{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Just beyond the first glimpses of wretched misery, there is an Imaginary Dimension, a Secret Realm that most of us knew quite intimately as children.  Just as I feel a serious bout of depression forming, suddenly it vanishes, or I should say, "I" vanish ... the ego vanishes ... the persona vanishes.

What is left is the Imaginary Protagonist who is apparently some kind of monk in his own private monastery of one.  His "religion"?   School Mathematics.

That's right.  In this imaginary world of "make believe," exploring the properties of complex numbers, the mysterious square root of negative one, becomes some kind of religious rite ...

Is it important to watch the evening news?

Do I really need to know about all the tragic events? 

There may have been a time not so very long ago when the acquisition of knowledge was viewed as "evil" - in some of the Western world religions ... you know, eating from the Tree of Knowledge Between Good and Evil ... or simply protecting oneself against hubris.

But I have found that the pursuit of knowledge actually does protect one against hubris, for when you become serious about focusing on one little area at a time, paying close attention to parts where you might have always been confused about for the longest time, well, the entire process is one of patience and humility - if anything, ego-destroying, not ego-inflating.

And is it so imaginary after all is said and done?   Is my private inner world of mathematics somehow less real than the World Soccer Play-Offs or a Baseball World Series or Football Superbowl?

Really.  I'm serious.  Is it all the gambling taking place and the selling of products on the television commercials that make the world of professional sports somehow more legitimate than the world of mathematics that a lifelong student approaches daily?

Which world is more legitimate, the imaginary world of numbers and mathematical concepts in my head, or the world of blood, sweat, tears, television, and money that represents the world of professional sports?

Put another way, which is more real, the world of the crowd, the world of the stadium, or the world we carry around on our shoulders, the world of the unconscious when we sleep?

In Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, in a talk in the prison, one of the characters insisted that one's own nonsense was more precious than another person's sense.

Maybe then, we might say that one's own madness is more precious than another person's sanity or common sense.

From "Jailhouse Scribblings: 2010"

Some jailbirds get together to study the Bible or the Koran. Hentrich studies Dostoyevsky in solitude.


2010.06.01

To say one has 99% belief is to imply one doubts. Both Christianity and Islam are slave religions which demand submission and obedience to a monotheistic patriarch. I’ll have none of that. Why so many inmates go for these religions and their secular equivalents (that are disguised as substance abuse therapies) while incarcerated is most likely rooted in the conversion process itself, which is the manner in which these sects spread, namely, via proselytization. Prisoners, inmates, and other oppressed populations seek inclusion wishing to belong to the herd – for security.


2010.06.02

awake
jail cell
foul stench in mouth
have to pee
jump down from bunk
step carefully on desk so as not to slip
mental hospital socks help somewhat
piiss into toilet
the piiss has strong odor
rub corners of mouth with fingers
smell fingers
smells like shiit
actual shiit
breath foul

And so I brush teeth and wash corners of mouth and beard, thinking about how I might go about turning these nasty odors into literature. Did Shakespeare or Dante write about these foul odors?   I’m sure that neither was spared experiencing the disturbing unpleasantness of our carnal foulness.

Why didn’t the holy medicine man, Black Elk of the Sioux, speak about shiitting in the woods or even mastur-bation, for that matter? Who writes or speaks about that weird smell when you press your nose down on your lip? Is it possible to unashamedly write an insanely hilarious autobiographical manifesto? Now I am getting somewhere!

Another unforgetable paragraph from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

“I just came to find out personally, once and for all – well, number one, is it true you’re insane? You see, there’s a theory current (well, there, somewhere) you’re insane, or you lean strongly in that direction. I can assure you, I’m rather strongly inclined to that theory myself; in the first place because of your stupid or rather nasty actions (which can’t be explained), and in the second place because of the way you treated your mother and sister not long ago. If a man weren’t mad he’d have to be a monster and a villian to act as you have to them. Consequently, you must be insane.”

