The Idiot

The Podosphere

The Idiot was one of those struggling rich kid stories, of which there are far too many. Dostoevsky himself was an intermingling between merchant and priest, who like Saint Teresa of Avila, another child of the wealthy, endured an occasional epileptic episode. The heart of Dostoevsky's Idiot story, a title dripping with irony, runs this way: A young, Christian and Innocent Prince returns to polite society from a period of isolation where his personal narrative of sweetness and wet-eyed innocence is confronted by, shall we call them, fallen, corrupt and wicked narratives as well as a couple of very dangerous hot chicks with serious intentions. "So what?" I hear the call!! Well the answer to that question is PPPGPSNFM. Or the Political Pundit Podosphere Greedily Peddling Saintly Narratives For Money. Here, podosphere is defined as"podcasters and their audience." Those of us who still have a DVD from Blockbuster of David Lean's Laurence of Arabia, in full Technicolor, starring Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole be wary of going anywhere near the Podosphere, and I'll tell you why: If you do such a thing, Dostoevsky predicted your fate, but unlike The Idiot Prince Myshkin, who didn't need health insurance you'll not be able to afford a comfortable rapture. Remember how The Idiot, an account of a Christ-like figure navigating the folds of an unfettered ruling class ended. I'm sure we all do, but, just in case you think I don't know, the hero of the tale does the right thing, he enters a catatonic state and is returned to a sanatorium - otherwise known as a posh nut house - in idyllic Switzerland where unblemished men and women represented the heavenly host. Well that won't be for you or me, our fate will be a wooded slope somewhere being stared at by chipmunks, while Baxter recites the Beatitudes. (Mathew 5:3 12)

Why the Rabbit of Usk

Carolina Elephants-Foot Gone to Seed

The dilemma, what is an authentic lived experience, resolves itself when the meaning of being is meaning. Be patient! The issue of neurosis generally and the troubling neurotic behaviors that present themselves as an unhappiness searching for quiet in particular, could well be a rewarding manifestation of Will. There again, if Arthur Schopenhauer is correct, Will is a "blind, restless, metaphysical force that is the inner essence, or the thing-in-itself." This blind, aimless, sub-rational force that throws seamstresses down stairs is very different from Martin Heidegger's Dasein, his specific Human form of Being, existential and reflective which asks the questions of being. Here the meaning of being is meaning, means no more than a blind and unattached individual Dasein finding itself thrust into the world asking and answering those questions of being as it gains both the use of language and experience of the world and as a result makes meaning. For Heidegger, Authentic would be an untroubled lived experience, and neurosis would be an expression of a troubled lived experience that's in the process of making new meaning. So when you ask: "What is an authentic lived experience?"  One answer is: "It depends on whether you interpret the World as a Representation of an overarching metaphysical Will, whether that Will has been troubled by reason and design, or whether it remains an undifferentiated blind and irrational source of suffering, and as a result of either one or other of these interpretations you begin to see yourself as a part of the universe? Or, whether you cleave to the notion of Dasein, and see yourself as an individual, a unique and very special living being equipped with a capacity to negotiate a path through a wider process." The next question, which is probably one of those questions Kant suggested our species will never be able to accurately answer is: "which of the above three basic narratives suits our species best?" A lot can be learned from a philosopher and traveller who went by the name John 'Walking' Stewart who was born in the February of 1747 and died in the February of 1822 at the age of 75. He's a big subject and both Baxter and I are much daunted by his mysterious genius, his difficult writing style, his bamboozling use of the double "f" as in the philoffopher mufft bow down to the microffcope, we nonetheless both refuse to call him an eccentric, instead we think of him as a giant, an untrammeled by any formal education independent spirit with a face to match, who met William Wordsworth - of Daffodils while wandering lonely as a Cloud fame - when both men were in Paris during the French Revolution. Worth noting that Walking Steward is a hero in a somewhat rambling, possibly turgid and disjointed, but never schlocky book called the Rabbit of Usk,

