was never my
prescription for a long life. And lets face its, Alan Moore was right, if superheroes
really did exist, they would be fascists.
   I said goodbye to Art for the evening, he picked up the bill. I asked what he did to
get by after being unemployed for so long. He told me “flipping houses.” I picked
the wrong profession. You having lived in England your whole life, you donʼt
appreciate the American love of real estate. That is why London Bridge is in
Arizona. Oh, I did watch the coronation of King Charles the other day, who looked
liked an absolute dickhead. Bravo! I wandered down the street looking up that
night sky and wondered when I would start seeing lightning bugs. My thoughts
turned to heroes and history.
   In January of 1789 on the island of Tahiti, the dude-bro himbo-hero Fletcher
Christian and his fellow feckless crew of the H.M.S. Bounty, in the middle of a long,
arduous and most likely purposeless vegetarian transforming seafaring voyage,
found themselves astride and aligned lounging on self-sucking sun-kissed
beaches and under water falls, surrounded by countless hefted cliff-less naked
breasts and guiltless supping on the rarest sugary fruit and ripe nut that would
rival the dopamine hit of any lengthy rail of refined cocaine. These petty English
gents who had survived under the cruel and sadistic command of alpha-top power
Dom Captain William Bligh, who by wrangling will of the before mentioned Fletcher
Christian would within a few early months lead a heartfelt, foolhardy and eventual
assault and failure of a mutiny. Twenty five of these men would eject their captain,
make the mistake of not killing him on the spot, and gain their freedom for a few
years, to be unowned and unobliged. But most would eventually be hunted down
arrested and killed. Philosophers can look to this story of these begotten rebels
and ponder the anal finite questions of order vs chaos, human liberty vs the
pragmatism of hierarchy, justice vs duty . . I confess, I lack the passion and
charisma of a revolutionary, and although I am still a card caring queer polysexual
socialist and in my youth I marched against the blood for oil and occupied a
Wallstreet here and there, I had no stomach for propaganda of the deed, again,
cowardice is a virtue in my humble stride. As much as I wanted to change to the
world, I was no Jack Reed . . but in my dreariest of hopes, Iʼd like to think i would
have made a good mutineer. I certainly wanted to enlist my coworkers to
overthrow our employer on many an occasion. Not sure of the motivations of these
sailors form hundreds of years ago, as Englishmen Iʼm sure they had to fight their
born and bred propensity for being catspaws, and quislings and milksops. But in
the heart of every Englishmen beats an anarchist and a glorious pervert, let us all
pray. At the very least, as they indulged in mid voyage shore leave in Polynesian
bacchanalia they simple could not refuse the haunting battlecry in the mind of
every sane human on this god forsaken planet:
“I donʼt want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day.”
   Walking home from the Social, I caught my reflection in the window. The two or
three scars around my chin from too many lost fights. Thinking of Artʼs day with
his family tomorrow, my mind wandered back to the year of our disgrace, 2016
when I found myself in the throws of desperation, once again. My mother had just
been diagnosed with ALS, pseudobulber palsy, which had started a year ago and
consumed her ability to speak, I would never hear her unrecorded spontaneous
voice ever again and over the phone my father would read me her messages from
a typing tablet she used to communicate. Pretty soon her mortal affliction would
drain the family of money and her torturous death would drive my father to drink
himself to death less than two years later. I was stuck in a dead end job being paid
in less than sufficient cash for this mega-city or for being able to visit her. Almost
friendless, my alcoholism was in full swing I would be at the Red Line Tap every
day communing and commiserating with creeps and nerʼdoʼwells, passing away
my less than precious consciousness for any attention. A rather gangly and illsuited
couple hung onto me, letʼs call them Jack and Diane. She was an attractive
sort but bitter and shallow, he was a pill and an absolute bore, they both
represented a sickness in older people swinging into conservatism as the idealism
of their brilliant sexy 20ʼs faded away. I found them obnoxious beyond saving and
in my drunken obnoxiousness I proceeded to assist in helping her break up with
him. She was sick of his dour face and useless cock and I helped guide her to the
light of dumping his useless fat ass. The next day he got a sense of what had
transpired and when bumping into him seeking spirits at that local tavern he
proceeded to beat the snot out of me and leave me on the sidewalk. I walked
home with a broken face and a rockbottom curve in my spine and realized I once
again must stop everything I am doing, sober up for awhile (not for long I hoped)
and reboot. I remembered as a child on the Jersey shore with the salty smell of the
ocean soaking up my childish thoughts I would sit and watch Star Trek the Next
Generation while building scale modes of old sailing ships. I figured to help me
through the boredom of inebriation deficiency I would do that again. I want to the
local hobby store and sussed out potential plastic scale models to build, I certainly
was looking forward to the high of plastic cement fumes . . and on the top shelf
and some what reasonably priced was a scale model of the H.M.S. Bounty. I
tackled it. Took three weeks. It continues to sit dusty but complete on my long
shuttered fireplace mantel, a faithful rendition and I treasure it as a token and idol
of the rebellious spirit I had drowned away so long ago.
    I continued down the street and was trying to find a path to the lake, I saw a text
message on my phone from older brother which I promptly ignored. It was
probably about Motherʼs Day. He currently runs a right wing radio talk show where
he interviews Proud Boys and Antifa hunters. I had always hoped he was just a
“swimming pool Republican” but that Divorced Dad energy has him going full nazi
these days. Speaking more of history and histrionics, January 6th of 2021 we all
witnessed a much different type of bacchanalia, by a rather unreasonable group of
potential mutineers, styled both old and new, the most striking feature of the
average Jan 6th capital rioter, besides their shared loved of “Call of Duty” cosplay
and rifle fetishism, is how comfortably well-off all them were, especially compared
to Americaʼs most poor and desperate, Robert Paps of the Chicago Project on
Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, found in his analysis of this
group were of mostly white collar middle class business owners with only 7%
unemployment and a rare amount of actual military service . . the insanely racist
and violent rhetoric of this new revolutionary class seems to be bound by a
strange attractor and poses a very question: “what the hell do these people want
and why the fuck are they being so rowdy about it?”, why would some of the most
pampered and comfortable beer-battered-burger-swilling, air-conditioned, flesh
balloons of consumerist gluttony have such a gaping want of demands that
burning down the capitol building and risking jail was worth the risk of that want?
As we are told in this historical wax pinnacle of neoliberal democratic capitalism, a
post cold-war ebb where techno-oligarchy has proven to be the greatest
achievement and best system that reflects the will and nature of the Christian
white male . . what could possibly be the source of an insurrectionist anger from
couch potato small business mini-tyrants, the most remarkably untalented
mediocre white men in all of world endeavor?
    Having lived through the misery of post 911, sheltered in the hippie bars of
northern Chicago I suppose I am cut off from the mind rending hell that is rural
Ohio or seen the Tribble like exponential multiplication of the Confederate flags on
the dilapidated porches of west Pennsylvania small towns. But is this national
argument really anything new . . isnʼt the general complaint of white America just a
regurgitation of what was formed in 1965 post Goldwater where Buckley and his
group of pseudo intellectuals gave rise to a conservative movement masquerading
in the over investigation of Stateʼs rights for what essentially (considering
Americaʼs god given birthright . ) is just a racial hierarchy where white men sit at
the top and command money and power. Isnʼt that also just a regurgitation of the
failures of the founders to craft anything that didnʼt served their land grabbing
needs Is not the constitution of the United States still a blueprint for “how to be a
slave owner.” Isnʼt the failure of the Reconstruction Era to fulfill the promises of
the Civil War actually part of the plan? So wasnʼt it a success? I would imagine that
the generals of the Confederate army would have been hung for treason, instead a
group of them went on to form the Ku Klux Klan and police the servitude and
continued destitution of Black Americans with no punishment for their
insurrection, something which would continue to this day, often in simple police
uniforms.
    It is a long suffering truth that the marriage of American Protestantism and
Capitalism has led to the downfall of any rational or compassionate spirit in a U.S.
citizen, and although I believe in the inherent goodness of my fellow Terran-born
carbon-based creature, as I get older I grow weary of this country and its bloodsoaked
land, itʼs naked sadism, avarice and buffoonery. The rise of a fascist
movement in America is often besmirched as hyperbole by the confused centrist
or as blatant anti-intellectualism of the armchair communist. Fascism is a
particular movement and structure in history, the failure of capitalism to provide
the spoils and treasure to its adepts will result sadly not in a communist marxist
revolution to the equality and community of all human kind, but leans almost
always on a road to fascism, the weaponization of death drive, the need to locate
an everlasting series of internal and external threats and scapegoats and
