Once again last night I just wrote 'til I had to go to sleep but really didn't finish with what I was saying, or trying to say. I don't think these posts have much in the way in the accessibility, but none of them have, and I just can't help myself from getting into the nitty-gritty with the history of my own creative work, even though that means I'm now speaking a philosophical language no one can understand. Perhaps that's the goal of these posts, is to boil down the biography into philosophy, to move forward having completed a bit of a self-analysis that's emerging here.
In the first post of this series, of which this is the third, I argued about the opposition of the Successive and the Integrative Processes, or Principles. Basically the succession is the movement forward, which continually disavows itself in self-rejective phases. This means perpetual conflict and discovery, and I connect this idea to my early album Pretentious Double Album, the first disc, which was Delusional Adam in the Garden of Irrelevance: "I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong." This is an idea which announces an inspiration, in the form of the Residents, and this musical inspiration announces the Successive Process, of perpetual birth and death, eternal recurrence. It does so by the fact that Residents widen my vision from a narrow individual vision of ego/love which is the singer/songwriter mode I was in previously. I have an existential vision at this time, which centers on birth/death, which is the Successive Principle. It also shows up in a song called "Infinity" from this time: "We can never hope to fully understand, so we have something to hope for." The incompletion, the nothing of the in- worked against completion, is infinity, the in- worked against the finite, complete form. This temporal idea is called preconception violation, the idea that our preconception, our past, is continually violated by natural chaos or complexity, assuring new life, growth, change. It's really more complexity than chaos, the idea of nature always being one step ahead of whatever our sense for our "drama" is. Consciousness always expands in an infinite definition, knowledge is unstable, knowledge is always destroyed and created. There is a notion of succession which precedes this articulation of it in my discography, which is the Pixies-influenced "For Everyone." Here love is the succession of "For Everyone," into For Someone. An antisocial movement, and also an egoistic one. The social conflict terminates in love, in an exclusion. But with Delusional Adam, the conflict is perpetual, the love is always new love, never the same love. Nothing is bolted down, and everything that is bolted down will be destroyed. It is the entire impermanence of consciousness, the idea that every premise rejects the one that came before it. Love succeeds the social order, and the truth succeeds the self, which basically cancels the love, because the love is an establishment of ego.
I have been calling Phase A the Love/Ego principle, and Phase B the Birth/Death principle. Phase A is imaged by the idea of selection-- one from many. Phase B is imaged by the idea of rejection-- the zeroing of the previous one to create the next one. Phase B announces a succession over Phase A and enacts that pattern. Now I satirize the love/ego I had before. This leads to what I called Phase C, a dialectic of Phase A and B, Comedy, because Comedy reaches towards/critiques the social, has an erotic and narcissistic dimension like Phase A, but also has a degenerative, rejective side, a la self-effacement. Even if a joke does not efface one's self, it effaces something, and it does so with an effacement of sorts, a ruse, an illusion, a farce, a ploy, a play. The joke is the self being wrong, intentionally. And so this fuses the idea of a one which is rejected, a generative imperfection which truth dawns on, to the social premise of Phase A, to selection of the other, the second-person, the joke's hearer. The self, by Phase C has become a joke, something which is always wrong. Yet later the idea of the joke becomes refined as a representation of something psychologically inconceivable, which enforces the idea that there is something psychologically conceivable, that there is a static truth which is not in perpetual upheaval. Basically I am looking at my creative history as the history of two ideas, the inspiration and excitement of their discovery, the first which doesn't negate anything but which announces the self, expresses hatred for society, and love for the person who feels the same. It doesn't negate the self, it choose the self, and the individual other, it enters the social discourse critically but with an idea on selection, and self-selection. Self-selection then becomes self-rejection, the artistic means of the communication seem to have a bearing, in the sense that the artistic principle, the creation of the new, is announced here, a creation which is not out of nothing but out of the negation of the self. Social communication really has nothing to say here. This is really about the self, in relation to the universe, as something the universe continually negates, so to continually create. Death and birth in each moment of preconception violation. The self is wrong, so the self can live forever. Whereas in the earlier stage, the self is right, so the self can love another.
