#253: Columnated Ruins Domino (Side F)
(Mixture of summary and my own interpolations.)
- There was a living dream, but it was smothered by a false one. Where the American dream mercifully failed to be realized. ’60s, ’70s, how history could have transpired but didn’t, and now we’re stuck here.
- The theatre and the dream. That something of the real dream is permitted to surface in the theatre (only) because everyone believes it to be fake. Conversely, fakeness hidden behind the screen within the open-air movie theatre pretending to be reality.
- As if the job of the priest during mass was to take the real spirit of a god and turn it back into wine and bread.
- “The dream” is not necessarily good; it is not even necessarily something that each of us feels consciously. [~46m] Definition of the dream. Binding agent. The sense that anything has anything to do with anything else. Luminiferous aether, the invisible, universal medium of things’ reality.
- Not everything in the dream is real, but everything that is real is found in the dream.
(Anti-paranoia:)
- Anti-paranoia. That nothing has to do with anything else. Paranoia is that everything has to do with everything else. There is no knowledge without some (at least implicit) measure of paranoia.
- Anti-paranoia as scientism, reductionism, materialism. In Gravity’s Rainbow: For example, Roger Mexico and Pavlov.1
- The powerful define when “noia” (cf. noesis) is called “para-”. Anti-paranoia as liberal ideology, that we think, “I must not believe anything that is not true,” and so we believe nothing. We assume that nothing has to do with anything, ever. Anti-paranoia is a far worse toxin than paranoia, even true psychotic paranoia.
- In a place where nobody knows who I am, nowhere to be. Cool exhilaration, that everything and nothing could happen.
- The Sky was gone, only its shattered pieces were left—the atmosphere, clouds, but not the Sky itself. Platonic ideas, the binding agent; the idea of the Sky versus its physical constituents. The Sky as the Idea binding the World together. Without it, everything might fall off; hanging off horizontally.
- See also the null-delusion in A Philosophy of Madness. Nothing, the void, emptiness, nihilism, negation. In psychology, schizoid nihilism as a prodromic stage to psychosis proves this link (see for example The Divided Self, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis).
- Anti-paranoia “is not merely paranoia’s binary opposite but its structuring antagonist.”2 In fact the two are related; perhaps they are even the same underlying phenomenon, both psychologically and metaphysically.
(Continuing with Pynchon:)
- Gravity, the desire of things to stay together; making complexity; without gravity, there would be nothing. The eeriness of gravity, character based on Dulles. But, what about the Sun? Is it pressed too close together, so that gravity became a force of reduction; or, is the Sun more alive than our Earth?
- Myths. People have been in this place for thousands of years. Resonance, cycles, harmonics, structure.
- Silicon Valley biohacking, insane blasphemy against death. Death to death transfigured, analysis of Christian resurrection myth.
- Resistance giving form, e.g. electrical resistance.
- Analysis of lyrics to Surf’s Up. Going to the theatre and something real accidentally happening. [1h35m–2h18m] Tidal wave of potential change. Good or evil. Of dreams. Entering the painted backdrop. Real disguised as fake. Falling away. Colonial, prerevolutionary America. Founding of a new mythic history. How things could have gone. And still now, the only viable next phase of the dream. Understand which dream we must join.