Madness, or Notes on Foolish Thinking
Sickness, Algorithmia (Go To The Bottom For An Important Note!)
Part One: In America, Thinking Doesn’t Count As Work
Cognition Requires And Consumes Energy, And Is Physical Labor
Section A: Cognition & Gnosis
To know, together: co-gnosis
Summary: A cultural devaluation of cognitive activities—thinking, to put it too simply—creates a culture of meaningless action, or actions void of inherent meaning—that is, meaning imbued through the act of creation—a cognitive workout if there ever was one—and that allows meaning to be usurped, co-opted, exploited.
Commentary: This is a vaguely Marxist problem, I guess. We are alienated from our labor; it is not allowed or supposed to mean much of anything. Or, if it is, its meaning is created elsewhere, by someone else.
Response: The thinking-class, or cognoscenti, is an elite crew tasked with giving everything meaning, including the work most of us do. Not me though. I don’t do the Man’s work. For this, I am punished with poverty.
Hypothesis: The thinking-class is not especially good at thinking and mostly believe that all the important thinking has already been done. Thus, the cognoscenti are there mostly to keep the machine churning. They reap the rewards, a meager amount of which they may dole out to their favorite employees.
Definition: Employees: We unthinking workers!
Not I! I’m rebelliously lazy, and in a lot of pain, and sick all the time, and mostly a useless person with no skills, and very depressed, lacking the necessary go-get-em attitude, mired in self consciousness and self doubt. What’s with these demons on my shoulder? Are they speaking to me? Am I a Madman? Are they telling me that I deserve more? These talkative gremlins are driving me crazy.
Questions & Concerns, Re: Thesis and Hypothesis: Where am I? Where was I? Where is my sociological data? I need it to prove things. Does the author make coherent observations about the world? Can the author backup anything with data?
Addendum: The cognoscenti don’t concern themselves with data; that’s grunt work.
New Hypothesis: I’m a thinking man, very elite. I cough and wheeze and get lost in the long corridors of a dizzying castle. It’s stuffy and cold and molds grow on the walls. Maybe this is why I feel sick all the time.
Section B: Elaborations
I’m lost in a scary warehouse. See me hunched over, trying to sort through a mess. My back hurts. I’m aging. It’s inevitable.
I’ve been in this warehouse for a long time. I spot scrawls on the walls from when I was a disillusioned teenager. Some are even dated so I know I’ve been working here for at least twenty years. Not much has changed since I first started. My work has not improved my lot in life. A few things have gotten better. But a few things have also gotten worse. It’s a wash.
I meet someone and tell them I am lost.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m lost too,” they say. “Just go about your business and I’ll go about mine. Remember, we are always alone in the warehouse.”
I read an old scrawl: In a whirlpool, spinning around, and drowning.
How bleak! I wrote that when I was an angsty teen but being an angsty adult is very sad.
In Part 2: I visit my therapist and talk about my issues. My therapist suggests I run for public office. I laugh. I don’t have the stomach for that! I get sick too easily. I would constantly be sniffling and this would not be good optics.
Addendum: this is a story about me having a cold. But it’s more than a cold, isn’t it? It’s global meltdown.
Where I Hide (Madness, Part 2)
Experiments in Coherence (Theme: A Sick Mind)
Section A: This is from the Past.
I didn’t have a good week last week. This includes yesterday. Today begins a new week and a pall hangs over me. I may have been permanently traumatized by the events of last week (including yesterday), though if I were to describe those events, you might think, well yes that sounds less than great, but permanently traumatizing? That’s a bit much.
I agree.
This isn’t about that. This is about the Act, the flow-less Act, this thing, a thing that is a loop, a dead thing inside a dead inside thing.
Section B: Thoughtless Commentary on the Following Article:
Analysis: Phhht! Driving needs to be made punitive for everyone, including (but not only) the poor.
Counterpoint: It only makes sense that we be proportionately punitive. Tolls should vary based on income and what sort of job one has, and what sort of property-holdings (ie: is one landrich or cashrich or virturich or spiritrich).
