Hurry up, slow down.

Utopian societies are immanently conceivable, but fatal for societies to achieve. First, it implies a global agreement concerning an abstract term. The innumerable springs of definition lend themselves to imagination, and even to practice, but not to perfection. It is a haughty expression whose logic works to undermine evolution. A utopian society limits the imagination, dreams, and the future. It is self-sufficient, but like a punch-line repeating in Space. It is senseless without the context of a past-present-future continuum. It is incomprehensible. It is death disguised as immortality, a senseless twilight sleep. A utopian world lacks memory and a sense of what’s possible. It is a congealed world lacking hope. At bottom, there is dystopia. A dystopia is a resignedness. It is a ghost-town, but a freer one than its sister. A ghost-town at least allows for nostalgia that can turn on itself and become hope. Nostalgia is moot within a Utopia, as are all dreams. Inside of a dystopia there is at least the dreams of a past. It doesn’t move forward either, but it stands on everything that came before it. It is, in a sense, suicide. The only real life is in the middle, inside dreams, inside science fiction. Real life is the imagination, and they both lack that. They both lack the omnidirectional mobility of imagination.

All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground.

Brain Litany: Or, Overlooking the Existential Factor
*"Can it be that any man has the skill to fabricate himself?" -- St. Augustine
The brain is a network of connections of cells
It is not a connection of cells
It is a connection of information
It is a connection of blue vases
with red flowers in them
It is not a connection of vases
It is a connection of living memories
*" ... and when we think of coconuts and pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain." -- Gregory Bateson
WHERE ARE THEY
WHERE ARE THE COCONUTS
WHERE ARE THE PIGS
The brain is a network of behavioral potentialities
The Brain is the mind
The brain is the central integrative role in human performance
WHERE ARE THE PIGS
WHERE ARE THE COCONUTS
The brain is a compendium of holographic mechanisms
HELP ME FIND THE COCONUTS HELP ME FIND THE PIGS
The brain is a neuro-physiological metaphor
The brain is an illusionist's exercise in Euclidean geometry
The brain is a vibrational amplifier for ambient field quanta
FIND ME THE GODDAMNED COCONUTS THE PIGS
The brain is a cybernetic miracle with a three-ring triune brain circus at its centre
The brain is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern
I KNOW I SAW THE COCONUTS
I KNOW I SAW THE PIGS
The brain is an evolutionary archaeological site
SHOW ME THOSE PIGS ONE MORE TIME
The brain is a dance among three interconnected biological computers
I SAW THE PIGS
I SAW THE COCONUTS
The brain is a bicameral structure for playing epistemological handball.
I know you have the coconuts
The brain is a reality structurer with lacrimal glands
The brain is an international casino for quantum indeterminancy
THE PIGS
THE PIGS
THE PIGS
When we think of brains, there are no brains in the brain.
THE COCONUTS
THE PIGS
The brain is a psycho-biological tar pit GIVE ME
THE BLOODY COCONUTS in an emotional jungle YOU BASTARD
or the brain is a macro-evolutional myth for the maintenance of
I'LL BASH the brain is an omnidirectional time machine
clogged with death consciousness
I could cry
SHOW ME THOSE PIGS
SHOW ME THOSE COCONUTS
THE ABRIDGED CARTESIAN VERSION
I THINK, THEREFORE I AM.
When we think of the "I," there is no one in the brain.
WHERE AM I?
WHERE AM I? etc.
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

Pain/Pin

There is felicity at work behind a mechanic named weasel. More when he scams you.

It shares something, I'll wager, with what I found on Fannie's counter: identity stickers from the American Heart Association, her family name misspelled Lies. Fannie Lies –– boy, does she.

There exists in my life the tendency of symbols to bob in my ken before their realer counter-parts. And thus exists the argument that lived-out lives are amenable to literary analysis. Further, the suggestion that the field of analysis is not exactly a construct, but an impulse sprouted from more ancient education. "One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato's dialouges, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility" (Scarry, 7-8).

As a three year old, my sister fluttered from a three-story building, landing in our yard's sole shrub. In the hospital she told me "I shoulda' known because I thought of that before." She thought of it in a dream.

This is not plainly poetry. Of course, one should apply the same diligent apprehension to symbols as to teachers. Some symbols, in the way of some teachers, are more reliable than others. And there is no surefire method to determine reliability. The best anyone can do is wake-up, remain alert.