Gentle Apocalypse

FROM THE GENTLE APOCALYPSE EMPORIUM

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:38:00 +0000

Do you suffer from arhythmia, spaz-realease-anxiety or creaky psyche-lag in the arms of a dance partner? In dance do you perform simple, mechanical, jerklettes, large, predictable or out-of-time grandstanders, refuse in your headstrong flesh to follow or lead with technical brilliance but subtle flairless grip? Or perhaps you love to dance but are tied to someone who does not and are tired of playing table-tennis in a deep-sea diving suit or hauling a corpse stapled to a mattress up the spiral stair-case of your enthusiasms? If so, why not try Dr Pong’s Yawp Serum; an intramuscular boogie-juice arse injection of concentrated hooplas, crunching squat-glides, electro-stills, mobile rolls, michegan-synchros, high-park-gaylords, wet-fleckerals, rubber-ochos, highland body-melts, net-casters, chick-spacks, wang-scythes, bubble-rubs and glorious bronto-yawps. Just one monstrous pump and a whole new landscape of vibe-delight is yours.

A Little List of Lies

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:42:00 +0000

Hope, Belief. Fear. Random mutations detemine evolutionary progress. An abstract god created the universe. Nature is based on competition. Human beings are fundamentally violent. Sanity can be determined democratically. Democracy is the fairest system. We live in a democracy. The world or the environment needs to be ‘saved’. Recyling does sod all in this world. Natural selection can explain human behaviour. When you die you come back as another person, or animal*. Pre-civilised groups lead lives that were ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Children are ‘little monkeys’ - selfish and wild. Schools educate. Its the government’s / your parent’s / your past’s fault. Money replaced barter. Land can be owned. Debts should be repaid. You need money-beauty-security-sex-fame-prestige to be happy. The universe was created at some point in the past. Propaganda is the mere telling of lies. You are fundamentally seperate from what you experience. Reality is fundamentally the same as ideas about reality. Intelligence is fundamentally a matter of intellect. And the one they’re all based on: happiness and sadness are fundamentally due to external events or other people.

*an enervating belief, but it does stand at the door of the inscrutable.

Postcard from Evolia

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:46:00 +0000

(by I and Ai)

How to Deal with the End of the World

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Or How Societal Collapse Begins with a Broken Heart

When the internet shuts down, and mobile phones stop working, and streetlights go out, and jobs cease to exist, and money becomes valueless, and you are constantly surrounded by people that, for once in your life, you have to have a direct relationship with, you will find that it is not scarcity that you need to learn to deal with, or the army, or the collapse of ‘democracy’, or the end of an oil-based economy. It is your self. The following short guide is a means to prepare yourself for a time when large chunks of who you are - your habits, reflexive desires, fantasies and repetitive thought patterns - are, through having no ‘external’ object to work on - annihilated.

UNTHOUGHT The fear and desire of self-in-charge (aka dominator consciousness) feed off brain chatter and associative thought trash. Unless you can master your thinking and the restless mechanical movement of your attention, you will be paralysed by thought-fear at the annihilating fact of total loss rising before you and unable to hold back from agonies of craving, anger, guilt or panic brought on by thinking during loss.

Use the city to practice thought and attention mastery. Walk through the metro enjoying your breathing more than the adverts, refuse to participate in gossip. See how pornographic news-violence has power over your attention - and in seeing this, take the power back. Allow the urge to rubber-neck disaster slip through your system.

Practice melting thoughtlessly into the strangeness and actuality of ordinary phenomena. The entire universe exists in the space between ordinary things, so vast, and so strange. To see it, is awe, to travel across it, is adventure, to express it, is art. And all this, of all places, in the kitchen!

SEX-EMOTION Unless you are in contact with the delighted love-feeling that contact with the opposite sex naturally bubbles up (regardless of whether you are in a relationship or not), or able to feel and let slip away sexual frustration or its money-business-victory substitutes,, you'll be a slave to murderous sex thoughts. This will be the same as now - unable to tell the gentlemen from the beast, prey to maulers, restless, cold or violent - but, when civilisation crashes, without social checks to keep these insanities suppressed or locked up, they'll make a howling nightmare of life.

Use the city to practice the awareness that precedes automatic glances towards stimulus-response tits and arses. Practice scriptlessly, wantlessly facing the opposite sex in spontaneous ungrasping unknowing. Practice loving when you most don't feel like it. Practice letting go of the constant clench of wanting.