Countercounter: Enacting something like proportionate punishment for automotive ownership (the war on cars) via tolls and fines and other traffic laws might require an extensive surveillance state.
Countercountercounter: Or maybe it just involves an efficient and just bureaucracy, or maybe just honest citizens?
Literary (ie: anarchist) analysis: The Surveillance State sounds terrible and dystopian but also very realistic and believable, perhaps even inevitable, give what the State is: an authoritarian construction. The State of the Honest Citizens sounds impossible and as such, utopian. The State of the Efficient and Fair Bureaucracy sounds banal, boring, unimaginative, like you’ve compromised your integrity as a divine creature of love, denied the poet in you a place to flourish, denied the hive of gremlins that is your very being.
Look at all the cameras everywhere recording everything all of the time! I wonder: what is the surveillance for, if not for a redistribution of pain?
Epilogue, by a Teenager:
It’s best not to think about The State of Things. It’s best not to think at all because it’s not your job.
Meanwhile:
I try to go for a walk in my neighborhood but am followed around by scary big trucks. They stink and are loud. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood and I have to walk in the middle of the road lest I melt into a ditch. In the nighttime I’m invisible.
Dangerous Men (Madness, Part 3)
What if I have no story? What if stories are ruining me?
The last happy thing I did was see Gremlins 2: The New Batch with my partner at a jewel box theater in the dark of night. During one portion of the film, the Gremlins escape the film and it is suggested that they enter the theater. Gremlins are vagrant which means they exist not-quite without spacetime, but adjacent to it, moving through it differently than the human specimen (with oscillating exceptions). So, though I was only recently infected with these gremlins (as this was the first time I had seen the movie in a theater), they have also been with me since the beginning of time. Examples of the gremlin’s temporal wonkyness can be found in early scenes of Gremlins 2: The New Batch, wherein technology begins glitching the moment we enter the Trump Clamp Tower. This occurs well before any “gremlins” are released. But the gremlins are not “released.” They are already there. They are inevitable. Gizmo will be anointed with water. Midnight will come. The spawn will feast. Only light burns away their anarchy. They are creatures of darkness, from a time before Time. They were what lived here before space and before the big bang’s infectious expansion/colonization via light. Anyway, some gremlins within me originate from the VHS version, some from the DVD version. They all get along, more-or-less. The gremlins that hitched a ride to me after the theater experience hatched a few new thoughts in my head, having little to do with the film or the infection itself (but for in a meta-commentary sorta way). A specific gremlin wonders aloud: do you need more happy moments? The gremlin then suggests there is something pathetic and sad about the film experience being my last happy moment. But I was speaking hyperbolic, I protest. It wasn’t really my last happy moment. Plus, it wasn’t that long ago. And I’ve been quite sick since. So… maybe it was? What of it?
Conversation with Gremlins:
Host: I’ve been sick for a long time. Narratives can’t form. Life is shitty. I’ve lost the thread and the ability to speak with good words. I’ve lost something I can’t name because I’ve lost the ability to describe. I’m losing my mind.
Brain Gremlin: What is this thing you speak of, the mind? I don’t understand its nature.
Host: I once had a mind and I think it was expansive. My brain couldn’t contain it. My body couldn’t contain it. Now, it’s been obliterated. Most of my brain is not taking part in anything called mind. Most of my body is just a sick vessel.
Hungry Gremlin: Yum yum. Can mind-fragment regrow? Does it have mutating properties or fungal properties or private properties for me to yum yum?
Host: It’s regrown before. But who knows.
Hungry Gremlin: I eat mold?
Host: I want to be left alone.
Sad Gremlin: You don’t want to spend time with me?
Host: I can’t hear you. I’m lonely because I’m broken and not allowed to heal the part of me that can be with. Can be with. The part of me that can be with. I need to be alone in order to not be lonely.
Mean Gremlin: Whine whine whine. You drunk!
Brain Gremlin: So, you say that your time alone recharges you?
Mean Gremlin: Or do you just get drunk? You drunk!
