Bachelor Machines - Steve Calvert

Bachelor Machines - Steve Calvert - texts


	STEVE CALVERT	COLLECTIONS
	‘PATAPHYSICS Plagiarist assemblage text compiled 2005-06 par le Calvair Endosymbiote Ensemble Illustrations by Steve Calvert from the albums Mek Bok and Mek BW ............................ Deployment of an implied multiplicity. There’s no great art without great audiences. Protomanifesto: The work of art in the future will be the construction of a passionate life. Operating procedures for feedback-loop limit systems; isolating thresholds; pure multiplicity irreducible to any other sort of unity: open-ended generative constraint programmes... verb studies... Allusions to the unspeakable; catalogues of diagrams and instructional videos invoking the infinite names des autres sous efface, sous ratour [the others under erasure]. Living together, communal assemblies of bricoleurs engaged a collegial collaborativity, implementing designs to improve and enrich quality of life for their cognitive ensemble. Valuing process over product, recipes and models for constructive social behaviour accumulate, self-replicating the concept object – Canadada concrete comedy after the fashion of Intermedia, and intermission. Persistence and perseverance to buttress a fleeting existence. Creative thinking moving to community orientation; food is a device to articulate this relationship; events, experiences, public actions between the individual and collective bodies. In many ways the body is a constantly reconfigured agglomeration. Written of the conviction that we only use language because we haven’t got anything that works better. To engage viewers in perception of the unconventional - protoscience, ‘patapoetics, paracultural research, projects for the elimination of poverty: artists books, print editions and conceptual multiples, art to order; celebratory video portraits, mockumentary shorts: enfolding a subject laterally, associatively. Being increasingly attentive to non-ordinary associative sensoria, receptive to an expanding breadth and depth of field, to the quivering lattices of endocatalytic memes, an art of graphemes that might present the world within its startling image. Lateral database hyper-archive applications stimulating relaxation of focus, illuminating irresolvable clouds of speculative data into relational pattern-networks. Building lasting value into collections; investment art-banking. Facilitating artistry, memory, and critical historicity. Implication evocation invocation; discursive formations, textures of thought actively multiplying; a rich state space opening frontiers and vast pools of possibility. Imaginary gardening instructions; deep encounters with subtle living thought-forms, mediated by graphical reproductions. Merely descriptions, not divisions; from which culture must itself emerge, to achieve and offer sustenance. Consider the sheer mileage of print that one’s eye must scan. Accept and admit our complete naivety of any grand design. Openness shall remain our principle - a glimmer of truth. Amid error and obscurity, take the time to really get deeply involved with the materials we are interested in. All of us live life with proscriptive systems, few develop ideas about it. Still fewer arrive at integration and acceptance. That revelation of man’s powers, of failure and error, the poet, does. Fearing neither devils nor demagogues; who would teach us what to seek, what to shun? So you think you can tell heaven from hell? Are there those who truly privilege dawn over dusk? Perpetually regenerative demolitions, the universe enjoys the play of form; continuous transitional joy and aliveness - anything that’s not that is not being honest to life. The end of a personalized sense of self; violent collisions of sacred and scientific. What is it to be human? To laugh together more. You can never go back to the original madness for long, once the flower has emerged. You can’t bread toast. How many transcendent gifts we refuse by deciding what we need and want. Examining one thing at a time, the dissecting eye of knowledge, the thing demonstrated is a doctrine of correspondences, counterpoised by the exotic charm of another system of thought. Drawing linkages to separate even the complimentary is the limitation of our own. A double negative is necessary to stop the mind believing that it too is a graven image, and to see that behind all likeness is a Likener. I had wished to unburden myself of this culture, which though it produces knowledge, is not itself an object of knowledge: I now recognized that culture was fragile and difficult to conquer. Moreover, I understood that there was nothing outside of it that could justify the human adventure. I doubt therefore I am, the axiom that underlies all science. A collective entity may lack both the will and the intelligence by which it can verify its theories. In attempting to disprove them, only failure on an epic scale - this shame helps an individual control himself. Focusing on general principles, instead of individual circumstances, influencing what is recognized and celebrated as ‘good’, instead we imagine a city where all gods are Creole, mulatto; synthetic, syncretic, symbiotic. If the attempt fails, the theory is held to be correct, or at least workable. They are all mixed up, all mashed together. Alas, the absence of contradictory evidence is not proof of a theory’s validity. - don’t unscramble it! Leave it this way! - We can, we should, we ought to, we will. The world is observable because it is unobservable; as an assembly paradigm, knowledge of graven images fragments unity into innumerable reflections. What can observe itself is not one – we’re all friends here. We are all earthlings now, each proclaiming its own selfhood collectively. Citizens of international airspace, our mynd is a thynd. Mulattas miscegenate, mixing mongrel monstrosities. abandoning petty nationalisms and exclusionary identity tribalism. There is no reason to be foreign in either west or east. Our ideas are gifts, all thought is music. Autology, the science of the principle each man calls “I”, nothing exists without our shared duration. Culture is contingent on interesting and interested persons. ‘Pataphysics and theology prove to be the same. Participants’ discount, you’re all invited. Your task is creating an esprit de corps among the heterogeneous mass of will that now is free, true and integral; it would be a fault not to act as it bids. Not as a way of imitating the visible, least of all, by induction, simply the most frequent or regular; even less as a projection of the author’s interiority. Dislocating phenomena through access to another system, he puts himself in the place of the machine, to release by de-inscription those trapped forces of libido, plunging into a kind of automatic behaviour; filling the breach rather than forcing its closure, as if he has forgotten himself. That which is most completely out of control - like an automaton, fixedly contemplating the mirror - most clearly reveals the workings of unseen machinations. Without reflection and without illusion, obliging the maddeningly divergent vagaries of life. There is no there, there. As projects for improving speculative knowledge, they must be very wrong in very important ways. By mechanical operations and other contrivances, where form can’t even find function, much less follow it, a science of imaginary solutions emerges; a hyperbolically rigorous study of the anomalous; rare examples of impossible similarities that repeat but do not imitate. A matrix of criteria and norms by which speculative facts are established, ‘pataphysics is a personal system of phenomenological explanations: logical speculations and rationales for the absurdity inherent in the universe. Dedicated to examining the laws which govern exceptions, addressing relational vagaries that diverge from what directs them, ‘pataphysics studies epiphenomena superimposed on phenomena, usually by accident, escaping the events of the system that controls them. Charting paths of least resistance, the unimpeded tendencies of flow demonstrating infraordinary partiality - intension - which ensures that such a flow has no fate. What art is powerless to do, chance overtakes to