VIOLENCE is built on sexual frustration (in that the connected warmth of love-making is without violence), and depends on restlessness and expectation. In civilisation violence is mostly anger and irritation, and leads to shame and vibe corruption; but when the bubble pops its going to get grotesque.

Learn how to deal with your anger - by feeling your restlessness, and looking for the tiny expectations which lead to frustration and fury. Learn to remind yourself, when angry (or afraid or depressed), that no situation is so bad that you cannot laugh at it, or find it interesting.

Facing other people's violence requires instant discernment, the subtle art of calm, watchful prisoner’s defiance, super-sensitive threat-awareness or the death-fearless chucking of all chips to the wind in order to defend someone else. You can practice most of these in the arenas of cruelty that civilisation currently offers; the office, the factory and the family.

FEAR stands before every nightmare you'll face as the mask is ripped off the face of the world. Fear, first of all, of losing things you think or feel you have - money, dignity, possessions, qualifications, power, status or beauty.

To overcome attachment to the things you have, seek out situations in which you cannot use or rely on them; situations that you fear or really ‘don’t like’ - aloneness, poverty, unscripted theatre, nature, extreme boredom and the company of the young, the dying and the mad are the classics, but everyone has their own private hell which, sooner or later, must be faced. Better to do it in your own way, now, than to be propelled into it by civ-pop.

Underneath fear of losing what you have, is the atomic fear of losing who you feel you are. This aversion to the emptiedness of unbeing is a constant background anxiety or tension which lies at the root of all fears, even the tiniest eruptions of anxiety or violence. To face it is partly a question of self-mastery - learning to let your self slip into inner feeling and full sensory awareness of the present-moment - partly a question of love - exposing yourself completely to another and allowing that gaze to raise your game - and partly a question of honestly - not mere confession, but the unjudging turning-towards of self-awareness, watching the self as it thinks and feels.

It cannot be stressed enough that your own particular practice depends less on any one of the tips mentioned here as on facing your own particular selfmare. You might find it easy, for example to walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield, but play clunkily with children, have secret sexual shames, and talk down to your mother. Or you might be a yogic master, able to suck water up your anus, but be afraid of any kind of definite judgement, unconfortable around the working class and weird about money.

The super-intimate skills of self-mastery are not acquired by any specific effort, psychology, magic, education, community-action or self-knowledge, but by actively seeking out criticism, uncertainty and the experience of unself, and by practicing, again and again, letting go of self, feeling out and allowing subtle internal pain, listening to its message and then courageously, selflessly acting before the manifold opportunities normal life offers to lose your presence, break down, throw a wobbler or behave like a dick.

Objections:

1. All this has been said before. ‘There are many paths of gentle wisdom.’
2. Self-mastery is just effort and denial.
3. Do you have children? All very easy if you are single. Having kids is a unique challenge.
4. What about community? We should focus on our external lives.
5. You over-emphasise sex. Sex is not so important.
6. I can already walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield.
7. There is more to be said.
8. Its not the end of the world yet.

My responses:

1. I dig those ‘old pathways of gentle wisdom’ - but I found it hard, as a youngster, to apply their lack of specific guidance on dealing with pointless jobs, ‘causeless’ emotion, sexual problems, raising children and wotnot to my modern chaotic not living in a hindu-field lifestyle. That’s not a problem with the teachings of course, as they (at least the ones I love) still get so finely to the point, but a great deal of dressing up and being special surrounds spiritual tradition and the wily western mind is, if nothing else, a genius at subtly missing the point. And as I mentioned above, nothing quite hits the sweet spot (or puts its finger on the wurm) like the truth fresh, which is why I prefer contemporary ‘pathways’.

2. Self-control and self-mastery are not the same. Self control (as Krishnamurti spent his life saying) is one part of the self – an idea or emotion – controlling the rest - which is effort and suppression. Self mastery is the whole context, or unself, in charge. The difference between the two is both phenomenally subtle and unbelievably vast (or as Dennis Potter put it, ‘both trivial, and important, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.’)

3. Having or not having children has nothing to do with self-mastery. In fact if they ‘challenge practice differently’, (or more than anything else, which is not true - as millions of suicidal or insane - but childless - people testify) if they did, then this would make them less of a barrier to self-mastery. The more anxiety, stress, hurt and annoyance something or someone causes you, the greater the opportunity to face down your self – which is all to the good, as mastering your moods, irritations, selfish fears (meaning the smothering controlling ones some mothers have and mask as ‘care’) or blithe hardnessnes of heart is essential if you are to raise a child that doesn’t spend its whole life trying to even perceive the vibe-conditioning your self warped it with as a bairn - let alone deal with it.

