The End Event

“It would seem that things are getting worse. But nevertheless, I do see hope. In point of fact, sometime around the unfortunate C incident—that contemporary castration of humanity and the systematic eradication of synesthesia that Consciousness demanded—a true synesthete came forth, blessed with luscious cock in its prime and oozing sexuality: bereft of shield, sword in hand, I watched as he slew these mongrels and their punctles.

"Indeed, this was no ordinary man—he was a survivor and a savior, a liar and a layman, a shaman and a sophist, a wayman and a warrior, a beauty and a beast. This was synesthesia incarnate, in all his glory.”

This, readers, were the initial jottings in what was to be a published memoir of my blissful tripping days. At this juncture, I began to lose touch so thoroughly, I know not whether sense came through. For the interested reader, I have kept the rest of this particular event intact as an endnote to this post.

Now, reader, I must beg your pardon—this is goodbye. I fear that my body is just not built for this life. It seems my war is in vain. Life is a zero sum game, the source of my ceaseless horror and utter castration. My shoulders simply cannot bear the weight; our mutated brains weigh too god dam much! And my senses can’t event taste, much less breathe the air of synesthesia.

And do not worry reader—I plan to go gloriously. An overdose of epic proportions. Indeed, perhaps I will have a few moments of true synesthetic being with the world. A going with of worthy palpations.

The Event, Part 2:

Um, yea. I see a fugue now, a fractal fugue folding and folding, and shaping and shipping away in the clouds—how I love this rainbow ontology. Heidegger—seeing, smelling, shitting—on acid… There is just no other way—he saw too clearly. He saw too clearly… And Nabokov too. Just no way. Those… um….

Ah, yes—in a fit of blissful ecstasy folding and folding—they’re all gone. I see a land bereft of castrato, bereft of virulent plagues and consciousness and punctles and all those gloomy folk. Yes, here I see a reclassification, a new species becoming before my very eyes. This is living now. Tripping on stripping signs to be—synesthesia happening, or… yes, yes, yes—this is living. This is living!

A teethy electric surge, some trees and, humming birds, humming honey, strumming tummy, yummy sunny, sonny sonnet punching punctles...

The Mutation Event, or How Consciousness Demands the Total Abandonment of Synesthesia

Castration is not the problem of a society gone terribly awry—of the unabashed consumption of sensibility by the contemporary pedestrian and the shameless rape of the penis by the tyranny of capitalism—no, it is merely a symptom of a virulent disease relentlessly sucking us dry of all that is vital in this world. Castration indeed is just a symptom: indeed—the true and sincere epidemic of our time, the origin of our plight, is no less—no less!—than the evolution of consciousness itself.

Indeed, Consciousness—and ipso facto us, the human being—is a mutation hell-bent on wreaking havoc, a monstrous brain tumor, an anomaly of evolution, a fetid and sick perversion. Indeed, no less than a virus spreading over our lands, a voracious plague ruthlessly and relentlessly exterminating synesthesia.

Indeed, Castration is just a symptom. No doubt, there exist others: cuckoldry; the female and her enslavement of the contemporary castrato; writing and its derivatives; the modern academic and her punctles. It may seem easy to mistake these as origins. Nevertheless, these are only symptoms of an evolutionary mutation gone awry. Indeed, as Joseph Campbell writes in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” we are born too god-dam early: we haven’t cooked enough—our heads are too big—we need motherly nursing—or we die!

Indeed, Consciousness demands that our heads come out of the female undercooked. And the female, not cooking us properly, mutates before our very eyes: she takes on the weight of castrating us before we have even separated from her. Her social role, in a moment of true misfortune, was determined evolutionarily, biologically—Aristotle was not wrong when he said the female was a birth defect. But then, if she is, can we not help but all be, can we not help but all be born from an always and already defective animal.

Indeed, she cannot escape her place as the enslaver of mankind. But she is not the origin; she herself is constructed according to the evolutionary demands of consciousness itself!

Consciousness, then, must be eradicated. We must devolve; and go back to our primordial being—we must become stupid! We must allow synesthesia to once again become the driving force of our society; not consciousness and its inauguration of man’s plight and his utter castration.

