I'm too sad and scared about the current events of our world, and too rattled to speak of them. I need to write about something other than those sad, scary things... so I'll ramble to you:
Dear diary,
If I were to title my life "The Egg that Never Hatched," how accurate would that be? I'd say about seventy-one point six percent accurate. And we could flip that point six to point nine if we altered our title to "The Unhatched Egg Whose Embryo was Ever in Agony."
If you read William Blake's Book of Thel, that explains my existence. —But now I'll try to stop whining...
Podcast. I hate that word. Why don't we just call it an interview or a conversation or a... I think the word broadcast originally referred to casting seeds broadly upon the soil, because the very first Media Conglomerates all were farmers. But seriously, no matter what the actual gender or age of each show's participants, I wouldn't mind if we re-titled all the podcasts in the world with one same description: two teen girls talking on the telephone.
So I listened to this conversation between these two teenage girls on the telephone's party line; but I don't want to mention their names, because then, when I return to re-read this entry in twenty years or more, I'll go and do a search for the link and waste my time again; whereas if I leave everything all vague and mysterious as it is now, then some far-off day I'll have the luxury of ruining my evening's dinner chat by remaining aloof and musing about who the heck I must have been auditing way back then – for I don't remember that podcast at all; I don't even know what a podcast IS. (Is it like when our alien saviors cast their fleet of space pods onward and outward into other worlds, for the sake of the truth and the light...?)
Ubiquitously distributing copies of Dante's Comedy – I bet THAT's what they're doing, the UFOs.
So anyway this pod-host was interviewing a popular actor, and he (the host) asked a million questions about acting technique, and the specifics of preparation, etc., and about all the movies that she (the actor) had acted in. And one of the main reasons that I tuned in in the first place was in hopes that this actor would speak about her behind-the-scenes experience with director David Lynch on the new Twin Peaks...
Oh, that reminds me: I haven't yet reacted to the latest episode; we're now up to hour 14 of 18. So there's only four left to go; and the last two hours will be presented in one special extended show, which means that there are only three Sundays left where I will feel the thrill of a potential epiphany from the time I awake until nine o'clock unveils its anticlimax. But seriously I bet that at least one of the remaining episodes will be good. Maybe even TWO...
"There's enough money in here to buy weed for the next year, maybe even two years."
—Officer Sunshine (from the 2013 film Wrong Cops, written by Quentin Dupieux)
So perhaps the very last Twin Peaks special bonanza finale will be the big payoff. I can't believe it'll ALL be bad. But I couldn't believe that ANY of it could be as bad as it was, and so very THOROUGHLY bad; let me repeat, for any of my future selves who might've tuned in late and missed the other entries where I kept barking this critical truth: only hours 3, 4, and 8 have contained distinguished, poetic cinema; the rest are pure politics.
On a side note: I swapped the word "politics" above for the intended word "trash," because I just finished transcribing an interview of Mark Blyth – not the aforesaid two girls talking on the telephone, but a wholly different link – wherein Mr. Blyth not once but twice employs that 'p'-word contemptuously.
When you bail out the financial sector, and debt-to-GDP in the United States goes from 60% to 100%, that means you’ve taken 40% of national wealth and given it to Wall Street to keep it solvent. Now the U.S. public should be immediately saying: "Now you Wall Street guys are gonna pay lots and lots of taxes over the next ten years, to pay that back." Right? Oh no, quite the opposite—we're told: "We need to cut taxes on rich people again, because that’s the way that we'll balance the budget." This is POLITICS, all the way through: it’s NONSENSE.