In Phase A, there is not the palpable present sense for an endless stairwell to the stars, a spiritual search. There is not knowledge but criticism, value and not fact. "I know I'm aware, I know there's a where," I say later, on O Vocoder, out of a reprise of social criticism-- as if in Phase B, there is love, and positive society, so the issue becomes more eternal life, which can only be rationalized with eternal death. Then it seems society becomes a little unstable and so needs to be 'rectified' with Phase C, with the dialectic. The self/love principle must be re-approached as comedy in order to hang onto the surrealism, to hang onto the disruption of the self's mental patterns and paradigms, which are clung to in the process of songwriting. The song insists on a coherent self, on a language of self, which is social, and the avant-garde music insists on an incoherent self, a self which is constantly changing and revealing novelty, which is constantly being disproven by the world. All preconceptions, cynical or romantic, are but limited grasps on reality which reality extends through negation. Consciousness expansion is essentially perpetual, never-ending negation of the self. The self lives between the joy of birth and pain of death, always wrong, but always alive, always learning. Comedy is a resting ground between two sources of energy which are counterposed due to Phase B's rejection of Phase A. But essentially Phase B rejects itself at the same time, which validates Phase A, and so the movement goes backwards to the social and the erotic, but cannot leave the source of energy of Phase B. So Comedy functions by way of providing a mediation of the principle of self-selection, and of self-rejection-- the joke rejects itself, but selects the joke-teller. And this inaugurates my adult musical career as Joke Science, and essentially proves disastrous, because in comedy, neither the dramatic wishes of the songwriter or of the surrealist inside me are fulfilled. What is comic is what is fake, what is amusingly rejected as phony. Both Phase A and Phase B are "real" drives and observations-- alienation/love, and then transcendent wonder and egolessness. The comedy communicates both of those, and neither of those. It maintains disruption-- discontinuity with the self and continuity with the self-- and perhaps this inward relation with the self is what is "social" and "erotic."
The inward continuity with the self is really very much what I argued in my final Pacifica papers, but at the same time I was arguing inward discontinuity, with my doctrine of oblique disruption. Not the integrative movement, the movement down into the past and into the self, but the successive movement, the movement of the present against the self. One easy way these two pictures might be superimposed without their being Comedy, the false disruption of real social congress-- miscommunication, is by considering that our movement down into the past and into the self is an unconscious one which throws off, obliquely, the ego, a la Jung. That, rather than considering PDA the image of the universe contra the self, that the I who is always learning how they are wrong are always learning how they are wrong about their self, that the self is the right thing correcting the wrong "I." What's interesting here is that the order -- connection, disconnection, misconnection -- it is as if the dialectic were a reversed thing that needs to be re-reversed. What does disconnection depend on in the PDA model, but the self perpetually being a joke, a misconnection, which should be disconnection. It is as if Phase B creates Phase C as the 'imperfect aesthetics' of what it is refuting. And for a long time afterwards, the idea of exploring apophatic work, of doing satire, of making intentionally disposable things, inventorying clichés and garbage, is really the Comedy mission. It is like a whole well of mistakes, of evil, which Phase B announces--as its preconception! So we enter the preconception after the violation, which is all just bad prototypes. Like a whole society that was rejected with For Everyone. Like the musical journey ultimately goes in reverse, from the discovery of self and of love as antagonizing society, backwards to succession, the principle which rejects the society and all preconception, backwards to that society, to the satire of that society. That what seems actually to be an "expansion," a progression from limited to unlimited, is actually an unfolding of the antisocial dimension which is precedent to the song, to the first step. The first step doesn't progress onward, it actually regresses, to the cosmic negation, to the joke of what was negated, the comic negation. Succession is disintegration. Capitalism is schizophrenia.
When the alphabet gets counted, we have an object that goes from A to Z. We pull out A from "A to Z" to begin counting. A, alpha, is the first, the symbol of succession, of power. And it is the original disintegration of the alphabet, the initiator of the progressive movement is actually the destruction of the alphabet. The succession, then, however, recomposes the alphabet, becomes immediately integrative as soon as we count B. Absolute succession is only the movement from "A to Z" to "A," towards the beginning of this chronology, because B, C, and D and onward become progressively more integrative as they go. This sort of rejects the idea of time as a continuum which an object is floated along. It says that time can only be made out of space through the fragmentation of space, and space can only be made out of time through the integration of time. A person doesn't continually awaken, they fragment into their constituent parts-- their wakefulness is like sleep, a self-fragmentation. Succession is disintegration; this is what "I am the soul who is always learning how they are wrong" says.
The crux of my theory depends on the realization that I have inaugurated a new movement between A and B, which I consider elementary units of my artistic personality, from the original solution, which was dialectic, fusion, which ended in separation--A and B would not be fused. A and B together, in that sequence form the story of succession. And AB does not create C but a site between A and B, half-A, half-B. The only way to shift the separated, agonistic dynamic of A and B that they have now, in which the first part is the self/love, and the second part is the succession/disintegration (birth/death) ... this is the thing about "birth" -- birth is succession. And so Freud's death instinct is essentially a birth instinct also. It returns things to zero to produce another one. The life instinct, on the other hand, which would be the birth instinct as a sexual will, as a creative will, is not creative but affirmative, and this what permits Freud to accuse mystics of worshipping death. The life instinct is just the persistence of the one, not the creation of the one, which is also the destruction of the one. Self/love are in this corner of oneness, love being the true integrative relation within the ego, and without. So the life instinct is not a birth instinct, an instinct to create, for the instinct to create is the same as the instinct to destroy. Jung's dichotomy, his union of opposites, is not one with the self, with the identity, it is the nothingness-- for it is from nothingness where the opposites are unified--a la Shotgun's Nothing-- which is added to the identity to produce identification in chronological time.
