From: IN%"REZABEH1648@cobra.uni.edu" "heath michael rezabek" 9-JUN-1994 02:25:16.55 To: IN%"fixion-list@netcom.COM" CC: Subj: PSYCHOdeGRADABLE : silo 3 scrytch : The Remittance Man -- when i come to my senses, i find myself deep in the bowels of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS, utterly lost in a boundless building of musty dusty creaking wooden walkways, ladders, stairways, trapdoors, gangplanks; corridors that stretch beyond the distances of credibility, windows that look back into the other side of the building... i gaze out and can just see the back of me, barely a speck. i knew the Men in Monochrome would never follow me here; dreamers and cats only; that was the score, and they knew it. on the windowsill is a Siamese, fur of an almost luminous, almost green, almost purple, almost spectral grey which moves me beyond words.. i weep freely, droplets bursting on ancient dust into little balls, rolling away like quicksilver. then *flip* "there is, then NATURE. flora, fauna. complementing this and sometimes complicating this is human culture, here called SECOND NATURE. SECOND NATURE is simply that subset of NATURE which is aware of its own awareness. it has thus forsaken the forms of alingual and all-but-simultaneous communication which is common practice for the insekt kingdom; human culture, by becoming aware of its own awareness, has forfeited its own immortality. the present author is of the opinion that NATURE and SECOND NATURE, while obviously inter-related, will never fully be reconsiled. the tricky bit is to fuse the meme and the gene, the place where NATURE fuses with SECOND NATURE is at the memetic/genetic level. the meme remains jauntily aloof." *flip* There comes a sound, like a string of words through rustling cellophane, all of them floating, yelling, trying so bravely to articulate a single word, never spoken in any human language, a mouth opens tat an absurd angle, forming the shape of a death or a rocketship in its position, straining, twisting, and my mind twists with it to catch its drift; then *flip* "there was at one time a crew of scholars and researchers whose ill-fated task was to discover whether there was in fact any sort of underlying order to the whole of human writing independant of those connections of which its authors were aware. i say ill-fated not because our crew never found out, but rather because of what they eventually, horribly, discovered. their Research Packets can still be found here and there, by those who know how to look." *flip* i awake in shards of dusty sunlight, Spring ringing in my ears. a warm welcome crystal surge of joy spreads through me like tea through a sugarlump. then *flip* "it would seem to me that a return to the preparation and consumption of insekt matter might do much to aid our current situation. no meat to be found; none of the health problems inherent in a side of beef. the vegetation is, after all, needed to keep the planet breathing. and we all secretly, silently, loathe and fear the BUG, who we somehow realize will out-live us anyway. it is because a swarm, a hive, not even a nest of termites can ever quite add up to a single sentience that we feel so carelessly justified in this gastronomical revolution. but there are tricky gnots. it, like all cultural habits, is an acquired taste." *flip* i bound with great rejoicing strides down a steep line of two-up-two-down back-to-back terraced houses, washing lines strung across the cobbled streets. then *flip* "in the end it does not matter as much as the palpitating heart shudders to think; if the scritcher is the sole ytcher, or one of perhaps a handful, then there is no reason for alarm. no reason for alarm. return to your seats. there is no longer, seems to me, any such thing as a mockery, self or otherwise. nothing is quite that funny; either this or else nothing is quite serious enough to not be a mockery already. the line between laughter and tears is -- well, barely is. remember that damn banana peel, already browning, good now for slapstick, little else. but it's doing its work by definition. it simply is." *flip* i stop before a low-slung line with a single white sheet pegged to it; the wind has spun the sheet around the line, revealing a curvy crisp delicious contoured body of cotton. I steal a kiss and walk on by, silently longing for the terrain whose numerical analogue is found in the fractal geometry of chaos. and then there are only words -- tempest fugue "Situate a pedagogical cessation" at one time there were toys called Zax. [i suppose that an individual piece would be called a Zak; i was never able to confirm this.] they were wonderful little devices, but the company went defunct. Zax Pax can still be found in the corners of various toy stores, but i have stopped collecting them. {it was full of surprises} she arches above me, her back stretching in the ink of the nightlight, and she feels like home and all the other cliches at once, and its over. she relaxes, her red hair covering my chest and her face. she looks up, brushes the hair out of her face, looks away : [HER]: "We're kidding ourselves. There's no love here. This is a lie. We're just two stupid horny kids." a