Also, when the detective is talking to Raskolnikov:

"I repeat, you are very impatient, Rodion Romanych, and sick. You are bold and proud and serious, and you have been through a great deal – I knew all that long ago. I am familiar with all these moods, and as I read it your little essay seemed quite familiar. It was thought out on sleepless nights and in a state of wild excitement, heart heaving and pounding, and with suppressed enthusiasm. It’s dangerous though – this proud, suppressed enthusiasm in a young man! I jeered at you at the time, but I’ll tell you now that I’m terribly fond – I mean as an admirer – of this first, youthful, passionate experimenting with the pen. Your essay’s absurd and fantastic, but there’s such a sincerity that keeps flashing through it, such a youthful, incorruptible pride, such desperate boldness; and it’s rather somber, your essay; well, but that’s to the good, yes. I read that essay of yours and I put it aside, and … as I put it aside I thought: ‘That man’s heading for trouble!’”

There’s another passage I want to quote in full where Raskolnikov’s mother addresses him, and I sometimes like to imagine someone addressing me this way, for imagining this helps to protect my spirit against the status quo which would have me mocked and marginalized by their chain-of-command lapdogs, knucklehead authority worshipers, and degenerates-in-charge:

“I may be stupid, Rodia, but I can tell that you will soon be one of the top people in our learned world, maybe the very top. And they dared think you were mad! You may not know it, but that’s what they really did think. Ah, the miserable worms, how could they understand what it means to have brains!”

Since I am obliged to pass this text on to yet another scholar/jailbird, a few more little excerpts that I can meditate upon at my leisure:

The policeman, Gunpowder, says to Raskolnikov, at the station when Raskolnikov is about to confess for the murder of the old pawn broker, “As for the little ornaments and appurtances of life are concerned, for you nihil est; you’re an ascetic, a monk, a hermit! … For you it’s a pen behind the ear, a book, scholarly researches – that’s what makes your soul soar!”

Expressing Raskolnikov’s inner reflections, the narrator writes, “It even struck him that they [the prisoners] valued life more in prison than they did when they were at large. How much agony some of them must have been through – the tramps, for instance. Could an odd ray of sunlight really mean so much?”

“Everybody disliked and avoided him. Finally they even came to hate him. Why? He did not know. There were some far more criminal than he, and even these held him in contempt, laughed at him, laughed at his crime.”

“‘You’re a gentleman!’ they told him. ‘You shouldn’t have been walking around with an ax – not a gentleman’s business!’ For some reason he did not understand there was a quarrel one day; they all fell on him at once in a fury. ‘You’re an atheist! You don’t believe in God!’ they shouted at him. ‘You should be killed!’”

“He had never talked to them about God or faith, yet they wanted to kill him as an atheist; he remained silent and did not contradict them. One convict flung himself on him in a real frenzy. Calmly and quietly Raskolnikov stood his ground; not an eyebrow twitched and not a face muscle quivered. A guard managed to get between him and the murderer in time, or blood would have been spilled.”

In the afterward, Robin Feuer Miller asks, “Has the immensely private act of reading made you more thoughtful or more compassionate, or has it hardened your heart?”

“How will this novel insert itself into the private recesses of your living, thinking, feeling self?”

Dostoevsky himself spent eight months in prison in Peter & Paul Fortress, sentenced to death but reprieved at the last minute … four years as a fettered convict in a prison camp and then five years as a soldier reduced to the ranks … In a footnote there is something written by Tolstoy in an essay called Why Do Men Stupify Themselves? (1889): Raskolnikov did not live his true life when he murdered the old woman or her sister … He lived his true life when he was lying on the sofa in his room … when he was doing nothing and was only thinking, when only his consciousness was active: and in that consciousness tiny, tiny altercations were taking place. It is at such times that one needs the greatest clearness to decide correctly the questions that have arisen, and it is just then that one glass of beer or one cigarette may prevent the solution of the question, may … stifle the voice of conscience … as was the case with Raskolnikov.”