My thesis of 'identification' would have been great if it made sense, which it does as an ideal way to progress through time. Yet the progress of life is not aggregative, but diminishing. The progress of life keeps moving against death, producing birth, individuation, fragmentation, omnipoesis. The omnipoesis is also a nonpoesis, atonality is polytonality. The one, the self, keeps dying and being reborn, and Jung escapes this by distinguishing self from ego-- self as a the whole alphabet of egos. Self as the death/birth which does the "Delusional Adam" number on the ego. For Jung, Phase A would have been ego, and Phase B would have been Self, and then Phase C would have been the transcendent function, which I, not incidentally, paralleled with comedy in my final paper for Dylan, rejective sensation vs. active imagination. For Freud, Phase A is life instinct, and Phase B is death instinct, and Phase C is the ego, the product of both life and death being censored, as forces in the id, by the superego. Freud, sadly, seems more accurate to me, at least in Phase C. Because Freud agrees with Nietzsche, individuation is tragedy, and Jung treats it like a good, evolutionary process, of course, by defining it in this way that it integrates with a bigger section of self, rather than what I contended, which is that the self just keeps being put down by the bigger facticity, the world keeps challenging their preconceptions.
This theory of mine is also probably crazy, because it goes against how people actually accrue knowledge, which is aggregative, though mistakes do occur, yet it is not through these mistakes exclusively that knowledge accrues, and when new knowledge comes it does not always reject the entire shape of knowledge gained up to that point. It's as if this plays on the fantasy of "breakthrough"-- of everything you know is wrong, over and over, being the way knowledge ... no, knowledge doesn't increase through these means, just the paradigm of self which is knowing continues to be broken down by the world. The self is always wrong, and perception is continuously violent and corrective. Kant would say everything we know is preconception, is a priori, is decided upon by the nature of our perception. What I have found in life is that perception is not violent and corrective enough, that the true sadness of life as I have discovered it is the grim repetition of banalities, the world continuously agreeing with the self in its most dismal judgments, which may sneak up and surprise us because we try to escape and avoid them, deny them to ourselves. Things aren't what they seem could be good or bad, and things are what they seem could be good or bad. To me at the time of PDA I have this idea of "drama" being the "self." And so even though the project is extremely dramatic, my philosophy considers the drama an illusion. The garden is irrelevance, and all the fear, anxiety, seriousness, all of this is irrelevant-- this definitely prefigures the movement into comedy, for comedy also makes everything irrelevant. So that complicates the picture somewhat because it's as if, back to Phase C, Phase C is really the Garden of Irrelevance, and "Delusional Adam" is really Phase A and B, the drama of the songwriter and the composer. Adam says this line "I am always the soul," insisting on its drama in different ways. Later work, in Pasadena, sounds like "irrelevance." It has lost that theatrical splendor of the Residents, for the most part -- Hollywood Negro Spirit and Jade Maiden being exceptions -- but a lot of my tonal explorations are really in a new place from the post-Residents work, a bit more R. Stevie, maybe more Frith too, and John Cage. The improv videos are not dramatic and intense like Delusional Adam is, or like GCW is. The sketches lose their darkness, and become more absurdist than satirical. It would seem Delusional Adam directly announces the movement towards Pasadena and Comedy, out of satire towards comedic surrealism.
So, wow. A very new interpretation is dawning on us here which no longer considers C as the fusion of A and B, but rather sees Delusional Adam as the midpoint of a movement from drama to comedy. It's confusing because my film career makes a different picture. Only with GCW did my film work start to invoke the earnestness of my music, or even really include my own music. Before that it was pretty surreal and absurdist, and this really was more of a contradiction, though very gently made, between what my albums were saying and what my movies were saying. The albums being fun, humorous, but emotionally sincere, and the first two films not really getting into dramatic personal emotions except unconsciously. Yet with Jodorowsky and The Residents, I'm into the serious, sad stuff, with a humorous edge. But I am indulging the new thesis that actually, there is no dichotomy between the two sides of PDA, the dichotomy is between PDA and the Garden of Irrelevance, between PDA and Existence Music, principally. It's Existence Music which really owns the Irrelevance thing and perhaps starts to convert the Garden of Irrelevance into Moontown. Laffer Curve ends up being pretty dramatic, but I ultimately think Delusional Adam is a dramatic anti-dramatic statement, and so it announces a succession from drama to comedy, to all the dramas being jokes, to they being irrelevant, and the project of PDA and GCW seems to purge this histrionic, cathartic drama and affirm the comic as the spiritual power. Nothing to DRDS to Pasadena/Existence Music-- the cover of this album was a picture of 9/11 arranged in four like Andy Warhol, and then all the photos rotate-blurred so they weren't recognizable as anything but a strange, alien pattern. And this really gives the feeling of what I was doing in Pasadena artistically, the landscape, which the photo interprets rather darkly, actually-- trauma into haze, tragedy plus time is comedy. Ultimately the vibe of this change lasts a long time, throughout the Joke Science years, even though there's a lot of drama going on for me personally, it's like my music doesn't even give me the opportunity to express it. "Everything's okay, the universe is perfect and complete; everything's okay, you are really perfect and complete." The comic ending; it's all irrelevant, all the drama, all the suffering, it's all artificial, and this is the truth. But then the universe and the self are degraded. The Garden of Irrelevance, which was purified of a drama, has become tainted again with an even more powerful drama.