4. Community is a good testing ground for self-mastery. All your insanities and stupidities will out if you have a direct relationship with your fellows. Few of us do have such a large direct-relationship group though – but nearly all of us have romantic relationships – the community of two – and so I tend to confine what I have to say about self and others to that.

But it is also a red-herring to suggest that one first look externally to solve the problems of self – as it is not about where you look, but who, at any particular moment, is doing the looking – and not even finally look – because when your wife turns her face to the wall and you feel the whole dread universe between you, or when a writhing monster has taken possession of your children and is pushing all your buttons, or when you are walking through a forest and are not mad overwhelmed by the weird vibrating god-beauty of it, or when you just cannot stop yibber-yabbering inside about something someone said about you – the solution, even before action, is an inward release.

5. In theory, its true that relationship problems and sex are not so important. In practice just about everyone yearns for romantic love, has or has had chronic relationship problems are absolutely cripped with obsession or encoldened by boredom and the experience of ’normality‘. Solving all this is clearly a vital part of life. But I should emphasise that I am making a fundamental distinction between sex (good or bad) and love-making. Allow me to make the distinction clearer:

Sex is a restless, reality-excluding mental-emotional tight-grip focus on a self-created image: no different to masturbation and porn – there just happens to be someone else there.

Bestial sex-want is never satisfied and only creates problems. It is violent, desperate, quickly bored but never satisfied and can only be controlled by cold brain-clamp. Sex with another (and constant sex-fantasy) creates distance between you, spike, irritation, annoyance, all sexual problems and many (perhaps most) social problems.

Making love is an experience of total sensory floodout – the 99.9% of the sense data normally excluded by the mental-emotional self is perfectly allowed in a state of self-annihilating devotion and near hideous strange-delight. This is no different from the full-scale wide-attention life of über-woo which surrounds it.

Transdimensional animal love-making (and constant woo) creates liquid ease, lack of cling and creative amazement all day – but to reach the garden you have to be able to know how to give up your self – and you have to want to – which is impossible while men and women are addicted to their silly plans and schemes.

Love-making, in this sense, is never a refuge for the self – and it lasts all day. Sex always is.

(I’ve made the distinction clearer here than it sometimes is in practice though. The restless sex-brain can interpose itself into love-making and present lovers can bring each other out of the virtual world.)

But of course there are other ways to overcome self than making-love or really being with the opposite sex – there’s the whole of your life, for a start! – but sex and love-making are a huge part of men and women’s lives, and must be addressed if self is to be mastered (or allowed to be swept sweetly away).

6. Each self faces its own complexes of fears. You might find it easy to walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield, but play clunkily with children, cannot step onto an improvised stage, have secret sexual shames and talk down to your mother. Who knows – but whatever it is, that is the training ground I am pointing towards.

7. Agreed. There is much to discover at this point – where the extreme meets the ordinary, and where the individual self meets its own, particular shadow. And much by way of pearls to bring back too. Not just clunky blog-posts like this, but electric weird straight line hit to the good thing michaelangelo-standard comics, timeless melodies with neptunian beats, dandelion-mimicing architraves, vigilante plumbing and truly miraculous trousers.

8. It is always the end of the world.

Kali Yuga

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sun, 06 May 2012 05:17:00 +0000

This from the Vishnu Paruna, an ancient Hindu text which describes the Kali Yuga, the age of wickedness at the end of time:

‘In the Kali Yuga charity will constitute righteousness. Pride of wealth will be inspired by very insignificant possessions, upon which all will lust and hanker. Accumulated treasures will be expended on dwellings and illusions. The minds of men will be wholly occupied in acquiring wealth; and wealth will be spent solely on distractions and gratifications. No man will part with the smallest fraction of the smallest coin, though entreated by a friend. Cows will be held in esteem only as they supply milk. The people will be almost always in dread of dearth, and apprehensive of scarcity; and will hence ever be watching the appearances of the sky.

In the Kali Yuga, food will lose its savor, women will become as men, love will be confused for desire and time will appear to speed up. It shall be forbidden to lie down in public spaces and dead bodies will be hidden from view. Dreams will be troubled and sexual communion will harden the hearts of the coveted and frustrate the hearts of slaves*.