So, in this first instance, Blyth uses the word politics as a synonym for nonsense. Now here's the second instance:
Essentially every financial system in the world has dollars as its basis. Why would you do this? Well, because gold is a shiny rock that has no intrinsic value, and there isn’t enough of it around; and if everybody tries to hoard gold, the money supply collapses and you end up in the 1930s: bad idea. Right. So what then? You need something that’s deep, liquid, plentiful, and you know it’s gonna retain its value. So long as you have a country that
- can pay its taxes (and we in the U.S. under-tax, cause we’ve been cutting so much);
- can collect tax across generations because it’s got positive population growth (yes, that’s us);
- and is backed up by the largest military in the world, so that in extremis it can defend itself (yep, USA: check);
then that country's piece of paper [in our case, the dollar] is going to be good. Now what’s your alternatives? Well you could have Euros. Great; but if the Italians have a referendum on the Euro two years from now and it breaks up, you’re left holding nothing. What about China? You can’t do it; they have three layers of capital controls, you can’t buy the domestic debt very easily [etc. . . .] So basically the whole world runs on dollars. So the notion that there’s a "dollar crisis" etc.: complete politics, there’s nothing to it.
In this second instance, Mr. Blyth uses the word politics to denote a thing even less substantial than cotton candy. For cotton candy at least contains a wispy type of material in itself and is not nothing.
But I was trying to explain my views on the latest Twin Peaks, because it's important for me to fulfill my self-imposed task of reacting to each show in a timely manner; for I wish that I had done that for all the movies and TV shows that I've ever watched: then my family'd have a big stack of papers to burn after I infiltrate heaven. Yet I think I'll die family-less; by which I mean: I'll have no one to attend my funeral, unless my sweetheart survives me. Why do I say this? Because not a soul in my familial bloodline aims to procreate. And I believe that I'll be the last of us to die; because the LORD has taught me only this one thing for sure: that I never get what I want.
"You'll never have me."
—Alice Wakefield, to Fred Madison (from the 1997 film Lost Highway, written by David Lynch and Barry Gifford)
So why are fine U.S. families like ours (I mean mine as well as all my siblings' partnerships) choosing not to reproduce our kind? We, the descendants of respectable baby-boomer parents; why are we not bearing them any grandchildren? Why are we neglecting to provide this country with the positive population growth necessary for it to continue collecting tax revenue across generations and thus to KEEP OUR CURRENCY KING! (If the motto "Make America Great Again" results in the hashtag "MAGA," then I wonder what hashtag will stand for our bonnie future's motto, which consists of those last four words preceding this parenthetical statement.) (Also note, all ye who live in the bonnie future: "hashtag" was a jargon term popular on social media roughly 200 years after the advent of William Blake.) Here's the answer: Today's finest couples decline to procreate, for the same reason that giraffes pacing concrete cages in zoos decline to procreate. We have all arrived naturally, unbeknownst to each other and even innocently, at the same wise stance advocated by ancient Gnosticism.
(I know that there wasn't any "Official Church of Gnosticism" advocating stances – the beauty of the speculative minds that we engird with that label is that they were decidedly the opposite: poetical and inventive rather than controlling and bureaucratic – but I speak of the chaos as orderly for comic effect.)
And again recall that "Christ" simply means "King" (which I assume is why Robert Graves named his amazing novel King Jesus), so the future's motto could be rendered as Keep Our Currency CHRIST, which would be fitting for this land filled with paper bills claiming In God We Trust.
For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.
But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
That's from the first epistle to Timothy (6:7-10) in the King James Bible's "New Testament." And now I want to juxtapose two phrases that came to my mind just now, for little reason:
- One nation under God.
- One nation underdog.
But I STILL haven't explained my views on the latest installment of Twin Peaks: The Return. While offering a few general remarks, I end up getting sidetracked from talking about the specific episode. That last show aired four days ago; I'm writing this Thursday night: is it too late already? have my views soured? No: for something to sour, it must once have been fresh. This last episode made me feel the same as I've felt after initially viewing the bulk of the most recent shows: my soul was less than whelmed. OK, that's all I wanted to say; it's not worth more words.