Brain Gremlin: So electrifying! Can no one else accomplish this revivification? You may be cursed. I worry you’re unfit to be around others. You should probably be alone most of the time.
Host: I need people, desperately and sadly.
Brain Gremlin: You need validation and approval. You want them to think highly of you.
Hungry Gremlin: You want them to fear you. You’re going to eat them.
Host: What?
Hungry Gremlin: Just kidding. You only want to be loved and to love.
Host: Love itself has been colonized and I cannot be within the colony of love.
Mean Gremlin: Laughing. Oh yeah, because you’re a man. A dangerous man. Dangerous because you are a man. Men are dangerous.
Brain Gremlin: The desire for men to be feared is central to who they are. Mostly, you would rather be loved, but you are taught to want to create fear in others. You are taught Dominance, Aggression, and Control, or CAD. I said them in the wrong order for the acronym. Apologies.
Host: I am a man?
Mean Gremlin: If you control things.
Host: I am not a man. I have no control. I am flung around by fate. I have no say in the composition of the world around me. I am a man!
Brain Gremlin: Does a Man control things, or seek to control things, thereby partaking in illusion?
Host: I only want a Say In Things.
Mean Gremlin: So desperate.
Brain Gremlin: Men are creatures of desperation.
Host: It’s not about control or desperation…
Fun Gremlin: Why not? What could better? Passion is suffering. Laughs.
Secret Gremlin: Let go. Be a different kind of danger. Danger is sexy. Change the definitions of words. You’re a madman.
Host: I want my voice to be valued by the community, but I don’t think it is.
All Gremlins: What?! We value it, sort of! Who cares about the community? What community? Community is dumb! Eat the community!
Host: I actually enjoy melting. Sometimes I walk in ditches and melt in the rain.
Mean Gremlin: Such a white man thing to say.
Brain Gremlin: Sympathetic. Mmmhmm. A white man raised mostly by white women.
Host: Sometimes I think they didn’t do a good job. Better than the men, who weren’t even around, but still not a good job. Who do I blame?
Mean Gremlin: You were raised by public school system and television, and other forms of mass media.
Host: They didn’t do a good job either. Do I blame them?
Fun Gremlin: You hold a lot of resentment and bitterness, which I think is fun.
Host: What am I supposed to do with it? Drop it?
Brain Gremlin: You have been well-taught to hate. Grins.
Host: By whom?
Brain Gremlin: I’m certainly not sure. No one in particular. You just sorta soaked it up. Osmosis. Laughing. Pedants hate when someone uses osmosis metaphorically. There are two reasons (at least):
The metaphor is scientifically inaccurate (because it doesn’t involve water???).
It is also an overused metaphor.
Host: But it is osmosis! It really is! I soak up emotional content through permeable membranes. The air is drenched, wet with emotional matter. My inside is wet too. Sometimes, the inside is dry compared to the outside and sometimes the outside is dry compared to the inside, and so there is a flux, a constant re-balancing, attempts at equilibrium.
Hungry Gremlin: Equilibrium never attained. Futile process causes decomposition.
Secret Gremlin: Allow for decomposition. Become compost.
Hungry Gremlin: Let yourself be eaten!
Host: But can we address the gremlin in the room? I’ve been invaded by alien lifeforms. Alien as in Strange, not as in From Outer Space. Aliens live inside me. I’m sick and I hate it.
Brain Gremlin: Allow for a more robust emotional engagement with your surroundings. Be less of a quote-unquote Man. Weep.
Host: There’s a blockage in my soul that I sometimes experience as hunger and sometimes as the inability to breathe. My insides are swollen. I’m activated. What’s the word? I don’t know. I can’t think of most words because I can’t think. What’s that thing when your tissue is on fire?
Hungry Gremlin: Yum yum! Inflamed tissue.
Host: I caught a terrible and common virus. I will live. Who cares?
All Gremlins: We care sorta! Is that not enough?
Secret Gremlin: Plus, you’re not dying… whisper …ever. You will become one of us.
Host: Would I be missed by my own self? Or wait, are you saying I will be missed by the spirits and gods and/or aliens that live inside of me? I talk to imaginary things! Is that something to worry about? On my best days I am very crazy. On my worst days like recently, I feel so normal. I watch television and am depressed. I am most unhappy when trapped acting like a normal person. It doesn’t suit me.
Mean Gremlin: What a “normal-person” thing to say. Laughing.
Host: Does a normal person have long conversations with the alien spirits that live in their stomach and hide in the cupboards?
Brain Gremlin: I don’t know much about people at all. People are alien to me too but they seem often incapable of engaging with my ways. We are Invisible Demons and we’ve engaged with you. You should be worried.
Host: I’m worried. Am I some thing to worry about?
Fun Gremlin: A dangerous man, sometimes with violent thoughts?
Secret Gremlin: This one thinks in the violence of body horror. This is nothing to worry about. The thoughts without category are scarier. Fear the madman: equivocal, ambiguous, marginal, indeterminate (M:EMIA). Just kidding. This guy’s alright.
Host: I am mad. I am angry. No, I am mad. I’m insane.
Brain Gremlin: No, you’re very sane.
Secret Gremlin: Still mad.
Host: I’m sane but diseased. I see through time. I talk to god easily. More than one. Devils too. Not a big deal.
Secret Gremlin: Everyone does it.
Host: I suffer.
Mean Gremlin: Mocking. The Man Suffers! Man Suffers! Always suffering, so very special Man. White Man Suffers! The Unoriginal. The Sequel! The Copy!
Secret Gremlin: Or have you not seen suffering before? Is this something different?
Hungry Gremlin: Or, maybe all suffering, no matter how banal, is a unique and delicious morsel on this edible plane of existence wherein I feast, feast on human misery, feast on that desire for control, feast on delirious human hubris!
Brain Gremlin: The Man in Sorrow.
Host: I think I’m gonna talk to someone else now.
Brain Gremlin: Strange and abrupt way to end things. Tongue in cheek? Sorta hostile? Gremlinesque? Cruel parody? Anti-gremlin propaganda? Found out next time!
THE BOTTOM:
A Contemporary Note from the Rogue Bureaucrat (Fully Human),
About the Text
The above text is a semi-fictionalized collage of recent events, and the thoughts that may or may not have occurred during events both fictional and nonfictional. Thoughts and Thought-Havers vary but for that they all reside within one body-soul thingamajig author, wherein the author, though “he contains multitudes,” these multitudes cannot all make legal proclamation, as our current society cannot accept multiple valid identities, and often cannot even fully accept singular expressions of identity. This leaves the multitude holder in a bind that often sees the creation of “secret” or “fictive” identities, or variations on a theme. I am a variation on a theme insofar as I still use the the bureaucratic identity you’ve come to understand, with name and face and other bureaucratic signifiers. One may ask, aren’t all signifiers inherently bureaucratic? Those originating in bureaus, which is only one very specific kind of work-desk, are certainly bureaucratic, but other signifiers may emerge from other pieces of furniture. My face need not be about identification. But now is not the time for fantasy and transformation. Let’s stick to facts.
About the Foolish Oracle Variety Show
The Foolish Oracle Variety Show, a co-creation of An Eccentre Productions, Limited (L,EAP), did not occur two months in a row due to illness (et cetera), and we are taking a few month hiatus to figure out “what we’re doing on this earth.” Perhaps this information, deemed “important,” should have lead the way and been more clearly delineated through title and subtitle, so that the reader’s attention is appropriately dictated. Maybe the author seeks to not be a dictator.
Creative projects continue. They’re a little jumbled and messy right now. We will return, but we may transform slightly (or radically) in the process, may emerge an unfamiliar thing. We may hop genres, mediums, or architectural styles. We may emerge a new and unholy demon-science.
To fund the Eccentre is to fund our Search. To fund the Eccentre is to fund our Collective Work.
Thank you and remember: this is not the final note.
There is a Part 2. There are more than 5 Parts. Probably more than 7 or even 8.
To be continued.