In the Kali age every one who has cars and elephants and steeds will be a Raja, and every one who is feeble will be a slave. Farming men will abandon agriculture and commerce, and gain a livelihood by servitude or the exercise of mechanical arts. Then will the clouds yield scanty rain: then will the corn be light in ear, and the grain will be poor, and of little sap: garments will be mostly made of the dying fibres and milk will come mostly from goats.

In the Kali Yuga every text will be scripture that people choose to think so and humans will be haunted on both sides - by the fist of despotic ideas and the rising ocean of ignorance. Endowed with little sense, men, subject to all the infirmities of mind, speech, and body, will daily make dreadful errors; and every thing that is calculated to afflict beings, vicious, impure, and wretched, will be generated in the Kali age until men and women will become as lizards are, skuttling and watchful for weakness, or as hunted birds, white and ever blinking. The world will become a hive, fuelled by nighmares.

But for the children and the insane there will be freedom, and those that learn the madness of play, at the end of time, will take their game to the Satya Yuga.

And those who love freedom will be amazed at how awake they can be.’

*and the young shall not know where lyeth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock.

The Serene Empire of Evolia

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 04:57:00 +0000

The Empire of Evolia is a massive, feral nation, notable for its huge mushroom trampolines and tame mastadons which frolic freely in the ancient mahogany forests.

The sweet, insane population of manythousand fluid grouplets are free to do what they like, howsoever they please, governed by nothing more than a subtle sense of obviousness which wells up from bellyminds run rapturously asunder in a monstrous range of impromptu rituals, thundering swing jams and near constant love-making.

Evolian Architecture partly imitates natural forms, the rest is alive; the inhabitants having learnt how to persuade their staggering flora to cooperate in civic construction. More temporary dwellings are common and all children can bivvy.

Emblem: Vast, pulsating electric jelly fishgod which periodically rises above the clouds, lashing out its firey white limbs, pinning Edolians, howling with delight, to the sky.

Government: Liquid anarcho-monarchy. Leaders who give orders or seek consensus are handed over to the care of young children until the yibber-yabber has left them.

The capital of Evolia is Shlaarg Makwang-Hoosh Fe-Tarp! and its currency is the Romantic Gesture.

Languages: Djang-djang, Zala, Chess, Riddim and the Strange Language of Bees.

Education: None. Economy: None. Politics: None. Law: None. Crime: None.

Bill’s Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:30:00 +0000

During my peculiar youth I spent a year living with my granddad, Bill. Here we are on a bench in front of Island Wall:

Bill had some good stories, and some funny ideas. He said that everything had happened before, loads of times, and one day they’d dig down under the pyramids and find a world just like this one. I asked him how many worlds there were down there. He said about six.

Bill also said not to wear pink because you’d get ‘set upon by gays’, and so for a long time I thought gays were like bulls and if you wave pink at them they’d start frothing and pawing the ground and stuff. He also said not to eat peanuts before you go to bed, because they ‘sit on your chest’, which turned out to be true.

He was wrong about the gays though.

Ambition

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:07:00 +0000

I've developed a new level in my Reality computer game - its called ‘Ambition’.

Set in a total-immersion virtual reality real-time 3D world, your objective is to get as many points as you can - points being earned every time you get money, fun, fame, power, attention, security, any kind of success or promotion, a new possession or a new experience. All religious observances score highly, including advanced yoga positions, but so does atheistic superstition-debunking and the acquisition of scientific learning, theories, histories and paradigms. You also get points for sleeping with people, having babies, and ’achieving recognition’ - either for yourself or for any animal, woman, gay, minority or shadow rights cause you support.

In order to play Ambition you first have to learn how to use your VR self (or Avatar), then you have to learn how to navigate through the VR world, then you have to learn how all its institutions work. There is so much to learn that by the time you achieve a really good score not only will your real world body have atrophied, stiffened, dried up and be unable to move and perceive with subtlety or clarity, but your consciousness, having spent so long in a binary, relative, unreal world, will have become virtual too. The spontaneity and love required by the real world will not just be difficult - but painful; meaning that if you decide to retire, relax or drop out, you’ll have to do that in Ambition too.