figure. ‘Pataphysics accepts no one point of view as final. Cuttings, dilations, positive decompositions, misalignments, marginalizations; give up art as a means of self-expression, fitting neatly within the limitless confines of an all purpose construct. Concentrate on the unification of opposites, and see it as a means of self-change; a complete bodily assimilation of existence - to transcend the modality of the ordinary, all ambiguous simultaneity; a synthesis of all senses and powers. Surrealo-cubist philosopher detectives, technicians of generative emergence. An athletic aesthetics of intuitive and instantaneous judgments; methods of synthesis under which nothing is incompatible with anything else. Not an imitation, but a profound, wild force. Gleaning indications as to the means of manifestation in the field of reality - observe how these systems organize themselves. Everywhere is music, if only the listener is prepared to hear it. The enormity of these revelations; self-reinforcing internal consistencies; matrices of norms and criteria by which facts are established - narrative modalities applied to affect coherence; interpretive grids, depth illusions, vanishing points. They run into an insurmountable limit: the mouth and source of the font. Persistence of vision - every culture is ethnocentric, though not all are anthropocentric. Convention obscures these discriminations and distinctions; insides and outsides; nothing declared admissible except what is structurally necessary: phenomena that require the presence of intelligence to exist – firstly ours. Bare data are never visible, selection pressures remain occulted. We are all blindly loyal to the patterns and habits of our perceptions - prerequisite belief in the verity of our systems. Political prisoners of culture and language; the human sciences are only sciences by way of a self-flattering imposture. Not metaphorically, but literally, most authors display a complete lack of astonishment, because the realities they aspire to understand are of the same order of complexity as the intellectual means they deploy, independent of one’s angle. This is not science, but a form of interpretation, reflecting only the observer’s gaze; a troubling certitude in the face of the profoundly mysterious reality we are describing. Prism or prison? The problem is not having presuppositions - all figurative modalities produce assumptions as conclusions - but failing to make them explicit. Instead are deployed insipid categories by means of which the scientist devitalizes their data. Without words, without such fidelity, we don’t think the same way about the same things. The best theory would still be a guess, rather than a fact. Language entirely effects and affects the way we gather information. Words are very treacherous things - I’d made up my mind. We don’t see life as it is, we see things as we are. Amidst wandering points of view the imagination could run wild with madness and anarchy. Crowned are vagabonds and mercenaries - repetitive actions and event intensities aggregate to mitre you over yourself. A vast fellowship feeling; rhythms of whole populations entrained: when a grouping of total powers achieves boredom, even god renounces it. The dancefloor expresses its sovereign will; a primitive and very powerful social bond wells up among them, and pretends instead to be people and fish. Culture is made after midnight. The impoverished morality of economics contemplated in daylight. Perpetuating precapitalist mentalities, vestigial feudalisms, respected and accomplished gentlepeople exhibiting atavisms which inhibit destratification of power relations. Helping common people feel sophisticated, a cataclysm of langages forever ongoing; cool making, publicity marketeering, spurious business; mass industries of subtle persuasion. Remembering alternates with forgetting, humorously bracketing aesthetic dominions, diffusing discernment, autonomy, authority. The ease with which we can form a word is disproportionate to the profound effect our words have on others. Trying to persuade human beings to change their patterns is a preposterous kind of game. But you can physically rearrange the civic environment so people will behave in appropriate ways. We discovered: anthropology and biology had a blind spot of historical origin; our objectifying gaze was indeed a tool of domination, a circular argument we rested on, a self-serving colonialist discourse. The systematic denial of a central dogma; narcissistic gaze incapable of mastering its object, perceiving its own shadow. A powerful reality that we did not even expect existed. The evolutionary model offers no receptor, presuming that chance is the only available source of novelty. We are only human beings, and this we do not understand at all. Speculations, metaphysical illustrations; drawings which quiet the repressive anxieties, and with luck allow useful insights to emerge. Not testable scientific theories, but ‘pataphysical research regimes; procedural probes; modular visions, constantly diverted from any objective by the very progress which their energy sustains A symbolic chain or series of metonymic displacements, the unconscious is considered already a type of alphabet. Shunning such comparisons, grand generalizations and metaphorical condensations, inevitable presuppositions which demarcate the blind spots of the rational and fragmented gaze. Enfolded, occluded; pocketed epistemological blocks – an impasse. Art is perhaps the most visible ‘return of the repressed’: the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination. No objectified point of view granted any exclusive monopoly on reality; the surface world might not even exist. Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole; unconscious memory of the liberation that failed; it was a figment of your imagination. Thank you for your continued cooperation; please take time to learn the city’s newest laws. A city in itself, Individuality is neither a lasting entity, but an aggregate. I am a bundle of conditions; a union of irreconcilable models otherwise universally identified as sovereign under God. Denounced as a utopian ideal, ‘pataphysics insists that it can and must become real; that happiness and desire surmounting all rationale will deprive life of its terror; that behind the illusion lies knowledge, craft. This occurs everywhere in art. Imagination telling itself what it is, what can be; both to recall the repressed and repress it again, purified. Appropriating the objective world as the arena of its self-realization. Art survives where it cancels this tendency. In its refusal to forget what 'could be' lies the critical function of ‘pataphysics. New anthropology masks: no doctrine but experience. To escape prejudicial complicity with historical tyrannies; this culture wages battles of attrition, wars of annihilation… conscientious objection; frag your superego, decommission the inner cop. “To live without anxiety”, this idea can be formulated without punishment only in the language of art. The Great Refusal - a committed protest against unnecessary repression. To reduce imagination to slavery, even if one’s so-called happiness is at stake, means to violate all that one finds in one’s inmost aspect of ultimate justice. Where it saves its substance by denying traditional form, practicing uncompromising adherence to the strict truth value of imagination, thereby denying reconciliation, the ‘pataphysician comprehends reality more fully. Where it becomes surreal and atonal as a fundamental, independent mental process, possessing no form of constraint, it will necessarily fascinate. ‘Pataphysics has a truth value of its own. Rejecting force, it will wield a certain magical grace which corresponds to an experience of its own existence – it will appear supernatural, namely, the surmounting of the antagonisms of human reality. Why else produce graphic novels? Accelerating limits in non-traditional spaces is an emerging form. To practice and become proficient, if not masterful, wielding holographic magnets of mutual desire. Articulations of unspeakable comprehensions, where value is mobilized in culture. Evocations in spoken lines and strobing type, dematerializing the mausoleums of