Adult undergarments filled with sour cream...

Hey there.
Just discovered some of my old school poetry from my ill-fated university degree program years ago. If Linda Woodbridge had stayed at the University of Alberta for just a couple more years, my whole life would be different, but alas, all I have now is old photocopies of poems written in classes that didn't matter in the pursuit of a degree that means little, if anything to anyone in the real world. In any event, here's a snapshot of myself ten years ago, trying to be a smartass...

Burning Desire

O my love is like a ripe, ripe orange
I can't wait to freshly squeeze her
She opens herself like a rusty door hinge
Each time I try and tease her

Her face is like a new-fallen acorn
Surmounted by squirrel-brown hair
Around her shoulders are sweaters worn
To keep her from chills in the air

Tall she's not, but she's not barred
From sporting as she's quick and thin
O my love is like a new graveyard
And I'm dying to get in.


Okay. Send all raspberries and abuse to jdsilentio@city-of-liverpool.com. I apologize for the weasel that I once was. I hope I've outgrown it. And as the paramecium said, "Adios Amoebas."

Justice for the 96

-mARKUS

More epoxy for your sea-monkeys?

Hey there.
In an effort to try and break the monotony of my intellectual maunderings, I thought I would throw in some quick poetry to keep potential readers interested. Who wants to read about aesthetic abstractions all day, every day? I don't, and I write the bloody stuff. So Part Two of the treatise is done, but I won't publish it yet. Instead, here's one of my poems. Haven't set it to music yet, and haven't really found the heart to do so yet.

when i can't ring you on a winter night i wonder

where on this endlessly frigid
snowscape of ice floes
and impassable drifts
riven with wind
in an unfamiliar silence
could i find you
when by day stabbing
snows penetrate
violate
the domain of sight
and by night stars
smile darkling in their shine
illumined ice still freezes
and my voice
carries as far
as the mist of my breath
(if loneliness was a place
i would see it all my nights
your features woven through it
beneath the northern lights)

- mARKUS


Right. I'll be back tomorrow to bore the socks off the people tenacious enough to try and read through more of my dissertation. Cheerio.

Justice for the 96.
-mARKUS

Art and Science, Chapter One

The Inherent Diametric Nature of Aesthetic and Scientific Disciplines
(Warning - may cause drowsiness. Do not read before operating heavy machinery.)

