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AntiOedipus Revisited

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Nation of One:
Since my time is limited as far as the Internet goes, I will transfer the one excerpt from Dead End: A Philosophical Diary.  It's from chapter 7: A Laughing Stock  At my leisure I will reflect upon this and add commentary if I feel compelled to do so.  I don't think I'll remove the context of the politics of daily existence, but will leave the entries as is.  Hell, they are already cut down to size from the scribblings they were taken from.

Actually, Holden, Trachycarpus, and forthebirds, if not for this message board, I would have no motivation for even discussing this stuff.  Generally, people say I "talk too much" or "think too much" ... There are a couple people who don't mind listening to me babble, but, for the most part, I am left muttering to myself. 

That's why listening to john Trudell is so refreshing. He says many people prefer ignoring him too.   :D


January 2008


--- Quote ---If I do end up securing this little domicile in Ocean Grove, I will be bringing all my salvaged notebooks and enough texts to create my own private sanctuary.

I have all my notebooks from 1987 to the present all on the shelves in plain view, no longer hidden in chests, and I pick volumes at random to spark some contemplation.

The text, Anti-Oedipus, is a real brain bender. Deleuze and Guattari reference Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism:
“I observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kilth and kin, or the preservation of the State.”

Deleuze and Guattari write, “After centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate still being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery, not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

I will not be bringing a television set, not even for a woman. I will eventually get Internet access, but in the meantime I will forge ahead, typing at my leisure then uploading at the library. Gathering texts to haul to Ocean Grove is chaotic. Unlike the large apartment in Matawan which absorbed my entire personal library as well as two desks, computer network, and entertainment system, the domicile in Ocean Grove is severely compact, so I am forced to focus … no more reference books. My Bibliotheca is in my mother’s basement in Freehold, so when I go there, I can still access it.

Now I will revive Schizoanalysis and expose the current industry of Psychoanalysis, along with its State religion, The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, as enforcing an age-old tendency to humble us, demean us, and to make us feel guilty. Instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeoise repression at its most far reaching level; that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all. (Deleuze/Guattari 1972)

Again, from Anti-Oedipus:
“As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side! – never did psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement for social repression, and for participating in it with enthusiasm. Oedipus is one of those things that become all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the priests. Oedipus is like God; the father is like God; the problem is not resolved until we do away with both the problem and the solution.”

Do I really need to present these or other ideas to the world? Do I really need to type anything? No, and again, no. I don’t need the Internet. I isolate. Writing just for the sake of writing without any motivation to publish what is being scribbled is like demonic possession. The author is simply leaving a trail of where his mind has traversed. Could it be that all my writings are conversations with myself? I want to scramble the codes in my own mind and hack into my own brain. It is my brain, right? Reading obscure texts makes me a Presence of Mind in the social fabric regardless of my low status. Intellectual evolution is a higher level of evolution than society and biology!

The Farmer’s World, of which mass industrial society is an extension, requires dull-witted compliant citizens. With the fear of being punished or of not being rewarded, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be “good enough” for someone else. Eventually we become someone we are not. We domesticate ourselves. We become socialized adults who do what we are told without supervision. We police ourselves into behaving as trained and tamed automatons.
Many of us resort to alcohol or hard street drugs to “set the demons free” or lower our society-induced inhibitions so that we can experience our raw animality.

We seek to expand the boundaries of poetry and prose by stating our own desires in our own terms.

Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his INSTINCTS.

I have been observing the treatment centers and day programs the State employs and refers “clients” to. Institutions such as the asylum, the hospital, or the prison function as laboratories for observation of individuals, experimentation with correctional techniques, and acquisition of knowledge for social control. My own subjectivity is produced as a political operation. Conversely, changing one’s everyday existence becomes a political act with potentially radical consequences. I want to think coherently!

Just reading Arthur Schopenhauer at age 23 had a powerful effect on me: I was free to think forbidden thoughts such as “life is not worth living” and “it would have been better never to have been born.” These realizations helped me to experience the absurd and ridiculous nature of our lives.

When I was 15 years old I read both Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day. I just can’t shake the impression these novels had on me … I am still haunted by the question, “What the hell were they thinking having us read these novels?”

Surely whoever was in charge of assigning the reading list was trying to tell us something very subversive that he could not just come out and tell us point blank. I secretly imagined myself the protagonist refusing to take his medications, resisting “treatment.” I imagined myself growing us to be some anti-hero fighting the forces that were “in control.” By the time I was 19, I was scribbling in what I have come to refer to as The Destroyed Diaries (1980 to 1986), the ones I set on fire down at the pit near Lake Topanemus.

When I became homeless after choosing not to go directly from high school to college, I started researching some things they didn’t cover in high school, like what Adolf Hitler’s life was like when he was younger … before he became the megalomaniac we all know him as. I learned that Hitler lived a solitary life. Much of the time he spent dreaming or brooding. He was an angry, lonely man. He wandered for hours through the streets and parks, suddenly disappearing into the public library in pursuit of some new enthusiasm. Hitler’s moods alternated between abstracted preoccupation and outbursts of excited talk. He was a poor wretch, often half starved, without a job, family, or home. He clung obstinately to any belief that would bolster up the claim of his own superiority. By the age of 21, he had become what more disciplined folks like to call “a jobless bum.”

