Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together

In order to see beyond yourself, you have to get outside of yourself. Hegel talked about the self-alienation of making yourself into an object for yourself. The subject must become a subject of its own inquiry, so it must somehow objectify or exteriorize itself. But from what perspective other that the interior first-person can one observe the objectified self? The material sciences operate on the faith that third-person objective observation is possible when the observation is purified of as much of the observer as possible. Without the interference of the observer in "scientific" observation, all the motivated bias of the observer is eliminated, but there's no one left there to report back any findings. The phenomenological intention is both the projection and the screen of whatever appears to us as the world. The world that appears is then necessarily motivated or biased by the intentions of the intention.

PKD often puts himself in his narratives as both the observer and the observed. In "Valis," he is both the author PKD and the character "Horse-lover Fat." He demonstrates how these two positions of "from-within" and "from-without" separate from each other when they are trying to see the self from somewhere outside of itself like an author imagining his protagonist's person. But he also shows that observation, or any sort of knowing, requires the mediation of a located, embodied self in an intentional, first-person world. In "Valis," a four year old prophetess heals PKD and Horse-lover Fat of their self-division. Now that the author is fully embedded in his story from what perspective is it told?

Nick Land didn't invent "hyperstition," but he did invent the locution. HP Love craft's "Necronomicon" may be an excellent example of how fictional objects realized in a virtual possibility space can cross over into the material plane, but it follows the recursive loops of the imaginal into the physical and back again ever since the split between body and soul was introduced into human thought by the virtual possibility space of the subjunctive in human language. The material sciences have collapsed the body / mind division into a purely physical monadology in which virtuality is an immeasurable mode of matter. However, the modal relation between the qualitative mode of matter exemplified by experience and thoughts on the one hand and matter's measurable quantities, usually thought of as physical on the other, has been asserted without explanation. The sciences equate physical states and mental state without a physical substrate while promising that one will eventually be discovered. In such physicalism, possibility is also somehow physically real, which is why the endless multiplicities of possible worlds have been physically realized but in hidden dimensions that cannot be scientifically verified, but maybe, someday.

PKD's search for gnosis looks a lot like madness at times, but he is able to present this madness as a kind of insight into the nature of the Universe because his depiction of it is from the position of the observer who too removed from his subject, but removed enough, through the process of authorial self-alienation, to laugh about the absurd, hermeneutic circle he must ride to uncover this hidden knowledge. But the honesty of Dick's fiction is that in trying to get a glimpse of himself, our human situation is revealed as it hides more deeply in unknowing.

https://youtu.be/i-JVmVgD9lg

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Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

This is a redone episode. You may have to erase the previous download and then reload the new episode to get the correct audio file. The new format is more compact, so less time with more invaluable, perhaps to the point of uselessness, untimely meditations.

Freud's notion of the "unheimlich," which was translated into English as "Uncanny," might have more literally been translated as "un-homely," which suggests the eerie sensation of the familiar warping into the unfamiliar. "Uncanny" comes from old Scottish meaning not known or safe or prudent. The uncanny for Freud was something previously known becoming unknowable, so that it was the haunting presence of the past but not the past as intentionally remembered.

When nostalgia for the past is the promise of a return to a halcyon Eden when everything was in its right place, then it is the stuff of fascist regimes. But when nostalgia accidentally returns what had been carefully repressed by the primary naivete of innocence, then it becomes unintentional and uncanny.

James's nostalgia for the late radio of his youth growing up in the Detroit area isn't nostalgic because it includes what algorithmic radio has repressed. His Midnight Radio project is an open platform where anything can happen because it includes the otherness than algorithms cover-over with averages. Some folks turn on the radio to hear what is familiar and comforting, but others turn it on to encounter the novel as the failure of the familiar. The mystics speak of the "Far-Near," which is when elsewhere speaks locally. 