Spectacle Commodity Fetishism

Gotta Love Fleabane

I think it safe to assume that some of us with access to keyboards, internets, television, telephones and teenagers have come to know what Foot Fetishists and Furries are. Of the two, I suspect the following understanding of Furries better elucidates the subject at hand: "An interest that can lead to participating in the furry fandom, a subculture where individuals express themselves through artistic creations like "fursonas" (personal animal characters) and elaborate costumes called fursuits. The fandom is also known for its conventions, online communities, and focus on artistic expression, acceptance, and community." So with Furries it's not just a macabre Halloween, with tricks and treats, it's a whole life style, not exclusively centered on inappropriate or weird commingling of the furred and the un-furred. Commodity Fetishism predates the telephone, as early as 1840 Marx was waxing on the fetish of metal money which everyone loved and needed, paper money just didn't count. In the late 1860's he had a detailed understanding, of how, in our minds a product lost touch with the material world, what the product, let's call it a tooth brush, was, where it came from, the labor involved in making it, who owned the labor involved in making it and on it went for approximately 400,000 words. This social relationship had magically become a relationship with a toothbrush, not a social relationship between two people, but a relationship between a person and a thing. And Lo in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell for the first time ever telephoned his assistant and rather seductively said "Mr Watson, come here. I want you," a new world of fetishism was born. It was a form of progress that used electric signals traveling along wires, and which soon enough would be overtaken by electric signals traveling through electromagnetic waves. This was the beginning of a condition a Frenchman called Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist International and cigarette smoker who died at the age of 62 in 1994, chose  to call, Spectacle Commodity Fetishism. (Le fétichisme de la marchandise spectacle.) You could turn a love of stuff, into a love of Spectacle, defined as a social relationship mediated by images. We don't interact directly with each other, we interact with images of what what we are persuaded is what our lives should look like  It's not the person, he could be a dim-witted jackass, it's what the person looks like and the image he presents. It's not the toothbrush, it's what the toothbrush looks like, how its presented in images, that may include handsome men driving motorcycles and hot chicks brushing their pearly white teeth. It's not the staged sea battle with multiple casualties in somewhere like Portland Oregon, it's what the staged sea battle does for the image of the Emperor.

I am Spartacus as a New Narrative for David Wallace's Post Irony Depression

Unknown Moth on Moonflower

Rabbit-Rabbit, I guess. It's not a truly ancient salutation to the first day of the month, around 1909 it appears in print, it was something children were saying in England and might have soon disappeared if President Franklin Roosevelt, who was diagnosed with Polio in 1921 hadn't adopted it for his polio charm or whatever. For a long time, across many countries, rabbits have been a symbol of growth, abundance, fertility, rebirth. You only have to see them in spring, there's something in new grass that hops them up, they bound around with no shortage of self esteem, like rabid mental patients, frightening the cats. The thing about new spring grass, it's very high in moisture, sugars and starch and contains very little fiber, it is like an all natural doughnut washed down with a caffeinated soda pop for the rabbit world as well as a source of rabbit constipation. You can always talk about the rise or fall of collective insanity anytime you want, go back to the Roman Emperor Titus and the equally autocratic Roman Emperor Claudius in 52 AD and 80 AD respectively, they put on sea battles as an entertainment for the masses. So why not a healthier diet, a more stable body mass index, no facial hair something called FAFO, something else called PT, they must both be naval expressions. Either way these bunny hopping offerings from our higher echelons must have been a less expensive alternative to the massive cost to the treasury of Sea Battles with Real Live Casualties as Spectacle to keep an understanding of the world simple and stupid, or KISS as it's called by the very un-woke safety people on the big boats that aimlessly wander the oceans looking for good will or trouble. After that sort of mind blowing desperate hunt for spectacle by the destroyers of the Roman Republic, the First Century AD decision to introduce a more formal practice of Condemnation to Beasts, otherwise advertised as publicly feeding lions with fresh Christians must have been a rather clever economy measure. In our own Post Enlightenment, Post Irony arena my own current favorite in state orchestrated spectacle is that of unlabeled, and slightly pudgy, slavishly obedient to a bee stung and aging princess, masked men with bearded JD running styles employed by the taxpayer attempting to chase down urchins with Brylcreem free and wonderfully flowing youthful hair riding their bicycles. Me, as an upstanding, and paid up member of the back row, it's a narrative I heartily approve of and can't get enough of. I think David Wallace had he lived would agree..