Dangling From the Meaning Tree

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 03:38:00 +0000

She can hear what I am saying, and what I am not saying. She trusts that I mean what I say, but her trust is not blind, for she can pick out the off-colour and the bum-note. But she doesn’t say the opposite just because the opposite can be true - she’s a ‘yes, and...’ kinda girl, if you know what I mean?

I mean she listens intently when I speak, not itching for her moment. She is interested in the content of what I say, not the novelty of it. She doesn’t agree before I’ve given her anything to agree about. She lets me get to the point, and then responds to that, not to what the first thing I say reminds her of. And yet, sometimes, she cuts in smoothly and breaks it all up, and we walk along some more. We deviate, but don’t forget the point - which right now is spring, in the park.

We sit down on a bench and enjoy the smoothness of the air, the body-temperature of it. We drift on intricate silences, before land appears, growing into an another conversation tree, hovering between us, sprouting and maturing.

She knows how to listen to the tree. She can take the interactional fractal exactly where it needs to grow, into a succession of ironies, connections, observations, memories, facts, gestures and games that connect together with uncanny aptness, as if the tree knows that the next comment exists - which it does.

She is less interested than I in connecting ideas up, of course, or in providing anecdotal information about the nature of the universe. She tends to let things hang in mid air, sipping at the sensory pleasure of them or declaring how she feels with such honesty that I snot out my orange juice.

We complement each other, but we are not so different. The lead-follow / mind-vibe / male-female distinction is blurred between us with subtle simplex art and we are able to aptly slide between driving towards a destination and meandering around it, between not having to guess at wishes and not having to cause each other the discomfort of having to ask, between tactically directing the conversation and allowing it to grow by itself, between talking of ourselves and asking of the other, and between speech and silence.

And we both love to climb all over the tree between us and hang upside-down from its branches, unconfused by its implications. And we both try to speak fruit-stuffed, chin-dribbly, before giving up in round meaningful blabs and runging.

Around us, sitting in the park or walking in twos and threes, people are tacitly agreeing to pretend to hear each other. This pretence involves the ‘listener’ adding a certain number of headnods, ‘reallys’ ‘uh-huhs’ or ‘wows’ while, eyes flat and inward, or restlessly wandering around looking for something more interesting, he thinks about what he wants to say, all comments out of step, clumsy or mechanical, building a stunted, lopsided or over-swollen tree; a tree as drawn by a manager; scratchy, straight and flat.

Some are afraid of what their conversations may become. If it seems to be leading towards blocked-off branches, towards criticism or the unknown, they attempt to drive the structure prematurely out into a familiar branch, to get the conversation back to familiar patterns or topics; or - blunderingly unaware of the intricate structure just created - they will, like a fat kid kicking over a sandcastle, crush the entire thing with a non-sequitur, in order to build their own tree, on their own terms. Such comments feel unnecessarily emphatic, weird, selfish, or a bit gay. They create secret body-cringe discomfort as the comment shuts down or jolts the flow of speech between them, and the conversation that grows is like every other controlled tree, skeletons hung down with plastic fruit-boobs.

Or they might be talking and even though the other has got the point, they can't stop spluttering through, everything going awry, discomfort creeping up the throat, compulsive irrelevance driving them out into one distracting branch after another while their poor listener vainly tries to wrestle them back to the point, or get them to shut up for a moment.

Or they might not enter into the stream of speech at all, and - playing all silent and enigmatic - avoid the chaotic, unpredictable and dangerous game of communication; unless they know they can play it according to their rules.

Or they are engaged in vibe-war, everything on the surface playful, polite or plausible, while underneath they are parasitically sucking the life from each other in opinionated, anecdotal or falsely solicitous attention-vampirism.

But then, a rare few, one or two - perhaps just in a reckless moment of abandon - are really with each other, scrambling around a garden of delight, taking definite meanings and making daisy-chains of them in irony or courtesy, saying untruth but meandering around the point in absolutely honest pre-verbal vibe-pong, talking with each other not there, on paper, but in that vast Jupiter-moon here, where our dinosaur selves romp and flop together.

Are you Insane?

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:40:00 +0000

A brief guide to virtual delusion.

All delusions are adherence to a virtual reality, which is to say a self-made replica of what is happening. Because the delusional simulation is based on self, self is unable to identify the error. It only has its own delusional logic to judge with, and so it is only capable of judging others.