We eventually turn from comedy to poetry, on the basis of admiring Rilke's work, of not being able to laugh everything away, of having tears to shed. So in Pasadena, it's a good thing the drama is over! "Why'd you have to win the final war, life had nothing left in store." "O Vocoder" is, however, as my current masterpiece, the only work I still believe in, try as I might, an incredibly dramatic album. Dramatic, theatrical, cinematic, the drama has just gotten bigger. Delusional Adam, if he is delusional, had entered and then left the Garden of Irrelevance, the Divine Comedy. "O Vocoder" is more like Rilke's Duino Elegies, an elegy, an album of death, hatred, ("Hatred and Death" is the first recording after the Pasadena years) minuscule, heroic hope.
Wrongness is the learning how to be the soul that is always myself.
To reverse the flow of Delusional Adam in this way -- The Garden of Irrelevance is the Delusion of Adam. What is irrelevance? Relevance is "the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. " My writing on the flap of of the album said, "Adam's delusion is relevance." Hence one topic is not connected to another topic -- disconnection again. What I meant by relevance was the power of drama, the dramatic situation being always conflict, need, want, pain, seriousness. I failed to hear the truth of the maxim "it's only in love and murder that we remain sincere," perhaps. But then there's the will to playfulness, a recent idea, getting at the notion that only playfulness is capable of creativity, only playfulness is capable of inventing "the will." Slurring invention and artifice. All forms are but the jests of God. Exactly--the getting off the stage is the defeat of love, as well as murder. Basically my theory depends on the idea-- and gosh, even will to playfulness sticks to it-- that love and irrelevance are the same thing, that only by leaving the theater do we find love, only in the playing. This reaffirms the idea of irrelevance, play, comedy, illusion.
Maybe the most significant change since what Delusional Adam announces is what happens on "Before and After Joke Science." But really you can feel it on The Dream Songs, "poetry," thank you John Berryman-- it's the fucking Dream Songs that begins the reversal, the journey back to the song, the self, the drama. This would make more sense in terms of time than the idea that Phase B ended and it snapped back to Phase A immediately. What we've done is a bit of preconception violation, a bit of an enhanced analysis of my past work. Delusional Adam is the midpoint, not the other pole-- though musically I have shifted from the song to more abstract landscapes, and feel a tension between the song and the landscape, perhaps it's not so pronounced as I think. "Nothing" after all does the same job as "Delusional Adam." Says the same thing, landscape or song. DRDS develops the drama and takes on comedy, and Existence Music is almost completely isolated from the drama. "There's always a nasty part of your life you're avoiding," is what the final, title song says. And it itself is built on a sample of "Why Can't I Write a Hit?" Like all the other covers, this is a zone of oblivion from the dramatic world as I know it, a giant repression of reality, of drama, inducing this comical, false Garden of Irrelevance. I drew the leaves, I was trying to capture the aesthetic of nature which I defined as "loving-humor" and which I saw in terms of rejecting the human dramas that occurred within it, which were sort of staged by nature's playfulness. Nature was capable of generating the drama, from the position of loving-humor, like a Greek chorus, and what happened on the stage was all bullshit. This is why JOKE SCIENCE instilled such magic in me, and the union of the Law of its Survival and the Inexpressible, this was the notion of the equivalence of the dramatic law of survival, and the comic inexpressible, the thing always on the transcendental horizon, which was united with the serious world in that moment, the inexpressible (I guess what later became "psychologically inconceivable" but in a way of falsification). The law of its survival would be the tendentiousness of the joke, its real "narrative" meaning, why the joke is being said by the sayer, and its humor was the inexpressible part-- that part which censors expression. The laughter basically stemming from the concealment, from the sudden disappearance, from the lack of the expression of the tendency, from the interruption to willfulness, not in a contemplation, but in a falsification of the will-- the falsification of the will giving us the sense -- the world as will and falsification -- of the will creating its creator, through its falsification.