But here's one funny thing, which I'm sure is not intentional: While ostensibly trying to double the number of Dale Coopers (by splitting the single Agent into self-plus-doppelganger), Lynch has left us NOT with two Coopers but with zero. No Coopers at all in this "Return". For the so-called bad Cooper is barely seen, and neither looks nor sounds like the Agent of whom he's supposed to be the copy; and then the original Cooper is practically comatose.
Didn't I make the above point before? I haven't gone back and re-read any of the T.P. stuff I've written here lately – I feel like I must have said the same thing elsewhere. Oh well, that means that my anger is not only ineffectual but repetitive; so I fit in with all of modernity's fashions and trends. ...But is this stupid show making me senile? Yes it's the show's fault, not my isolationist habits and physiological slope toward untimely degradation.
Two heroes that result in zero heroes. Two gods in heaven and none on earth. We had Yahweh descend from his storm-cloud and walk as a warrior among us, but then we got sophisticated and told him: Stay in the sky henceforward, you appear all-too-human whenever you visit us earthlings. The LORD acquiesced, and as compensation we offered him a doppelganger. So now Jesus comes along, born of a woman, and that seemed OK, as long as we could claim that no sex caused this; but then Jesus died, and his biographers claim that he didn't even try to fight the fascists, he didn't even defend himself in court; according to the accepted propaganda, he just let the empire torture him, and he underwent capital punishment like any criminal. But we flipped this also to our advantage and argued as follows. Since you can't really kill an immortal, then the notion of ending itself must be just as fake; therefore: If God is slain, then Death is slain as well. (Note that they are played by the very same actor.)
So as Twin Peaks gives us one Cooper, two Cooper, both Coopers, which ultimately sum to zero Coopers, my ancestors' religion gives me one God, two God, both Gods (Yahweh and Jesus), which equal a goose egg (North American slang for zilch): a golden goose egg.
Insert here: the Wrong Cops quote from my August 1 post.
In summary, after punting the deity's visible presence back upward, we reappointed a mortal to do the job, and he died, as mortals tend to do; thus, instead of a double deity, we have none, but an Holy Ghost surveilling us all; an invisible fiend. As it is written:
...in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Blake refers here to John Milton's masterwork Paradise Lost, which either relates or does not relate to our world.
P.S. I'm embarrassed how much I let my tug-o'-war with Twin Peaks dominate these entries, which are supposed to be achingly personal. My shame comes from realizing how much a silly television series dominates my soul. It seems that the soul should be more dignified. But, when you think about it, even a TV show is a work of art, in the sense that it's made by living creatures; and I do believe that there's something essential to siphon from the best of them. For consider the English poets from the so-called Romantic Era: our present age looks back on them and wonders why they all obsessed over William Wordsworth's Excursion; but that's only because his far superior Prelude was published posthumously; so we of the bad year 2017 get the finest portion of that unfinished super-project, while those of the bad year 1814 had to simply snatch what crumbs fell themward. Wordsworth was of immense importance to his age (not to mention our own), and there was more value to be gained by studying Wordsworth's stumblings than in observing his contemporary poetasters' sure-footings. This is how I feel about David Lynch: he is of similar importance to MY epoch, so much that I find it more rewarding to ponder his daring failures than to feel the buzz of others' careful successes. Perhaps futurity will smirk at my poring over lubberly behemoths like Twin Peaks, but I consider such works BEYOND PASS OR FAIL. If the future gets its mitts on some great wonder by Lynch that shows up posthumously, then good for the future, I'm jealous of you for many reasons beyond this one, O survivors, but we who are dead to you had only The Return, which is to say, the Excursion, not the "Poem to Coleridge" (which was Wordsworth's working title for The Prelude): not Ronnie Rocket. And, by the way, I want to emphasize that I started this overlong paragraph with a "P.S." because I really did come back and add it after finishing (= post scripting) the rest of the entry – I was, as I said, embarrassed for waxing on about such a blank. But now I'll return the gentle reader to this scatterbrained entry as it appeared in its untouched draft; I'll never step in this same stream to interrupt it again, here's a rainbow, I swear.