history. To be able to signify an extraordinary experience of otherwise inaccessible possibilities; impossibly rare similarities that repeat but do not imitate. Resemblances, recollections for which we cannot yet assign available words or images. Reconstituting reservoirs of sublime encounters, known to be profoundly truthful, still grossly misleading. Repositories of revisionist memory; decompositions, ambivalently paradoxical; self-reflexive, internally consistent, synthetic syncretic conceptual project-objects: self-propagating, self-negating, self-validating, self-absorbing psychodynamic feedback wetwares; absolutely speculative with respect to our mundane, pragmatic existence. A biomolecular bibliomecha of breathtaking beauty; indubitably coherent yet absolutely nonsensical; exclusive and integral, active instructional diagrams, dimensions variable: cool, slippery, wet; terrifyingly attractive. Infinitely reproducible, yet non-repeating, original copies. To manifest this mystery in manifold mediums; transforming masks of abstract machines, to receive and transmit eruptions of forms. Frictionless capitulations, spread across yawning chasms of space and time. Everyone knows what they want: to illuminate the transpersonal meaningfullessness, the itch we want to scratch, establishing the existence of this unspeakable That. Sometimes you just need to enlighten their load a little; the OX, four faces of Brahman, Atman, the Auxin. Turn up the lights in the arena, evoke an AHA in which all are again astounded by this Ur we have always been; guided to where gnosis is nestled away, concealed, yet otherwise elsewhere ignored, sabotaged, suppressed and exiled; a lucid dream in the warm folds of the subconscious. Why must I be a vampire, mom and dad? Get out of your own way, the rose remains a rose. Exposing language for the artificial cognition that it is, writing stages a play of repetition in which apparent production is actually reproduction. Stylistic and formal experimentation can not be dismissed as purely apolitical. Recognized not only as an alternate to aesthetic convention - a story of revolution told in higher and higher resolution - but also as an alternative type of social formation; a fable always on the verge of stupidity. Writing establishes the condition for the possibility of ideal objects, and therefore of rationality and scientific objectivity. Writing is the name of these two absences. Two readings of the same book show an identity that can only be defined as a difference – variable phoneme sequences in suspension within a cloud of relative epi-cultural etymologies; a narrative that has fused with its object, without gaps. The only identity is in its difference from all other readings. In fact there is no book except these ever-different repetitions: operating on the basis of a belief in the total resolution of the story; words and things or thought never become one. Nothing that you are about to see is real. No single theory can cope. In this kingdom, there is no order to demolish. To activate ‘pataphysics everywhere, to reengage the search for novel passages through labyrinths of our nervous system, to integrate more variable speculations than the scanning process of rational attention can memorialize with obsolesced thought-machines. Dissolving reifications to acknowledge the perversity of such conspicuous absences. To articulate the new significance of difference; participants full-discount. Wedging the gaps in this perpendicular frame of existence; for fascinated and interested peoples. Responsibly engaged and assertively demanding consumers anticipating the elusive moment of coherence. Technology remains the primary cause and medium for social change. Participants need to act on these great possibilities. The rhebus uneclipsed by our own shadow; a model of rational self-interest which indirectly serves the public interest. Not all tragedies are lamentable; some are funny. Comedy = tragedy + time. A certain requisite view of the world, of consciousness, and of language - that all things are connected and convergent, and only by chance, or mistaken judgment, do they miss each other - has been accepted as the correct one. That the propositions of the artistic imagination are untrue… if the minute particulars of that view are examined in terms of the actual organization of the facts, a rather different picture [that is a no-picture] emerges, which belongs to the essence of their truth. To assume something to be familiar is the commonest form of self-deception. An inscription that marks absence - only a metasign – which is the baffling result of an examination of the obvious. The meta-language of a scientific vocabulary – indulging its hyperbole – as the lifting of the most natural forgetfulness. Molecular metaphors do not invoke the rhetorical equivalent of a science. Artists explore the meaning of the interface itself, not its legitimations: instead, the nomad value of these modifiers rises in indirect relation to their absence of meaning. Verfremdungseffert. It constitutes a science-fiction: a distancing, estrangement, or alienation effect, practiced in the service of the symbolic, with the ability to confirm certain experiences. Speculative solutions for imaginary problems: the Joke is one mask that the Other wears to conceal itself. To keep beyond the grasping comprehension, move on, switch projects, change hemispheres; the more clearly we experience something as nonsense, scorning all limited pre-identifications, the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of semantically self-imposed cognitive structures. Seek other creatures of passion, less reason; a feathered irreverence, dissent, informed ridicule. Nonsense is nonsense only when - emanating a potent charisma, provoking an inspiration to practice; an aura of enthusiasm, levity, charm - we have not yet found the point of view from which it makes sense. During the instant when the humour of a particularly perplexing situation causes us to laugh we are able to escape mechanical strictures of ordinary thought and liberate attention from the indignity of defending the barricades segregating conscious and unconscious. Criticism in the spirit of eroticism. Heroic frivolity, pleasure in dissolution of boundaries - erotic excitement arising by contact with the Others. Theory cannot be why art exists; penetrating an infinite realm beyond all limitation, affectionate interest silently diffusing all hostile anxieties. Laughter is the discord between tensions being resolved. ;Laughter brushes the mind’s shadows away, spreading as a benevolent contagion, distress transubstantiates to exuberance. The reproductive organ moves from the genital chakra to the throat. Against violent trepidation and the anguish of the sacred, we need an erotics of art, not a hermeneutics. Laughter is a defensive response, a diversionary tactic, not to be subsumed under any agenda, apparatus, or interpretation. It is not thought-through, it is patched together. A process by which discord is made to pass into concord. Definition - to defy/deify the de-finite. Read with intention to rewrite the manual. We’re all so much more complicated than our names. Autoproduction of a speech declared alive, capable of helping, protecting and defending itself. Looking for logic in this progression is misguided. Still and all a good delivery is what makes the orator. It’s the singer not the song. All the poets were at the LedZepplin concert. Resolving desire’s extreme desperation, animal abjection, public degradation and lack of love; a way of responding to passion with passion, content with our own mass and matter; raw material of beauty, necessarily. Courage to lead life according to radical propositions. A sovereign dance with the teeming world, contest of grace and charm; a fractal geometry of momentums. Consciousness is not the major effort of the human brain; a man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the new dangers threatening him; seeking danger is a way of getting to know the self. Some zealots still deny that thought is inherently embodied. Unless an artist has a human body, not just a rationing eye, sufficient to dangle on the abyss, to drink deep from the darkside, you don’t and can’t get smart. A space between life and death, very beautiful. As something that seems so difficult, yet is traversed only by doing it, knowing that you can. All life’s a party and you are invited. The real sickness of the world is that we deny and suppress the most beautiful parts of ourselves: creativity, joy, kindness, sex, love, dreams, imagination, inner beauty. Cultivating these properties, wildly sprouting with fertile nucleations… where people will gather; A broken water vessel sheltering octopi; that’s all you can see from this side of the blue. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. It takes courage. Convinced we’re not really here for ourselves, we’re here for other people. Entropy is also creative - freedom implies this reconciliation. Minimizing energy, crystallizing latent structure, pleasure is understood as a practice, and accumulates as experience. At night, I’m still a part of a secret community; vast and virile convivial sangha; ecology of souls. Don’t fall out of love. Literature is not an object of knowledge in the scientific sense, though it may be at the foundation of all art. Its real interest lies in the ‘something like’, the pseudo. Psychology will never be able to accommodate within its space the uncertain potential to mean something more than what is seemingly said. That which constitutes the absence of the signatory, to say nothing of an absence of referent. Almost as if the text transforms itself as soon as it is understood; the system of language is a vast structure that is always changing; infinitely proliferating branches, many of which lead nowhere. It remains as the only way to escape empiricism. No one is free to think anything outside the rules of language and one’s vain critique of experience at the same time. We must see our rituals for what they are, that this absurd tragedy can be accepted, as a completely arbitrary thing, with equanimity and even humour. The originary moment for the creation of a system is when an observer makes a cut, opening up great possibilities for change. Before the cut – before any cut is made, only an undifferentiated complexity exists; random acts of healing this wound, impossible to understand in its noisy multifariousness. The cut helps to tame the noise of the world by introducing a distinction. Do you wish you had someone you could speak code with? Which could be understood in its elemental sense as a form? Practice is the most advanced form of theory; a boundary between inside and outside. The sexual and intellectual functions can be confused for one another; what is inside is further divided and organized as other distinctions flow from this first distinction, as scientific reasoning and mystical speculation; exfoliating and expanding, distinction on distinction, until a full-fledged system is in place. Exotic entertainments for gentlepeoples of the cultural elite. Turning points; who is it that’s driving this machine? Asymmetric repetitions, un-used-to; a new basic experience of being could change the understanding of existence in its entirety. Repetition is a force – rhythmic cascade of pulses, wavelengths; change is expressed by the fact that the essence of being - the meaningfully musical figure affecting all fields and spectra of sensory stimulation - is no longer conceived as Logos: the Logos of domination and its systems. Adaptation of archaic mental structures to new environments would incite a beautifully controlled yet hideously wasteful bonfire, another ‘catastrophe’ – an explosive change to the environment itself. Imago imitatio - theories of imitation evoking intensive multimodal synaesthetic responses. Complete breakdown in the internal consistency of the symbol system. the old grid to which is given the task of outlining the domains of knowledge. Horror vacuii: When you’re at a party and someone’s passing around the weaponized hallucinogens - - reality is a matter of local custom. So long as you’re sufficiently self-aware of your own habits, the most troubling side-effects are other people and their negative preducial judgments. Related to challenging society’s perceived standards on a much deeper and less predictable level... When strings are slack, our marionettes continue to dance. Driven by compulsive urgency to constantly reconceive the whole idea. Exercise the will. Feel free, demand something different. The curves of quickest descent, pumping the corners to maximize net positive accelleration; how can we form the ideas we need to describe this realm, where all intuitions derived from life in space-time become inapplicable. For the explorer there are no true beliefs; the limits of one’s beliefs set the boundaries for possible experience. There are no discoveries, only revelations. When some happy mental aberration frees the soul from its anxious cares, and restores it by the addition of manifold delights. All of the time or most of time, please help yourself to this moment that you’re feeling. Anything from me is yours. Being completely available, a kind and sincere empathy; an attentive co-presence; total affirmation of the life instincts; a credible investment in providing good company; repelling all escape and negation, generosity without reserve. An erotic attitude toward being, marked by a dramatic increase in symbolic synchronicity. The will and vision for which necessity and fulfillment coincide. Advance yourself in an honest way; liberation depends on the reversal of bad conscience. Give priority to helping others be free of their fear and pain, suffering, fatigue, symptoms of loss of energy or libido. Don’t make of yourself a performing ape. Guilt arises not in affirmation but in denial of life instincts. In art, there is nothing to teach, we only invite the players to come towards it. Representing a failure to recognize a moment of crucial importance. None can flout the immutable laws of society and remain unscathed. A happening which becomes, which does and will yet exist, joyfully; as the psychic transformation or rebirth characterized by the alchemical process. Writing the unrightable wrongs, Earhart does not fly for the glory of the realm. The first obstacle is passing judgment, the second is trying to control or advise. To make pain a stimulus for affirmation; a link in the chain of joy; joy wants itself and everything else to be everlasting. Rebellion simply in acceptance of repressed ideals. Prisoners of conscience, the sexual revolution is the first step toward any revolution. Unrealized; observe: a man grows with the greatness of his task, but he must have capacity to grow. The man possessed by his shadow is living below his own level and only attains what does not suit him. The torture of the damned. He does not achieve inner transformation and rebirth in this life, but changes himself into this other being. Live your life as you would want it lived, nurturing that flowering personality maturing within us. This is it, no dress rehearsals. There are friends and counselors who lead us to the goal of our work; mercurial companions mediating between the stone and the disciple, machina sapiens negotiating the transformation of what is mortal into what is immortal. The Likener is also a likeness. You grow, girl . Be the change you wish to see in the world, the world will take you at your own estimate. Anything less is not being honest to life. What is it to be human? Confronted with an inner friend or foe, a certain other one, within. Councilor advocate paraclete, mystagogue psychopomp. The philosopher is as Hermes to the stone’s Mercurius. We are more than we believe ourselves to be. Sometimes the recognition of a greater personality seems to burst an iron ring round the heart. To laugh more; we must work without arguing - remember right livelihood - for that is the only thing which makes life bearable. …………… 'Pataphysics - Vancouver Dispatch WyrdStave Enclave et Le Calvair Endosymbiote Ensemble 2005-2006	TEXT by S.Calvert 1999 - EXP 2002 - Middle Worlds 2004 - ATCG 2005 - 'Pataphysics 2006 - Maintain Your Enthusiasm 2007 - Just Is 2008 - Theatre of Operations 2009 - Authentic Replica AUDIO by S.Calvert ARTby Steve Calvert MORE ARTISTS LINKS BLOG CONTACT
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STEVE CALVERT