This is a conflicted place, a conflicted argument. And it basically hinges on -- is love playful or serious? Is all the seriousness just the absence of love, the need for love, and to be in love, is just to be in playfulness, in the irrelevance which creates relevance, which creates movies, dramas, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, Parsifal, while nature is beyond all this dramatic experience. I am actually talking myself into my argument from years ago, into a frame of mind I completely lost, piece by piece. Talk about Succession is Disintegration. If this is so, then the reversal is actually profoundly bad, and it's been feeling profoundly bad. My new time in Pasadena is just the dramatic, painful version of the first, the apotheosis of drama, hinging along the choice made in Burbank. The Birth of Love Out of the Spirit of Tragedy was indeed Comedy, was indeed where I was in Pasadena, for I had left behind all the drama, the creative place of bliss was the silly, surreal, dreamy place. And Moontown in its original formulation was this kind of surrealist comedy ("psychologically therapeutic surrealist comedy films" being my stated mission at Art Center, "Help!" by the Beatles being my ideal film). Something just batshit, and my writing from the Pasadena time, it thrived on this disposability and absurdism. Everything got a lot less funny in my life, and it seemed, piecemeal, this artistic dream completely perished, and "poetry" was the axis upon which it started to go backward. If this is true, if I was onto something when I was first here in Pasadena, and I have since completely forgotten it, then my music is showing me a very alarming picture. Which it is showing in a way which is not too alarming, though, but ironized, but still sort of retaining some memory of the irrelevance. It means that what I have been arguing as succession, this integrative progress, is actually disintegration. This reversal integrates the old stuff.
So this is a huge and challenging realization, and possibly just a doubt on the lens of of our theory. But essentially if this new theory is correct, it states essentially that the movement I made towards poetry in 2014, and away from comedy, was actually the most ambivalent and strange movement in my career. ("Stranger" was the name of a film idea, involving an alien, at this time.) What I have been working towards in the form of an interpretation up to this point is this:
Interpretation #1: A is the rock songwriter, B is the surrealist composer, and I haven't been able to make up my mind since, I found Comedy at some point and then lost it, which in hindsight seems like the false negotiation between the two, populist yet surreal, self-rejective yet self-selective. A is an integrative principle, love/self, and B is a successive principle, which succeeds the integrative. I was unable to combine the two, because the dialectic was "Joke Science," a fraud, a way of self-rejecting and self-selecting at once. So the tension between A and B needed to be resolved another way, which began when my work shifted around the pole of comedy to the pole of poetry, which effectively brought me back to the song, without the sacrifice of the successive principle, by way of reversing the circuit, so B leads to A, and A integrates the succession, the self is selected out of the imaginal realm of a self-rejective epiphany. "I am always the soul who is learning how he is wrong" becomes "Wrongness is the learning about a soul who is always myself." Wrongness leads to the self, is corrected in the self, the self breaks the birth/death cycle. Reversal is the key technique for restoring a fragmented self, to integrate pieces of ourselves that were left behind in our successive apostasies. Our movement forward must become a movement backward, in that it is a movement within. We cannot chase the vanishing point but emerge from the point where we have vanished, our identity must continue to become interrelated with ourselves, because that self-consciousness is love, social and psychological, is "relevance," the connection inside. Identity and relation are the two principles of integration and succession, respectively, and progress is inward relatedness, which is de-chronological, remembering Dionysus.
Interpretation #2: My recent revisitations to the rock songwriter are patently unreal. What is being expressed as nostalgia, as homecoming, as preservation of a lost early self, pothos, is something entirely different. The integrative Phase A is being integrated into succession, a selective innocence which essentially is experience. The nostalgia for the past reawakens the problem that initially had you move out of the past, and so one returns to the past in this changed manner, one creates revisionist history, one 'fixes' the problem and in so doing very much rejects the past. And this is because the movement is not between Phase A and Phase B as originally conceived, but between drama and "comedy," but comedy is not quite the comedy of stand-ups and sketches, but something more artistic and alien. Drama and comedy are but two lenses on the same thing-- Joan Crawford screaming about wire hangers is tragic for Christina Crawford, but hilarious for the viewer. For Christina it is a psychologically conceivable union of opposites, a pathology of "wire hangers" and "rage" that is crazy, but deviant in a believable way. The theory of a "psychologically inconceivable union of opposites" as being that of the joke is flawed, because it does not explain "tragedy plus time is comedy." It does not explain how the same horror can be tragic for the participant, and comic for the onlooker. For the onlooker, it does seem more "psychologically inconceivable" and absurd, and less depressingly like "deviance," because it is so crazy, but it is really the same phenomenon for the victim as for the onlooker. What makes this psychological contradiction funny and not horrifying is that we lack "need" with respect to the problem as an onlooker, we do not have a reality-principle stake in the game. We do not have to be afraid Joan will beat us with the wire hanger, so it is funny. Detachment is essential to the imperfection being funny. This is why we can laugh at serious things in films when they appear absurd, because we are not involved in the situation. So, Delusional Adam in the Garden of Irrelevance is actually correct, and what Delusional Adam represents is not only Phase A but Phase B, the dramatic element of all the early musical work. Phase C, as it applied to comedy, began to