Realisation of delusion is only possible when self is perceived from a non-self perspective. This typically occurs as a result of intense suffering, great shock or extraordinary beauty - those events which force consciousness out of narrow feeling-thinking into a wider experience of the present moment - which is why genuine realisations of the nature of self (or of ‘how stupid I've been’) regularly come with a more intense experience of the present moment; brighter colours, clearer sounds or a sense of the clarity or strangeness or beauty of surrounding space.

This is not ‘me’ experiencing the present moment - because ‘me’ is the object of my experience.

This is the present moment experiencing me.

Identifying delusional virtual realities from the non-self perspective is particularly difficult when the reality is shared by many others (society), or when it is created in the external world (technology) - indeed the aim of societies built by selves is to ensure such identification is impossible. The perfect impregnable society, from the perspective of self-control, would be so technologically advanced it could build a perfect replica of self, a virtual reality (VR), which self would be unable to detect as false.

The belief that the virtual world is fundamentally similar to the real world and will one day match it in quality and quantity - that it is be possible to be lost in VR - can only be maintained by the thinking-feeling me-self - which is discrete (divided up into bits), finite (a limited number of bits) and binary (meaningful only through the relationship those bits have to each other) - in other words, like a computer.

If the self is discrete-finite-binary (DFB), then its only a matter of time before computers reach the required number of bits to ‘equal’ the self, to create a world that the self cannot tell from reality.

Computer game images have gone from crude binary blocks to a fine 3D world, but no matter how fine the pixels are, they will always be DFB. If your primary experience of reality is through mind, then you will find computer imagery to be faithful to reality, whereas if your primary experience of reality precedes mind and emotions, you will find the finest possible virtual imagery to always be absolutely (and nightmarishly) unreal.

As with imagery, so with playability. The longer it takes to learn a computer simulation the more ‘fun’ or ‘realistic’ it is; fun and functional realism in a computer game coming from learning ever-smaller nuances within an ever wider range of possible moves. A game's enjoyment is limited on the one hand by subtlety (how nuanced it can be) and on the other by extent (how many moves are possible). But again, although subtlety can become finer and extent can become wider, because they are always based on finite binary code, they can never reach the infinitely large or the infinitely small; which is to say, non-self.

If, therefore, you are, right now, in a virtually real world of near infinite subtlety and extent, comprising countless trillions of binary pixels, options and nuance, something will always be missing; non-discrete, non-relative, non-abstact reality - but that part of the player which knows, the DFB brain, will not be able to tell what it is.

Self has no way of knowing if what is happening is real or not. Only non-self is capable of percieving the unreality of a perfect sanity image. But the instant your self asserts itself over the present moment, experience becomes discrete, finite and binary again - and non-discrete, infinite and analogue reality becomes a threat: Delusional people are (either permanently or temporarily) intolerant of ambiguity, uncertainty and mystery and both leap to and cling to conclusions in order to avoid these self-unknowable states.

It is possible to have a mysterious (non-DFB) me-less experience of what is happening, before, a milisecond later, sinking back into a discrete relative universe, with no way of telling what has changed; bounded by the conviction that reality is not just merely what you perceive to be so - but is and has always been.

What makes this process so hard to spot is not just that it pulls a perfect simulation of reality over your eyes, but that it does it in your own unique way. It is, after all, you.

Because thought and emotion are you, you naturally find yourself attempting to assert your limited self over the present moment in those moments that are most you - those times when you are most assertive, most concentrated, when you most want or don't want, when you most like or don’t like. Such moments - those your self has pre-programmed itself to seize upon or flee from - are your unique delusion - your own personal complex of uncertainty-fears, money, status or sex-power addictions, vibe-blind stimulation cravings, repetitive compulsions of self-criticising thought patterns and ridiculous mechanical behaviours, and this bespoke nightmare will, no matter how sane you are, rear up the moment that your self meets your unique threat or addiction.

It is only when no such fear-craving exists, when nothing can make you automatically be your self, that you are sane, or experiencing sanity; because the you that experiences is then always perceiving, right in front of your eyes, the you that is not.

PR

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:59:00 +0000

My publisher has asked me to put together some promotional photos for my forthcoming releases. I'm not a big fan of photographic representations of myself, but I've reluctantly come up with the following gallery which I am contractually bound to pass on.

These nine photo-images of me, each one between four and seven metres tall, will soon splashed over London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. It will be hard to avoid my face for a while - sorry about that.

For Play

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 03:02:00 +0000

Boyfriend: ‘What d'y’ fancy doing tonight? Girlfriend: ‘Well, there's a new show on a the Tate, or we could stay in and watch a movie?’