1. Posit

The hypothesis is this: all branches of artistic, spiritual and intellectual endeavour deal with or address absence when contrasted with presence --- being and nothingness, to use Jean-Paul Sartre's translated Gallic phrase. This dynamism which activates art is powered by a tension which must prove itself to be more than merely a commonality which transcends all media. Rather, it must be an inherent and essential component which encompasses all aesthetics and academics. In other words, diametric relationships between people and concepts do not merely enhance a piece of artistic work, they are a direct reflection of the very nature of the process used by the artist to produce his or her creations. The soul, if such it may be called, is revealed through the completed work of the artist to be a universally appealing identity struggling against the essence of existence, generally defined herein as Newton's second law of thermodynamics.
Essentially, Newton said that in a closed system, entropy always increases. What is whole will disintegrate, what is ripe will wither, what is bright will dim, and what is rapid will slow and stop. Energy flows like a river down a valley, always seeking a lower state. Life spirals inevitably toward death, and the feature that makes Art authentic is the ability to create something that we recognize as being a part of ourselves fighting against that inevitability. Jacques Derrida said that existence is a hall of mirrors. We only adore and respect things that echo characteristics of ourselves, and every artist tries to use the one thing that all people have in common - the struggle against the inevitable - to make their works accessible. Hence aesthetics. The crude remark of "I don't know art, but I know what I like." - merely illustrates the extent of which one work of art has exemplified that ideal. What do we all have in common? Birth and Death. Universality of the human experience springs from that elemental touchstone, defined as what we know as existence, and it's diametrically opposed concept.
The concept of binary dynamic struggle proves not to be limited by what the human mind or social constructions perceive to be divisions between intellectual disciplines. Biology, for example, is composed entirely of examinations and experimentations which serve to illuminate a series of systematic methods of attempting to circumvent, or even contradict the second law of thermodynamics. If entropy is a universally true and applicable concept, and all things ought to be moving invariably toward a lower state of chemical and physical organization, then the Krebs Cycle is an anomaly. Nitrogen, Carbon and Oxygen ought not to be configuring themselves into the complicated affair that is organic matter, but rather working on decomposing from whatever compounds they happen to find themselves arranged and releasing heat, which is the derivative by-product of all thermodynamic processes. Hence the "thermo-" in the "thermodynamic".
How can biology exist, even as a concept, or a discipline, if the very foundation is denied by one of the key principles by which the universe operates? The key is in the exact wording of Newton's law. Entropy always occurs in a black-box, or closed system. Looking at life on Earth is not looking at a closed system. Why not? Because we receive loads of energy from the sun. Our little system is being fed by an external source. The entropic forces are operating, but on a much larger scale - life only exists here because our sun is a big fusion reactor which is slowly decaying and will quit supplying us with energy in a few billion years. Right now, it's mushing hydrogen atoms together to form helium, and when it runs out of hydrogen, the lights go out.
In essence, the nature of the definition of the quantity of entropy within a given scenario is dependent upon whether that scenario is closed to the admission of more energy, in which case, entropic decay is not cancelled, merely deferred to the originating energy source. That being said, there is some consternation created when attempting to derive general principles from circumstances and examples which have varying conditions of existence. Even though the Earth receives energy from the Sun, that doesn't mean that an individual life form lives as long as that energy remains constant. Every living thing on Earth still ages, gets sick, and dies. Every living thing is an entropic system, or as Hamlet puts it "A king may go a-progress through the innards of a worm", which is to say that Robin Williams' character in "Dead Poets' Society" is correct in saying that every person you meet or see will eventually be no more than fertilizer, their organic composite elements being used by little engines like the Krebs Cycle to form other living tissue using the energy of the sun.
How does animal life exist then, if only plants can use the photosynthetic effect of the Krebs Cycle to assemble the building blocks of life? And why are plants still subject to the scourge of disease and death? Shouldn't they just grow until the sun stops shining?
The answer is an entropic cascade. That is to say that all individual entropic systems can only slow that entropy by using the entropic force of another system. How does an animal prevent dying? It has to eat something. What does it eat? Something composed of compounds which are then broken down into component parts and absorbed into the animal's system. If you eat a carrot, you accelerate the entropy of that carrot as it turns from an orange veggie into a sludge of constituent minerals, vitamins, beta-carotene, water, and fibre. The carrot must be reduced in order for you to be enhanced. And plants are unfortunately victim to three other principles which limit their lifespan - structural mechanics, population theory, and evolution. In short - your lawn won't live until the end of time because grass grows at the leaf level disproportionate to the root level, and at a certain point, will be unable to feed itself, and there are too many individual plants competing for the resources available, and they will choke themselves to death unless another entropic system contributes (read: fertilizer), and third, grass that grows really, really high and is terribly efficient at doing so would have several properties - it would have been consumed by herbivorous dinosaurs that required acres of the stuff to get through the week, it would suck the nitrogen out of any soil base in which it was planted to get the nutrients necessary for the Krebs Cycle, and third, it would quickly be supplanted (sorry) by plants that could germinate, mature and release seeds to consume any available resources. In short, plants have to eat like we do, and they die in the same way. The Methuselah Bristlecone Pine from the Californian Cascade Mountains that has been dated at 4600 years old is terribly lucky to have the soil and water conditions it does, as well as the lack of competition and its genetically programmed lack of growth.