break out of the drama of the self, and treat life as one big illusion, yet within the domain of comedy, which is organized by a certain "Law of its Survival," a certain narrative need to be funny, a secret drama behind the comedian, when this divine comedy which is what Joke Science is really after is about the suspension of narrative need. So, later, "The Jokers of Funny" happens, which makes fun of comedians, and rejects "The Comedians of Comedy" which was inspiring to me in Phase C. At the time this work seems to mean, the rejection of comedy for a deeper, more poetic surrealistic art, what points towards Interpretation #1, the return to the drama of the Shotgun songs, For Everyone, The Residents. Life, the epiphany goes, is too serious and dark to take as a laughing matter, and my Joke Science work disturbs me because it is hanging on to a youthful, glib attitude. The Jokers of Funny is an artist's film, a filmmaker's film, which is more interested in critically questioning this kind of entertainment than in synthesizing it. I want to be loved, I want to be comprehended, and I do not want to be a funny, fake, nerdy guy like these hipster jackass comedians who are all depressed and desperate for attention and to have their highly developed, overachiever's social charisma validated. The persona is sophisticated under the hatred of a cruel social world, and I would rather speak about that cruel social world, and make you cry about it, relieve your heart's grief, and recognize your pain, in other words be a dramatist. My youthful idealism was such that I thought everything could be laughed away, but it couldn't. The pain is so intense that it needs to be shown and manifested, and break through the restrictions, the shallowness. However this misses the point about what "comedy" really was in 2007. I've made many integrative movements towards my past, and past influences, synthesizing my past in its absence. Yet each integrative movement only synthesizes, only falsifies. The more we relate with our identity the more unreal it becomes. The "comedian" was a dramatic character, could not escape having a place on the stage, a narrative need, and so as that character dies, like the rock n' roller, it becomes synthesized. So this is just a further act of "distancing" from the ego, from the Phase C ego, which turns tragedy to comedy. It is true that the comedian made fun of the poet and then the poet made fun of the comedian, vis a vis my poems in 2007, and The Jokers of Funny. But what the "return to drama" really means is the acknowledgment of the narrative need of the comedian, the sense that drama never left, and this coincides with my albums becoming more cinematic, more like movies and less like albums. This enhanced theatricality is not a rejection of "comedy," but an even deeper, more relentlessly convincing form of comedy, a "play." There is no authenticity, no reality, there is but another mask beneath the mask. Moksha as a follow-up to Moontown, is a cinematic vista on personal suffering. It lacks the album-formalism of The Dream Songs which actually maintains the egoistic delivery of the songs, rather than represents a shift away from the early Shotgun albums. The Dream Songs is a book of poems, but Moksha is a cinematic vision, an imagination of hell, and O Vocoder refines it into a spaghetti western, as The Exterminating Angels before it made it into a sort of Zelda/Star Wars/Wagnerian metaphysical mythology. My next work will likely be just as cinematic, a little narrative microcosm where there seems something like screenplay structure to the way the songs are ordered, something like acts. What this does is enclose the personal suffering, the need which the album describes, into a narrative illusion, and essentially shows how it is an illusion, a drama, a movie in an existential theater of playfulness. The cinematic quality of the albums undermines them as direct expressions of a songwriter's feelings. It falsifies all that reality as a fantasy, and detaches from the identity of the singer, and identifies instead with the one who is playing, with the dramatist, the becoming of one's own God. Looked at as the self, O Vocoder is a horrible situation, a dark album, but looked at from the perspective of the "playwright," it is amusing, because it is so visceral, horrifying, over-the-top, macho, grandiose, tragic, its sentiment as hard and lean as can be, its bitterness absolute, its triumph hard-won, an epic, larger-than-life drama which is absurd and basically meaningless. It satisfies an ideal to a fault, a fault which it itself revel in, turning the pits of hell into the greatest joke in the world. To buy into its world is to buy into a narrative need which is ridiculous, and unattainable, a revenge plot which is both surrendered and fulfilled, by accident, by a would-be lover. Kalle is killed by Amy, and all is well with the universe again. But all always was well with the universe. Amy "Henceforth" is all temporal succession towards the comic, towards love, and Kalle is the dramatic "free man," the tragic man, his triumph to fall, which is like Satan and Lucifer-- in short the ego. The poem is cyclical because it is an eternal movement, the soul is always learning how he is wrong, the drama's wearing off. He is false, too. He is an illusion worn by the soul, so the soul keeps awakening to the comedy of being egoless, of being without narrative need, the narrative need which makes things so intense and serious. Amy Henceforth is the succession principle, and Kalle is the integrative principle, the one who relates to themselves and themselves alone, for whom the self is the only reality. The personal bullshit. TS Eliot has the right idea but his mistake is that he is personal with the impersonal material of literary heritage, to give his work significance through that egoless scholarship. The goal is to actually convert the personal to the impersonal, to disassociate from the self, which is not undertaken in the interest of fragmentation but in the interest of true liberation from the ego's need, which is vulgar and anti-artistic and anti-spiritual. The ego's core need is power, which can never be absolutely fulfilled, and the alternative is comic detachment. To build a strong ego with psychoanalysis or anything like that is nonsense, egos are only made strong with domination, a dark hunger which must be continually fed, which is essentially weakness, addiction. The true strength comes from detachment, from disassociation from the self, which taps us into the true creator