Left-Eyed Visions

The Unrepressed Dream... ;-)

...in search of the imaginary cause/ meaning.

Plato, "Meno"

SOCRATES: You would not wonder if you had ever observed the images of Daedalus (Compare Euthyphro); but perhaps you have not got them in your country?

MENO: What have they to do with the question?

SOCRATES: Because they require to be fastened in order to keep them, and if they are not fastened they will play truant and run away.

MENO: Well, what of that?

SOCRATES: I mean to say that they are not very valuable possessions if they are at liberty, for they will walk off like runaway slaves; but when fastened, they are of great value, for they are really beautiful works of art. Now this is an illustration of the nature of true opinions: while they abide with us they are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out of the human soul, and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of much value until they are fastened by the tie of the cause; and this fastening of them, friend Meno, is recollection, as you and I have agreed to call it. But when they are bound, in the first place, they have the nature of knowledge; and, in the second place, they are abiding. And this is why knowledge is more honourable and excellent than true opinion, because fastened by a chain.

MENO: What you are saying, Socrates, seems to be very like the truth.

SOCRATES: I too speak rather in ignorance; I only conjecture. And yet that knowledge differs from true opinion is no matter of conjecture with me. There are not many things which I profess to know, but this is most certainly one of them.

MENO: Yes, Socrates; and you are quite right in saying so.

SOCRATES: And am I not also right in saying that true opinion leading the way perfects action quite as well as knowledge?

MENO: There again, Socrates, I think you are right.

SOCRATES: Then right opinion is not a whit inferior to knowledge, or less useful in action; nor is the man who has right opinion inferior to him who has knowledge?

MENO: True.

Devil's Advocate

Hitting closer to home.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges!

...and Lou Reed's "wilder" flip side

Washing Up on the Shores of the Subconscious

...and building over the ruins.

Mortal Engine

...openned "drawers"

Shooting up the G.O.P.

from the Baltimore Sun

A gunshot fired early this morning shattered the glass door of a Maryland Republican Party field office on the Eastern Shore.

The Salisbury police discovered the vandalism after midnight and are investigating. No motive has been established, but Lt. Rob Kemp of the Salisbury police said the shot was likely "random."

"It just looks like somebody took a random shot. It wasn't multiple rounds or anything," he said. The single round was located in the office lobby but with no witnesses, Kemp said, it's not clear how much more investigating police can do.

State Party Chairwoman Audrey Scott called the incident "very disturbing."

“No motive has been established but whatever the reason may be it is very troubling that someone would do this to our volunteer field office,” Scott said in a statement.

The Salisbury office -- part of the GOP's national "Victory Campaign" -- is in a former Hollywood Video store.

Pound for Pound

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass --Ezra Pound

Happy 1st Day!

4 the Birds

...+1 4 all u ski surfers.

Coeus' New Medium

Aristophanes, "The Birds"

PISTHETAERUS Ha! I am beginning to see a great plan, which will transfer the supreme power to the birds, if you will but take my advice.

EPOPS Take your advice? In what way?

PISTHETAERUS In what way? Well, firstly, do not fly in all directions with open beak; it is not dignified. Among us, when we see a thoughtless man, we ask, "What sort of bird is this?" and Teleas answers, "'Tis a man who has no brain, a bird that has lost his head, a creature you cannot catch, for it never remains in any one place."

EPOPS By Zeus himself! your jest hits the mark. What then is to be done?

PISTHETAERUS Found a city.

EPOPS We birds? But what sort of city should we build?

PISTHETAERUS Oh, really, really! 'tis spoken like a fool! Look down.

EPOPS I am looking.

PISTHETAERUS Now look upwards.

EPOPS I am looking.

PISTHETAERUS Turn your head round.

EPOPS Ah! 'twill be pleasant for me, if I end in twisting my neck!

PISTHETAERUS What have you seen?

EPOPS The clouds and the sky.

PISTHETAERUS Very well! is not this the pole of the birds then?

EPOPS How their pole?

PISTHETAERUS Or, if you like it, the land. And since it turns and passes through the whole universe, it is called, 'pole.' If you build and fortify it, you will turn your pole into a fortified city. In this way you will reign over mankind as you do over the grasshoppers and cause the gods to die of rabid hunger.

EPOPS How so?

PISTHETAERUS The air is 'twixt earth and heaven. When we want to go to Delphi, we ask the Boeotians for leave of passage; in the same way, when men sacrifice to the gods, unless the latter pay you tribute, you exercise the right of every nation towards strangers and don't allow the smoke of the sacrifices to pass through your city and territory.