Germany had suffered a collective inferiority complex on a national scale. This led to an overcompensation for it in the form of extreme nationalism. The Nazis were a middle class movement rather than proletarian. The lower classes were also drawn to Nazism which began as revolutionary but later became anti-revolutionary. Could it really be that fascism grows out of economic stress? The middle class goes after the proletarian, destroying their organizations. This silent majority may be the same types who would volunteer information to “Homeland Security.” It is the silent majority that creates fascism. The collective frustration of the disappearing middle class gets subverted into fascistic regimes.

Now, Friedrich Nietzsche helps me understand the way the masses operate.

“High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors.”

Dionysus was the god of drunken ecstasy and frenzy. The symbol of Dionysus took possession of Nietzsche’s life. He consecrated himself to the service of the god Dionysus, but Dionysus is a dangerous and ambiguous god. Nietzsche was torn apart by the dark forces of the underworld, succumbing, at age 45, to psychosis. Nietzsche was one of the loneliness men. Is there any way to know if there exists or ever has existed a sane individual? The earth has become a madhouse, and those running the asylums are usually even more insane than the inmates confined within the walls.

Now I am venturing into realms of discourse where few traverse, building connections in my neural nerve net which I intend to implement immediately as my insights have concrete manifestations in my life-world and in my interactions with the social fabric. Do I, as a deoedipalized individual transforming, have the capacity to demolish entire sectors of the social machinery simply by calling into question the established order?
--- End quote ---

Holden:
 I would have no motivation for even discussing this stuff.  Generally, people say I "talk too much" or "think too much" ... There are a couple people who don't mind listening to me babble, but, for the most part, I am left muttering to myself. 

We can't change the masses.  There are Qualitas Occulta.They are ignorant so they ignore you.
Our correspondence has been a blessing to me.To be sure,the anti-gort germ was present in me before hand, but your ideas & thoughts have helped me a great deal.Its pure pleasure for me to read you,perhaps the only pleasure of my life.They say,when the student is ready,the master arrives.Maybe I am ready now.

I think the following applies to you-
One of his students asked Buddha, "Are you the messiah?"
"No", answered Buddha.
"Then are you a healer?"
"No", Buddha replied.
"Then are you a teacher?" the student persisted.
"No, I am not a teacher."
"Then what are you?" asked the student, exasperated.
"I am awake", Buddha replied.

PS -I would be out of town for a couple of days,so may not be able to respond.







 

Nation of One:
My god,  I can't even have a guest over without the landlord barking in my face after his minion/slave called the police because I wouldn't haul garbage cans for her broken back!  The current landlord has threatened to do all he can to see me lose my rental assistance, and I've only been in this residence since August.   :'(

Berlin or Bust!

Skip Greece, Italy, and Spain.  Start with severe, and I mean SEVERE austerity for Manalapan and Deal NJ USA.  If you think Greece, Italy and Spain are bad, you should get a load of this s-h-i-t here.  Talk about ostentatious consumption!  Landlord barking in my face for having a woman-friend over.  Her sister has no legs, off at the knees, and is missing one arm.  Pouring rain.  I bring her and her sister upstairs, and the thug cop gorillas with badges and guns are at my door interrogating, fully prepared to break my arm should I light a cigarette.  Jail bait, much?

If I had an army of me I would have saved her.   Germany?  Sweden?  Ecuador?  I already bought the tickets to take my mother to the ballet, Nutcracker Suite.  We haven't seen it since I was a child.  Yep, life sucks, put I am passionate until the end.  The police seemed to have a sense of humor, but there is ice in their laughter, as Nietzsche said.  I can't believe how ugly the landlord became.  He thinks I threatened him.  Huh!  He wants to see me lose my rental assistance.  What a f-u-c-k-i-n-g set-up.    ???

I want to spend the holidays with my mother.   You know, I just don't know what to do.  Life has always been one disaster after another for me.  It is what it is.

If Germany is listening, I could sure use your help.

Love,
H

Holden:
I am terribly sorry for what happened. What can I say? I remember you once said " "I am to Schopenhauer,what Hitler was to Nietzsche" and if that be so,I am to you,what Goebbels was to Hitler.I've written almost the same things about you that he wrote about Hitler in his diary:

"Great joy. He greets me like an old friend. And looks after me. How I adore him!"

"I ask. He gives brilliant replies. I adore him. Philosophical questions. Quite new perspectives. He has thought it all out...He sets my mind at rest on all points. He is a man in every way, in every respect. Such a thinker, he can be my leader. I bow to the greater man, the philosophical genius!"

"These days have signposted my road! A star shines leading me from deep misery! I am his to the end. My last doubts have vanished. Germany will live. Heil H!"

Deutschland.."If Germany is listening, I could sure use your help." Do you wish to repatriate to Germany?


To stay safe from the gorts- I've chosen the method of Perfect Isolation.
http://youtu.be/xySFquUkfyY

Holden:
"You know, I just don't know what to do.  Life has always been one disaster after another for me."

There is no solution ,is there? And my "Perfect Isolation" is a farce :
Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in the stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so […] the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis.
–Arthur Schopenhauer.

I am so sorry Mr H. Keep well.

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