sacrificial lambs to the aggrievement of caucasian heteronormative two car garage
jet ski dealers . . and to inspire the most stupid violence to eradicate them. It is
often said by nitpicky brand of pedantic philistines that the first one to use Hitler
as an analogy in an argument loses . . I find this reverse engineered marketing to
be completely ridiculous, are we supposed to wait until America looks exactly like
a fascist or totalitarian state before we call it that? Seems like that would be by
then considerably way too late, and in serving of no more purpose. History is there
to known and learned to be prevented.
   What the MAGA white supremacists and christian nationalists of 2023 donʼt
understand, is that money is not the solution to their problems. Immigrants arenʼt
stealing their jobs and sucking away social services, women have not replaced
them in the workforce and racial and LGBTQ sensitivity isnʼt causing companies to
go broke. But even if an economic explanation for bigotry could be made to make
sense . . it is misplaced desire. People think they want to be rich and in the
Barnum and Bailout con-man used car lot of America, everyone is just a
temporarily embarrassed millionaire and fortune is but a single good idea away . .
but what people really want is stability. They want a roof over their head and a
floor beneath their feet with no trap doors and no forgotten passwords, food after
hard but dignified labor and the free time to advance oneʼs dreams. Acquiring a
large sum of money doesnʼt bring stability, it brings the opposite, it brings chaos.
The fact that we destroy billions in resource just to stabilize prices so that the loaf
of bread and the mini mansion mortgage is always out of the grasp of “the working
poor” (something only our country deems a rational phrasing of words) is all the
proof we need that capitalism is the mother of all chaos, it is ultimate disorder, it is
the weaponization of instability and precarity, to discipline labor and fatten the
coffers of useless Fox News grandpas, who pinch their chubby flanks and giggle in
their Boomer decadence as the whole thing burns down having suckled the last
profits of FDRʼs New Deal, a shared commitment to a gated community.
I remember the days of 2016, the year I completed the creation of the snack sized
HMS Bounty. It would prove to be a turning point in US politics and the rise of a
racist fascist religious hatred of all queer and trans, all woman and the rights to
their own bodies, all immigrants and their wish to be free of pain and serfdom, In
that year I had a very terrible 40th birthday. George Orwell said your face at the
age of 40 is the face you have earned. My various cuts and bruises from being
pummeled by an alcoholic pharmacist were healing very slowly. I wanted to stay
home and hide under my bedsheets but I was dragged to a secretive Thai
restaurant by a misbegotten acquaintance, a recently divorced blackjack dealer
with a missing finger. He could converse well enough and was also lonely. I choked
down my vegetarian curry and felt the bleeding of my colonʼs pre-cancerous
polyps. While languishing in my balding and broken body I got a text message
from my cousin Charles, he was inviting me out for drinks at the Hopleaf in
Andersonville. He was with his friends, he knew I was going through a rough patch
and had lost most of my friends and would be alone so he asked me to join him. I
arrived to a boisterous room of strangers. The gang was a motley sort who talked
endlessly of sports ball and prestige television. I slowly sipped my scotch and
pushed the definition of politeness to its limits. One of his friends there was
named David, he was in his mid twenties and he was in a wheelchair. I had never
met him before. Toward the end of the night after a lot of drink, we ended up
talking. He confided in me and told me how he became a paraplegic. A few years
ago he had gone camping with friends. One day on the trip, they went and found a
high cliff over a lake. One by one they stood on the edge of the cliff and in a
moment of blind courage and “the will to conquer oneʼs fear,” they jumped off the
edge of the cliff into the lake, probably feeling so much excitement and joy as they
emerged from the water. David was unfortunate to land on a hidden rock in a
shallow part of the lake, he broke his back and was paralyzed forever.
I think about him sometimes, about how every night after that day he must have
re-lived that moment, over and over, on the edge of that cliff, when he made the
choice to jump. How in one simple moment, in one choice, his entire life was
altered forever. And if had he chosen not to jump, if he had obeyed his fear and his
anxiety, he could be running on a beach right now. Sometimes fear and cowardice
are our allies, they can be out best friends. To all those huckster therapists and
self-help gurus who tell us to self-actualize and conquer our fears and live life to
the fullest, embrace bravery and fulfill their potential, Iʼm sorry I call bullshit. Say
that to Davidʼs face and then go cash his check. We want to believe our lives are
defined by what we do, but in a universe this vast and powerful and unknowable,
the infinite amount of choices we donʼt make and paths we donʼt take, define us
more than we could laughably say we do. I try to remember that every day we are
all standing on the edge of our imaginary cliffs, facing similar fears, wishing we
were Iron Man or Thor, or Captain America (whichever one could fly.)
I often think about Davidʼs friends, his fellow mutineers against gravity. How they
survived the jump physically unscathed, but must have lived with survivorʼs guilt.
Were they able to stay his friends and be there for him? I know after he was
injured, his fianc. left him. Maybe that was the best choice, or the worse, who
knows? I often think of a kid born with cancer, or a woman with ALS, who never
made a choice like that. Would they scoff at his story, and talk of how he
squandered a gift with such a flippant act, to juggle with fate with such abandon.
Is the point of life to conquer our fears? I donʼt think so. The point of life, if there is
any, is to truly understand how absurd and scary it is to live in a world where no
sense can be made, where bad things happen to good people, where there is no
justice and fairness but what we try to make and to hold each other in friendship
and compassion as we try to survive and thrive for whatever brief time we have.
By the way, I donʼt really know if his name was David, by that time of my 40th
birthday I was too smashed to remember. I can only remember the fear, the racked
curse of courage, that scales will always grow back on our eyes, that anxiety is a
constant companion and a final revelation. I wake up in the sundry scorn of wish, I
need no faith for a I have seen the community that Christ beheld. I know that the
search for human connection is more powerful than the will in any competition. I
know humanity is more real than me, so I step back, and want of that community,
whose precious invite betrayed Kafkaʼs Trial, whoʼs warm embrace could ripple the
cold hallways and the salted soil of lost lands.
My motherʼs ALS would soon take her from this world, by 2018. She was almost
completely paralyzed when she died, in horrible pain mind you, I wasnʼt able to be
there. I was working. I canʼt ever manage to encompass all the ways my mom
taught me about love and loss, forced me to be a good person in the unluckiest of
ways, basically saved my life from myself. Itʼs too much of a brilliant soul to bear.
She was a holy terror, her insults would scar my brain for decades on end. Her wit
was unmatched and her low tolerance for bullshit was inspiring. There are flashes
of capricious connection and forged respect that are buried in my sinews. So
much time has passed I often canʼt wipe the fog from the memories about her. I do
remember something though, something weird and awesome. A foggy recollection
on a lone night on a visit back to my familyʼs home in New Jersey many years past,
long before the illness began. You have to realize, my whole entire life has been
based on the idea that honesty is what we are missing as a lost creature, as a
homeless animal. If you have ever met my mother she has the will and the worth
and no choice but to confront you with the truth and she is brave enough to do it.
She inspired me to become a philosopher and an artist and a friend, and she did it
through that courage that is trapped inside us all. I owe any accomplishment to
her as I skirt the event horizon of a the back hole of knowing something you didnʼt
want to know.
So, I was having a drink with her that night as we usually did, talking for hours
upon hours about chaotic messy life and i asked her “if she could do it over again
would she have had kids?” In that moment I knew she was weighing my life against
hers. She was being asked to eradicate me for another possible future of her own.
She looked at me and she spoke her heart and she said she has often wondered if
her life would have been better if she was allowed to pursue dreams and not raised
children, and that maybe, if given another chance she would choose not to. That
was about as honest a moment between a mother and a son as possible. and
surprisingly, or not surprisingly, I was not hurt, I was not wounded or broken.
Because in that moment I felt my mother was so much like me. Real. Burdened
with choices. Uncompromising DNA. Living an aware life. I was happy she spoke to
me in absolute honesty and in that moment, because it made me understand my
life was a gift and a gamble. I was an absurd miracle, a million stars and planets
had to align to to make my existence possible and my role, my duty, is to carry on
that miracle, that random crazy happiness. So because of her I wanted and want
to face the whole world in promise that I would never lie, I would never be
ashamed, I would always be human, I would give back the gift of life by being
honest with everyone I ever knew so that they would be free to do the same. I
donʼt think I did any of those things, but I remember trying.
My mother made unbelievable and endless sacrifices so that I could be born, tis
quite the currency exchange.
I must go now, the morphine and scotch are done negotiating and I can see
headlights in the driveway. I shall most likely need another hundred in a few weeks.
 