few moments pass, i feel like i want to throw her off of me, smash her into pieces, but i can't; i am immersed -- i am a part -- of my circumstances, and i want nothing more than to shed them, thoroughly and completely, and to just go away. instead i ask a question. [ME]: "Did we use any protection?" [SHE]: "... no, i guess not." and its dragging reluctance all the way down the hall, the two of us naked and her self-conscious and my own mind spinning with absurd abandon. to the bathroom, inside, close the door. this will have been a Good Thing. had we not known, we would have rolled over, subsumed our sadness or futility in dreamless sleep. instead we talk, til the sun begins to mottle the sky. "Deploy a situational culture disclosure" so i bend words, and as i bend them i bend ideas, into big bright neon signs or gaudy balloon animals, it doesn't matter. the substance of thought *will* give way to my persistence, goddammit. nothing can withstand Persistence. Persistence and Good Old Human Ingenuity... {it was endlessly revised and reworked and retained its vim and vigor in spite of it all} finding that again in 1990 in a 20 by 40 room with fugazi; clinging to ian's monitor, there is sweat on the strings and there is a mass of motion behind me that i cannot comprehend; people are carried out of the room, which swelters in the 110 degree kansas heat; july, and why can't i walk down the street free of suggestion? i dance, and that dance brings out something in me that i can only share with myself; and so it is Corrupt. were i a female, it would be my Strength. this is not dogma speaking, but a simple gnowledge. i can feel that echo of myself, and at the same time i am damned to feel the reason behind it. i swarm with rage, and exaltation. only i GNOW this moment, i and ian i suppose, and the girl clinging to the monitor below me throbs with the heat; i cling to her, the sweat is like a wine, the motion and heat intoxicates beyond comprehension. i gnow something that is No Good: there is something that i Need, that i will always Need, that i can never ever have; to be Whole. all else is the road to a substitute. "Interface with a pre-tested cognition" meanwhile IT has hovered : above us : below us : all around us : uncannily : like a shadow cast by our minds. a shadow is incapable of detailing a feature which is not already present. the source of light is incapable of illuminating a shadow. {it was a great place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there} so far as i can tell, i am not supposed to be here in the bazaar, and that sort of inherent foreignness may be what compelled me to take up a trade so apparently novel to many of you. i am not simply a merchant; my widgets are too intangible for me to be on solid ground. i am not an artisan; my craft is still being honed. if you've never had guides in here, then it's probably because you've never before had anyone so obsessed with puzzling out this borderland in the first place. i didn't take this up as a clever angle, i took this up out of sheer necessity. i had no idea what was happening all around me, and perpetual immersion in the struggle to find out led me naturally to the companionship of others who wanted to wander further than their fellows into areas of the bazaar of which they knew little. if this little packet does what it should, in fact, then many of you even now have no idea who i am or what i'm writing about. i'm a guide, a very inconsequential local guide, of a delta-region of the bazaar. ask the one who handed this packet to whether i'm up or down-flow from you. i'm beginning to think such distinctions are meaningless -- or maybe more intractably meaningful -- than any of us can know. "Spearhead a value-neutral guidance capacity" after sorting and uniting all of the sundry bits and pieces of the countless story-lines in question, the oddly clothed figure approached the little brown box once again. may as well use the same packet, it thought. the figure slowly placed the blackish-purplish blob of narrative mass, all a-flash with currents and eddies of pink and blue energy, into the box, closed the lid, and sent it out. the figure went over to the mat upon the floor and slept for a long time. {it was the spread of the dance from womb to womb} fragile as a slug-trail in the sand, i shuffle myself downstairs and into the kitchen. in front of a bowl of Flintstones Breakfast Boulders, i read the box for the latest free just-save-ten-million-carton-tops offer. it says: The process is in static flux, i cannot ask its size, i cannot ask its shape: Form is Process Form of all dynamic observables, experienceables, scrytchables, is same diversal universal process. People, clouds, mountains, flowers, stock markets, water pipes, scrytch. Trying to understand why is like being in a boat on a river and putting down a sign in the water that says 'i am here'. i belch loudly and swill the last dregs of tea from my free offer red and white nescafe mug. "Ratchet down reciprocal compensation projections" it was silent, it was dark. in the dark, aqaraza groped, searching for a reference point. he hit upon an object, shimmering and vibrating in e darkness: it