Indeed, we are prediction machines whose intentions are to reduce uncertainty, but their is some uncanny drive in us, which Freud morbidly named the "Death Drive," for the irreducible ambiguity of the Other because it is the unpredictability, or the "deterritorialization," of otherness that makes all things new. Radio used to be a place where the far could be brought near. James's Midnight Radio lets elsewhere speak in the clearing that he has made in himself for the Other, so let the otherness in us recognized and the otherness in him, which is the solidarity of twoness rather than of the One.

https://youtu.be/wevx36qH2bM

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Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

What about when we choose our disease? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambiguity about who or what is responsible where mental illness is concerned. Is environment, genetics, or something else to blame? Regardless, the conundrum is that often with mental disorders, nothing can change unless the sufferer takes responsibility for what he is not responsible for. Clark's therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, realizes too late that she has gone in to Clark's psychosis too far to rescue him, and that she has put herself into great danger. Her mistake was her misunderstanding that she was crossing the line with a truly sick person not entirely to rescue him, but more because she still had an unresolved desire to save her now-dead, mentally ill mother.

Horror often deals with the psychological mazes that we trap ourself in. The terror is the built in ambiguity of these interior, dream-like spaces, which is the ambiguity of the monstrous other's connection to oneself. Good horror asks the question as to where the evil lays in such a way as to show how implicated in what we would prefer to see as the outside Other we are.

Check us out at the Desire of Horror podcast by following the link below:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19326558

https://youtu.be/QDc0TWDH8ns

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Nostalgia is poison. So why do I like BOC so much? BOC's nostalgia isn't saccharine but complicated.  When remembering is blocked by a nostalgic concept, the past becomes a projection of the rememberer's wish-fulfillment fantasy. The general structure of this sort of fantasy projection is that of the fascist who imagines a past greatness, or a lost Eden, that never was to recover the past from a decadent present. It is a well worn and now all too obvious observation that "Make America Great Again," is a totalitarian dog whistle. But there is a sort of remembering that also enjoys imagining the past, but which includes those parts of the past that the nostalgic concept tries to screen out. The nostalgic concept can be rehabilitated when it is used to present the pass by way of contrast to how the nostalgic concept presents it. This dialectical way of remembering takes the concept and contrasts it with what it tries to repress about the past. BOC's uses of nostalgia are like this latter sort of dialectical remembering that includes the otherness that was previously suppressed by the screen memory of the concept, so that their uses of nostalgic musical concepts and samples highlight the menacing dissonance of their dips back into the "innocence" of childhood. I am reminded of Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" when I think about how BOC does this. Malick created the most convincing depiction of childhood ever to be laid down on film because he allowed the cloudy nostalgia of his subject matter to by vitiated by the lurking, cloudy threat of violence and transgression. James and I are back at again. You're going to want to hear this one.

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Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

James and I discuss Under The Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. We get into whether AI can have an intention other than the ones given to it by our Human intentions. And we wonder whether AI can have the conscious intention to save humanity from itself as a result of the purity of its love for humanity, a purity unlike the yin-yang(y) love-hate of humans that will ultimately be our undoing. Kawakami's AI claims to love human beings in the Positivistic sense of without any negativity; whereas, human love is always tinged with hate. Both James and I agree that love without hate isn't human love, just as human intention is both undermined and generated by the counter-intention of the death drive. But James feels that AI may someday have a different kind of consciousness because it has a different kind of singular intention, singular as in unique as well as in the oneness of a purified positivity, which seems to agree with Kawakami's take on AI. Kawakami's AI fails to keep human beings alive because it fails to cleanse human intention of its negativity. I hold that without this negativity there is no love and no intention of any kind.

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

In part two Kevin and I continue to work on Bart D. Ehrman's Book, Heaven and Hell: The History of the Afterlife. We recount some of our life experiences with various doctrines of Hell and the immense suffering that the idea of eternal separation and punishment has wrought in our lives and the lives of others. And then we get into Chapter One: Guided Tours of Heaven and Hell, Chapter Two: The Fear of Death, and Chapter Three: Life After Death Before There Was Life After Death.