-Your dearest, Jack Fitzgerald Renfield

"The Wonder of Tomorrow"

   I am reaching out from the graveyards of gravity swells and monstrous turns of the galaxy’s dark wheel. It has been a while since I composed theory so this will be a difficult leap. It is safe to say that after the rise of Republican White Nationalism in 2016 and Trump’s war on everything that is coherent and compassionate in these United States nothing is safe and nothing can get outside a shambling shadow of fear and violence painting our existence. The problem philosophically is one of orientation. From where can we grasp perspective? I am from a tradition of Lacanian Marxism and cultural critique that much to my dismay demands a reconciliation between the passionate force of identity politics and the bureaucratic calculus of a truly egalitarian democratic socialism. We need to move forward in the dark. The four futures of Peter Frase stand like doors in front of us looking for us to ask the right question and to ask it toward the door that doesn’t lie. Perhaps the riddle of the doors should include not just the one that always tells the truth and the one that always lies., but the two others: the one doesn’t believe in a  bipolar split between truth and falsity, intent to smash trained logos into a Derridian paste, and the one that believes it can be both true and false without contradiction, because the tension of the contradiction holds onto the power in discourse. Perhaps the key to revolution and a birth of Star Trek level luxury-communism lies in Zizek’s quadrilateral hidden variable of the ‘unknown knowns.’ About 100 years ago, president Woodrow Wilson staged a screening of D.W. Griffith “Birth of a Nation” in the White House. Today, the crippling majesty of that address is now occupied by a senile syphilitic reality TV dipshit who sits alone in his bathrobe at 6:00 pm in the Lincoln bedroom, angry because it hurts to pee and tweeting about kneeling football players and telling stories about trying to fuck Valarie Harper in a Bed, Bath and Beyond in the early nineties. I suppose not much has changed. Power is still a self reflexive loop, a masturbatory endeavor that turns upon death drive and shuffles like a zombie. Red Letter Media pointed wonderfully out how zombies would not eat the living, because zombies can’t digest; their guts are dead. The eating is hollow, a pure facsimile of consumption in both senses of the word. As a first strip in this re-orientation toward anti-fascism and anti-capitalism, let us turn to my favorite topic: film.

   Consider Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman, (story by Zack Snyder) as not only a sequel but perhaps a soft reboot, a fertile spawning of Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men. Let’s call it “Children of Men 2, The Rise of Dillon, now known as Diana.” Children of Men was set in 2027, (a frightening mere ten years from now if we manage to live that long under the golden reich of game show oligarchy.) The parallels are exquisite. Imagine at the end of Children of Men, when the 'Human Project,' a floating hospital ship disguised as a fishing vessel finds illegal immigrant refugee Kee and her child Dillon and the dead body of Theo floating in the waters of the shore of England at the end of the world rescues her. Now, imagine Dillon is taken onto the ship and transported to Themiscyra were her mother and African heritage and name are erased/transformed/disrupted into Diana, leaving one infertile land for an other, she was re-born as the only child molded by clay in a world of immortals who had never seen another child nor does she know the world of sex and war and yet is educated in all of these discourses. She is said to be that which will destroy Ares, the god of war, ending all the conflict that exists between men. To properly fulfill this prophecy one would imagine a future scene like that in Children of Men when soldiers of both sides lay down their guns to see Theo and Kee carry a newborn child for the first time. And yet at the end of what me must never forget is a "comic book movie," her role will actually be to inspire Spud from Trainspotting playing a Scottish sniper in the grips of PTSD to finally get his 'Chris Kyle' on and start killing again. The woman as energy for the phallus, an unending co-dependency of abuse and violence for centuries holds sway; both films are about the fear and rejection of impotence at all costs.

   However, the brilliant mirror to social weaponry in this film take the form of actor Danny Huston who appears in both films. In Children of Men he is a wealthy government official and cousin to Theo who is building an Ark of the Arts to salvage great pieces of human creativity from the savage downfall of civilization, who Theo points out, will be looked at by no one when we are all dead. In Wonder Woman he is playing the red herring of Erich Ludendorff, a German general in WWI who seeks the ultimate weapon to win the war, an ark of chemical warfare, a gigantic plane filled with an uber-mustard gas. Diana actually manages to kill Ludendorff only to discover that Sir Patrick, the seemingly crippled appeaser and proposed architect of peace is the real god of War. It is fitting that after her emergence as a warrior she hides and takes on the job of of art preservationist at the Louvre not only as her disguise but perhaps as a penance. She now having murdered the savior of all art from Cuaron’s film (both as an actress and part of the DC cinematic-industrial complex.) Wonder Woman can unironically be seen as the death of the artist’s presence in cinema itself considering what is to come.