The Filmic Event: On Lynch's Nomads

Inland Empire immediately throws us into the fray, into an encounter of flesh and film. At first, we try to make sense of a whole new universe, a whole new world of relations and signs, forging itself before us. And soon enough, that all too familiar feeling, that lurking panic, hits us: what if sense doesn't emerge? What if I never figure this movie out? Hollywood films—and most other films, too—make it easy on us: it is almost always a replication of some cliché or other. Sense is practically guaranteed. But it is a castrated sense, bereft of synesthetic possibility

Not here. With Lynch, our panic never disappears and sense never emerges—it oozes and undulates through us: it is an affective flow, indifferent to the conventional filmic seeing. There is no ground here. For Lynch, film operates in a different plane that allows for the odd meeting of senses: the film is not just seen but felt, not just a meting of visual and auditory but a relentless bleeding of sense.

Inland Empire, then, is a truly filmic film, a film that works not merely according to the logic of words but that moves with image and sound as film, in film: like a synesthetic piece of music or work of art, it turns its back on any sense of narrative or representation. This is the affect-sign, a sign that never points outside itself: signifier and signified are continous; they are constituted simultaneously.

But this affect-sign is never still: it is always and already folding into itself, always and already creating new ways of going, new modes of being. Sound and image, dream and reality, past and present, self and other—these Lynchian affect-signs interact to create ever new synesthetic-events throughout the film, events that operate as nomads and never stop folding amongst themselves to inaugurate further synesthetic-events.

This is no longer the synesthetic-event. This is a nomad-event, always and already on the go, always and already poised to take a line of flight, never allowing itself a ground. This is our liberation: nomads pave the way to the anti-castration-event.

The Literal Castration

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.”

--Marshall McLuhan

Technology qua McLuhan is an extension of some human faculty; it choreographs our experience, leaving nothing to ourselves. Individuality is an illusion, then, some dangerous media relentlessly working us over, prodding us in a singular direction: this repression of difference, of the multiplicity and synesthesia so necessary to man, inaugurates the illusion of consciousness, of individuality. But do not misunderstand McLuhan—he is not proffering a warning, he is not a doomsayer.

McLuhan is not warning us of old technologies—he is warning us of the old. We must become aware of our environment; all assumptions have outlived their usefulness. With the rise of new media, of new possibilities of going, new modes of being, we must eradicate older media—and voraciously consume the new with all abandon. This is a desperately needed change: a synesthetic-event.

There exist a multiplicity of media—some good, some bad. Each media distributes our senses differently, in different proportions. The printing press paved the way for the castration of man: with writing, with the book, man committed synesthetic suicide, shamelessly raped himself, castrating and depriving himself of everything vital in this world. For years, he toiled under an illusion of individuality: the tyranny of the book, of capitalism—the ultimate castration known to man.

The Medium is the Massage is not a book; individuality is distinctly erased by the very media that McLuhan writes in. Indeed, the book splays our senses along a single direction: the alphabet. As thoroughly visual beings, synesthesia becomes a crime, an abnormality to be treated by ridiculous psychologists—psychologists who themselves only speak of castration! Writing is the castration-event. It separates society—unifies the individual—inaugurates capitalism and the 70 hour work-week.

But with new media, with the rise of the electronic age and the annihilation of the book, we can finally extend ourselves according to an ultimate good: synesthetically, collectively, as always already a multiplicity.

The rise of electronic circuitry fractures our individuality: as we become thoroughly enmeshed in a community, we operate as networks—inside and outside ourselves. We operate as networked synesthetes within ourselves and as a global tribe, a community, outside ourselves. We are intimately intertwined with each other always and already, synesthetically.

Castrated Punctles, Too?

As my last post showed, the aching ignorance of bloggers never ceases to amaze me—to wit, a blogger linked to this very blog. Rosamary, aka Webspidie, in a ridiculous blog about Modern Punctal Theory, completely abandons synesthesia in her treatment of these very important typographic marks. Her first post criticizes punctal pedagogy: her alternative—treat them as characters to be made fun of. To be made fun of? Something seems off. These are the most sensuous of the typographic possibilities afforded us. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say these marks are more synesthetic than typographic ones.

Punctuation is, as this blogger noted, punctuated pause. But it is far more. These subtle and elusive marks are visual glyphs! Indeed, they operate primarily thus: they palpate us visually first; and then, synesthetically. An early case of this blogger’s unforgivable offense could perhaps shed some light on this.