was about the size of his head. it was difficult to hold on to: firstly, the vibrations of the contraption numbed his hands. But as he loosened and tightened his hold, he found that the thing let out a sound. It was a tone or a melody or a tempo; it was singing to him, a song of confusion and loneliness and wonder and fatigue. it was precisely what aqaraza needed to hear, because it was precisely evocative of what he felt consuming him. aqaraza sat and wept in the dark, and the thing [which was actually a Raw Gnot] wailed quietly with him. aqaraza was aware of very little. although he was embroiled in confusion, there were no easily apprehendible threats for him to confront. there was, essentially, no conflict. he had little energy, and without any solid point-event upon which to train his attention, he had no choice but to sit in one place. he was not functioning so as to get himself out of his dilemma; he had no idea what his dilemma was. it felt to him as though he were part of an elaborate, ill-designed joke. the Gnot resonated with this sentiment, and vibrated in a complementary manner. {it was a one way ticket} There where there's a piece which has integrated some pretty strange things what've been done. "Finalize a full-featured thesis" some say i say i want out, some say there is no out; some even crazier say there is no end, the good old inside without the outside again and yes again i am grabbing at a concept which does not exist, done so by a person who does not exist living in a world which also does not exist but i tell you _I_ tell you i want in to this inside without the outside and other times i am trapped inside and having a nasty case of cabin fever too and of this anonymous intensity i mean to say it has no name, it is unnamed, it has no face, not the face of pain or joy or pure raw angst or elation or urgency, but it is all of these things and none of these things and of this no-ending i can't remember a beginning but was one; i tell you here and i tell you now i never talk to anyone but me, and if that means i am hunting you down then i am hunting me down as well; and boundaries become very vague and possibly nonexistent. yes some juice would be nice but that is all water under a bridge that collapsed long ago and which now sits at the bottom of the river and yes I want out and yes I want in out of this and in to that and silence goes screaming through my head deafening me as I implode in this madness {it was the gentle fall of gnotions which blew into drifts} The God of Cities treats birds differently. They can start on one current and take another to get them Home. One current can cause others to follow. "Deconstruct goal-oriented design protocols" from the earth up, our gaze holds the moon in check. serendipity: "the moon is a hole in the sky." i sketch a flow chart. "so the world beyond the sky is moon?" no -- he stops and -- what you need is a good beating. come here. {it was the ocean's waves which froze the liquid fire in its path into multiliths of black black stone} You will probably feel like there is some sense in being alive, if it is so that many other people keep themselves alive. But the answer is: We live because we are too afraid to die. oh, i know what are you going to tell me. there are so many things to do. scrytching, for example. isn't it great, etc? and there are even more things to do; it's a question of feelings. it is very easy to channge your feelings. you can use: coffee tea music MJ TV computer net computer games books fixion books fantasy literature comics etc alcohol more alcohol cocaine well, it is not exactly the right way, i know. feels like being a little bit alone, but you know, the intercourses with other people are usually so biologically determined -- just think of: sex love agresivity money will to be famous, which is just another form of ABOVE, etc It has became slightly boring. so then why not speak about Great Things, about activities truly suitable for real men, blah, blah, blah etc. To observe everything? :-) To write about everything? ;-) To create something aBSoLuTeLy good, beautiful [young,succesful..]? :-| To do something aBSoLuTeLy bad? :-( And so then what I can do ? There is just emtpy, sensless universe filled with black holes, and terrible green monsters and UFOs and people, insists Henrich. "Pragmatize pre-agreed-upon dialogues, depending on a non-prejudicial accountability listing" Cummeth the visigoth vandal hun PanchoVilla Conan to reap what is still goodly in his God-given sight by sight shall ye be known to the reppers who will replicate that which is God and dis guardedly nonrep rest for the bit bucket. [Hell?] And whither wither we? Blame it on the Quassa Nova? Don't take individual responsibility! Let Congress do it! [to us] If we don't grab this li'l, local, motha, it's gonna fall over. The multiple stages, as resolved into words by R.A. Wilson in "Illuminatus" are real. {it was a fix within the flux} let me ask myself this: Q: Self, what is The Earth doing? A: Why, it seems to be talking to itself. Q: But Self, haven't we sent out Space Probes? Aren't we searching the stars for Signs of Life? A: Apparently we are. But most of our energy