   A few lovely touches: as Dillon left the shores of England on a boat, that is how Diana returns: with a man guiding her. Also, In the misery of London in the middle of a war she notices a baby being held by her mother and is immediately shifted away from it by Steve Trevor to attend more important matters, in one fell swoop destroying the beauty of the child rescue from the battlefield at the end of Children of Men. Here, babies mean nothing if not an inspiration to fight as we get in the No Man’s Land scene. Parenting as the influx, influence and pre-demiurge of cascading alienation and social upheaval is marked in the Campbellian story circle, the atonement with the father that never comes. Theo’s cousin played by Danny Houston has some kind of relative, a son or nephew who seems trapped in a video game playing fugue state and being forced to medicate, that is the Dr. Poison character’s origin story perhaps. The strangest parallel is the loss of hearing scene in both films. In Children of Men, Theo loses his hearing when a bomb destroys a coffee shop, his ex-wife played by Julianne Moore points out that the hearing loss is permanent due to the cells dying and hearing that frequency for the last time. The scene is meant to illustrate his lost of ambition and morals and a descent into the drunken apathetic anti-hero who may or may not be redeemed or redeemable. At the end of Wonder Woman the roles are strangely reversed. Steve Trevor, a Gavin McGinnis Vol-cel Proud Boy is now the revolutionary who dies crashing the chemical ark to inspire Wonder Woman to get stronger and keep fighting. Before he dies he tries to tell Diana he loves her but a bomb causes them to lose her hearing temporarily. Wonder Woman takes on the Theo role as'unable to hear' but in a fuck-up of narrative logic magical does later hear what was said to her, and it was of course that tautology of our ego-death driven, nomadic, infinite, inescapable, unrelenting, re-invention  indentured entrepreneurship : “Love conquers all.” But unlike Theo who uses love to save a child from war, Diana upon hearing the words of Steve, kills the fictional god of Ares who had already confessed that men are the makers of war and he is but a devil who tempts and influences, she then indulges in a epilogue about how she no longer seeks to end war or save the world, she simply recognizes that war is a part of human beings and she must accept it. Neoliberalism embodied, military intervention is not a choice, but a way of life.

   In a quite brilliant stroke, Diana becomes the dream of the alt-right answer to Children of Men; what was lost was not just infertility but weak men unsupported by women who understand them. Wonder Woman is the woman who finally understand men and then can love them allowing them to perpetuate war without interruption.  Children of Men was a perfect allegory of a world dying under the future-less path of late stage capitalism and ethnographic cleansing mania. The role of Children of Men in Zack Snyder’s worldview is the impotence of leftist PC posturing in the face of a world dying under multicultural finger-pointing and a refusal to accept the tent poles of the future. The insanity of that premise and position, as those seeking to purify the river of diluted white male sperm that barely glues middle class life together in the American failed state is expressed in grotesque vista and CGI and a fucking narrative Infertility as both a prelude to war and as a prelude to end all war. In terms of story structure, I suppose if Children of Men is a Star Wars, a literally new hope in the face of a dying expanse, Wonder Woman can be seen as the Empire Strikes Back, an anti-immigrant pro-war lashing back to regain blood and soil, the Return of the Jedi is yet unknown to us, but this trilogy has reached it’s darkest apex and we wait anxiously for the rubber band to snap back.

"The Three Wise Guys."

   So, I realized something that has been troubling me for along time. I have these two films that I would say (as often people say,) that "I love to hate." But actually when it comes to these films, "I hate to love." Or more accurately, "I hate to appreciate." I hate the skill, I hate the beauty, I hate the precise storytelling and I have the vision:

The Godfather and Goodfellas. 

   The argument is as follows. This is not anti-mafia or anti-rebellion or anti-Italian or anything of that nature although one cannot help point out the racism and misogyny in the material themselves. This is a generational zeitgeist type of conflicting experience, born of many years of feeling alien to the arcs of these screen icons. And the catalyst that brings it together is Citizen Kane. 

 

   Most of the time when I talk to people about Citizen Kane the response is always the same. "Yes, I understand that Citizen Kane is one of the greatest films ever made, yes it established film as an art form and the director as the auteur and yes in the context of the space-time-period it is an amazing film, BUT, I hate watching it, it's boring, it's ridiculous, it's self indulgent, it's sexist, it's Orson Welles sucking his own dick . . " Brilliant, point taken. Because when I look back on The Godfather and Goodfellas, it is the same syndrome of lost innocence. I saw Godfather as a child and was mesmerized by the tension in the hospital scene when they are coming to kill his father, when he has to kill the police chief in family restaurant, it is all stunning in composition and my first viewing of Goodfellas was exciting, blood pumping and it felt like art and as art should be. Bucket of water later, I started to feel in the cracks in this veneer, the annoyance in its commonplace ritual. The sad fact that these films are self indulgent misogynist bullshit rises to the surface. They are wank rag garbage. They are what led to Favreau's Swingers which led to Favreau's fucking Iron Man, a movie about a billionaire that comes to terms with the fact that he is awesome. These are films in the guise of male bashing ergo male worship. It's phallus inversion proving that your are just as big on the inside as on the outside. They are not critiques of any power structures, they are excuses for power structures. And the obvious male apologetics can be seen if you break down how each film has almost exactly the same plot.

   In Citizen Kane, a poor innocent boy is taken from the warmth of his home into massive wealth and power which corrupts him. In Godfather Michal Corleone is taken from the outsider status of war hero loving boyfriend to revenge crazed maniac and murderer, and in Goodfellas the boy Henry Hill is drafted into a crime family and destroyed by epic hubris. One can make various arguments about whether this protagonists where willing recipients of their power or forced to bare a burden, such is the argument of all white males. What is important is that these are beloved characters of Christ-like falling, they are not anti-heroes no more than any male is a anti-hero for being male. It is White Man's Burden. It is the sad tale told in the hearts of the rich and powerful that they are in fact the victim, they are society's lynch pins and load bearing walls and nobody understands their business. And in each film, the love of a woman is seen as a downfall, a hurdle to be overcome, a point of weakness in the hearts of this vikings.

   The recent death of Chantel Akerman reminded me of what innocence and art and filmmaking was suppose to be. I saw Je Tu Il Elle long before I tried to make films. It was one of those inspiring moments, you could see the medium for all it offered and an artist vision with morality and feeling and purpose. I would claim this film rivals and overcomes the three, and could easily replace all of them in any museum to film art.