COLLECTIONS

‘PATAPHYSICS

Plagiarist assemblage text compiled 2005-06 par le Calvair Endosymbiote Ensemble

Illustrations by Steve Calvert from the albums Mek Bok and Mek BW

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Deployment of an implied multiplicity. There’s no great art without great audiences. Protomanifesto: The work of art in the future will be the construction of a passionate life. Operating procedures for feedback-loop limit systems; isolating thresholds; pure multiplicity irreducible to any other sort of unity: open-ended generative constraint programmes... verb studies... Allusions to the unspeakable; catalogues of diagrams and instructional videos invoking the infinite names des autres sous efface, sous ratour [the others under erasure].

Living together, communal assemblies of bricoleurs engaged a collegial collaborativity, implementing designs to improve and enrich quality of life for their cognitive ensemble. Valuing process over product, recipes and models for constructive social behaviour accumulate, self-replicating the concept object – Canadada concrete comedy after the fashion of Intermedia, and intermission. Persistence and perseverance to buttress a fleeting existence. Creative thinking moving to community orientation; food is a device to articulate this relationship; events, experiences, public actions between the individual and collective bodies. In many ways the body is a constantly reconfigured agglomeration.

Written of the conviction that we only use language because we haven’t got anything that works better. To engage viewers in perception of the unconventional - protoscience, ‘patapoetics, paracultural research, projects for the elimination of poverty: artists books, print editions and conceptual multiples, art to order; celebratory video portraits, mockumentary shorts: enfolding a subject laterally, associatively. Being increasingly attentive to non-ordinary associative sensoria, receptive to an expanding breadth and depth of field, to the quivering lattices of endocatalytic memes, an art of graphemes that might present the world within its startling image. Lateral database hyper-archive applications stimulating relaxation of focus, illuminating irresolvable clouds of speculative data into relational pattern-networks. Building lasting value into collections; investment art-banking. Facilitating artistry, memory, and critical historicity. Implication evocation invocation; discursive formations, textures of thought actively multiplying; a rich state space opening frontiers and vast pools of possibility. Imaginary gardening instructions; deep encounters with subtle living thought-forms, mediated by graphical reproductions.

Merely descriptions, not divisions; from which culture must itself emerge, to achieve and offer sustenance. Consider the sheer mileage of print that one’s eye must scan. Accept and admit our complete naivety of any grand design. Openness shall remain our principle - a glimmer of truth. Amid error and obscurity, take the time to really get deeply involved with the materials we are interested in. All of us live life with proscriptive systems, few develop ideas about it. Still fewer arrive at integration and acceptance. That revelation of man’s powers, of failure and error, the poet, does. Fearing neither devils nor demagogues; who would teach us what to seek, what to shun? So you think you can tell heaven from hell? Are there those who truly privilege dawn over dusk? Perpetually regenerative demolitions, the universe enjoys the play of form; continuous transitional joy and aliveness - anything that’s not that is not being honest to life. The end of a personalized sense of self; violent collisions of sacred and scientific. What is it to be human? To laugh together more. You can never go back to the original madness for long, once the flower has emerged. You can’t bread toast. How many transcendent gifts we refuse by deciding what we need and want.

Examining one thing at a time, the dissecting eye of knowledge, the thing demonstrated is a doctrine of correspondences, counterpoised by the exotic charm of another system of thought. Drawing linkages to separate even the complimentary is the limitation of our own. A double negative is necessary to stop the mind believing that it too is a graven image, and to see that behind all likeness is a Likener. I had wished to unburden myself of this culture, which though it produces knowledge, is not itself an object of knowledge: I now recognized that culture was fragile and difficult to conquer. Moreover, I understood that there was nothing outside of it that could justify the human adventure. I doubt therefore I am, the axiom that underlies all science. A collective entity may lack both the will and the intelligence by which it can verify its theories. In attempting to disprove them, only failure on an epic scale - this shame helps an individual control himself. Focusing on general principles, instead of individual circumstances, influencing what is recognized and celebrated as ‘good’, instead we imagine a city where all gods are Creole, mulatto; synthetic, syncretic, symbiotic. If the attempt fails, the theory is held to be correct, or at least workable. They are all mixed up, all mashed together. Alas, the absence of contradictory evidence is not proof of a theory’s validity. - don’t unscramble it! Leave it this way! - We can, we should, we ought to, we will.

The world is observable because it is unobservable; as an assembly paradigm, knowledge of graven images fragments unity into innumerable reflections. What can observe itself is not one – we’re all friends here. We are all earthlings now, each proclaiming its own selfhood collectively. Citizens of international airspace, our mynd is a thynd. Mulattas miscegenate, mixing mongrel monstrosities. abandoning petty nationalisms and exclusionary identity tribalism. There is no reason to be foreign in either west or east. Our ideas are gifts, all thought is music. Autology, the science of the principle each man calls “I”, nothing exists without our shared duration. Culture is contingent on interesting and interested persons. ‘Pataphysics and theology prove to be the same. Participants’ discount, you’re all invited. Your task is creating an esprit de corps among the heterogeneous mass of will that now is free, true and integral; it would be a fault not to act as it bids. Not as a way of imitating the visible, least of all, by induction, simply the most frequent or regular; even less as a projection of the author’s interiority. Dislocating phenomena through access to another system, he puts himself in the place of the machine, to release by de-inscription those trapped forces of libido, plunging into a kind of automatic behaviour; filling the breach rather than forcing its closure, as if he has forgotten himself. That which is most completely out of control - like an automaton, fixedly contemplating the mirror - most clearly reveals the workings of unseen machinations. Without reflection and without illusion, obliging the maddeningly divergent vagaries of life. There is no there, there.

As projects for improving speculative knowledge, they must be very wrong in very important ways. By mechanical operations and other contrivances, where form can’t even find function, much less follow it, a science of imaginary solutions emerges; a hyperbolically rigorous study of the anomalous; rare examples of impossible similarities that repeat but do not imitate. A matrix of criteria and norms by which speculative facts are established, ‘pataphysics is a personal system of phenomenological explanations: logical speculations and rationales for the absurdity inherent in the universe. Dedicated to examining the laws which govern exceptions, addressing relational vagaries that diverge from what directs them, ‘pataphysics studies epiphenomena superimposed on phenomena, usually by accident, escaping the events of the system that controls them. Charting paths of least resistance, the unimpeded tendencies of flow demonstrating infraordinary partiality - intension - which ensures that such a flow has no fate. What art is powerless to do, chance overtakes to figure. ‘Pataphysics accepts no one point of view as final.

