Thought Experiment 1 (sans WC)

Words, words, words (to quote a famous Danish prince).

Words, Intrusions, and Parasites.

This work is a manifesto of intrusion, because declaring my ideas boldly is decidedly uncomfortable. Since it is easier to challenge a work which has been laid out in clear-cut conception, I hope that others will take the opportunity to edit the ideas I'm outlining below.

First, words can be parasites. This may sound incredibly self-evident, but the word can is what requires emphasis and examination. Second, intrusion (interruption, thought, pure idea) is positive, and not only positive, it is necessary. I mean to explore these ideas through examining the vast pool of interruptions that have niggled into my brain over the last few weeks, Austin, Nancy, and the writings/lectures of Susan Blackmore. I'm also fairly certain that the influence of the Tomcat Murr is lurking somewhere in the sooty stove of my mind, ready to interrupt my own interruptive musings at moments notice.

Words can be parasites. All words have the potential to be parasites, because as conveyors of IDEA they are ways in which we infect others with our basic thoughts, our world-views, even our lies and mistakes. When we phrase an idea we force it into the guidelines of the tool of language, and in doing so we create an impact on the recipient. But do all words live up to that potential? It's a tricky subject to judge, as what constitutes effective parasitism is a rather slippery and elusive thing to come to consensus on. Since I believe words have much more of a chance to be parasitic in nature than not, perhaps the best place to start is looking at what words wouldn't be parasitic. In many ways the value of words seems to be the impact they have, no doubt why certain phrases are recorded and, irritatingly, quoted on a semi-daily basis as clichéd aphorisms.

Several problems exist here, however, despite the fact that these phrases stem from the very value of words themselves. Once words have become clichés, they lose their meaning beyond the very first exposure of the recipient to them. Phrases come to replace thought, and when that happens there is no thought being transmitted, only words, words, words. There is no infection happening, the host has already been infected long ago, and no longer can be influenced by the fact that the speaker has “let the cat out of the bag,” or finally placed the “straw that broke the camel's back.“ Memetically, words lose a lot of their power to infest. If the common cold always attacked our bodies with the same makeup, our bodies would remain unphased (as well as unchallenged). Likewise, words must attempt to convey real thought, new thought, any thought at all, or else we as infecter waste our words, and our parasites die with us.

That said, memetic intrusion is one of the most prevalent in society. We are all the products of our environment, whether or not you side with Nature or Nurture philosophically, it's impossible to ignore the fact that we are the products of the books we read, the conversations we take part in, the movies we watch, the ads that surround us, the people we let in and get close to, even the graffiti that we cannot help but read, cannot help but become infected by. Our minds are perfect hosts because they are, in a sense, sticky, and all passing stimuli collects and infects in one way or another. It's hard to delve into memetics without bringing up the work of Susan Blackmore, and her work will be talked about at greater depth later, but I think it necessary to rebuke her conclusions of memetics at this point. In her essay The Evolution of Meme Mechanics, she claims that “we are meme machines, created by and for the selfish replicators,” and that it's possible to “drop the idea of an inner self” completely. This makes some sense, given the huge impact of memes on all aspects of our lives, but while memes build up momentum I believe that they all require an origin, and are limited by the fact that, as old thought, they degrade in their ability to infect and generate new thought. If Blackmore wants to suggest that memes are the totality of our selves, then she begs the question of what the difference is between memes and ideas. If one and the same, why call them memes? If not, what room is there for ideas generated by the self?

Intrusions are positive. Parasitism and intrusions both have an incredibly bad reputation as words, and by extension as ideas. While parasitism is by definition detrimental to the host, at least scientifically, (and by no means does that need to impact our concept of parasites for an English class) intrusions are, I think, uniformally positive where words and thought are concerned. In The Intruder, Jean-Luc Nancy's introduction invaded my mind and planted the idea for this whole thought experiment. He starts out quite simply: “ The intruder makes his way in by force, surprise, or cunning, in any case without any right to do so and without invitation. There must be an element of the intruder in the stranger, otherwise he loses his strangeness.” I was surprised to find that, try as I might, I could not now unread or unthink those words. They made an impact on my mind for their eloquent simplicity, and the more I thought about it the more connections started to get made. Words were the ultimate intruders, as Nancy so deftly proved. They were not simply parasites, jumping from host to host and altering thoughts and behavior. Instead, words were intruders by the benefit of their strangeness, their incomprehensible other-ness; as wonderfully complex as language is in conveying ideas, it can never make up for the loss in translation which occurs from host to host. Like we discussed in class, until telepathy, or mind melding, there will always be the need for a “jk” or a repetitive E. Nancy goes further in saying that:

Once he is in, if he remains a stranger, and for all the time he remains, instead of “naturalizing himself”, his arrival does not cease: he continues to come and he never stops being an intrusion; he continues to be without right and familiarity and habits, but he remains a disturbance, a turbulence amidst the intimacy.