Boyfriend: ‘Yeahhh. I was kind of thinking perhaps we could work on our magnificent struts together, or cut up bits of paper, or go out and take photographs of babies, or cycle to portable speaker music carried in rucksacks, or make extraordinary granola, or start a strange business together, or go on nighttime graffiti missions writing beautiful and subversive messages for tomorrow’s commuters, or play one moves lips while the other makes the sounds, or lie on the ground perfectly still in a cow’s field and wait until they come up and lick us, or move to Saariselka at the drop of a hat, or make a horror film together, or learn to waltz in the supermarket, or lindy-hop on the tube, or tango over a cliff, or build a house together, or form a two-piece band of trumpets and drums, or picnic in unlikely places, or make love on warm rocks, or play with our food, or try to deeply embarress each other in public places, or overdub distant conversations, or pretend to die horribly, or play three word theatre, or dedicate a year to learning joinery together, or meisner each other mental, or make a radio-show, or care for goats, or dangle from bowers, or bow in spangles, or languish in lounges, or seriously discuss vast verbal hyopethetical side-realities in which we have ten noses, or are made of yoghurt, or paint vast panoramas of future worlds over the bonnet of our car and then drive it into a wall, or love each other even though we don't feel like it, or finger-paint each other in the nude, or set fire to each other's socks... instead.’

Girlfriend: ‘Jai Rama!’

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:22:00 +0000

For the last eight months or so I've been posting sporadically because I've been all beans go finishing two colossal projects - Sam How, the rabbit-based epic mentioned elsewhere - and, colossaler by far, The Gentle Apocalypse - my utopian newspaper / guide to everything / graphic novel / dictionary / trampoline; an early sketch of which was also once here. They've both transformed into something... insane-beauty-surprising.

I'll still post, put up the odd drawing of Buddha as a peanut perhaps, but still not much more than once a month until the books are done. If you'd like to know when that is, drop me a line and I'll write back then with a gift. Also, if you've written to me before and I didn't reply, please try again - I recently discovered that mails were going into my spam folder and thence to the void.

Squid Ritual

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:09:00 +0000

Last time I was in Japan I lived in Ishikawa-ken where I played a kind of live computer game on New Year's eve. Crowds of us gathered outside a three story temple with long balconies and loads of sliding doors on all sides from which monks dressed as badgers shuffled out in file, scattering beans into the crowd which we had to catch in special nets and then take home and hide in a 'rarely looked-at' corner. The beans would, for the coming year, subtly emit good luck radiowaves - but not for oneself, only for neighbours you hadn't met. It was widely acknowledged in the Ishikawa prefecture that one's good luck came from one's neighbour's secretly generous beans.

This new year, in Kurashiki, was a more sombre, squid-based, affair.

On the stroke of midnight the temple bells were rung 108 times to clear away the 108 defilements. We were gathered in the square, hundreds of us, dressed in red. As the bells rang we remembered times this year when we had dirtied ourselves with ungrateful complacency over good health, the false generosity of begrudged giving, prawn-greed, intimacies dishonoured with weak gagging, bland robotic anecdotes, unconscious repetitions of old facial tics, grey daymares of morbid self-pity, the excitement of complaint and bad news, loved ones tortured because we didn't have what we wanted and were too cowardly to make a dash for it, and for all the trees, clouds and sparrows we'd ignored, lost in trivial thoughts. By the simple act of recognition we purged ourselves. The monks chanted 'recognition is to really see is all we ever need to be free is recognition is to really see...' over and over, resonantly harmonising while, together, the crowd made the ten-handed sign of the squid, symbol of liberation and mystery. The crowd began to press, our sombre waggling limbs entangling into a vast web and we hummed together in collective warmth until the final bell was struck whereupon we backed out of the temple, reverent and cleansed.

Übernews

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:01:00 +0000

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If so, sir, you need: Übernews! We are proud to present the news service for the gentleman - of the left or right - who absolutely cannot get enough news. For a regular subscription fee we will actually take you to where the news is happening. We will pilot you over war-torn battlefields in our indestructible glass übernews flight-ball, we will show you around tsunami-smashed villages and we will give you direct access to domestic violence and depravity. We will even discretely usher you through the hotel rooms of rockstars and politicians as they smite their sexual wroth upon call girls. The world, in all its sickness and horror, will be before you direct. No more pouring over the pages of hour or day old newspapers, no more catching up on news blogs and discussion forums. You will be able to tell your friend you were actually there!