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Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

https://youtu.be/JIMQBSi50Yw

Dom and I are reading High Weirdness by Eric Davis together as a part of this reading in recovery project. "Recovery" can mean all sorts of things, but in this episode, it means recovery from the paranoid conspiracy theories that so many of us in the US are so deeply into. We discuss the "Mind F---ery" of Robert Anton Wilson and our own struggles to stay somewhere between naive belief and total skepticism, and the times when we went too far in one direction or the other. We discover, yet again, that in the most general sense, "recovery" is from absolutized or totalizing ways of being in the world that make each day a repetition of the same. We get sober to become more playful and creative, rather than more ridged, self-serious and certain. Therefore, Robert Anton Wilson offers both a cautionary tale about getting caught up in too much pattern recognition and the creative solution to this sort of psychosis, which is the play of humor that lovingly undermining one's tightly held concepts about reality.

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

Kevin and I have been having conversations about our faith for almost two decades now. While we are both actively recovering from such harmful doctrines as "eternal conscious torment," neither of us reject entirely the Christianity that we were brought up in. We have continued to develop what it means for us to be followers of Christ, so that we thought that the model of "recovery" was a better way of thinking about our faith journey than the currently popular model of "deconstruction." Recovery has both the sense of uncovering or clearing away debris to return to some essential kernel of the faith, but also the sense of getting over a sickness, or getting better from something harmful endemic to the faith tradition that was given to us as children. We are both agreed that the essential kernel worth saving is the Law, specifically the "Law of Love." In this first of our recorded conversations about our faith journey, we discuss recovering our faith by going more deeply into the teachings of love at the center of "The Way" that Jesus seemed to be teaching. We use Bart D. Ehrman's book "Heaven and Hell" as a helpful guide for freeing ourselves from some the misconceptions that we were taught as absolute truths in our religious education.

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a conversation with Satan, and which led him to reinterpret scriptures according to his hermeneutic of love. It is often pointed out that Jesus would have be considered a poor interpreter of the bible in the light of modern Biblical scholarship, and that much to the chagrin of modern "Biblical Literalists," neither he nor any of his interlocutors held to such a limiting and deluded principle, except for maybe Satan, but that his open relation to his tradition allowed for him to understand himself and religious community in a new way. True followers of Christ seek to "make all things new."

https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_s

My Uncle Father Herb, my Dad Bob, and I discuss Jesus's testing in the desert. I chose the passage this time. It has always spoken to me about how we are left to interpret the Word of God for ourselves but as a community of interpreters. There will be no one "absolute" interpretation that excludes all the others. However, there will be interpretations that cannot withstand the practices of a hermeneutic circle of responsible interpreters. A hermeneutic circle tests possible interpretations against a set of criteria, which for our circle of Biblical interpreters includes: historical-critical techniques and scholarly information, the history of the theological interpretations of the Church, and our own experiences of trying to apply Biblical teachings and narratives to our lives. But the most important principle for the interpretive practices of those who seek the God of love is love, which is sometimes called the interpretive practice of "Christ the Key" in the Church's tradition of Biblical interpretation. Our faith is that the histories, mythologies and even the laws of the Bible must be interpreted, which means they are open, except for those interpretations that would close one off to hope or love. Unloving Biblical interpretation is without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is what proliferates most rampantly today. This is the consequence of both our fallenness and our freedom to interpret without love's lure. 

Love is revealed anew throughout ours lives as it has historically been reveled through out the lives of those who have sought it, but it is always a lure to love and never compulsory because love according to its nature must be freely chosen. Even when things seem dark or evil, it is our faith that God is still speaking as the lure to love. Jesus's test in the desert reveals His ministry and is character to Himself and to those that would follow Him. Satan's job as God's "prosecuting attorney," is to test and reveal. In the desert Jesus reinterprets the figure of the "Messiah" from his Jewish tradition and scripture according to the law of love, so that it becomes a figure not of power but of weakness as love does not overpower or control. Jesus passes His test by refusing to test, which is to choose the revelation of love over whatever revelation is given by tests of strength.

If you want to check this episode out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_s

My podcast in which I develop the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics: https://failureisfreedom.buzzsprout.com

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com

We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes.

This is a crossover episode with the Desire of Horror podcast available on all the major pod-catchers, including apple and Spotify. Come check us out there. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184

Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nqaZp3-AK4Q or you can search "Kitchen Table Conversations: Annihilation"

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com