What a perfect description of the foreign idea, the complex question, the difficult issue. Nancy has summed up the intrusive idea spectacularly, as a stranger which the host cannot find comfort with yet, out of an inability to understand or connect with it, but which nonetheless obsesses the mind. These ideas exist as constant disturbance, “amidst the intimacy.” Parasitism, interruptions, things you can do with words, these are all vast, complex subjects that we as a class, we as people, could never grasp through normal lecture or conjecture. Rather, once introduced, with Tony or Nanotext or whichever moniker was used, they arrive like strangers to us and never cease to arrive, at every new reading, every instance of example. Like _stephen said on Plurk, he was “beginning to see parasitism everywhere” (http://www.plurk.com/p/3addk0). Plurk, googlewave, blogspot, and the various readings we have done are all designed to familiarize us with the stranger who disturbs us always from the back of our minds. And so, as a class, we struggle with familiarizing ourselves with the otherness around us.

Susan Blackmore's equation is applicable at this point: “any information that is varied and selected can bring design.” This seems to suggest that all information, however varied and new, will eventually become memetic, will eventually cease to be varied and new, and will instead become a part of the larger body of thought called the common. While this may seem rather fatalistic, it's a hardcoded aspect of evolution; we as humans must evolve to survive as well, and thus our best ideas must evolve and improve to keep us from stagnation, or worse, ruin. So information exchange, in it's highest form, can only be intrusive, parasitic, interrupting. If ones words are NOT intrusions, NOT parasites, then one has failed to make an impact. Failed to create, inspire, or force new thought. It's clear, then, that if you go away from this experiment without having been infected by my words, that I have failed; in fact failed quite literally, as the grading rubric is designed to give low marks to a student who doesn't “engage in the production of knowledge.” And what is the production of knowledge but an interruption on the status quo, whether on a larger intellectual scale or simply on a personal level.

Intrusions are necessary. What does not intrude is not a stranger. And what is not a stranger is not strange. And what is not strange is familiar. What is familiar is safe. And what is safe is of no consequence to anyone.

Parasite Blog 3: on CATullus

As we've gotten further into The Tomcat Murr (abv.) as a class, I've been sensing a lot of hostility towards our furry narrator, in conversation and frustrated plurk updates. I think Danny may have put it best in a facebook update: "He's a cat, pompous and full of himself." That more or less seems to be the complaint against him, and I think it bears some discussion (admittedly one sided seeing as this is a blog post). First off, I won't argue he isn't overbearingly arrogant at times- a Philistine, self-centered, egomaniac, what have you. But perhaps he deserves some recognition. After all, if he truley wrote this biography, as a cat, that would make him somewhat special. That's not to say I think he's a genius, as this novel has shown that all cats are not only sentient but equally cultured and intelligent as homo sapiens (or if you believe Murr, smarter). Murr seems to be stuck between two opposing beliefs- if he is to be a genius he must be a more educated, poetic, emotional, and interesting cat than not only other cats but also humans, his inspiration. Simultaneously he holds it to be self-evident that cats have the potential to do greater things than humans, as evidenced by lines like "how superior is my own kind to Homo sapiens." It doesn't get much more obvious than that... but Murr both idealizes and romanticizes humans while scorning them as lesser to himself. As he sets out to be a pioneer for feline intellectualism, he fails to recognize how much he borrows from the gaints he is riding on. Hoffmann, however, is quick to make the absurdity of a self-titled genius cat-scholar abundetly clear. For one, all of Murrs pretention and intellectualism (and he is hardly stupid) is useless when he is forced to deal with his innate cat-ness. His size and status as a cat means he has to study in secret. Lost in the city, Murr is forced to hide and steal food to survive. In one of my favorite scenes, Murr, Kitty, and Mazius are singing an (in his mind) unparalleled rendition of "My Love, Shall I see you no more," and right when you almost forget that these are cats you get a harsh (and realistic) interjection of "Can't those bloody cats pipe down?"
The juxtaposition of Murr's narration of the event to the image of a bunch of cats screaching and meowing is hilarious, but also rather poignant- as a cat, Murr's ability to impact the pool of genius which he draws from is limited, and a genius who makes no mark on the world is a talent wasted (this would seem to be Murr's opinion anyway).
Murr reveals his arrogance in one more interesting way which I want to discuss. Our Tomcat is a Fur-vent namedropper, in the rather irritating way in which (to be horribly stereotypical) hipsters introduce their latest super indie find not so much to talk about the band but to claim superiority for having found it. Murr, for example, makes constant reference to Greek and Latin myth, Shakespeare, and contemporary German writers, but rarely in a context where it contributes to his point, or any point other than to have hinted at obscurity. While some writers demand a lot from their audience, Murr has admitted, thrugh his supressed forward, that he is writing this book for young Tomcats, or for his audience to admire him. References like Goethe, Kotzuebue, and Tieck all feels like namedropping intended to go over the heads of his readers for the sake of inflating his own image as a scholar. This ego-centric abuse of literature draws a lot of credibility away from his own claims at literary intellectualism. Murr deserves sympathy despite his bloated ego: he is a cat who raised himself a human, and all of his human knowledge and insight can't help him understand what it truly means to be a cat. Nor can he ever be a man. As Danny so perfectly put it: "He's a cat, pompous and full of himself." For that I pity him, and read his every word with fascination.