This wily blogger tried and failed to understand the space in a particularly synesthetic Cummings poem, titled, aptly, “The Grasshopper.” Take a look at it: a punctal image of a confused unarranged grasshopper becomes a rearranged grasshopper, quite literally. As Rosamary notices, the space is central—she (falsely and ridiculously gendered by this certain blogger, not the poem or by punctal theory itself) rearrangingly becomes grasshopper herself. But the point of this “becoming” is missed altogether: it is a synesthetic-becoming.

At first, the poem proffers an unspeakable grasshopper—it exists as a visual glyph, as unarranged punctuation threatens to obscure meaning. But as space itself becomes a grasshopper simultaneously with Cummings’ punctles, however, we see and hear meaning emerge: the punctles rearrange so as to be spoken. This is a thoroughly synesthetic movement: seeing to speaking, which is to say, visual to hearing. And, through it all, the confused and slighted space can not help but palpate us, can not help but thoroughly drench us in its pathetic plight, an overly-sentimental drama of punctuated pause.

Modern Punctal Theory thus operates: punctuation is not simply punctuated pause—it is at once synesthetic movement and punctuated stillness. Hence, punctuation seems almost too apt for a Derridean (the differential structures behind the effacement of this dichotomy are only too obvious)—and alas, this nihilistic blogger has, um, missed the point entirely? 

How Blogs Castrate Us

Today I would like to talk to you about blogging. It would seem that some bloggers have, um, missed the point entirely.

Blogging is far more than a way to publish writings you couldn’t otherwise have published, more than a shameless capitalistic advertisement to further a career, even more than a way to publish writings anonymously a la Kierkegaard, more even than a public diary. Which is to say, the blogosphere does encompass all these things. But these are merely symptoms of a virulent technological mutation (extension qua Marshall McLuhan) gone awry. Indeed, the blogosphere really is an elaborate holocaust of sensibility, a total abandonment of synesthetic possibility. 

At first, it would seem to parallel reality, and more interestingly, to ground Foucault: the internet is the panopticon par excellence. Think about it: just as our identity in society is molded by the gaze of others, the constant fear of humiliation, so it is with blogs. The total effacement of the expert, of editors, brings with it a bevy of relentless and merciless bloggers waiting to criticize every word you write. And in effect—to shape your identity, to inaugurate your soul. And stranger, blogs, unlike prisons, even unlike society itself, are voluntarily chosen. Do you understand what I just said? People are actually seeking humiliation!

And what, then, becomes of synesthesia? Our attentions, obviously, are directed elsewhere—as if in a prison, quite literally, our behavior transforms before our very eyes, unconsciously. We are castrated so thoroughly, so thoroughly sucked of vitality—we become bile-drenched zombies, utterly abandoning the notion of anything interesting, indeed stripped bare of that synesthesia we so desperately need as we try to war off shame and humiliation. This is no different from the Renaissance: the total effacement of synesthesia, as rampant societal discourse shames us, humiliates us, makes cuckolds of us all.

Do they (that is, us bloggers) really think we can bask in our synesthesia as cuckolds? Can that really be a question at all? It all seems so obvious now: blogs are the root of everything evil in this world, of the recent surge in terrorism, the depression, etc. How can politicians have missed this blindingly obvious fact—blogs are hell bent on castrating us left and right, and we are desiring it, even going so far as to give up our synesthesia voluntarily. For what?

Take this as a call to action: abandon the blogosphere. And question. Question identity, and question society. Always.

Demand your synesthesia. 

Becoming-Violence, Becoming-Synesthesia: On the Pope, Velazquez and Bacon

Each image, when taken separately, operates as good art in and of itself, as a staple of art history classes around the country. But what occurs as they are placed side by side, as they become intimately intertwined, relentlessly forging a new composition? Does one jamb the circuit of the other, which is to say, does the one overshadow the other? Or, perhaps, neither is privileged? Perhaps, they inform each other, produce a mutual circuit, a new mode of seeing altogether. It would seem such is the case. For this nuptial does proffer the strange, the unfamiliar: the tense calm of Velazquez encountering the disturbed anguish of Bacon. A chilling violence overtakes us, telling us at each moment: “This is no ordinary seeing.” Indeed, this is a seeing construed according to a very peculiar movement: a (guilty?) pope violently transformed before our very eyes.