of the world, which is playfulness. This detachment is also the more sexual, sensual, and benevolent movement, not only because of its receptivity to another person, but because when things are evaluated without narrative need-- like Kant's purposiveness without a purpose-- they are truly appreciated for all their luminous beauty. But in this world sexuality is typically funneled through the 'reality principle' of egoism, which fulfills needs which are not sexual, insecurities and desires to possess and control. Vulnerability and domination are the flip sides of the ego. The "empath" is truly anti-Narcissus, and anti ego itself-- they are more sensuous because they are not attached to personal need, but merely evaluate. The real philosophical dichotomy is not fact/value, but need/value, for our needs are established by our egos, our bodies, identities, arbitrary circumstances, the illusory drama of life, maya, and what we value is appraised more purely without our egos-- hence, the evaluative unconscious. The mimetic psyche "imitates" the self which is presented for it, and all the systems of need which grow around a self. Everything is dictated from the outside, and the inside complies and reads the lines which are fed to it. The evaluative unconscious has an oblique, disruptive relation to this mimetic psyche, emerges in sensational, and ego-destructive ways. The banalities of the world are all this solipsistic relation of identity within itself, whereas the relation without identity, without in effect existence, is pure sexuality, what non-material force comes from the inside to disrupt this theatrical story. Being outside the system of need and gratification, it does not evaluate "psychologically" in terms of past chronology, in terms of personal desires and dreams and traumas and so on. Rather, it evaluates on the pure basis of sensuous design, on aesthetic, and this aestheticizing appreciates situations beyond good and evil, but not in the Nietzschean term of power, but only for their fascination, for their identity. The individuation creates experiences that can be appreciated as objects, rather than compared to other objects which values them with relation to present need. All the good and bad experiences are but scenes in a drama; and just like our favorite scene of a film might be a negative scene for the on-screen characters, we evaluate them only for their individual power, not relative power, the power of the scene's identity.
Interpretation #2 is just going to have to keep going into a second paragraph. Identity is what the evaluative unconscious distances itself from through my new transcendent function, disassociation, and thus can actually love the identity, of anything, be it good or evil. The experience is tasted for its flavor, not for its nutrition. We cannot love the self and be the self at the same time, and it sure seems we cannot admire our self-admiration and thus are narcissistic in this manner only via oblivion. Narcissus sees their reflection, not the sight of themselves staring in the mirror. But who sees them staring in the mirror gets something interesting, a picture of the identity in one particular pose, one particular relation to itself. It is not voyeurism, because this onlooker is not actually present, they have no needs that can be met or denied by the situation. The situation just has a particular flavor for which it is appreciated. By appreciating the flavor of a situation outside of our own narrative, egoistic need, or anyone else's, we falsify the situation, and we involve a reaction to it that is not dictated by the needs the situation presents, of a self inside a world. This is the aesthetic, artistic response, which swerves against the ordinary utilitarian mind, complicating the reaction to a situation by fetishizing it. So it's this which complicates "dramatic experiences," in which we go through great suffering, because to some degree, it is always undergoing a fetishization and an aestheticization while it occurs, a form of sexuality which is independent of need, which is not in a circuit of sexual/anti-sexual, but is always sexually evaluating its sexual happiness or despair, as the identity measures it. This is an oblique emergence, a radical emergence, the ultimate interruption of the egoistic life-- which converts all of it to play, to playfulness, to conceit, to play-acting, and views the world and one's own destiny as a self as a farce, an illusion, some arbitrary MacGuffin which provides these opportunities. All morals, life purposes, personal attachments collapse. They are just plot devices that permit a new camera set-up. If we think of "drama" as the "identity," as the individual organization of a thing into a comprehensible, isolated unity, as something being "dramatic" for being well-defined, then from this perspective the divine comedy appreciates the "drama." But when we enjoy "drama" for emotional catharsis, we are not actually enjoying drama, but participating in drama. The difficult, alien perception we travel to ceaselessly is the complete detachment from our identities and the dramas they deliver to us, the ability to love our identities as our identification with narrative need prevents us from doing. The more advanced we are as artists, the less real we are as people, the more we look at ourselves as just some flavor of dream, in which there are dreams within dreams within dreams. The more absurd becomes each and every action and sensory detail and each and every narrative need, each and every utilitarian element in consciousness that pushes us onward in a goal-oriented way. Nothing has to be done, it's all arbitrary and sensuous, nothing is wanted or unwanted, we just know the particular flavor of this experience. This evaluative unconsciousness continually re-enters the world of narrative need, destabilizing it like the clinamen to the atom in the Epicurean idea. Our will is a shallow thing, our desire, our need, our loves and hates, for it is just organized by our personal biography, some bullshit story that's been poured out on some eyeball. People are farcical and so are we, and they become more farcical in the tragic inertia that all our narrative needs are invited into-- the more we pursue our narrative needs without this swerve, the more of a domination/submission paradox we are, because we are completely dominated by reality, and enacting that same domination, the more invited into monstrosity we become. A reality that is not fake is monstrous, because it is a reality that will never be without need.