Cuttings, dilations, positive decompositions, misalignments, marginalizations; give up art as a means of self-expression, fitting neatly within the limitless confines of an all purpose construct. Concentrate on the unification of opposites, and see it as a means of self-change; a complete bodily assimilation of existence - to transcend the modality of the ordinary, all ambiguous simultaneity; a synthesis of all senses and powers. Surrealo-cubist philosopher detectives, technicians of generative emergence. An athletic aesthetics of intuitive and instantaneous judgments; methods of synthesis under which nothing is incompatible with anything else. Not an imitation, but a profound, wild force. Gleaning indications as to the means of manifestation in the field of reality - observe how these systems organize themselves. Everywhere is music, if only the listener is prepared to hear it. The enormity of these revelations; self-reinforcing internal consistencies; matrices of norms and criteria by which facts are established - narrative modalities applied to affect coherence; interpretive grids, depth illusions, vanishing points. They run into an insurmountable limit: the mouth and source of the font.

Persistence of vision - every culture is ethnocentric, though not all are anthropocentric. Convention obscures these discriminations and distinctions; insides and outsides; nothing declared admissible except what is structurally necessary: phenomena that require the presence of intelligence to exist – firstly ours. Bare data are never visible, selection pressures remain occulted. We are all blindly loyal to the patterns and habits of our perceptions - prerequisite belief in the verity of our systems. Political prisoners of culture and language; the human sciences are only sciences by way of a self-flattering imposture. Not metaphorically, but literally, most authors display a complete lack of astonishment, because the realities they aspire to understand are of the same order of complexity as the intellectual means they deploy, independent of one’s angle. This is not science, but a form of interpretation, reflecting only the observer’s gaze; a troubling certitude in the face of the profoundly mysterious reality we are describing. Prism or prison?

The problem is not having presuppositions - all figurative modalities produce assumptions as conclusions - but failing to make them explicit. Instead are deployed insipid categories by means of which the scientist devitalizes their data. Without words, without such fidelity, we don’t think the same way about the same things. The best theory would still be a guess, rather than a fact. Language entirely effects and affects the way we gather information. Words are very treacherous things - I’d made up my mind. We don’t see life as it is, we see things as we are. Amidst wandering points of view the imagination could run wild with madness and anarchy. Crowned are vagabonds and mercenaries - repetitive actions and event intensities aggregate to mitre you over yourself. A vast fellowship feeling; rhythms of whole populations entrained: when a grouping of total powers achieves boredom, even god renounces it. The dancefloor expresses its sovereign will; a primitive and very powerful social bond wells up among them, and pretends instead to be people and fish. Culture is made after midnight. The impoverished morality of economics contemplated in daylight. Perpetuating precapitalist mentalities, vestigial feudalisms, respected and accomplished gentlepeople exhibiting atavisms which inhibit destratification of power relations. Helping common people feel sophisticated, a cataclysm of langages forever ongoing; cool making, publicity marketeering, spurious business; mass industries of subtle persuasion. Remembering alternates with forgetting, humorously bracketing aesthetic dominions, diffusing discernment, autonomy, authority.

The ease with which we can form a word is disproportionate to the profound effect our words have on others. Trying to persuade human beings to change their patterns is a preposterous kind of game. But you can physically rearrange the civic environment so people will behave in appropriate ways. We discovered: anthropology and biology had a blind spot of historical origin; our objectifying gaze was indeed a tool of domination, a circular argument we rested on, a self-serving colonialist discourse. The systematic denial of a central dogma; narcissistic gaze incapable of mastering its object, perceiving its own shadow. A powerful reality that we did not even expect existed. The evolutionary model offers no receptor, presuming that chance is the only available source of novelty. We are only human beings, and this we do not understand at all.

Speculations, metaphysical illustrations; drawings which quiet the repressive anxieties, and with luck allow useful insights to emerge. Not testable scientific theories, but ‘pataphysical research regimes; procedural probes; modular visions, constantly diverted from any objective by the very progress which their energy sustains A symbolic chain or series of metonymic displacements, the unconscious is considered already a type of alphabet. Shunning such comparisons, grand generalizations and metaphorical condensations, inevitable presuppositions which demarcate the blind spots of the rational and fragmented gaze. Enfolded, occluded; pocketed epistemological blocks – an impasse. Art is perhaps the most visible ‘return of the repressed’: the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination. No objectified point of view granted any exclusive monopoly on reality; the surface world might not even exist. Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole; unconscious memory of the liberation that failed; it was a figment of your imagination. Thank you for your continued cooperation; please take time to learn the city’s newest laws.

A city in itself, Individuality is neither a lasting entity, but an aggregate. I am a bundle of conditions; a union of irreconcilable models otherwise universally identified as sovereign under God. Denounced as a utopian ideal, ‘pataphysics insists that it can and must become real; that happiness and desire surmounting all rationale will deprive life of its terror; that behind the illusion lies knowledge, craft. This occurs everywhere in art. Imagination telling itself what it is, what can be; both to recall the repressed and repress it again, purified. Appropriating the objective world as the arena of its self-realization. Art survives where it cancels this tendency. In its refusal to forget what 'could be' lies the critical function of ‘pataphysics. New anthropology masks: no doctrine but experience.

To escape prejudicial complicity with historical tyrannies; this culture wages battles of attrition, wars of annihilation… conscientious objection; frag your superego, decommission the inner cop. “To live without anxiety”, this idea can be formulated without punishment only in the language of art. The Great Refusal - a committed protest against unnecessary repression. To reduce imagination to slavery, even if one’s so-called happiness is at stake, means to violate all that one finds in one’s inmost aspect of ultimate justice. Where it saves its substance by denying traditional form, practicing uncompromising adherence to the strict truth value of imagination, thereby denying reconciliation, the ‘pataphysician comprehends reality more fully. Where it becomes surreal and atonal as a fundamental, independent mental process, possessing no form of constraint, it will necessarily fascinate. ‘Pataphysics has a truth value of its own. Rejecting force, it will wield a certain magical grace which corresponds to an experience of its own existence – it will appear supernatural, namely, the surmounting of the antagonisms of human reality.