This is not the movement of the cinematic image, nor is it the movement of our everyday lives. Whereas the cinema proffers an ever-modulating frame, a stream of still-images creating an illusion of movement, here, the frames are unsettlingly still. There is literally no movement of the frame. Nevertheless, there is a movement of some sort here. And like the cinema, this movement is occurring behind our backs: just as the moving-image of the cinema is composed of still-frames, the movement of which is constituted by our seeing and not the image itself, here, we are seeing two images that are moving somewhere, but not in and of themselves. This movement, like all movements, occurs behind our backs. And yet, this movement is just as apparent as any other movement.

So, then, what is this movement? It is a movement of violence. That is to say, this work disturbingly displaces us: seeing Bacon’s tormented pope, our bodies begin to writhe, convulse, palpate violently. This work is no longer mere depiction—it is an aggressive performance of violence itself, shamelessly intertwining seer and seen: as we become privy to this strange motion, we become violence. We perform violence—in each sensory mode! A wholly synesthetic performance, then.

Hence, we can finally see this movement for what it is: a synesthetic movement. And don’t be mistaken—this odd motion does not privilege violence; it is the movement of everything. We are always and already engaged in a synesthetic movement, unbeknownst to us; like the movement of life, this movement streams behind our backs. And, don’t mistake this movement for Kant’s “free play” either. This is not a movement of a mental state; rather, this is the movement of phenomenology. And it is an impossible movement, a movement composed of seer and seen intertwining always and already—a movement bereft of opposition between subject and object. And to see this movement: perhaps it is this odd space of seeing—if only we could see movement—that allows us to recast our eyes, and perhaps, to get a little closer to seeing what it is to see synesthesia.

A brief explanation

Yesterday, in the midst of a weekly acid trip (synesthetic exploration), the idea somehow got in me to write on this here blog. Let me state this clearly: what I wrote was no more than the ramblings of a sick misogynistic “zombie,” the musings of a castrated passion, of a thoroughly shit drenched, bile infused fiend exuding nothing more than unfounded loathing and fear. Indeed, this post was so complex, so insane and hilarious, so achingly stupid, that rather than delete it, I have decided to use it as fodder—to use it as an opportunity to praise womankind, and everything she has done for the synesthetic experience. Let me say it loudly, in case previous posts have not made it clear: the carnal intertwining that woman inaugurates with man—that is something that no synesthetic experience, save for sexual synesthesia of a sort involving woman and man, could ever undermine, nor surpass in its beauty.

So, to my readers, know this: I am not a misogynistic man, nor have I ever been one.

Why I Avoid the Female (at all costs), part 1

Departing from my central concern, from the familiar (as should be done, and will be, on a regular basis), I want to talk to you today about an oft overlooked social currency: sex. And particularly, the way that females have manipulated sex, the way females yield their sexuality to enslave mankind—and, indeed, have been doing so since the dawn of humanity.

Their tactic was subtle, brilliant: the reversal. First and foremost, the issue had to be confused; rather than enslaving men, females made themselves the subject of enslavement. Their seduction (the females) was so thorough, so profound, that mankind never had a chance. From the Renaissance through to the Victorian era, men have thought they were on top, but unbeknownst to them, females had enslaved themselves as a tactic of survival. They weren’t the ones working—men were! Men were the truly enslaved: the tyranny of capitalism was the final coup de grace. With the 70 hour work week thrust upon them, men became drenched in their enslavement, utter zombies.

And, when man finally awoke, upon finally realizing his despicable enslavement, females confused the issue further: the inauguration of contemporary feminist theory. Before man could respond, he was enslaved further—he was punished for an enslavement of the female that the female, in all her subtlety, had inflicted upon herself. Hence, man was forever doomed to servitude. Yes, the female did relinquish certain things: she began to work. But with this work, she introduced a weapon far more powerful than any man had laid eyes upon before: her raw sexuality.

The conclusion to be made is blindingly obvious, so obvious in fact, that it is no wonder it has escaped us for so long: the female is a shameless vampire, relentlessly raping and sucking man dry; and man, as a result, is a zombie, a blind servant to the every whimsy of his female counterpart.

