Yard Lamp Off

Here's a sight that impressed me — as I opened my newspaper today, these images appeared one-over-th'other, so it looked as if the sporting fellow on top was wearing the legs of the Heather Gray model.

Dear diary,

Another day, another ice-rain storm in Minnesota. The temp here has been hovering around the freezing point, and the sky has been precipitating since yesternoon; thus the raindrops keep shifting between solid and liquid: when they land, they ooze around for a bit before they turn rock-hard. So everything’s slippery. And when I looked outside, I noticed that our yard lamp is out. (That is to say, its e-flame got extinguished.) I hope it’s not the wiring or something more serious, caused by the sinister snowflakes seeping into its motherboard and icing everyone. (I imagine that you can open up a yard lamp’s brain casing and find a big auditorium like a war room, and this is called the “motherboard”; and all the circuits live there: they sit in their seats like the U.S. congress and cast judgment on everything; which is to say, they operate the electric light by way of a system of ballot-voting; and their great fear is that a noxious mass of shape-shifting precipitation will someday infiltrate the seams of their hideout and assassinate all the actors, like that scene from The Godfather.) I hope it’s just a bad bulb, so that I can replace it.

Now, simply because the word matches, I’ll quote a couple sentences from the story of Byron the Bulb, from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, and are gone. The first few of these hit Byron hard. He’s still a new arrival, still hasn’t accepted his immortality. But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about the transience of others: learns that loving them while they’re here becomes easier, and also more intense—to love as if each design-hour will be the last.

A light bulb that does not expire when it’s supposed to. A real problem for its manufacturer. Not good for profits.

But today I wanna write an entry that contains many miscellaneous topics that do not cohere; so let me think of something else now…

SOMETHING ELSE

What are photos, and what are drawings? Why would a person say “It is better to capture ‘truth’ as exactly as possible, in a photo, as opposed to painting a self-portrait with one’s own hand; for one’s hand was fashioned by God and thus prone to err”? And why would another person say “I prefer an artist’s rendition of a given event, done in charcoal, ink, or oil paints; because then the soul of the craftsman shows thru the…” Thru the what? This turkey can’t even finish his con!

The thing about photography is that it can be manipulated using a computer program. So even if you were to snap a picture of God, it still wouldn’t convince any atheists to join your cult, cuz they’d just say “I bet you manipulated the source material and superimposed a solution on top of reality.”

Here I get stuck: because I don’t believe in God, but I favor lies, so I’m always dying to attend church services, but I never dare let my soul out of its cage.

II

Everything is collage; that’s what I say: Everything is more or less a collage. A drawing, like any dead prez bedecking a greenback, is a collage of certain ideas stolen from reality: it has lines & dots. Also you can use shading techniques in a drawing. But a photo is a collage of larger fragments: sometimes it’s just a lone snippet — and that’s where it becomes confusing to refer to it as a collage; for, can one single image taped to a canvas be called a collage? — I mean, if you just point and click your camera in any direction and leave the result unmanipulated, still you’ve framed a bit of reality out away from the rest; and this frame is itself the fragment’s accompanying element, and that’s like collaging: cuz the reality didn’t belong to you in the first place, so it’s like you’re scavenging some other artist’s source material; and now you’ve removed its essence from its context, like cutting an image from a magazine. And the magazine of reality is a glossy publication.

But even if we invent a telephone booth that can travel back in time to the ancient past, and, say, I myself, the Bryan Ray of 2019, go and pay a visit to the Bryan Ray of 1944; and yet, at that exact instant, the far future folk have chosen to test their invention that is another telephone booth, which can allow its passenger to experience life as the exact quarks and forces that comprise one human life elsewhere, so that, say, the Real Me — Bryan Ray of 9956 — sets the machine’s coordinates to “Bryan Ray of 2019”, this will not result in the 1944 Bryan being haunted with twofold intensity by his multi-souled doppelganger; it will only force TRUTH to begin yet another accounting ledger — in other words: to cook the books further — for dimensions can be added as easily as dollars can be born into the 21st-century U.S. economy; you just have to click the “Green Double Zero” button a few more times in the corresponding application.

What I’m trying to say is that even when 9956 Bryan becomes 2019 Bryan and physically bestows two golden tablets upon the 1944 Bryan (and there’s writing inscribed on the front and back side of each tablet), this doesn’t mean that the prophecy of the advent of the super-king has been fulfilled and that the world shall thus roll over and play FIN. For there are upwards of thirty 1944s overlapping at the moment, and only one of them can flux out per kenosis. That’s why Jesus had to die as a lawbreaker at age 33 before he could apotheosize into Zarathustra and live backwards from 44. Note that Zarathustra lived before, during, and after the appearance of his oversoul Nietzsche-Zostrianos. The same thing happened to me, on October 22nd.

Notes & Glossary

An “oversoul” is kinda like one’s “Heavenly Father”, only ineffably superior. And “kenosis” is a term from Christian theology which refers to Christ’s act of self-emptying his own will and becoming entirely receptive to the divine will. It’s the word behind the phrase translated “he humbled himself” in the following passage from St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians:

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in human fashion, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death: even the graceless execution of a common criminal. (Philippians 2:4-8)

Again, I wanna move on to other things, but first I’ll copy one more quote, because it helps explain what I was trying to illustrate in the above passage about my own temporal avatars amusing each other.

This is from the very beginning of the chapter titled “Kenosis” in the religious critic Harold Bloom’s scripture The Anxiety of Influence:

The unheimlich, or “unhomely” as the “uncanny,” is perceived wherever we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action. Overruling the pleasure principle, the daemonic in oneself yields to a “repetition compulsion.” A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before.

I trust this all makes sense to you, gentle reader.

Now, as for the modern movement called “Me too”... (for those who don’t know how to navigate to Wikipedia’s website, I’ll paraphrase some of its entry on the subject: “Hashtag Me-Too” is a movement against sexual assault, especially in the workplace. Social activists began using the phrase as early as 2006, and it was later popularized by the actor Alyssa Milano, one decade later, on the social network Twitter: Milano encouraged victims of sexual harassment to microblog about their experiences, so as to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem”. A number of high-profile posts and responses from celebrities and other modern aristocrats soon followed, which resulted in the removal of many high-ranking officials from office. It even eventually took down the U.S. President. For the system of capitalism was discovered to be pragmatically indistinguishable from the notion of abuse, whether sexual or otherwise.) Actually, I don’t have anything to say about this at present. I know that I promised a variety of disconnected ramblings in this entry, but I’m going to renege on our deal and just press the “eject” button. Cuz I’m dying to quit...

Ms. Ray’s Closing Thot

I have no prob giving anyone $$$ to dream. I think I myself deserve about ninety zillion caesars for refusing to become a part of the postmodern art market. The barbarians of Earth should consider bribing me to refrain from unleashing my creations on the creation.