Why else produce graphic novels? Accelerating limits in non-traditional spaces is an emerging form. To practice and become proficient, if not masterful, wielding holographic magnets of mutual desire. Articulations of unspeakable comprehensions, where value is mobilized in culture. Evocations in spoken lines and strobing type, dematerializing the mausoleums of history. To be able to signify an extraordinary experience of otherwise inaccessible possibilities; impossibly rare similarities that repeat but do not imitate. Resemblances, recollections for which we cannot yet assign available words or images. Reconstituting reservoirs of sublime encounters, known to be profoundly truthful, still grossly misleading. Repositories of revisionist memory; decompositions, ambivalently paradoxical; self-reflexive, internally consistent, synthetic syncretic conceptual project-objects: self-propagating, self-negating, self-validating, self-absorbing psychodynamic feedback wetwares; absolutely speculative with respect to our mundane, pragmatic existence. A biomolecular bibliomecha of breathtaking beauty; indubitably coherent yet absolutely nonsensical; exclusive and integral, active instructional diagrams, dimensions variable: cool, slippery, wet; terrifyingly attractive.

Infinitely reproducible, yet non-repeating, original copies. To manifest this mystery in manifold mediums; transforming masks of abstract machines, to receive and transmit eruptions of forms. Frictionless capitulations, spread across yawning chasms of space and time. Everyone knows what they want: to illuminate the transpersonal meaningfullessness, the itch we want to scratch, establishing the existence of this unspeakable That. Sometimes you just need to enlighten their load a little; the OX, four faces of Brahman, Atman, the Auxin. Turn up the lights in the arena, evoke an AHA in which all are again astounded by this Ur we have always been; guided to where gnosis is nestled away, concealed, yet otherwise elsewhere ignored, sabotaged, suppressed and exiled; a lucid dream in the warm folds of the subconscious. Why must I be a vampire, mom and dad? Get out of your own way, the rose remains a rose. Exposing language for the artificial cognition that it is, writing stages a play of repetition in which apparent production is actually reproduction. Stylistic and formal experimentation can not be dismissed as purely apolitical. Recognized not only as an alternate to aesthetic convention - a story of revolution told in higher and higher resolution - but also as an alternative type of social formation; a fable always on the verge of stupidity. Writing establishes the condition for the possibility of ideal objects, and therefore of rationality and scientific objectivity. Writing is the name of these two absences. Two readings of the same book show an identity that can only be defined as a difference – variable phoneme sequences in suspension within a cloud of relative epi-cultural etymologies; a narrative that has fused with its object, without gaps. The only identity is in its difference from all other readings. In fact there is no book except these ever-different repetitions: operating on the basis of a belief in the total resolution of the story; words and things or thought never become one.

Nothing that you are about to see is real. No single theory can cope. In this kingdom, there is no order to demolish. To activate ‘pataphysics everywhere, to reengage the search for novel passages through labyrinths of our nervous system, to integrate more variable speculations than the scanning process of rational attention can memorialize with obsolesced thought-machines. Dissolving reifications to acknowledge the perversity of such conspicuous absences. To articulate the new significance of difference; participants full-discount. Wedging the gaps in this perpendicular frame of existence; for fascinated and interested peoples. Responsibly engaged and assertively demanding consumers anticipating the elusive moment of coherence. Technology remains the primary cause and medium for social change. Participants need to act on these great possibilities. The rhebus uneclipsed by our own shadow; a model of rational self-interest which indirectly serves the public interest. Not all tragedies are lamentable; some are funny. Comedy = tragedy + time. A certain requisite view of the world, of consciousness, and of language - that all things are connected and convergent, and only by chance, or mistaken judgment, do they miss each other - has been accepted as the correct one. That the propositions of the artistic imagination are untrue… if the minute particulars of that view are examined in terms of the actual organization of the facts, a rather different picture [that is a no-picture] emerges, which belongs to the essence of their truth. To assume something to be familiar is the commonest form of self-deception. An inscription that marks absence - only a metasign – which is the baffling result of an examination of the obvious. The meta-language of a scientific vocabulary – indulging its hyperbole – as the lifting of the most natural forgetfulness. Molecular metaphors do not invoke the rhetorical equivalent of a science. Artists explore the meaning of the interface itself, not its legitimations: instead, the nomad value of these modifiers rises in indirect relation to their absence of meaning. Verfremdungseffert. It constitutes a science-fiction: a distancing, estrangement, or alienation effect, practiced in the service of the symbolic, with the ability to confirm certain experiences. Speculative solutions for imaginary problems: the Joke is one mask that the Other wears to conceal itself.

To keep beyond the grasping comprehension, move on, switch projects, change hemispheres; the more clearly we experience something as nonsense, scorning all limited pre-identifications, the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of semantically self-imposed cognitive structures. Seek other creatures of passion, less reason; a feathered irreverence, dissent, informed ridicule. Nonsense is nonsense only when - emanating a potent charisma, provoking an inspiration to practice; an aura of enthusiasm, levity, charm - we have not yet found the point of view from which it makes sense. During the instant when the humour of a particularly perplexing situation causes us to laugh we are able to escape mechanical strictures of ordinary thought and liberate attention from the indignity of defending the barricades segregating conscious and unconscious. Criticism in the spirit of eroticism. Heroic frivolity, pleasure in dissolution of boundaries - erotic excitement arising by contact with the Others. Theory cannot be why art exists; penetrating an infinite realm beyond all limitation, affectionate interest silently diffusing all hostile anxieties. Laughter is the discord between tensions being resolved. ;Laughter brushes the mind’s shadows away, spreading as a benevolent contagion, distress transubstantiates to exuberance. The reproductive organ moves from the genital chakra to the throat. Against violent trepidation and the anguish of the sacred, we need an erotics of art, not a hermeneutics. Laughter is a defensive response, a diversionary tactic, not to be subsumed under any agenda, apparatus, or interpretation. It is not thought-through, it is patched together. A process by which discord is made to pass into concord. Definition - to defy/deify the de-finite. Read with intention to rewrite the manual. We’re all so much more complicated than our names. Autoproduction of a speech declared alive, capable of helping, protecting and defending itself. Looking for logic in this progression is misguided. Still and all a good delivery is what makes the orator. It’s the singer not the song. All the poets were at the LedZepplin concert.