    "Time Marches On”

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
                                                                   Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
                                                                                                 by David Eagleman

 

   Imagine a pill that could change a person’s perception of time. Well, you don’t have to imagine, you are probably on one right now. Anti-depressants, the diet of most westerners creates a lack of anxiety (the endless stress) and a hum of limitless energy that doesn’t need to be consumed. Anxiety is at its core the perception of time’s encroaching march that never wavers, never stumbles. But what about a relativity pill that can accelerate and decelerate time as per the sensory manifold? The conscious would be intact, under the effects of this pill we could count off seconds in this manifold absolutely convinced if we were viewing the second hand of analog clock we would be in sync with its mechanics. but reality as our immediate horizon of understanding is moving slower, perhaps 1 day per second . For every day I spend in this state only a second goes by in reality. The effects of the pill wears off and I re-sync, for me 4 years have gone by but only 24 minutes have passed in my environs. In affect, I have served a prison sentence within my own consciousness while exerting no financial, emotional or carbon footy difficulty on the world around me. This pill is the nightmare pill, a self-contained Guantanamo Bay that requires no hunger-strike force-feeding, no election season political stance, no galvanized attention paid forward by a sleepy populace. Is it possible? Better living through chemistry?
     In the 2012 film, Karl Urban's Dredd a drug called “Slo-Mo" is illegally dealt in a housing complex called "Peach Trees," it allows the user exactly this experience and obviously the benefits are there. Imagine a state of orgasm that instead of lasting 30 seconds lasted a day, or 10 days in consciousness, then imagine as the the film does, a man shot and falling off a balcony on this drug, experience a near instantaneous death for hours and hours of pure agony. An explanation/re-evauation of heaven and hell involved the brain going into a prolonged dream state at the moment of death, the last though you have as you die was to be lived in dream time, possible forever. This was the conceit of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception, and more recently, the relativity of time takes center stage in the plot of Interstellar, where not only does the dramatic focus of experiencing time separate a father and daughter, the notion of love as a quantum force that transcends space-time or at very least, can manipulate space time is explored. We can write off space time as side effect of sentient awareness. Animals are free to live without the knowledge of their deaths on pure instinct and satisfaction but human’s were gifted/cursed with the countdown of time to propel them toward excellence in the face of adversity, story telling against solitude, dialogue against dogma.   
    Space-time and evolution: is there a possible force in the universe that we associate with consciousness or will-power that acts to bring large scale forces into creation against the undeniable law of entropy? Why is there complexity if everything in the universe is pulled toward decay and collapse? How does the eventual heat death of the universe appear as an end, did we in fact come from an infinite complexity and life on this planet is a result of some prolonged entropy? Our perception of time and the course of evolution invariably sees entropy being defeated for complexity. Thus the mystery that leads to spirituality and religion, why is something other that nothing? The teacup leaps from the floor and reassembles on the table with every birth, with every invention, with every moment of justice and art that survives its terrible age.
   The ability to control the perception of time is integral to human experience. When we watch superhero TV shows and films, the protagonist the ability to perform tasks faster or perceive threats and respond effectively in a space of time most humans would find overwhelming. The hero sees a punch being thrown but in slow-motion, they react faster than an average person would, often portrayed in a hyper-stylized exaggeration of the skills used by let’s say a highly trained juggler who can catch objects with ease or the player's ability to maintain Matrix-jujitsu multi-tasking survival in video games. The notion of ”thinking on your feet" which can allow one to defeat an opponent in a mere debate is a simple of expression of collapsing the pressures of time to one’s advantage.  The question becomes, are we as a species preparing ourselves or forcing ourselves to change the way we can experience time as a preparation for our next stage of evolution? More importantly, is there a qualia to time? Kant’s evaluation of the sensory manifold makes space and time analytic intuitions, they are primary ground, the baseline of our brain’s lie detector. But as cloistered Mary may have never experienced a certain shade of blue, how do I know that meal was as a fast and as vast for you as it was for me?
   Time expansion and biology: I can use my mind to slow down my experience. One flaw in this reasoning may be the role of biological consciousness. In the example of the juggler who uses muscle memory to catch multiple objects at high speed, we should agree they do not literally see the objects moving in slow motion i.e. "The Flash” or Spider-Man” seeing an object moving in slow motion but maintains the speed of his or her own thoughts while dealing with it. Thoughts are physical things, capillaries must carry information, post-synaptic action potentials require the influx and expulsion of potassium, actin must be created and destroyed to move muscle, our brain may use electro-chemical messages to move our body and lightning speed but it is exactly that: light as we know it, it is the speed limit of the universe. A pill that could alter the perception of time must also alter the speed of conscious activity. What is this biological speed limit? The answer comes from an understanding of how neurons create consciousness, and thus to date, unresolved. The singularity proposes technology increasing consciousness to near super-computer levels.   The horribly disappointing self indulgent Johnny Depp film Transcendence offers this same time-collapsing super-hero who is merged with technology and then invents nanobytes that can not only heal biological wounds but enhance the biology itself creating heightened human speed, strength and intercommunication in a hive mind and allowing for faster coordinated innovation. The implication of the film is that such heightened intelligence is also heightened morality and so the characters in the film who see him as a threat and try to destroy him are in fact acting out the raw stupidity of their inferior monkey minds, picture Plato’s chained cave dwellers watching their shadow puppet matinee to the dulcet tones of Sebodah’s Freed Pig. Depp’s character can simply infect them with nanobytes that repair their minds to think faster and in essence agree with him. The idea is glanced over with scary simplicity when he suggests that his enhanced followers “have compete autonomy but can also act as a collective.” Thus we have the perfect capitalist’s dream, workers who feel free and part of a union meanwhile tirelessly serving the bidding of the master. Our culture’s obsession with superhero stories is a viral worm placed by the wealthy elite convincing us to lay down and worship the superior over the wants of the average. This is often in the guise of showing the hyper skilled and smart as misfits in need of understanding and family but in the end, normal people must obey Magneto’s charge. If you think about it, Magneto is always proven right, violence is either a voice or a forced course, but never abandoned. The mediocre never fights back, that would be extraordinary. The working class must remain the frozen monolith, buried for centuries on a forgotten moon.
    A common sci-fi trope, the bored immortal: the species that achieves immortality loses vitality. Crawling among the ground of the ocean like a lobster, the never-ending Oscar party of the renegade eternals of Zardoz, the last Charlie Rose interview with William F Buckley. Is it the case that extremity of emotion,  the need to engage, envelop, indulge, destroy and even self destroy is based on our being toward death, we need to be mortal in order to be alive? Death gives life meaning. Ray Kurzweil sees death as a sadness stealing meaning from life, a loss of information and a necessary enemy to progress, the Aronofsky film The Fountain claims it as a disease to be cured, but like wisdom, a paradox, one craves wisdom and avoids offering, but wisdom only comes from suffering. In the brilliant revenge meditation Blue Ruin, we see an immortal pain made mortal and finally ended by the passion of retribution, sometimes we need to end our lives to create a circle, to answer or a claim. The most important philosophical lesson is to learn, in the words of David Lee Roth,  “Life goes on without you.” We would like to imagine that when we die, the importance of our existence was so grave, so necessary that time halts in it’s tracks to grieve for us, that the people we knew, knew us so well and loved us so much that they couldn’t and wouldn’t ever get over our passing. The truth is much more relevant. Everyone is eventually forgotten about. We grieve for the dead and we move on.  Any philosopher must wrestle with this idea. The terrified embrace religion or celebrity to conquer it. If only I could make my mark on the world and achieve fame will I survive death, or perhaps their is an after life, an infinite luau where I commune with my dead relatives? Under our feet is the decomposing corpses of millions who convinced themselves they were so important they would not be forgotten. We shall join them one day. How does one reconcile meaning as death approaches, but not just death, the necessity of meaningless death? In order for life to continue, the dead must be forgotten. Is immortality the solution to this paradox? Must we eliminate time to restore meaning?