This is part one of my musings on Murr's nature, if you were wondering what the title referred to. It's uh...it's pretty obscure so I doubt you've ever heard of it.

Parasites Blog 2: On truth.

In class last Friday we briefly touched on the idea that narrators are not necessarily trustworthy. Either by design or by the simple truth that all narration is bound to be biased as soon as it entered the narrators brain, we're always seeing a story presented to us. Sometimes the book is presented as a clearly biased work- first person narrative is obviously going to be a result of the created characters bias, with the authors bias on top of that. Third person similarly shows the authors influence. Autobiographical novels, even as non-fiction, are works of imagination and biased memory- no one can write a story of their life without consciously or unconsciously attempting to change or skew facts. A novel such as that, without bias, would simply be a long list of events and descriptions. Incredibly boring. Perhaps an accountant would read it, everyone else would no doubt rather read the latest Twilight novel.
So if all narration is biased, what, I wonder, is more offensive to us as readers? A clear bias or a hidden one? I'm inclined to say most people would prefer a direct and obvious bias, as the later makes us feel like the author is trying to pull something on us.

This is a blg in progress. Also, my O key is sticking.

Parasites Blog: On Interruptions

Just to be absolutely deplorable, I'd like to start this blog by including the definition for an "interruption" as found in some free (and absolutely dependable) online dictionary.

1. To break the continuity or uniformity of.

2. To hinder or stop the action or discourse of (someone) by breaking in on.

Now, I've never really thought about interruptions much prior to discussion of them in Parasites, especially not in a positive light. I always considered interruptions to only be sources of annoyance: a friend cutting you off in mid-sentence, a cell phone going off in the middle of a movie, remembering that you have work to do right when you're finally relaxed and de-stressing, etc. And to me action, by contrast, is willful, planned, and generally positive in association. However, the more I think about it, the more action becomes a useless concept. For every action to come into the realm of reality, for it's praxis, it must interupt another action already in...well, in action. But if every action is an interruption, then every interruption, by extension, is interrupting an interrupt.

Life is sorta like this

Ok, perhaps not. I rarely tap any islands before considering my next interruption. Regardless, from birth, the course of our lives seems like a constant stream of interruptions. For instance my stream of thought is constantly interrupted by a friend texting me as I try to type this. Each interruption of hers is interrupted by the fact that I restart my blogging efforts. No one action is isolated, and since most actions can't run simultaneously...well I'm slaying the slain by this point I'm sure you get where I'm going with this.
Ok, now to truly blog. By which I mean things are about to get rather messy in my brain.
So what does this interruption-chain concept mean? To be perfectly honest I'm not sure. I don't think a lack of action, as opposed to interruption, inplies anything like predetermination or fatalism. If anything it would more closely resemble determinism, the view that all thoughts and actions are determined by the thoughts and actions preceding them in an unbroken chain of causality. I don't really think that a shift from considering actions and thoughts to one of chains of interruptions really supports determinism, but it is interesting to see how they both handle the idea that one event seemlessly leads to another in a way that is largely outside of our control, even if we are so used to interruptions that they feel like free will. After all, if you ignore determinist theory for a second, it's clear that interruptions allow for more freedom. For example, if somone walks in late to a class, the professor and the student have options as far as the parameters of the interruption go. The professor could call him out on it, or ignore him and continue lecturing. Likewise the student could try to sneak in quietly or swagger in with bravado (cell phone ringing, perhaps?). And of course the class is an interruption on both of their lives outside of the class, just as the rest of their lives is an interruption on the time they spend in class. And that concept was an interruption to my larger argument which I've now more or less gone off track of.

