Many years ago, I had a blog called Decadence Devoured, in which I talked about stuff that happened to me and people I hated and the dumb bullshit on my mind as I arrived as a transfer student at Brown University. Years after that, I remember two blogs, a briefly attempted blog called Pasadena Moon, which was a short spurt of philosophical ranting about my artistic process while I lived in Pasadena after graduating. Then after moving home from Pasadena, back to Delaware, maybe the most I'd ever blogged was on Island Fog, which was a lot of music analysis and reviews, and then some essays about movies and video games. I remember some pretty interesting work on Bitches Brew, Rosemary's Baby, and GTA Vice City. Maybe some connection between those three landmarks.
Oh, which landmarks? Three blogs or three signets of vice. The three-in-one is the nature of God and Epson Printers. I have had a revelation, which is really not much of revelation, it's more like the last resort of the first resort, and I've been, with some success, applying this thinking to many things in my life. As an intellectually ambitious, or just neurotic, person, I tend to always feature progress and transformation, becoming, and not without reason. For a while when I was young I was really "becoming," things were opening up, things I didn't realize were true about myself were coming true and truly realized. You kept walking down a road, and the road kept turning, and the world seemed like a partially horrible, partially interesting place, where there was always something new to explore to anesthetize the ubiquity of intentional mediocrity and cruelty, and unintentional stupidity.
Something new to explore that challenged who you think you were, too! In that happy and exciting way that made you feel like the tip of the iceberg never became the iceberg, and as you were challenged and awakened you felt pretty good about yourself, because you were noticing all this stuff and some people never saw it in the first place. I suppose the biggest symbol of this phase of my life is The Residents, who changed my thinking and aesthetic sense, in own fell swoop, more than anything I ever encountered before or since. I was working on a lot of music under the influence of their work, and taking LSD, and taking LSD and working on music, and one very memorable experience of doing so created an album in two acid-trips, in two days, called Pretentious Double Album.
The first disc, and the first acid trip, was called Delusional Adam in the Garden of Irrelevance. And it was this jam, basically, with bass, guitar, and piano performances that were all pitch-shifted, and pitch-shifted with a program that didn't do it too well and so created a pitch-shifted version of the audio that was a different duration, a bit slower or faster, whatever. And I did total stereo separation on each performance and its pitch-shifted version, and each instrument was pitch-shifted with a different tonal relationship, and as the 45 minute running time of the performance went on, you heard the timing go off-kilter. Underneath these three performances, doubled tonally, was a super-slow drumbeat I made in Fruity Loops, which was played at such a slow BPM it didn't sound like a drum beat but just a waveform spurting noise. There was a crash of cymbals maybe, in there, you could sort of tell was a cymbal. Just so you get the idea. And then on top of this trippy performance, I said the words "I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong," over and over and over, in different ways, in different articulations, stylized, sad, dramatic, et cetera.
The project originated from the onset of the LSD in which I was sitting in the backyard facing nature, and then I looked back at the house, and I felt the beauty and complexity of nature, and the delusion of civilization, and my own delusion. I felt we all lived inside of dramas, myself included, and nature was complex and drama-free, irrelevance. Every melodrama I could generate would just dissipate eventually, and yet I would still head back to my computer, and start designing my melodramas, staring at my Narcissus reflection, becoming lost in dreams. That was the intense realization of what nature really said to our designs, our designs showing preconception, which to me was the great evil, or put less melodramatically, the great insanity of human nature. We say, or philosophers do, on the one hand that our perceptions create our realities, and we live in a constructed reality and we bear witness to a natural world that is more complicated and strange than anything we are capable of inventing. So that's either bullshit, or we create natural reality and somehow like to create ourselves as idiots standing within it, telling ourselves stories and believing other idiots' stories. The only way that could be true is if we were modest demiurges, or conceited demiurges. There is nothing in our imagination, our dreams, our thoughts that shows us to be capable of inventing the world. Another dreamer may dream we ourselves, and our world, but I can't access that: that's irrelevant. You'll have to forgive me for this paragraph: Kant and Schopenhauer are on my mind after some reading of The World as Will and Representation, so I'm plugging their phenomenological doubt in with my remembrance of this acid trip. Pure perception is only creative in the sense of its choice of representations to look upon. The house, or the backyard.
"I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong." Delusional Adam, indeed--what a dud that mystical proclamation turned out to be. If only that drama was correct! Life would continue to be far more interesting than it is, as interesting as it seemed then, when all nature seemed to be a "preconception violation." Of course, that comes to be a preconception in itself, and so you violate that and then you're back in the bourgeois generosity to preconceptions. You follow that doctrine of "becoming" and it comes to move against "becoming," and you're left with "being." But true to form, "I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong" was a preconception that was violated, maybe the core of what preconception is, the preconception of transcendence. I was, for some time, the soul who learned how he was wrong, and who he really was, and then I became the soul who was forgetting who they were in experimenting with things that were interesting, though repressive, and then finally the soul who was just being torturously repressed, not interested, just attempting to survive in a world that bored me but which I had to figure out how to navigate just to get through another day.
And so "Decadence Devoured" is resumed. An ouroboros ring, drawn through Pasadena Moons and Island Fogs, Delusional Adams and Irrelevant Gardens. You realize the greatest pain is actually returning to something like "preconception affirmation," where it concerns something that was only made into a preconception by occurring in the past. That's one's own nature is like to the nature surrounding you, something nothing can change or expand or correct or supplant, but which we impotently build things on top of and attempt to stifle. A preconception like the one I was trying to violate, the one I felt devoted to violating, is of the type that exists without experience. It is the fixed idea we mentally wield against the unknown future. Fuck our ideas, and long live our memories.
I became and then I was. And then I tried to keep becoming, and I just kept destroying myself. Because what you're becoming when you think you're always bound to be wrong, eventually, is just the person others want you to be, which is a slave. Because too many of us love to think we're always bound to be wrong, and we get pretty arrogant in our insistence that we're bound to be wrong. The nature I saw on LSD may have been complex, but it wasn't trying to teach me anything, nothing really mattered, it was autotelic splendor. It was an affirmative apophasis. The invented world behind me would eat itself to become this radiance. I close my eyes and return to nothing but my perceptions, my a priori categories, I perceive my perceptions, and none of it is there, the radiance is gone, just a hall of mirrors. Without the real, natural, organic world, we are an incomplete and psychotic organism.
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