Voluntaries from the Invisibles
Douglas Milburn
Part the Third
Princeps provinciarum
facta est sub tributo.
(Princess among the provinces,
she must now pay tribute.)
--Jeremiah.
1. Cassandra didnt know the half of it.
2. If all you have is money and if you lose that,
what do you have left?
3. The texts touted by organized religion contain value.
Finding it in the obtuse, opaque obfuscation in which it is embedded
is like finding diamonds in that state park in Arkansas.
4. Seduced by the hoarded shards of simultaneity called
"culture,"
we unhappily inhabit and, generation after generation,
with unquestioning conviction, pass on the episodic fallacy.
5. Trapped, we think, in growth and decay, pleasure and pain,
how, we keep asking, can the way forward not be the way forward,
and remain, with thespian devotion, deaf to the obvious answer.
6. Dont forget there is a whole cast of characters within you
clamoring for stage time.
7. The Necessity and Luxury of Multiple Simultaneous Agendas:
At first the only agenda was survival. Stability brought varied, specialty agendas
("roles"),
each mono-mentational, with a monomaniacal Tyrant Ego lording in over each consciousness.
Racial and sexual minorities early, of necessity,
developed multiple internal and external agendas
(hidden, and always subversive to the established mono-mentaiontal order).
Further stability and expanding economic security allowed
public display and expression of some of these agendas (jazz, camp).
The pernicious habit of fractious mono-mentation finally gave way
to the spread of constantly active simultaneous agendas,
though almost no one recognized what was happening (chaotic relativism, irony).
Beyond the old world of single personality disorder and mere irony
lies the braver new world of multiple personality order.
8. Your better conduits flow freeliest.
9. Like hollow people, hollow poems are poseurs:
carefully chosen words, arranged poetry-like,
dribble artfully down the page,
announcing their prize-winning presence,
like pus from an infected, untended wound.
10. On first awakening everybody
was offended by the old one-two punch of death:
disappearance and decay (cessation followed by stench).
Apparently the Egyptians were most offended
on both counts (pyramids and mummification).
11. Somewhere along the way we got inside-outside reversed,
but good.
12. As with the practice of expanded visual foveal focus
with the resultant vastly expanded field of inner vision,
so too with the practice of expanded mental focus
through repetitive pondering of value-free paradox.
Slowly the suspension of accretive, habitual belief happens.
13. This far across the distressingly wide Pacific,
we are reduced to eating scrapings from barrel bottoms
and chewing on thrice-chewed leather straps.
14, Unfettered consciousness.
The goal for now the ability to remove voluntarily,
as reuiqred,
the shackles of acculturation.
15. Trackless forests are by definition without paths,
and often quite brambly,
hence the many false starts and odd turns
above, and above, and above.
16. Humans have long excelled at doing the unspeakable.
Saying the unsayable remains beyond us.
17. Clarke correctly pointed out that advanced technology
seems like magic to inhabitants of earlier cultures.
What he filed to note is that the philosophy and theory
underlying such technology would seem like insanity.
18. I daily attend the parade of the grand pessimists
(from Chuang-tze to Nietzsche),
applaud the cleverness,
and marvel at the shallowness of their delusive verisimilitude.
19. The machine-consciousness singularity is possible, even
likely.
Given how little we know about consciousness (almost nothing),
its effect may be less profound than predicted.
The singularity that will change everything overnight is
unlimited cheap energy.
20. The ego as we have it in this civilization is a rambunctious
lout,
a badly behaved child, fit only for metaphysical pubs and the like,
ill--suited for drawing rooms or lecture halls. Not to mention temples.
It wants taming.
21. It would be difficult to overestimate
the degree and extent to which
the details of the world we create
are outward and visible replications
not just of our physical selves (cameras, cars)
but--mostly clumsy and crude--of inner realities
of which the present conscious mind
knows almost nothing:
the way we design and build cities,
the interstate highway system,
televisions,
the piano.
22. Next, dimensional exploration and travel.
We already do it (sort of) daily, nightly,
though were not aware of what were doing,
just as those who first walked north out of the Serengeti
werent aware of their movement on the surface of a sphere hurtling through space.
23. Just as dangerous as novelists who read themselves are
thinkers who think themselves.
24. Given the low quality of our receivers,
our weak batteries,
and the lack of reliable program guides,
the best time to listen for metaphysical newscasts is
the hours before dawn,
when most of the daytime static-makers in your vicinity are
deep in REM sleep.
25. How many uppity flowers do you know who go around seeking
rain?
26. So many franchises hawking
biblical fast food,
koranic fast food,
talmudic fast food.
Sustenance in those and similar books exists
but is neither fast nor cheap nor popular.
27. The goal of every journey
is precisely the here that your have got to
with considerable difficulty.
Listen, look, settle in.
The beginning of wisdom is
knowing when the circumnavigation is complete.
28. The truly wise do not take on or encourage protégés.
29. Gasamtkunstwerk.
Gesamtkunstspiel.
Gesamtlustwpiel.
Gesamtluststreich.
30. A medium of unknown content deep within itself
exudes bubbles of various sizes.
The bubbles make their way to a surface
where they glided, then burst.
31. Donning a second skin of purple glitter,
she picks up seven balls,
commands no net,
steps onto the wire
and with small smiles
juggles her way from pole to pole.
32. How could we not be vain
as children of a world thats constantly saying,
"And now for my next trick..."
33. This playpen is not too small.
This playpen is not too large.
This playpen is just right.
The problem is not its size,
nor whether it is the best of all possible playpens.
The problem is how it distracts us
from other available playpens.
34. Piling-like, metaphors are so damn persistent.
35. Though theres a lot to be said for narrative sweep,
your better esthetic wants a vacuum cleaner.
36. Our various flights (from death, life, etc.)
are in fact only of fancy.
37. So many log entries are rococo variants
on your basic self-serving data:
position, speed, direction, water depth,
salinity, weather, crew doings, etc.
38. Feed your head well.
39. Careless captains fail to set course before sleep.
40. Were miffed (some of us mightily)
at not being Beethoven
because we dont understand
how hard it was to be Beethoven.
41. Without maps and navigational tools (compasses, etc.)
even those few who try to experience dreams and drug trips
as other than shards are lost.
42. GWBD. The consanguine myth of reality--grow, bloom, wither,
die--
is neither necessary nor sufficient.
It is only a useful teaching tool.
43. Pain negates, then deletes,
most of our cleverest wisdoms.
44. It is difficult to take wholly seriously
a universe in which the ratio between diameter and circumference
is irrational.
45. Have we lost sight of the unseen through carelessness,
or is it the Everest of corpses that blocks the view?
46. Against all reason and with modest elan
Sengtsan got it all down to two characters
which build a bridge whose farther end
disappears 20 billion light-years away,
and which form a neat packet
bundling together plenty and lack,
pleasure and pain,
substance and emptiness
in perfect comfort,
and which marry hope and despair,
music and silence, one and zero
in fine harmony,
and which for modern inconvenience and bafflement
translate with precise exactness into two English words:
not two.
A most useful (or, depending on your habits, annoying)
string around the old mental finger.
47. Cultivate memories
of a different future.
48. Well, yes, Fritz, dance, for sure.
But you forgot that the one-legged German Terpsichore
tends to fall over
when doing anything other than
really fast pirouettes.
49. The novel, like embroidery, is a craft best practiced
by the extremely shortsighted.
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
Fourth >>
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
First
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Second
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Third
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fourth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fifth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Sixth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Seventh
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Eighth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Ninth
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