I want to acknowledge a debt. Just now I realized that much of the above "Two heroes..." paragraph echoed unintentionally (now that I look back, I see it so clearly that I'd call it copying, if I was not certain that I was unknowingly doing so) parts of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens. Part III begins: "Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth." And it contains these lines:
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
But d'you remember that podcast that I mentioned in the beginning, the two girls with their telephone party-line convo, where I was hoping that the host would ask the actor about her time performing in this recent series show, about which I have nothing good to say howbeit whose reputation as a valuable work of experimental film I feel the need to protect? Well the thing that ticked me off, that miffed me, that got my goat, was that the host said that he never could understand why people admired even the original Twin Peaks; for, when HE tried to watch it, HIS care was worn down by the weird details and incidents that never "paid off" in terms of the narrative. Now, I know I shouldn't let these plot supremacists get to me, but the topic comes up so often in my daily life that I've developed a tic; and the whole point of an involuntary muscle movement is that you can't control it; so I MUST jot more words now:
I love plot, but to sacrifice poetry, epiphany, THE SUBLIME for a game of connect-the-plot-dots: that is reprehensible. I hate to put it this way, because, as a practicing pataphysician, I'm usually at odds with Moses, moreover I'm categorically against all commandments, nonetheless: Thou shalt not honor clocktime over eternity. (Neither one should abase itself to the other.) I could froth all night about this, but I'll let it be...
So, back to the podcast: after confessing "I don't GET that innovative artwork," the guy then cut the talk artificially short on this subject, and his tone was smug because his perspective is small.
I've heard that the ancient Athenian dramatists would routinely use the same plot-lines for their plays, because the expectation of the audience was that aspects of their culture's familiar myths would be retold by each new playwright, and in the process the material would be filtered thru that artist's own unique slant; thus the stories would be presented with a different gusto, different emphases, different styles, at every fresh performance. I like that climate of culture so much better than our focusing solely on the novelty of PLOT. Again, I don't hate plot, I just prefer plot to be less in the foreground; I like plots that are old and familiar, tried and true, and very well-known, so that the glories, the lustres, the subtle sparks of genius hiding in plain sight can be made to expand our mind.
I don't like these modern times. But also I yearn for these modern times, despite the fact or perhaps because they exasperate me. My gosh they are tedious. Almost everything is the opposite of how I'd want it: it's all upside-down and inverted.
"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top."
—Lula Pace Fortune (from the 1990 film Wild at Heart; screenplay by David Lynch from a book by Barry Gifford)
Obviously I need to fix my attitude; so I'll change the subject... Do I know anything about the human genome and the editing thereof? I guess not. I wish I did, though; I'd like to be able to say some things about all that.
One problem that the world of so-called science suffers from is that its jargon is not appealing to the average individual. And who is the average individual? I AM the average individual. I don't like acronyms in general. Like those hashtags that I mentioned to you above. Jumbled letters are boring. I don't like DNA. I don't like RNA. I don't like the CRISPR/Cas system or the word prokaryotic. Or plasmids or phages. Actually those last three words are better than the rest, I love them a lot, on second thought, because, even if they're not exactly resplendent, at least they're speakable words and not abbreviations.
And don't put numbers in your name unless you want the name to sound weird funny and cool. I wish that I could be hired by the scientific community as a full-time thing-namer. I'd happily name all the new things that those folks discover. It seems to me that they're tuckered out by this nonstop job of labeling everything, so they end up recycling old latin words and nonsensical, unpronounceable number-letter combinations.
But for the record: scientists are all exactly 100% nice. (I say this in case they ever manage to reverse-engineer the godhead.)
The idea of changing aspects of yourself. If you could tinker with your blueprint...
All I would do is buy new clothes and change the economy. I don't need to be taller or shorter. Amor fati.
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