I guess my point is that I've come to accept that interruptions are not only important, they are practically everything. And that this paradigm shift has, thus far, not shifted very much... So consider this blog post a very tentative step in the deeper understanding of the nature of interaction.

In the mean time, the Tomcat Murr calls for an uninterupted reading sesh.

Art of Life

A Youtube Poem


The world Is Our
Raison D'etre
I swallowed hard, like I understood.
So long, lonesome
Unspoiled Monster

They Move On Tracks Of Never Ending Light
Arriving somewhere but not here
Where am I?
The sky remains the same as ever
When everything dies

Do
The quiet things that no one ever knows
Fireflies and empty skies
The end of the beginning
The art of dying

Don't save us from the flames
Set fire to flames
There Are Some Remedies Worse Than The Disease
Birthday Resistance
Forever Lost

The remains of the day
Gone
The way of all flesh

http://www.plurk.com/p/3cyjao

_____________________________________________

Ok. So I have no idea if I followed convention, or even if there are conventions, but I like what my efforts have resulted in so I have to say I like this medium of expression as well.

My first intent with this poem was to create not only a poem (since I could do that through simple plagiarism of song titles) but also a playlist. A good, nay great playlist, one that followed the pacing of the poem and contributed rather than accompanied the poem as a whole. It would take more hubris than I have in my body to say I successfully accomplished this, but for a first effort I think it turned out pretty good.

Post-rock and experimental/progressive rock have always fascinated me, and I knew from the second I heard "youtube poem" that I wanted to incorperate them into the project somehow. It turned out that certain of these bands formed the core sound for this poem: God is an Astronaut, World's End Girlfriend, Mono, and All that Remains, all unique in their own right but similarly dreamy and beautiful. Bands like these always evoke in me feelings of isolation amongst beauty, one human being struggling to describe the astonishing phenominom that is life around them. From birth to death this music is all of us, trying to make sense of the world.

In a sense then this poem runs from birth to death, perhaps it seems to short to do this on paper but if you listen to the entire poem as one long playlist, well perhaps not. To help structure the poem better in accordance to this theme, I included songs that were not in the same genre field as the post/experimental rock instrumentals. Screams, static, temporary lapses into silence, all of these elements are favored heavily by Mutyumu and World's End, Mutyumu is especially fond of counter playing beautiful piano and vocals with screams and harsh techno breaks. Their song near the beginning, Raison D'etre, is birth (markedly not the first line) for this reason, both beautiful and violent. The poem plays on in a dreamscape until it hits Porcupine Tree's "Arriving somewhere but not here," which represents the first instance we recognize our mortality, and our transient nature in the world. Brand New's The Quiet Things is a shift into youthful aggression and frustration, continuing to grow but feeling directionless.

The instrumentals become heavier at this point, eventually building up to a lengthy metal song by Gojira called The Art of Dying. At this point the "life" in this poem has begun to decay, this person specifically or all of us as a species must switch over from the art of life into the art of dying, a (especially if you listen to the song) remarkably violent process. Although only 7 lines remain in the poem at this point, everything following the switch to the art of dying represents adulthood. The music slows, darkens, but is now, in my opinion, the most beautiful in the entire piece. Birthday resistance encompasses the struggle to come to peace with death, starting timidly, crescendo-ing with violence and anger, ending with strength. Forever lost is the euphoria, and the lift away, and then the nothing.

The last three lines are merely an echo of the poem as a whole, two parts beauty and one part violence and decay. Life, to me, is violent and beautiful, and neither is diminished by the others interruption into it's domain. Our minds struggle through our whole lives to make the decay around us into something beautiful (post-rock), to turn the final violence, that of death, into peace. But death is violent. Even understanding death is violent. For that reason I included two concepts of death, the first of Forever Lost is the acceptance of the concept. The Way of All Flesh is experiencing it. If you listen to enough death metal, even the growling and the heavy guitars become soothing. I would go so far as to say that Gojira makes beautiful music. Feel free to disagree.

Anyway, the tl;dr idea here is that we exist as a result of violent beauty/beautiful violence, and the music that spawned the words for this poem (hopefully) will blend together to convey that in this youtube poem.

P.S. even if you think the way I arranged this poem is bad, do not do yourself the disservice of passing up the music. Most of it is truly amazing imho.