The Mapping of Opposites and the Theory of Iatrogenic Desire.

i·at·ro·gen·ic  (-tr-jnk)
adj.
 Induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially of an infection or other complication of treatment.
[Greek itros, physician; see  -iatric + -genic.]
i·atro·geni·cal·ly adv.

The terms iatrogenesis and iatrogenic artifact refer to adverse effects or complications caused by or resulting from medical treatment or advice.



      There is a character in Greek Mythology that is mistakenly categorized as hermaphroditic; the blind soothsayer Tiresias, son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo. In the origin story, Tiresius is a priest of Zeus who while wandering through a forest one day comes across two snakes who are having sex. In some bizarre busybody mentality, he decides to hit them with a stick. Hera, Zeus’ wife gets very angry at Tiresias and decides to transform him into a woman. This results, in accordance with the logic of Greek Mythology (if there is such a thing,) in Tiresias  living out the next seven years of her life as a priestess of Hera. Alternative origin story has her living as a prostitute during that time.  Seven years pass and Tiresias is wandering through the same forest and discovers two snakes having sex and again decides to hit them with a stick. This magically transforms her back into a he, and as a “he,” he lives out the remainder of his life as a man.

   Now because of this experience, Tiresias is swept up in an argument between the two main Gods, Zeus and Hera. The argument is about which of the two human genders enjoys sex more.  Again, as per the logic of Greek mythology God’s have nothing better to do than sit around having inane discussions such as this; Zeus believes human women enjoy their orgasms more, Hera is convinced human males do.  They decide that the best person to ask in order to resolve the dispute is Tiresias since he has lived his life as both a man and a woman.  They ask him according to the myth, (and as strange as it seems this is word for word,) “on a scale of 1 to 10 who has the better orgasm?” Tiresias responds, “oh, well, a woman of course, 9 on a 10 scale, a man is more like a 1 on a 10 scale.” Hera is obviously incredible angry at this answer and decides to punish Tiresias by blinding him, Zeus cannot reverse the punishment but in sympathy decides to give Tiresias the gift of fore-sight, the ability to see the future, as compensation for falling victim to Hera’s wrath, not once mind you, but twice.  I imagine Tiresias next move would be to look into the future by about  ½ second, thus rendering his blindness inconsequential. But I suppose that’s more of a science-fiction/phenomenology problem. 

   In a related story, the famous and tragic case of David Reimer, born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1965 as Bruce Weimer, twin to Brian Reimer and was the victim of a accident during circumcision. The machine they were using (which they shouldn’t have been using) burned the majority of his penis off rendering him essentially maimed and handicapped the rest of his life. One day his mother is watching television and Dr. John Money of John Hopkins is discussing the new field of medical sex re-assignment. She haphazardly (as was the style at the time) invests her faith in science and decides to have Bruce surgically changed into a woman; breast implants and hormone treatments, and to be raised as Brenda, all without the child’s knowledge and consent.  By the age of 14 Brenda is refusing to accept the sex-re-assignment and eventually, upon discovery of the full explanation for her condition, she insists on being turned back into a boy, changes her name to David and lives out the remainder of his life as a man, marrying and fathering children. However, he takes his life in 2004 with a shotgun after suffering a lifetime of depression. His twin brother Brian also takes his life, the discovery of his sister being a brother leads to any number of schizophrenic symptoms in the years before.

    The first mistake made in interpreting these two stories is the attribution of gender. In my theory neither of these two stories have anything to do with gender.  And by gender I mean that social construct whose stereotypes both offend and give comfort to human beings of various sexual states and tasks as they proceed through life in pursuit of pleasure and the satisfaction of desire with a partner or multiple partners and so on.
In psychoanalysis there is the critical distinction between the object of desire and the cause of desire. There is often a necessary third party during sexual exchange between even willing and loving partners, the third party being the Phantasmatic element, the fantasy that causes the desire allowing the safe objectification of the partner. There is a beautiful/horrific moment in the growth of a human being where they discover themselves as a sexual being, and for a brief moment, the human being does not know what he or she is, the experience is pre-analysis. Once the child attempts to build a vocabulary and a theory and systematic strategy behind what he or she is, the beauty is usually lost giving way to rapid descent into “play-acting” as the part of whatever sexual orientation they classify or are classified.

     My belief is that “gender” fails as a theory to encompass the memes and mores of  the so-called hermeneutic lifeworld  and that a new theory of desire, a theory on how we as social beings arrive as desiring subjects and are installed within the coded social reality.   My theory uses the structure of an Iatrogenic illness.  The basic idea that the new illness which is caused by the doctor or by attempts of the doctor to treat the pre-existing illness can be understood as a structural activation of desire, if one were simply to imagine the old and new illness being the same, or more specifically, that time is irrelevant in desire. Desires are outside of time. 

    It is possible to imagine ourselves as fully realized, we stop for a second and sum up ourselves as an entity, existing in time, but not torn apart or betrayed by it. However, as we begin the movement through time we lose sight of ourselves. There is an implicit horizon of understanding of what constitutes identity at any particular point in one’s life. We are the sum of our choices, our actions and so-called inner world of logic, dreams, passions and corruptions. But since we are always incomplete, with a future not yet seen and memory not quite computational, there is always a void, a split in us between what we see ourselves as and what we have not done or do not remember doing. It is in this void, that we find the praxis of desire.  As we go through our lives we invent new desires for ourselves, some based on biological drive or synthetic pleasures, some based on guilt and shame and self-harm. But habits and drives and desires are very different, desires being the most illusive to define, but inherently unsatisfiable. The act of invention happens with the split, the fold upon which consciousness can study itself. The seemingly impossible act of a broken machine trying to diagnose it’s own malady is an often comically invoked theme in western arts and spiritual life as we argue endlessly about free will vs. determinism in human nature. It is my theory that all desires are moral. It is also an axiom of this theory that all desire is inherently the result of an accident, a mistake of reality. However, the ability to act on or resist a desire as a moral choice is not excluded from morality because of its accidental nature, but precisely because of it. Why?

    There are three intermingling axioms in philosophy which erupt into a single paradox, the axioms are from each of  the three genres-  “What is it? How do I know? Why do I care?” The first is Ontology – reality is always defined by an observer or the suggestion of a consciousness observing.  Thus, reality cannot be said to exist in and of itself. The 2nd axiom is within Epistemology. Truth cannot be understood as relative or contextual. Truth must exist in and of itself for if there is no absolute truth, the statement “there is no absolute truth”  cannot be made and thus allowing for the possibility of absolute truth.  The third axiom is within the system of Morality:  and that quite simply moral choices are an attempt to combine absolute truth with a “lived world” that is completely contingent.  

