haiku pass the time unsure what therapy brings afternoon wasted the storm has broken sun makes unshaded eyes squint Ricola lozenge Clippers play the Mavs tonight, which is a Tuesday. rooting for Luka
On The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
in an attempt to keep better track of the things I read this year, I’ll be writing, however much I feel like, about each of the things I read this year. the first book I finished was VALIS by PKD, which I briefly posted about a few days ago. then, in the days after finishing it, I had what can only be referred to as a kind of “episode” that made the nervous breakdown PKD describes in the novel seem a little too real. not that the book itself precipitated a psychotic break or anything, nor would I call what happened to me such; all of my intellectual efforts to that point were aimed at attaining a megalomaniacal ability to organize fringe ideas and esoterica into a coherent perception of history, time, and language, so as to structure my fiction writing efforts around evincing the paranoid worldview in its myriad iterations while simultaneously saying something “true” about psychology, humanity, art, technology, politics, economics, trauma, and so on. easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?
today I wrapped up a personal favorite of PKD’s, Julian Jaynes’s watershed classic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. the copy I owned has sat on my shelf for I don’t even know how long at this point, and, ironically, once I picked it up, I tore through it in only about a week and half. having owned the thing, I obviously was aware of the basic thesis Jaynes puts forth, but in case my faithful readers are not, it’s a fairly straightforward idea with extremely profound implications: only a few millennia ago, humans did not possess “consciousness” as we do today, but instead, when conditioned habit could not adequately address a novel situation, they were commanded by hallucinated voices. these voices are where we got the idea that there are gods governing the world. “consciousness” arose in the centuries when the authority of these voices was undermined by population growth, increased cultural interchange, and mass migrations.
I’m not going to outline the case Jaynes makes here, as that would amount to me rewriting the book, something I do not care to do. what I will say is that, even if Jaynes isn’t entirely “right,” or if there are bits of the book that strain credulity, the overwhelming feeling I got from reading this work was of having found a puzzle piece I’ve been desperately searching for. the peculiar evolution of Greek and Hebrew philosophy, the drastically varying senses of human psychology presented by different historical eras, the idea that language is founded on perception-altering metaphor, the role of the Muses in artistic creation, the archaic power of poetry, all these and more are brilliantly elucidated through the lens of Jaynes’s theory. this & David Graeber’s Debt are easily the two works I most recently read that fundamentally shifted my conception of the world.
anyway, I’m taking a little break from marijuana because my fundamental conception of the world seems to be pretty easily shifted, and also neo-Jungian depth therapy is proving to be one hell of a drug on its own.
the Empire? you say it never ended?
I’m rereading VALIS by Philip K. Dick, and the analogy I’ve landed on is that mids weed is to psilocybin as PKD is to Pynchon.
maybe I ought to write more about this, and about literature generally, like essays and criticism or whatever. I dunno tho I kind of hate my literary critic voice, plus I’m too lazy to dwell long enough on any one work or author to say anything interesting. but also it would benefit me to work out my own opinions on my influences. hmm
what I really ought to do is yell at Adam for abandoning Story Time.
Sir James Frazer on Christmas
two quotes on writing
A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts… The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. – The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schoepenhauer
Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter
Revelation 1:19
after Rupi Kaur
when you are broken and she has left you do not question whether you were enough the problem was she didn't realize she could save 15% or more on car insurance
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she grips him with her fingers like she's sanding the skin off a cucumber
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of course i want to be famous but i don't crave fame for me i need to be famous to gain enough weed and pussy to never write or read poems ever again
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you must have known you were wrong when your hand was wrapped around me squeezing for cream that would not come for you
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clown on bullshit artists all you want but who's a New York Times bestselling poet? - not you
Mary Oliver on the poet’s ambitions
Various ambitions—to complete a poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone’s comment about it—serve in some measure as incentives to the writer’s work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to that other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, or Yeats, or Williams—or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet’s ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation.
Mary Oliver
early thoughts on Neon Genesis Evangelion
about halfway through the second episode it occurred to me just how few fucks the creators of this show give. absolutely none of the plot makes sense, probably on purpose as satire on the absurdity of shonen mecha shows. like, it has to be a joke that Shinji has zero experience at all and yet this shadowy multinational intelligence agency trusts him to be the first line of defense against supernatural apocalyptic destruction, right? as a non-weeb English-speaking anime naïf, I can only assume as much.
props also to the writers for blowing past the niceties of explication in favor of throwing the audience into the action without any clarification or orientation. about ten episodes in now and I barely know what’s going on beyond sweet vibes, Kabbalistic diagrams, “boom anime babes,” and everyone seeming very sad.