EPOPS By earth! by snares! by network! I never heard of anything more cleverly conceived; and, if the other birds approve, I am going to build the city along with you.

The Technik Assuring Future Vortical Oblivion

Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"

What were you thinking of, overweening Euripides, when you hoped to press myth, then in its last agony, into your service? It died under your violent hands; but you could easily put in its place an imitation that, like Heracles' monkey, would trick itself out in the master's robes. And even as myth, music too died under your hands; though you plundered greedily all the gardens of music, you could achieve no more than a counterfeit. And because you had deserted Dionysus, you were in turn deserted by Apollo. Though you hunted all the passions up from their couch and conjured them into your circle, though you pointed and burnished a sophistic dialectic for the speeches of your heroes, they have only counterfeit passions and speak counterfeit speeches.

Is the internet all about perpetuating "counterfeit" emotions, much like television and MSM media, so as to distract us from the possibility of contemplating lives "better" spent, not simply as the "consumers" of Hollywood produced faux Euripidean emotionality?

Vortical Symbiotes

Peering Out from the Vortex

Reflection, that is, explicit Self-Consciousness, is arrived at when one internalizes an image of how one appears to others in general, that is, one self-objectifies, or, as Sartre puts it, one 'assumes' one's 'Being-for-Others'. In the Evolvemental scheme, this is the achievement of the awareness of one's particularity qua particularity, namely the emergence of one's Individuality.

Cogitating Asymmetries

Wyndham Lewis, "Inferno" (1937)

Sucked Into the Vortex

“I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.”
---
“With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping ''homeliness'' entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all ''sentiment'' is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called ''the Public',' the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.”
---
“Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a ''revolutionary'' review, or read a ''revolutionary'' speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly ''revolutionary'.' What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!”
---
“Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman, as a respecter of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.”

--Wyndham Lewis

Seeding the Vortex

Hesiod, "Theogony"

Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bare deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.

Can You Hear It?

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." --Friedrich Nietzsche

Either Take Control, or Shut Up and Enjoy the Ride

Nietzschean Will to Power through the Eyes of Absurdism:Absurdism through Nietzsche's Eyes:And now I will tell a fable for princes who themselves understand. Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck, while he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his talons, and she, pierced by his crooked talons, cried pitifully. To her he spoke disdainfully: `Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.' So said the swiftly flying hawk, the long- winged bird. --Hesiod, "Works and Days"

Nobody listens to music in order to reach the end of the song.

"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." -- Sir Winston Churchill

Retrospective on Feminine Posing

Traditional...versus the Modern

DuChamp's Large Glass

Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase. The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"

Man with a Gun - Jerry Harrison

A pretty girl, a pretty girl
Can walk anywhere
All doors open for her
Like a breath of fresh air,
Her beauty, it precedes her
Wrapped in her beauty,
Everywhere, she is welcome
First class on the plane,
Closed door of the club,
All faces turn, all faces turn
And they come alive,
With a desire to protect her
Nothing can interfere
With a dream of dreams so near
And when she caught my eye,
We were those for whom
The rules do not apply.

Chorus:

Pretty girl young man old man
Man with a gun
Two people in love (Two people in love)
The rules do not apply
To people in love
Pretty girl young man old man
Man with a gun
Two people in love (Two people in love)
The rules do not apply
To people in love

On a wire, a high wire
She likes to balance on a knife
She says on the wire,
That is living, oh,
You can forget the rest
On the wire, that is living,
Each step must be in place
So don't look down,
One false move is all it takes.
We'd rather risk it all;
Roll the dice and let them fall
They say we can't survive
But a life like this keeps me alive
Doesn't matter where we are,
I still say the rules do not apply

Power Posing

Why we pose. - The world is Will to Power...

"Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." --Saul Alinsky

----

"Attiring: gymnastic:: cookery: medicine:: sophistic: legislation.

And,

Cookery: medicine:: rhetoric: the art of justice." --Plato, "Gorgias"

----

"What determines your rank is the quantum of power you are: the rest is cowardice." --Nietzsche, WtP 858 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

----

"I do not know Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;' Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do't." --Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

----

Nietzsche to Alinsky - "What? You seek followers? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred, by a thousand? Seek zeroes!" 1,000 x 0 = 0. Nihilism in action.

Posing for Pictures

Longing to see and be seen...

Blending In...

... the authentic Mr. Cellophane blends paranoiacally in.

Knowledge Quest

Ambivalence...

...is not carelessness.

Dionysius, Where Are You?