   Let us take the example of a seemingly congruous moment, at the moment you, the reader are reading these lines on the computer screen in front of you, the question of  ultimate reality or the experience of the objective reality of all of the conditions of your situation, the screen, the chair, the lightening in the room , they are all taken at hand, in the Heideggerian sense. They do not separate from the flow of “being toward what comes next immersed in the ever changing life-world” unless they break-down or are called to attention as in the way I just did now.  If we are to then ask the question, does the computer screen exist independently of my observation of it; since the answer to the question is invariably “No” how do we arrive at an absolutely true statement concerning the experience or reading the essay in front of you?

First there is the hermeneutic question? What do we mean when we say “the computer screen exists.”  First, take for example these ten statements:

The screen exists
I believe the screen exists.
I know the screen exists.
I perceive the screen exists.
I want the screen to exist.
I need the screen to exist.
I sense the screen exists.
I care that the screen exists.
I’m afraid the screen exists.
I act as if the screen exists.

Now each of these ten statements has a subtle  and seemingly distinct meaning that separates it from the others. However, it is possible due to hermeneutic circles to make one of these statements while  in fact “intending” to say another even if in fact your motive is to align the meaning of your words with the actual content of  your thoughts, which, let’s face it, it may not be. It may also be entertained that one simply cannot discern if one of these 10 statements is made, it does not in fact refer to three or four or even none of the other statements as the intended thoughts. I may wish to say “I believe the screen exists”  but I may really intend to say “The screen exists” or “I want the screen to exist,” depending on my particular frame of mind. Due to the capricious nature of language, not ten but seemingly an infinite number of statements can be made concerning the existence of this computer screen, if we begin to treat the computer screen as an entity, an essence, a collection of attributes or a mass of atoms in which case size perspective dictates at what point the atoms of the screen stop and brush up against the atoms of the table, which as we purport to know, they never do.

Outside the hermeneutic question is the moral one. Who cares if the computer screen exists? A simple thought experiment: let us imagine that an asteroid destroys all conscious life on this planet in the next ten minutes, the sad truth being we were the first instance of life in the universe and we were destroyed before we had a chance to mutate and colonize another planets and thus the entire universe is now completely lifeless and will remain so. If such a thing were to happen, does it really matter if the computer screen survived the blast? Does it even matter that the universe exists if there is nothing in it that is aware of it? Is the ability to matter, simply the ability to exist? As another thought experiment, simply ask yourself  “Can you name something that exists that no one including yourself has ever heard of before or ever will hear of?” The answer is no, since by naming such an object, you violate the conditions of the object in the question. Awareness is always awareness of something.

The Mapping of Opposites.

     The moral choice is simple, how to act upon our desires in truth when no absolute reality of our desires is accessible?

      What opens the argument is the difference between negating and negation. When I state that the “screen you are currently reading does not exist” what I am attempting to do is use one definition of negativity as the opposite of positivity. However, to say that non-existence is the opposite of existence is problematic.  Let us simply equate them in mathematical terms. If I state the number “1” I could then imagine the opposite number of 1 is 0, however, a perfectly rational argument can and is made that 0 is not the opposite of 1, -1 is the opposite of 1.  Now rationally they cannot both be opposites, however, we have no reason to choose one or the other since both systems work perfectly. It is the equivalent of saying  “The right hand is the opposite of the left hand” vs “The lack of a left hand is the opposite of a left hand, or the opposite of a left hand is no left hand at all.” If we understand an opposite to be that whose attributes opposes every attribute of its opposite object than whether we treat “existence” as an attribute determines which system we apply. The obvious dilemma: what happens when existence itself is the object in question?

     The paradox resolves itself because in either system in which 0 is the correct answer or -1 is the correct answer, 1 is taken for granted as an answer and is functional in both worlds.  My inability to prove the existence of something means simply my act of negating it operating in one system, while the positivity of its existence is in the other where its negation violates mine. The 0 mathematical system and the -1 mathematical system  are functional, viable operations and so they cannot be dismissed but they cannot be mapped onto each other either, they are both true and mutually exclusive. This attempt to map negativity and negation upon each is what we consider, the attempt of the doctor to cure the paradox.

    When we attempt to cure ourselves of a desire, do we not more frequently intensify this desire, just as we peak curiosity in something by hiding that something from sight?  It is as if the cause and object of desire is like the 0 and the -1 system.  What is the opposite of  the gender of man: woman, or non-man? Is Brenda the opposite of Bruce, or is David the opposite of Bruce? Such examples of problems can be called forth ad infinitum.

    When we as the desiring subject wish to quell our desires we face two courses of action, we either satisfy the desire, or we reject the very existence of the desire, we abstain. The intention of both strategic courses is to make the desire go away, but like using -1 to negate 1, if done in system where 0 is the actual negation, the 1 remains. Our plight as desiring subjects is to already always be acting within whatever system our strategy cannot afford to be.  We are always on the losing team, and even if we win, we can’t win.  The reason however, that desire is always a moral choice, is that we always choose -1 vs 0, and even though these choices are simply mirror images, the act remains.  This is not the illusion of choice but the illusion within choice itself.

Three Tales of Vertigo

  That was a nice coma. My back kinda hurts though. Not to mention other . . .

  So anyway, I was having this lovely conversation with my friend where I  was forced to revisit my old “triad of desire.” I was at a loss so I figured I’d break it down again here and try and wrestle with what was always a nebulous and prawn to infinite obfuscation. The premise is related to the Lacanian triad, imaginary, symbolic and the real. I created this for examinations of neurotic obsession and self sabotage.

  The terms by which this structure breaks down can be thought of as “identity motivators,” not unlike id, ego and super-ego. They are in no particular order: Hedonist, Masochist and Sadist. Defining them becomes tricky because as the triad unfolds in dimension, each exhibits a set of three “directions” let’s call them: “What we are, what we think we are and what we wish to be.” The human psyche, it’s subconscious, it’s collection of primordial baseline drives and artificial constructed desires exhibits these three identity motivators or channels to produce personality and quest. If we begin with Hedonist, the first thing we discover is the raw impossibility, pursuing happiness through the satisfaction of carnal, sensual and pragmatic desires, essentially combating happiness with happiness itself. (Keep in mind, these three categories encompass sexuality but are not defined by it.) The hedonists see themselves as deserving of happiness and that their desires fulfilled will produce such happiness. The happiness of others is irrelevant if the hedonist does not gain any pleasure from it. The masochist, the obvious complimentary pair to the hedonist has invested happiness in suffering, 'the more pain I endure the happier it makes me,' the more content with the way things are, suffering becomes and remains comfortable. The libidinal economy can handle the paradox in a simple reversal of the hedonist paradox, the dilemma of never being satisfied no matter how much one feeds themselves, the masochist realizes the futility of giving in to desire and the worthiness of will power in the face of temptation. The hedonist is the ultimate control freak, this would be necessary since suffering can become real, so when choosing to suffer, one must careful write the script of your domination. The third category, the perpetual outsider and antagonist to the first two is the sadist, the super-ego, the solution to both paradoxes, not unlike infinite judgement in the Kantian formal, sadists are the negation of negation. Hedonist desire is a failure, the masochist’s solution is a failure so eternal judgement against these two reigns and happiness is found in the demand for a sacrifice. The sadist is the mirror image of the hedonist, s/he enjoys not pleasure for themselves, but enjoys taking pleasure from others.