is spent on finding more efficient ways to talk to ourselves. Q: SELF, that's HORRIBLE! What can we DO about it? A: Well, we could talk to ourselves about the problem and see if we can work up a solution. and so here's the Net. it allows people who have never met to talk to themselves through each other at a tremendous pace. what could we say? what could we do with what we say? negotiate out a common ground. what will we do on the ground thus secured? "Deconstruct pedagogical contingency criteria" The world wants people dressed as hot dogs. {it was a revision not found in prior drafts} "i feel the need to communicate something but words seem lost to the enormity of it. it's nothing. i need to communicate, i feel. perhaps i'm going for too much too soon." "its a pleasureless task. so i try to create pleasure, which is pleasureless and decadent." "Downsize an exemplary commitment perception" Scrytching? Hmm. I approach it with a dubious regard. Is it art? Or is it nothing more than random expulsions from the subconsious? But, if it is indeed only a random expulsion, might it be a prelude to a transition? A transition to something a little more coherent? Might it not give momentum to whatever unconsious machinery is involved in artistic creativity? Am I scrytching? am i a gene or a meme? 23 questions. it seems initially apparent that i am a gene. i am a biot, a biological unit; i simply happen to have meme-hacking tendencies. what, then, is a virtual community? is it a meme or a gene? the memetic attractor -- the virtual community -- would not exist without the constant through-put of the biots which lend it form, and i suppose that once the biots are gone the memetic attractor will flicker and die as well. why, then, would a meme even exist? no, this is a phase in a process. it can't be the ultimate state of things. the meme is trying to find its way to a preferred state. a state, perhaps, of what i like to call "static flux." for an analogy, consider a rain forest environment. through countless generations and re-generations, an ecosystem has developed of such stunning and rich complexity that we find it difficult to understand, yet simple in its workings. a rain-forest is one big niche, adapting to itself. {it was the department of redundancy department} in the early days, there were Grand Schemes and Daring Gambits. every idea was pontificated upon, dissected, torn down, resurrected and re-formed a thousand times, with no sign of end in sight. the biggest idea to be thus treated was, in fact, that there was no end in sight; to culture, to the world, to anything... in fact, things truly seemed to be getting MORE complex. then we remembered the second law of thermodynamics and had to struggle with that. because none of us had yet run into Prigogine, we simply changed topics. and thus it was that the biggest idea became the fact that there was no BEGINNING in sight. no-one could formulate a clear idea of how all of this STUFF ever possibly got into motion in the first place. it took a lot of time and energy to come to the point where one of us realized that this issue was never going to be resolved because we just plain weren't there at the time to see it. that person suggested that instead of spending so much energy trying to puzzle out how everything STARTED, we might be better served [and more directly involved] were we simply yo try and describe how everything currently WORKED. the question of why, being irresolvable, fell to the question of how. it, equally irresolvable, eventually led to the question of what. this we could handle. what is it now? what is it now? what will it be? ap! scratch that; we've no clue. what was it? ap! we tried that tack. what is it now? what is it now? much much better. because if we can figure out what it is now, we might be able to figure out how best to respond to it. "Interface with a flexible interlocutor" writing no longer helps. Funny, I've been wondering, is scrytch going to be my literary savior? The miracle lubricant which greases all my mental parts so that I can recover from this stagnant lethargy? I've been trying to force things into movement, trying to jump right into writing short novels -- but if I haven't really written anything worth mentioning in months, if I've lost all that creative inertia, how can I just start of where I left off? So I am scrytching. i wish i could get to the point, but as far as i can see, that's absolutely impossible for me, 1st Person. all i can do is point towards other points, which point towards the murky issue, the Trickiest Gnot, the Very Gnotion. i'm working on it... i think it'll eventually take a reconciliation with my parents, something i'm not looking forward to simply because i know it'll be sheer chaos. {it was the spread itself of fire and dance by any means necessary} Walking again. Shoe's untied. I tie it. I really should go for a bike ride while its like this. Michgan weather changes at whim. Now I'm typing from the loading dock at the rear of the UC building, just feet away from the spill of plates from the open bags. "Resolve pedagogical facility nomenclatures" even when the flesh meets, no union is possible, though assumed. union