Tuesday, January 28, 2014

tranquilidipity

"You say "oh, which future do I want?", and maybe you think of flying cars and rayguns, or what have you, and you never think to ask the question: how is someone in that future going to think? What's their metanarrative going to be? What's their internal mental architecture like? Their mind might be Sapir-Whorved differently than yours, you know. Language may shape their world in completely alien ways to the way it shapes your world. But their operas are not played with devices: if you can speculate how they might see the world, perhaps you can bring in some of their language-spectacles merely by the application of your imagination. So perhaps you figure out how to make yourself a little of that alien memome. I'm not going to belabor you with demographics: suffice it to say there are people who make it their industry of art to perform this sort of linguistic magic show on themselves, and there are those who are comfortable with the narrative of the world they understand and aren't terribly interested in reflecting it to Foofaraw junction. To the latter, I generally have nothing but bewildered incomprehension: "why do you want to stay there? it's so boring! I can, at a distance, perhaps some five kiloparsecs away size up what your mental architecture is like without having to look at marketing research studies. I can predict the sort of beliefs about the world you have and the kinds of relationships you're likely to prosper as well as falter in. And I can do this without an enormously complicated rat-dance. " The former I cannot predict where and how I'll find them: they're the ones looking at the ocean with this perpetual look of astonishment and building castles which levitate as consequences of their architecture because their geometry accords perfectly with general relativity or what have you to make such a levitation possible. I can relate to them. Mostly. Except that I don't just want to look out into the ocean. I want to sail away from this harbor to distant climes, or to discover what ocean-dwelling life there might be. And I start seeming didactic, or pedantic, or hung up on tiny, apparently inconsequential points: heavens to Balthasar, I don't want to lord these over anyone. And I don't want to play language games with low replay value: it's more than just manipulating words and speech, finding the most opportune and elegant way of expressing myself. It's a whole sensory gamut dealie, but it's not alchemy and it's not shamanism, and I run away at the drop of the hat from anyone identifying as either. I know that both the alchemy and shamanism songs after a while start sounding like a record caught in a groove. And I quite loathe the politics which get carried along with them, or carried away with the practitioners of both. I expressly give up trying to tell people about the out of context objects which they're already ignoring because their visual systems are overwrought having been inundated by crazy net stimuli. I stick to ramifications of the classically elegant, as opposed to jumbled messes. I make a sort of ecology of coherence for myself. And on a self-evaluatory note: I remind myself of the dangers of freebasing forgetful functors as a matter of course, because scattering the world into monad-dusts doesn't work, and there's a kind of organic slipperiness to the cosmos which is foreign to rigid intellectual systems: simultaneously, I keep the two notions of the ocean: nonarbitrariness and nonrepetetiveness within easy reach, because, Oh Zarquon, I might run up against members of the Church of the Cosmic Galois Group, who decidedly fall in the first latter category mentioned: I don't want to get too addled by the necessitated memomic-prophylaxis I have made should I have to cope with their ambient quasiproselytized reality model, simultaneously, as the first former category mentioned goes, I am equipped with shipbuilding instructions of a kind, but not shipbuilding knowhow. I can go out a bit with my own conveyances, but these do not ships make. My conveyances can take me places ships cannot probably go. But lo, the night wears on. And perhaps you want some ginger ale" I may have said.

No comments: