Douglas Mercer
September 8 2024
I would not be surprised if poetry, poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of the world being filled with metaphor, rhyme and recurring patterns, shapes and designs, is how the world works. The world is song.
The transportation is here
By his own admission David Byrne is autistic though some of it, the flat affect, the affected indifference, the exaggerated affectation, is no doubt an act; you can watch a younger Byrne talking about how he was inspired by the concept of cybernetics, about cybernetic hierarchies of control, but most of all how it represents something hard and cold and purely artificial which attracted him. He was involved in the New York school of conceptual arts in the mid 1970s and was clearly influenced by the cut up method of William Burroughs, that is his poetry is elliptical and phrase after seemingly random phrase goes one on top of the other until it makes what he calls “emotional sense.” With his “help us lose our minds” and “stop making sense” he is in the mainstream of the Identity Fracture Project, but in his case it is more that there is no identity at all, as if a cold machine was generating the symbols, come what will.
Descartes said that the poets give more valuable information and phrase it better than philosophers proper because unlike the latter they were proceeding from inspiration. Plato said that the poets who are mad will always be superior to those that are not, for the ones that are not may make fine verse, but the ones that are will penetrate to the center, however off beat it seems.
***
You can talk just like me
With a little practice
You can walk, you can talk just like me
If that's what you want to do
You will walk in circles around me
But first, I'll walk in circles around you
You can walk a little
But first, show me what you can do
The access is always available; anyone can do it; it is in the air but it requires a practice; that is it requires a discipline, it is something one can learn but it takes practice and work. Here he alludes to a classic master-student relationship as in a spiritual practice (with a little practice). In the end the student will supersede the master but first the master will master the student; in the end it’s always about what one can produce (first, show me what you can do), that is it is about tangible results, one can either make it happen or one cannot.
Peace of mind
It is a piece of cake
Thought control
You get on board any time you like
Peace is the still center of the beating world, that which passes understanding (Eliot). It is about thought control not in the sense of brainwashing but of mental conditioning, of being the operator of one’s own brain (Leary), and one can access it at all times (spiritual practice). To get on board refers to “the transportation” the cybernetic machine that carries one. In the movie Labyrinth the phrase “piece of cake” is always a trigger for disaster, for when one is in the labyrinth and one solves one riddle one must be aware that there are more riddles to solve, more bends to go around; and it is this hubris expressed in the phrase “piece of cake” that leads to catastrophe, that is the phrase is an instance of "famous last words"; in this poem the lines are uttered from a place brimming with serene self-confidence and nonchalance (sprezzatura, effortless grace) and so lead only to perfect control because once you have learned to play the game it’s easy and you can speak last words that will become famous.
All the world is birthday cake.
If I knew you were coming I would have baked a cake
Transmit the message to the receiver
Hope for an answer some day
Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock
We blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines
The title of this poem is Life During Wartime (life is war and strife, Heraclitus). Here the message is encoded to the god (the controller in the cybernetic game) and in supplication one hopes for the message back; the transportation (technique, practice, discipline) is here but in this instance the crossing over is difficult the road is blocked but is made through; now the one possessing knowledge holds it in secret and goes about incognito in this war (we dress like students, we dress like housewives, or in a suit and a tie). But as special intruders into the quotidian they have the cybernetic power (computers) and are able to tap into communications.
Burned all my notebooks
What good are notebooks?
They won't help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace
The burning keeps me alive
Get your instructions
Follow directions—
In this wartime situation the written word is a lie, the inner intensity (as in German Idealism) is what matters, it is the enthusiasm of the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks, the inner burning, it is what makes one live. As such anyone who has been initiated can see in a trice that one is confronted by another who is as well, that is the words might seem mundane but they possess a somewhat coded yet obvious implication once one has got on board. Then one can get the instructions and can follow directions, it’s a piece of cake, living is easy with eyes closed and one sees with the mind's eye (Hamlet, 1603).
Other people can go home
Other people, they will split
I'll be here all the time
I can never quit
Everything is very quiet
Everyone has gone to sleep
I'm wide awake on memories
These memories can't wait
Memory is a deep well. Here the burning inner intensity reaches fever pitch; memory is a deep well, full of forms and figures and images, aspects and facets, shades and colors and molds (hues), but the initiated will recognize what is in one’s own mind by means of them and the ideas (as Phillip Dick said) seize on one and use that person, they are commands. That is the memories (images, words) are alive and in control and the user possess no will in the face of them (I can never quit).
Lost my shape, trying to act casual
Can't stop, I might end up in the hospital
Changing my shape, I feel like an accident
They're back to explain their experience
As in Ovid forms are transmogrifying all the time, the inner world like clouds takes on ever new morphologies and forms (methinks it is like a whale, Hamlet), there is always the danger of madness (all our world is a hospital, Eliot) and it seems random (accident) but once one has gone though the experience one can come back to explicate it in a veiled or clear fashion, as suits one or as one wishes.
Isn't it weird? Looks too obscure to me
Wasting away, that was their policy
Heraclitus was known as the obscure, but the esoteric is only esoteric until it becomes known. The wasting away is as in Kafka’s hunger artist, an emblem of shriveling up or disappearing, as in Eliot’s rolling the universe into a ball. That is it is the known practice of the initiate to be able to become weightless or disappear on command.
Burning down the house
In this sense the house is the world which will melt like the insubstantial pageant faded that it is (The Tempest, 1613). Lightening hits the house of wax, the world is the wax house (see The Poets Calling, White Biocentrism. July 23 2024), the world (universe) is an ad hoc structure that will disband or be rolled up like a carpet.
All wet, here, you might need a raincoat
Raincoat is a reference to the rain (reign, see Rain and Shine, White Biocentrism, Jne 1 2024). A sly insinuation by the poet that the listener might consider getting a raincoat as the reign is coming and one does not want to be all wet (unprotected) at that time. Raincoat has become a code word among the illuminated ones, a tic or a tell. Paul McCartney makes multiple reference to raincoats: you and I standing solo in the sun—you and I wearing raincoats, dipping in the pockets of my raincoat.
My house is out of the ordinary
This is the house that the initiates are building, the house being the major symbol of the constructed inner life; Vitruvius was a Roman architect and engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work titled De Architectura. As the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, it has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory. Byrne did a Ted Talk in which he expatiated on how architecture helped music evolve. Vitruvius’ writing on building became a metaphor in the art of memory in building the inner life; this is the building that Sappho urges the carpenters to build, and which we are even now putting the finishing touches on (the roof beams raised high). It is no ordinary house but one that seems odd to the uninitiated (See Building, White Biocentrism, May 19 2024).
No visible means of support
You have not seen nothing yet
Everything's stuck together
The support cannot be seen; when we float in one place we will be born aloft by nothing physical; you have not seen nothing yet can mean both 1) just wait until something real comes or 2) literally, you have not seen the thing we call nothing (heaven is a place where nothing ever happens). Everything is stuck together, a classical and obvious statement of the seamless web, I can connect everything with everything (Pynchon), the paranoid always seen the synchronous connections that are hidden to the ordinary eye. Anti-entropic, it’s scientific.
It's always showtime
Here at the edge of the stage
I wake up and wonder
What was the place, what was the name?
We want to wait, but here we go again
O-U-T, but no hard feelings
What do you know? Take you away
We're being taken for a ride again
Here the poet is aware that everything is staged that the show is always happening; groggy he wonders if what he saw is a dream of if it was real; he wants to have time in repose to process it but there is no time now, and the forward thrust of the experience is relentless (onrushing time, Holderlin, 1802).
OUT
On the catastrophe and heel of pastime when it is out----
OUT
They take you away (roll up for the magical mystery tour it’s dying to take you away, we are so easily carried away). A carousel is a ride.
Down in the basement
We hear the sound of machines
I am driving in circles
Come to my senses sometimes
Why start it over?
Nothing was lost, everything's free
I don't care how impossible it seems
What lies beneath is the machines (cybernetic field) of the god (in the basement) which the poet can hear and take instructions from. He seems to be like a snake eating its tale but really is in the vast circulatory system of thought that makes a tour of reality (driving in circles, turn like a wheel inside wheel), he thinks maybe he is insane but realizes that one does not need to go back to the beginning as everything is retained (eternal recurrence) in recollection and all this floating in one place is inner freedom. In Ulysses Stephen is called an “impossible person” that is the poet is the fomenter of the impossible, Knight of Infinite Faith (Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling, 1842).
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
Heads across the sky (McCartney), make it up as we go along (cribbed by Tori Amos in Gold Dust) is the key phrase: it is literally what we will be doing in eternity, we will go along and make it (create it) at every moment when no time is like the present (the timeless world is the gift).
Home is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
There was a time
Before we were born
If someone asks
This is where I'll be
We drift in and out
Concentrating and dispersing, it comes and it goes; these lines are a reference to the Greeks notion that knowledge is not discovering but recollection, one is already at home, Kierkegaard’s seeker searches the world only to find what he was looking for upon his return home which was there all along; the poet is nestled in the womb of time before birth which is where one goes (or stays) upon the next birth (pray for us now and at the hour of our birth, Eliot).
And she was lying in the grass
And she could hear the highway breathing
And she could see a nearby factory
She's making sure she is not dreaming
See the lights of a neighbor's house
Now she's starting to rise
Take a minute to concentrate
And she opens up her eyes
And she was looking at herself
And things were looking like a movie
She had a pleasant elevation
She's moving out in all directions
Concentration or inner focus or a trance state is what is required for the practice. One pinches oneself to know that one is not dreaming; elevation is the one who levitates of flies though the air, dispersed over space (here, there, everywhere, Hic et Ubique like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or the god of creation).
Come on I go up and down
I like this curious feeling
I know, I see
It's like make believe.
Cover your ears
So you can hear what I'm saying
I'm not lost but I don't know
Where I am
I got a question
Who knows what I'm thinking?
Peculiar is the watchword (curious feeling) when reality becomes make-believe (we make it), knowing and seeing (it is knowing from Tomorrow Never Knows, one look is all it takes). One covering one’s ear to hear, like closing one’s eyes to see is a reference to alternate cognitive pathways of perception, one sees with one’s mind’s eye and hears with an inner ear.
Well, we know where we're going
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowing
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
Maturity is leaving childish things behind; the future is certain because we will will it; we just need more time to will harder; but what we will will is already in our minds (and thus has already taken place but has yet to become mutually manifest).
We are on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
And you know
We are on the road to paradise
Here we go
Inside and there you will know, the emphasis is always on being inside, the inside world being real, according to the lights of the world it is nowhere but really it is now here. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, in his madness Holderlin’s favorite phrase was: nothing happens to me.
Maybe you wonder where you are
I don't care
There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's all right
It is very far away
But it's growing day by day
Once more it is a ride and the city represents what has been built in the inner world (there’s a city in my mind, See Celestial City, White Biocentrism, June 22 2024). The city is being built and is far away (long is the time, Holderlin) but the roof is nearly ready to put in place. The building or the city is under construction but will be finished soon.
Your mind is a radio
Got a receiver inside my head
I'm tuned to your wavelength
Transmitter!
Picking up something good
Radio head
The sound of a brand-new world
Transmitter!
A reference to the supernatural soliciting of the poet, the poet is tuned in to the correct station, can pick up the messages as a receiver, the mind is more than conscious, more than matter.
It started in Oklahoma
You always think it happens somewhere else
This madness is attractive
Until the day it happens to yourself
Once more the poet refers to the Identity Fracture Project, and the divine madness (my house is Divine Madness, Holderlin) that Plato said was required to be the real Poet. But this madness is frightening (words are the most dangerous gift, Heidegger) and require a buffeting process that must be gone through to reach the Zone Of Eternity.
In Kafka’s Amerika (originally titled The Man Who Disappeared) it is written:
Personnel is being hired for the Theatre in Oklahoma! The Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is calling you! It's calling today only! If you miss this opportunity, there will never be another! Anyone thinking of his future, your place is with us! All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theatre that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place! If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now! But hurry, be sure not to miss the midnight deadline! We shut down at midnight, never to reopen! Accursed be anyone who doesn't believe us!
Step up for the magical mystery tour---step right this way, it’s coming to take you away, it’s dying to take you away, take you today.
And then comes salvation, in the form of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. Nothing in the rest of the book has prepared us for the Nature Theatre, and the reason is simple: it scarcely belongs with the rest at all. Its sui generis and its genesis is a gap that is not only chronologically substantial but represents a great chasm (see Out Of The Blue, White Biocentrism, August 25, 2024). In the Nature Theatre there are references to chiliastic imagery in expressing the hold that the vision has over the protagonist
Oklahoma is OK.
Oklahoma Sooners (soon or if not soon, then soon).
Time to jump overboard, the transportation is always here when dreams are walking in broad daylight.. All in all Byrne in a somewhat subtle (it’s only subtle to those who do not know, for those who do it is glaring) fashion gives a master class on spiritual practice. The message is you can get on board and be carried away any time you wish, and it is all free, the price of admission is free but you are required to admit it; that is you can have it for a song, it is nothing but a thing.
***
Notes:
Last time she jumped out the window
Well, she only turned and smiled
You might think she would say something
But you'd have to wait a while
Well, the lady don't mind
The lady don't mind
She just turns her head and disappears
And I kind of like that style
Little boat, it floats on a river
It's drifting through a haze
She floats by whenever she wants to
Well, there she goes again
Well, it's no trouble at all
No trouble at all
I'm going to Vegas
And if I don't make it
There are lots of
Other places
At a press conference in Metz, France American science fiction author Phillip Dick said that he believed that the world would one day shift into another mode of being but only a select few would be aware of the shift and (perhaps) the world had already undergone this secret transformation.
It's an invitation
So make a reservation
Roll up!
Carbon Dreams
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
Re: Carbon Dreams
Conceptualism refers to the Anglo-American art movement that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea, planning and production process of the artwork were seen as more important than the actual result.