Parallel to the scientific and physical principles outlined by the principles of entropy are the intrinsic properties which comprise and define aesthetics. Let us examine what can be described as a soul, which is to say the sum identity of an individual, comprising all intellectual and emotional faculties therein. Is such a thing a closed system? The answer must be in the negative, since (Platonic theories of a priori knowledge notwithstanding) it may be comfortably asserted that human beings are able to grow and expand; that statement qualified through centuries of observation and development. Since growth is essentially a linear process, and assuming that either entropy is not operating, or has at least been deferred, the question becomes: from what state do we grow? In terms of the soul, I hypothesize that the ground or original level of the human soul is that of a state of isolation, ignorance, absence, loss, despair and darkness. Freud's postulate that birth is the first formative experience of a human personality reinforces this assertion. The removal from the womb, the separation from the mother, the first breath of dry air all contribute to the incipient intelligence perceiving existence to be nothing more than a series of negative stimuli which compound until an eventual demise and consequent return to the identity-less void from whence it came. Such a traumatic and universal transformative experience must influence the dynamics of society and humanity as a whole. By extension, this means that all achievement and struggles against despair are significant though ultimately futile attempts to return to a womb which cannot exist, even as a metaphorical emotional projection. Heaven, Nirvana, and other such after-life concepts are reflections of this desire to return to the warmth, safety, comfort and painlessness of pre-natal existence. In short, being born breaks us, and we spend the rest of our lives in a vain attempt to put the pieces back together again.
Authenticity, then, finds its deepest roots in emotional and intellectual appeals to states of despair and abandonment, and the quest to restore unity and banish dystopia. Distance, as caused by isolation is therefore ironically the greatest common factor which unites humanity. This serves to delineate the postulate that aesthetic expression predominantly consists of manifestations which address the diametric tension between the appeals to the emotions of emptiness and loneliness, and the emotions of satisfaction and fulfillment. This can be shown by presenting another corollary discipline: economics. Emotional appeal is the fundamental principle which governs strategic advertising and marketing (when applied to demographics), and the objective of marketing is to sell in order to succeed and survive as a corporate entity. The Darwinist nature of market economies dictates that companies which are unsuccessful at convincing people to consume their product or service will soon no longer have the revenue necessary to continue advertising, and shortly thereafter will they cease to exist, but they will not procreate in the sense that their attitudes and philosophies will not be emulated by companies in the future. Thus, the majority of corporations currently advertising in and on various media must, after generations of marketing evolution, be making some significant emotional appeals in order to induce people to follow a pattern of consumer behaviour condusive to the success of those companies. If the extrapolation of personal preferences and affectations into the general or universal are in fact rooted to a universally negative emotion-set, then a great deal is revealed.
Why would people buy deodorant unless they considered themselves malodourous? Why buy diet products unless one considers one's self overweight? And thus are impossibly thin and impeccably coiffured celebrities used to market products in a way that is intended to make people feel inadequate and unloved. Those emotions are latent in every human being, and each bronzed adonis and lithe lilith only serves to create a sensation of discontent, and offer a commercial product as a means of remedying the situation. The nagging sensation of inadequacy is the largest lever in the human machine which is the human identity, and hence the one most vulnerable to commercial exploitation as well as aestethis appreciation.
But if the fundamental basis of aesthetics is dependent upon negative or deprecatory emotional appeals, then it seems odd that such a system can continue to exist. Surely if all the Van Goghs go mad and the Hemmingways commit suicide because they are prostituting their own feelings of loss and pain, then there would surely be a profound dearth of artists. Surely that depth of self-examination, coupled with the honesty required to try and link that individual case with the universal would lead only to the annihilation of the self. The only out to the scenario is found in Nietzsche or Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin asserted that a destructive urge is also a creative one. More to the point, Nietzsche saw the abyss as the source of stimulation to the imagination as well as being poisonous to the soul. Once the nature of existence is fully realized, the individual becomes at once authentic, self-actualized, and possessed of the mindset of the exiled, ostracized, and excommunicated. These artists thereafter can conceive of society from an external point of view, and can comprehend the futility of human endeavour and the naïveté of logical positivism. This understanding allows the individual to act in such a way as to cause disruption of the status quo, and explains why in one of the first precepts in a repressive political régime, it is the poets and the artists who are the first to be silenced and placed into camps. Expansion of cognitive and perceptive ability permits the individual to preclude manipulation or repression. In other words, we may all be marionettes, but those among us able to see the strings are more likely to have greater control over individuality and identity, often to the detriment of would-be puppeteers.
In the next exciting installment - Literature and how it uses a binary dynamic as its source of appeal. Stay tuned, gentle readers. Until then, cheerio.

Justice for the 96.

-mARKUS