is NOT necessary for community; a good thing, it being ImPossible and all. at Present Levels of Technology, mind you. i am no Dogmatist. i am a Catmatist. AT Present Levels of Technology, Union is ImPossible, even with self. by Technology i signify more than you think. words are technology. words may well be THE technology of the human race, but LogoTek will not bring Union. it will bring us infinitely close, however; it will bring us to the brink at which we will stand and over which we will gaze and upon which we will deCIDE. {it was a clear infringement of copyright} Am I going to be a father someday? Probably. Will I be like the man walking away from me with his family? He's eating an ice-cream cone, dragging a Lab (only really a pup) by a leash. His wife pushes a stroller behind him and their two other kids, maybe four or five years old, run ahead on the sidewalks. They're a "functional" family. They're doing things together. Maybe I'm reaching, but I think that they even love each other. "Accelerate ad-hoc application attitudes" Well, how accurate is the past now in modeling this future? Decisions, abilities, and values are changing faster than they have in the past-- like a rainstorm growing more and more fierce across the pool of future-models, changes like raindrops pummelling the stability of past norms. Can I be sure my vision is true? Will I rise with the tide of change or be dashed upon the inexorable rocks of alienation? Will this complex, chaotic system of interplay and collision of every little factor introduced by every little thing out there in the big angry world even come close to the futures given me by my neural crystal ball? Maybe I should go see my academic advisor. {it was reading} >the first step was to get it all down on paper. >assemble his thoughts in the most resonant -- or at >least the most unmanageable -- form possible. this >is exactly what he did. working from notebooks, >tape-recordings, random musings, he set out to >spew words -- on himself, on his life, on his >surroundings, on his fears, on his most and least >favorite topics and any others that would come to >mind. he wrote and wrote and wrote. some of it >made it into vaguely research-like form, most of it >sat in clumps on scraps and scatterings everywhere. >the tricky bit was: well, it was the saving grace. >human mind; the great pattern creator. throw a >jumbled mess of prose or a random squall of electron- >debris in front of a human brain and it will be >bound and determined to Make Some Sense of It All. >whether there is any there to begin with is a moot >question. and so it was that the many chunks of >text which were scrytched back and forth in those >early later days were assembled and glommed, re- >arranged and shimmied up to a lower and slower level >of simple order. Snodgrass goes with Lederhosen >because My Good Reader NEEDS it to, lest empires >crumble. we cope. "the other thing to remember is that little bitty quotes, pieces of text which were worthless in other contexts, might spark new life and some sort of *POYT!* once grafted into the flux of a random meandering. and everyone would miss it. and everyone would miss it. and no-one who read this text, as an example, would think to see it in the first place; it would be so utterly un-expected that it would simply pass right under radar As It Were, It would barely be sub-vocalized -- the implications astound and alarm." "WHY?! WHY WHY WHY keep it going?! i'm not at all sure yet, but i'm pretty sure at this point that the very gnotion gives me the willies. in the nicest possible way, of course of course." "undisclaimers: yes, mine, all mine. even blatent mistaking of the Point {dont worry, i'll give it back}, floppy attempts at humor in the wrong places, inapropriate appropriations, etc., and etctrs. sincere apologies for private jokes which nobody got, not even me, lack of forethought in public scrytching, meaningless drivel, amplification of personality bugs, and profuse apologizing." >then, inevitably, it all fell apart. narrative- >wise, that is. {humility has little to do with this place, but what little it does i will die attempting to preserve and to nurture} "give me rum, and cigars... yams too, and i will write. i will write things that you never thought to see on the screen. things of dream. and so, no matter the temperature, there is a flow of stuff... and not all of it is pretty. stepping on glass to make a point." {down here and below, there is no light, but there is a floating descent which can be seen in the pupil of the sky} "a string of words... all of them floating, yelling: they have things to say. "hey!" they say, or "psssst!" but i cannot afford to listen too closely; any siren song is too much. i have something else in mind: a single word. but it can only be pointed at by the local lingo, and the non-local lingo is aeons away..." {the scrytch spoke of an endless iteration, an adaptation to the circumstances of living} "scrytch is a treehouse sacred to Legba. it too inhabits a crossroads between reason and instinct. scrytch cannot be explained, it must be occupied." {there will be life after all death has faded into the tremors of the cosmos}