Love is the main trouble with this argument, of course, since it is the need which commits us to our narrative needs the most urgently. It is the one that gets us to "believe in ourselves" -- as valuable, we always say, forgetting the phrase means "existent." We are never more focused on ourselves then when we are in love, because we are always presenting ourselves, and reflecting on our presentation. In love, we get to believe in the illusion of self and reinforce another's. Yet we cannot actually love another person and have them love us, realistically, since we cannot really love anybody in that way for what they are, when we need something from them, when we need love. It is the greatest and most evil fantasy of life, romantic love, because it is like the dialectic of polymorphous and personal sexuality. It slurs the line between playfulness and seriousness. We appreciate the lover but as an interested party, as someone who is using them as a source of love, as the fulfillment of a need. It is an exchange, a banality of egoistic life. And it is the heart of all need, the heart of all illusion, what would have us commit ourselves to all our dramatic pain, what would condemn us to imprisonment in our self. We hang onto our self for fear of losing love, when our artistic power, our true ability to love anything, including our self, is only in detachment, disconnection, not attachment and connection. It is a romantic fantasy to say that lovers lose themselves in a larger being, but the larger being is only their individual larger beings, their inflated self-esteem and belief in their identities, which are constantly maintained and refined in the presence of the other. They are ultimately caught in the illusory drama of life by the other's gaze. We may only love what we need nothing from, and the only thing we need nothing from is an illusion. In order to love our lives, we must accept that they, and we, are dreams. Seeing them as dreams, we see everything about them, not just the part that has what we want from them. For this kind of sexual need, not sexual appreciation, is the sexual need for identity. It's the insistence on being real. The details about one's life enforced and reinforced to make the reality seem as true and positive as possible, which if achieved, is only the image of power. Romantic love is nothing but a royal ritual, a quest for power, enclosure, reality, identity, form. Sexuality runs on another current, which is but captured by romantic love, as everyone knows.
The difference between romance and sex is seen as the difference between love and something powerful and primal and dominating, but it is just the opposite. It is romance which is the statement of power and authority, the pure product of need, self-obsession, vulnerability. The same goes for friendship-- friendship is not so pure and altruistic, but again, a kind of power networking. But the lover is the one you fuck who you're also friends with, as if the friendship vindicates the sexuality but it doesn't, it's the other way around. Friendships are wired in the network of social status, race, economics, place of residence, line of work, et cetera. As evidenced by social media, friendships are possessions, not noble responsibilities. They are amplifications on the identity, not only "in its interest" but "of its realness." A sexuality without self is a sexuality without need, a sexuality which would be as gratified by one's own body as much as by the other's body, a sexuality in which the self can be eroticized. In the suspension of 'identification' we appreciate sensually all the contours of things, beyond good and evil, everything is a fantasy, an adventure, an individual identity to be savored. But as identity, we have the identity's need, which is for self-amplification, and for good reason-- without power, one suffers. Yet one is always without power, power is never fulfilled, it only asks to be increased. It is never enough. The only love we can ever have is the love for our own self, as nothing but that love and not ourself, to look upon our self not as the self complimenting itself, for these compliments always speak the language of power-- you're so blank, blank, blank (with respect to others). Outside of this ugly masturbatory narcissism, this infantile gratification, there is only the universal, unconditional appreciation for something based on its identification, not on our identification with it. For being what it is, in order to see that, we must need nothing from it and it cannot be real. It has the certain contours of a dream, a fantasy, something identifies it, and we see this spiritual existence it has. For its having an identity, it has beauty.
And yet then ... the only way we can see the identity's beauty is by not being the identity. As the identity we are monstrous, but when we are not the identity, we are beautiful. When someone else has no reality, they are fully loved, seen in all their detail, a farce, a dream ... We enjoy the identity only when its needs are met-- only when it is forgotten. Then we can "be" the "relation" to our own identity.
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