You may wonder, why should we (mankind) even care? Is it not obvious? The female has sullied synesthesia through a sensual enslavement—with no other purpose than to ensure that her sexuality was our only sensual experience. Indeed, the female has castrated us, sensually, synesthetically. We must overcome her control, if we ever hope to return to our true state, to a synesthetic world, a world teeming with sensuality.

The Music Event: On Mozart

Let us assume that synesthesia is any involuntary crossing of the senses.

In some sense, then, all music goes beyond the mere ear, all music a kind of synesthetic caress. Think about it: as you listen you are always already seeing, feeling, smelling—you perceive a network of sense, each sense perception an affective force continually working over your body, your mind, your emotions, all inaugurating intricate networks in and of themselves! But sensory affect does not move according to a single chain of action; rather, the meetings of these various networks fold sense into complex configurations, configurations that bleed into other senses.

Listen to Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. This indeed proffers sense-networks meeting emotion-mind-networks with an affective force to be reckoned with, a magnum opus of sense.

The work itself operates as an intricate musical network: at first, a traditional classical symphony, its thematic development, as musicologist Lajos Zeke showed us in his classes on the symphony, becomes a five-part counterpoint. A classical-baroque architecture interacting in impossible modes of movement, collisions and speeds, pure intensities, fluxes and flows—as Kierkegaard would say, this is the musical erotic, the ultimate sensual experience.

Indeed, this symphony choreographs our bodies (and perceptions) in new and unfamiliar ways each and every listening. Seeing and feeling, for instance, while listening to Mozart, is not the same as seeing while listening to, say, The Beatles. What changes? Affect, that is to say, music doesn’t just go in your ears—it works over your emotional state. And as your emotions drift, perception drifts; every sense thus is inflecting every other sense, always. The role of emotion, then, takes on a greater significance: where before it was passive, it now plays an active role in shaping sensory experience.

It seems, then, that synesthesia, by token of the way emotional networks meet sensory networks, is intimately intertwined with emotion; and hearing—inseparable from emotion, from some affect—, to some degree, is experienced synesthetically. But it is not just hearing: every sense exhibits synesthetic tendencies; our perception, from the womb, is synesthetic. Think about that—we are all synesthetes.

The Seeing Event

Is seeing separate from touching, or hearing from tasting? And what about seeing seeing? Or to hear hearing, taste tasting, smell smelling, feel feeling? Despite these possibilities—and yet, precisely in and of the possible—it seems seeing, and seeing alone, is privileged. Why, and what space can such occupy? Let’s try to, um, see.

Look at the person next to you and into her eyes. What do you see? It’s not just her eyes. You see her seeing you. And stranger, you see her eyes seeing you seeing her. Eyes, then, perform multiply: they are at once seer and seen, at once consuming the world just as they are playing the world back. But, alas, seeing is not alone—touching inaugurates a similar experience. Try touching her: a carnal intertwining at once a touching and feeling, at once changing the world and changed by it.

Now turn away from her and look at a work of art, a portrait if you will. You may see two eyes peering out at you, but they are not seeing you per se: paintings and photographs and film, then, remove you from your space. Or not so much remove you as enfold you into their visual fabric with an alien posture and gait, a thoroughly foreign mode of seeing. What is this seeing of seeing? It is an alien seeing, and it is because seeing alone is framed, is closed and bounded, that seeing can be alien, that seeing can see seeing. That is to say, you can see another person seeing and see through another person’s very seeing as if it were your own.

But just as in The Matrix, when Neo opens his eyes for the first time, he is blinded by the light, learning to see seeing hurts, it blinds till you emerge a whole new seer. To persevere, to finally open your eyes, however, explodes the world. Representational art becomes the norm, a mere replication of your familiar world. But so-called non-representational art, abstract art: ah, here we have the inauguration of whole new modes of seeing, whole new worlds to explore, to sense and create and become with.

May I say, though? The notion of privileging sight above the other senses, still, seems odd. Perhaps it is a symptom of language? Perhaps, just as we can see seeing, we can see sounds, see palpably, even see palatably? But I wonder, what about synesthesia? Can we see synesthesia itself? What would such an undertaking entail? Such will be the focus of this blog: to explore this strange space, and perhaps look at a film or three, analyze acid-induced synesthesia, and occasionally just wonder at the beauty of such a multiply single sensation.