In Lacan, the imaginary real of this virtual triad is the way in which we interact with others by erasing the unpalatable or quarrelsome aspects of them, when we engage as normalized people we look at others, we know they are sexual beings, possibly physically disgusting or in another sense having a wealth of personality we can’t afford, when we try to engage or connect with a neighbor or work side by side with someone, we know they share biological functions but we immediately see it as part of the horizon of their being. A simple example, when one thinks of their parents of course we know they are sexual beings whose sexuality produced you, but we do not allow ourselves to engage that part of the image, it remains outside the imaginary.

This triad is perfectly presented in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, see Zizek for a perfect analysis of that film. Three films which openly instruct us on this triad would be John Robbe Grillet’s La Belle Captive, kind of a Vertigo but by way of Magritte. The second is La Citie de Sylvie. Kind of a masochist’s solution which confronts sadism masquerading as hedonism, essentially Vertigo by way of Structuralist theory and the 2011 remake of Maniac with Elijah Wood, of course, the virtual real, Vertigo by way of the POV first person shooter, sadism as a solution to failed hedonism. In here we have:

Rescuer vs Kidnapper

Stalker vs Prisoner

Murder vs Victim.

  The character of Walter for example in La Belle Captive, he presents as a secret agent carrying out important duties for the state, what we know is that this is a delusion, a mimicry of the character of Scotty in Vertigo who is no longer a policeman  but carries on the investigation using the symbolic guise. What each of the triad relies on is the myth of sociopathology. The idea that one can interact with otters with no ability or care to perceive their emotion insides, to treat others as if they have no soul or at least, no inner life worthy of consideration or value. Sociopathology is a failed meme within psychology and psychiatry, however the experience of the “outsider,” to be considered irrelevant by a society, cast out, desires ignored, ambitions thwarted is a primal fear of all humans stemming from what I call a Christopher Ryan type hunter gatherer pre-history where sharing provided stability and survival and selfish behavior would have produced the status of outcast.

Let’s consider some formulations:

The classic hedonist. How did they become that way and are they really that way? A person who is a hedonist but doesn’t think of themselves that way erases the pleasure of making themselves the center of attention or desire by seeing themselves as the suffering one, they play this part to gain permission to indulge in hedonism but, the formula breaks down, you end hop with ‘taking from others without enjoyment as a profit margin,’ hence: sadism.

The classic masochist. They see their tormentors as sadists (not hedonists which would be a complement to their life) they wish they could just enjoy so they envy the hedonists. Often a masochist will see themselves as a sadist to avoid confronting the inability to feel pleasure in pleasure itself.

The classic sadist. Sees themselves as a hedonist, hence De Sade, constant symbolic formulation of pleasure seeking which robs it of any pleasure, what could be a more joyless book than de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom,” and endless list making of mechanical procedure. They fail and the formula creates a space of suffering, the need for pity and the righteous indignation, they fall into masochism.

   I’ve considered these formulas as useful to seeing power exchanges in relationships but more importantly, it reveals the endless stair case building that comes with the taxonomy of compartments in consciousness.

   I was watching Andrew Bujalski's film Computer Chess the other day for the 10th time. I was with my rather brilliant friend who was seeing it for her first time and we got into some analysis. (My idea of a perfect evening.) For me the film is like a mirror image of Lucas' THX-1138, there you have a protagonist trying to escape a numb cold technological nightmare labyrinth so that he can feel sexual love and the passions of freedom. His escape leads him to a gigantic sunrise in a natural world at the films end. Here, the argued protagonist Peter is seeking an escape from the confusions of feeling and desire, his piers and his mentor seemingly trapped in conspiracy and delusion, and the sexual predators who use a false love as a mask for abuse are his enemies, he seeks pure logic, and just wants an answer to the problem. The artificial intelligence seemingly in the chess program is striving to connect with another intelligence, something living and free; this is a mirror for his inability to connect with the living about intelligence. At the end of the film, a documentary filmmaker (in reference to sunrise of THX-1138) points the camera at the sun burning out the camera tube, this scene is connected with Peter in a room with a woman, supposedly a prostitute, who turns out to be an android. THX is alone in his escape. He lost his female companion and his journey ends/begins in independence; without a society in sight. Peter's story ends/begins either seeing the intelligence in those he wants to connect with or cursed to feel all around him is just artificial because we may in fact be more artificial than our creations. 

   Zizek once talked about the paradox of kindness. There is a play by Brecht "The Exception and the Rule," from the 1930's in which a rich man trapped in the desert is allowed to get away with the crime of killing his slave/man-servant in fear that in a desperate moment of starvation, the slave was attempting to kill him, (In reality the slave, also starving, is still trying to help the master and was approaching him with water.) The judge rules that no human being could be expected to not doubt such an act of extreme kindness and so self defense was merited. The notion that we are constructed by not only the world around us, but almost directly by the very humans around us and in such a way as to mistrust or even hate them on the zero level is akin to all existential fear. Bryan Fuller's Hannibal brilliantly captures this notion of being driven mad not by the meat of the mind or by genetic fault or even environment, but as a result of the intention of another. The subject seeks to be recognized by the other but only as what the subject wants, and must mold the other into the subject. One human being can drive another mad simply by needing recognition from them: the madness of paranoia, doubting kindness, doubting love. The moment in Computer Chess when the leaders of the New Age physical/spiritual exploration conference expose themselves in a creepy sexual proposition toward Peter, that moment when his instincts for self preservation are in conflict with expected behavior, that moment of madness is when your attempt to heal or purge yourself of something sick is seen as sickness itself. 'Iatrogenesis' is for me the beginning of intelligence, it the recognition of one's sickened state. The need to transcend it, and the escape and loneliness it creates. The world around is making us self-conscious, but is also not recognizing us in the Hegelian sense. We are alienated from our community, our friends, our loved ones. That alienation is the sickness that forces a confrontation with self. We must see alienation as recognition because we are in the end nothing but the alienated self.

   Another brilliant film on this is Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow, the story of a young captive of a seemingly benevolent institute for health and enlightenment but in actuality a horror show prison of failed psychedelic experiment and obsession. Elena's escape from Nyle is a reversal of the sickness caused by the attempt to transcend by Nyle in his youth, killing Elena's mother the wife of the Dr. Arboria whose institute Nyle has seized. Cosmatos used this film as an exorcism of his own alcoholism, we can only hope he succeeded. Again, like Computer Chess the spiritual tenants of the New Age and of drug experience are seen as a source of sickness, not enlightenment. Also, both films are a reference to the 1980's which in contrast to the 1971's THX-1138 prophecy, I see them as a strange reversal of a generation's perception of that era, the era of innocence, Reagan revolution and rebirth is in fact an era of bourn infection, invisible imprisonment and of a strange cynical 'profit-cy' from which we all now suffer.