when i first found about will alexander, i immediately bought three of his books: kaleidoscopic omniscience, compression & purity, the sri lankan loxodrome - i saw the potential, rekindled surrealism - perhaps a second peacock on the stage, as in more peacock of vocabulary, rather than a peacock of historical quanta merging (E. Pound).
i really do distrust this division in what science speaks
and what poverty stricken humanism speaks of -
i distrust it because science sediments itself supposing
humanism the pauper - science and all its immediate solutions,
humanism and all its delayed problems -
the new priests look so innocent - but i'm bothered,
i don't understand their need for awe-on-purpose -
the old priests demanded kneeling and an agonising
penitence - not a concept of predestination, but
this sort of minority report: you've done nothing wrong,
but we'll assume you already have, better than a microchip
implant, the idea, we'll use that, pre everything
limit the pro of everything, and catch you in a fishnet of
omni, it was too much, all in one go, in defence it started
with a mediator impersonal, Cartesian later Spinoza's
substance - partly due to the omni-etc., a shortcut -
the easiest way out - sure, if i went to a progressive school
rather than a catholic school in an Irish neighbourhood of
far-beyond the East End locality, i might have written
you L.S.D. filled poems, instead i start off tipsy working my
way around vocabulary that's adequate - hushing out
all possible onomatopoeia static in crude tongue -
ridicule feeds the beast, ridicule my prime loathing -
criticism well and truly accepted... ridicule feeds the beast -
but i mean, this perpetuated awe of scientists,
modern philosophy anti-Aristotelian does not begin
with awe, but with a ridicule of it, a disgust -
when did humanism ever experience awe? a stranger's
kindness would be a start, but even then there's hardly
any awe in it - it soon fades, scientists have immersed themselves
as prophets of awe's preservation, one picks up
a stone and speaks of a mountain, one draws a circle and
howls out the moon - i don't know how they can fake their
awe with so many certainties - so many facts -
awe reminds me of my first bicycle lesson, attempting
balance, failing, bruising a knee, and awe when
the balance was mastered - very short-lived, then the
drudgery of re-, i distrust scientific awe, primarily because
we're slowly no longer stepping out into the unknown,
we're stopping into knows and denies - not many unknowns
out there - except as in the case of Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld,
known knows and there are known unknowns -
now... that's awe... i don't know who was keeping check
on this, but that's more mesmerising that explaining
1,000 million years ago... in a nutshell... how long has
this pneumatic drill of Darwinism been pumping custard
into our brain? is this the part where you tell me we're experiencing
the Alaskan day in the summer months or Alaskan night
in the winter months? all this scientific awe-bashing
is no longer vogue, but they keep at it - oh amazing, ah,
stupefying - and all of it just becomes a regurgitation -
someone said in the 16th century that Aristotle was wrong,
the wrong in Aristotle is that he might have been wrong,
but he was still perplexed... we're no longer perplexed creatures,
not so much... well maybe a bit when it comes to social justice,
but it's not like: sigh and a tear in your eye... it's more like:
if a white boy was shot from a private school, the mothers
and fathers would come up to the police officers with guns
in their hands... you can see awe vanishing when the butterfly
feelings flutter away silently... it's now violent awe:
why is this still happening?! huh?! scientific awe is not
a cushion you can fall back on: we have ~100 years to live
(if you're lucky... or unlucky) and we're being told of life
in caves and trees - Darwinism has hijacked history, this is
where science in written form is like an atom bomb, it wipes
away the best part of humanism, that is: to make human
life itemised on the microscopic level - i don't care if you
go to church and **** out alms for the poor and put on
those ruby shoes and walk the yellow-brick road,
you can't relate to Judea 10 a.d. - not to save your life -
in that famous motto *carpe diem - but strained it's not
so much seize the day, but... relate to the days and those
around you who share them: pertineo diebus - or something
like that, imagine, going to a Catholic school and they
don't even have the manners to teach you a bit of Latin slang,
travesty; but that's how it is, we're no longer awe-stricken
in what the scientists are selling us, fair-dos to
the medicine men, shampoo men, cologne men,
but the awe-invoking men are a bit n'ah-ah to me -
given the timescale for one - i'm a simple man and i want
to enjoy my beer thinking about last Friday,
my life... not the collective origin of life, and whether
i was too hairy back then - you don't need theology to
argue this point, just a little bit of common sense self-respect,
last Friday, not 1,000 million years ago when there was
no Friday, no Sunday, no March, no human imprint -
no: i can touch it, i can feel it, i can see it... i want it.
just like in my dream today - it's rather strange that i dream,
i rarely do, but sometimes i remember one or two -
and all i can say is that - i had the best *** in my life
last night, asleep - yeah, i was ******* in it -
but what bothers me is that it wasn't lucid in terms of
images, but sensations - i can thus say it wasn't completely
impotent in terms of colour, but then again it was -
i'm starting to believe that i'm a blind-man in my dreams,
i ~see sensations rather than actual images in reel -
i can remember leaning against a wall and moving my
tongue in her mouth and my middle-and-ring fingers
into the... what? cliche? anatomic? *****? you choose -
a strange parallelism - we can use the tongue for such
eloquent fragments, and yet reduce it to other atrocities
of equal eloquence - then the whole dream-world changed
and i felt sitting at the tipping point where the sea meets
the beach sands, sitting down awash the waves and her sitting
on me. it's what i felt, i didn't see anything vivid -
but the sensations presented themselves as such -
i associate that with delving into writing in my mother tongue -
email / diacritics "crossword" (un-ditto and apply a
non-misnomer, i.e. give it a proper name, cf. Aristotle).
to finish i guess i might as well write a short critique:
the over-burdening of man with nouns -
as in will alexander's index of the sri lankan...
a few examples: proxima centauri (nearest star to our sun),
hemiopia (loss of vision for one half of the binocular field),
dukkha (buddhist term for suffering),
nystagmus (involuntary jerky movements of the eye),
nosophobia (morbid dread of some particular disease),
telesto umbriel larissa (moons of saturn, uranus
and neptune, respectively),
karina (egyptian demonology, a familiar attached
to a child at birth),
pretas (ghosts) - or as some people say
including Christian Guerrero - 'they're just words...'
oh yes, and words are not the cogs in the machine?
just words... just words?! a banker's bonus is just
an array of... just numbers... why is this nonchalance
to these fundamental units? first they teach us to read
and write an escape the sunny harvests of the fields,
the easy mental but demanding physical life -
after the demanding physical life went our supposed
"ease" mental life changed into a demanding mental
life and an easy physical life... that's the problem with
establishing a suitable vocabulary in yourself, you can
sometimes overdo it, meaning not many people will
understand it, globalisation didn't save us from
the babylon ambition rekindled (whether myth or whatever,
it doesn't matter, read a book literally and you'll end
up realising what could have possibly been mere myth)...
all the above cited words from the index, by god, impressive,
but why would i pain myself to use a word that i'd
have to write an index to? globalisation and words from
Iran - southern coastal to be exact home to afro-iranians -
but locally it's just a ******* shish kebab and nothing more -
or central scotoma (area of the retina that's blind) -
all this vocab wall building is amazing, it really is,
a fortress at Acre - admirable... but then a return to the dull
grey reality of everyday speech - the painful art of poetry
reduced to a personal involvement with certain words -
it's heart-breaking, well, not for me, for Will it must be,
but hey, bought three of his books, that must have counted
for a cheeseburger and a portion of fries at some point
in his life.