Resolving desire’s extreme desperation, animal abjection, public degradation and lack of love; a way of responding to passion with passion, content with our own mass and matter; raw material of beauty, necessarily. Courage to lead life according to radical propositions. A sovereign dance with the teeming world, contest of grace and charm; a fractal geometry of momentums. Consciousness is not the major effort of the human brain; a man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the new dangers threatening him; seeking danger is a way of getting to know the self. Some zealots still deny that thought is inherently embodied. Unless an artist has a human body, not just a rationing eye, sufficient to dangle on the abyss, to drink deep from the darkside, you don’t and can’t get smart. A space between life and death, very beautiful. As something that seems so difficult, yet is traversed only by doing it, knowing that you can. All life’s a party and you are invited. The real sickness of the world is that we deny and suppress the most beautiful parts of ourselves: creativity, joy, kindness, sex, love, dreams, imagination, inner beauty. Cultivating these properties, wildly sprouting with fertile nucleations… where people will gather; A broken water vessel sheltering octopi; that’s all you can see from this side of the blue. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. It takes courage. Convinced we’re not really here for ourselves, we’re here for other people. Entropy is also creative - freedom implies this reconciliation. Minimizing energy, crystallizing latent structure, pleasure is understood as a practice, and accumulates as experience. At night, I’m still a part of a secret community; vast and virile convivial sangha; ecology of souls. Don’t fall out of love.

Literature is not an object of knowledge in the scientific sense, though it may be at the foundation of all art. Its real interest lies in the ‘something like’, the pseudo. Psychology will never be able to accommodate within its space the uncertain potential to mean something more than what is seemingly said. That which constitutes the absence of the signatory, to say nothing of an absence of referent. Almost as if the text transforms itself as soon as it is understood; the system of language is a vast structure that is always changing; infinitely proliferating branches, many of which lead nowhere. It remains as the only way to escape empiricism. No one is free to think anything outside the rules of language and one’s vain critique of experience at the same time. We must see our rituals for what they are, that this absurd tragedy can be accepted, as a completely arbitrary thing, with equanimity and even humour. The originary moment for the creation of a system is when an observer makes a cut, opening up great possibilities for change. Before the cut – before any cut is made, only an undifferentiated complexity exists; random acts of healing this wound, impossible to understand in its noisy multifariousness. The cut helps to tame the noise of the world by introducing a distinction. Do you wish you had someone you could speak code with? Which could be understood in its elemental sense as a form? Practice is the most advanced form of theory; a boundary between inside and outside. The sexual and intellectual functions can be confused for one another; what is inside is further divided and organized as other distinctions flow from this first distinction, as scientific reasoning and mystical speculation; exfoliating and expanding, distinction on distinction, until a full-fledged system is in place. Exotic entertainments for gentlepeoples of the cultural elite.

Turning points; who is it that’s driving this machine? Asymmetric repetitions, un-used-to; a new basic experience of being could change the understanding of existence in its entirety. Repetition is a force – rhythmic cascade of pulses, wavelengths; change is expressed by the fact that the essence of being - the meaningfully musical figure affecting all fields and spectra of sensory stimulation - is no longer conceived as Logos: the Logos of domination and its systems. Adaptation of archaic mental structures to new environments would incite a beautifully controlled yet hideously wasteful bonfire, another ‘catastrophe’ – an explosive change to the environment itself. Imago imitatio - theories of imitation evoking intensive multimodal synaesthetic responses. Complete breakdown in the internal consistency of the symbol system. the old grid to which is given the task of outlining the domains of knowledge. Horror vacuii: When you’re at a party and someone’s passing around the weaponized hallucinogens - - reality is a matter of local custom. So long as you’re sufficiently self-aware of your own habits, the most troubling side-effects are other people and their negative preducial judgments. Related to challenging society’s perceived standards on a much deeper and less predictable level... When strings are slack, our marionettes continue to dance. Driven by compulsive urgency to constantly reconceive the whole idea. Exercise the will. Feel free, demand something different.

The curves of quickest descent, pumping the corners to maximize net positive accelleration; how can we form the ideas we need to describe this realm, where all intuitions derived from life in space-time become inapplicable. For the explorer there are no true beliefs; the limits of one’s beliefs set the boundaries for possible experience. There are no discoveries, only revelations. When some happy mental aberration frees the soul from its anxious cares, and restores it by the addition of manifold delights. All of the time or most of time, please help yourself to this moment that you’re feeling. Anything from me is yours. Being completely available, a kind and sincere empathy; an attentive co-presence; total affirmation of the life instincts; a credible investment in providing good company; repelling all escape and negation, generosity without reserve. An erotic attitude toward being, marked by a dramatic increase in symbolic synchronicity. The will and vision for which necessity and fulfillment coincide. Advance yourself in an honest way; liberation depends on the reversal of bad conscience. Give priority to helping others be free of their fear and pain, suffering, fatigue, symptoms of loss of energy or libido. Don’t make of yourself a performing ape. Guilt arises not in affirmation but in denial of life instincts. In art, there is nothing to teach, we only invite the players to come towards it. Representing a failure to recognize a moment of crucial importance.

None can flout the immutable laws of society and remain unscathed. A happening which becomes, which does and will yet exist, joyfully; as the psychic transformation or rebirth characterized by the alchemical process. Writing the unrightable wrongs, Earhart does not fly for the glory of the realm. The first obstacle is passing judgment, the second is trying to control or advise. To make pain a stimulus for affirmation; a link in the chain of joy; joy wants itself and everything else to be everlasting. Rebellion simply in acceptance of repressed ideals. Prisoners of conscience, the sexual revolution is the first step toward any revolution. Unrealized; observe: a man grows with the greatness of his task, but he must have capacity to grow. The man possessed by his shadow is living below his own level and only attains what does not suit him. The torture of the damned. He does not achieve inner transformation and rebirth in this life, but changes himself into this other being. Live your life as you would want it lived, nurturing that flowering personality maturing within us. This is it, no dress rehearsals. There are friends and counselors who lead us to the goal of our work; mercurial companions mediating between the stone and the disciple, machina sapiens negotiating the transformation of what is mortal into what is immortal. The Likener is also a likeness.

You grow, girl . Be the change you wish to see in the world, the world will take you at your own estimate. Anything less is not being honest to life. What is it to be human? Confronted with an inner friend or foe, a certain other one, within. Councilor advocate paraclete, mystagogue psychopomp. The philosopher is as Hermes to the stone’s Mercurius. We are more than we believe ourselves to be. Sometimes the recognition of a greater personality seems to burst an iron ring round the heart. To laugh more; we must work without arguing - remember right livelihood - for that is the only thing which makes life bearable.

……………

'Pataphysics - Vancouver Dispatch

WyrdStave Enclave et Le Calvair Endosymbiote Ensemble

2005-2006

TEXT by S.Calvert

1999 - EXP
2002 - Middle Worlds
2004 - ATCG
2005 - 'Pataphysics
2006 - Maintain Your Enthusiasm
2007 - Just Is
2008 - Theatre of Operations
2009 - Authentic Replica

AUDIO by S.Calvert

ARTby Steve Calvert

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