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Waking Up From Ikea

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:24:00 +0000

I had an Ikeamare in Ikeashwitz. My girlfriend, Ai-chan, and I were populating a new flat and on the shuttle bus I broke a basic relationship rule and started talking about an ex-girlfriend, Ariadne, who had given me the secret to mastering Ikea. The mention of the messanger put a wrinkle of irk between Ai and I, which I smoothed by emphasising the message; that only hell demands more peace of mind than Ikea.

The problem of course isn't so much megacorp greenwash, trying to escape from the maze of the minataur, forcing your way upstream against the shuffling armies of the undead, or even, in my case, that I'm writing a story about a cunicular superhero who does battle with unhappy furniture. No; its choice - aggrevated by penury: 'the tall one or the folding one? well the folding one is cheaper, but it doesn't look as nice, although, hm, not sure, perhaps the blue one? its not as comfortable, but we can get a better one later, but what if we get the wider one and put a throw over it, unless...' and on and on and on and and on.

But there was more. As we entered I saw the 'penang' armchair, and wondered how many people in how many worlds have sat possessed upon it by the insane idea that their arse is not being loved. Then I saw the one in my mum's house. Then I saw the one I had in my flat in Madrid. Then, as we wondered round and round, I began to realise, with a creeping cold sense of dream-dread, that Ikea was, in fact, entirely comprised of rooms from places I'd lived.

All of it. There was the futon I'd written my first awful novel, there was the sofa Bill had single-handedly carried up eight flights of stairs, there was the bed that Isabel had freaked out in when we'd made love... and there was Isabel.

Isabel herself was lying on a 'Malm' bed in the same bewildered state I remembered from the night I'd brought her back to my place and created a weird psychic sense of sexual distortion between us. My current girlfriend in Japan was trying to work out whether she preferred the beige or the cream Billy, while a girl I'd slept with ten years ago in Spain was here in Osaka, half naked in a showroom bed.

'Isabel? What are you doing here?' I approached her, but she paid no attention to me.

'Darren! I've just seen you.'

I turned; Ai-chan was flustered and gesturing.

'Over there,' she said, 'a younger you - you were arguing with a girl. And, yi! there you are again!'

I turned. The me of Madrid was sheepishly approaching Isabel upon the bed of disaster.

'And again! And again!'

Ikea wasn't just filled with all my old chairs and tables; it was also filled with all my old mes. Hundreds of me, drifting around hundreds of old domestic situations - along with crowds of old friends and ex-girlfriends at various ages, a vast shifting dreamworld of intersecting psyche-phantoms.

Ai, against her will, was fascinated. She didn't really want to know what I was like before we'd met, or how more or less beautiful / thin / blonde / etc were my previous loves, but she couldn't help herself. I tried to restrain her, but was held back by myself.

'Darren, you've got to help me.' The Madrid me was tugging at my sleeve. I turned and looked at him, remembering when I had been there, so desperate to know what to do about Isabel.

He started to explain but I hushed him with a gesture.

'What you are doing is against both of your instincts, and you know it, so raise your game and send her home or you'll both feel squalid and used for weeks.'

That shut me up. I went off to find Ai, but was waylaid by more mes, all with old love-problems. At least my younger selves had the humility to ask my advice, but it was pretty chaotic, so I got them to form a queue down in the market hall, leaving Ai with the ghosts of girlfriends past - and grateful that I'd kept so faithfully to another cardinal relationship rule - of not recycling romantic gestures. In fact, now I think of it, a large part of my 'relationship ethics' stemmed from the suspicion that something like this was bound to happen one day.

Anyway, it was heaving down in the market hall, but all my mes were getting on pretty well together and waiting patiently in line. I didn't want to get in long discussions with my old selves, so I just dealt specifically with the problems they had at the time; 'You always find her less attractive two days before she ovulates,' 'Don't try and change her bad habits - if you love her enough they'll either change by themselves or you won't care,' 'Things unsaid will speak in bed,' 'She responds to you as life does, and vice versa,' 'Write the letter, but for God's sake don't send it' - and so on.

It was all a bit silly. Reminded me of Marlybone Song, the man who knew everything, who sat at the top of the hill and people would come from miles around to ask him questions - such as 'how do I fill in my tax returns?' and 'what's a good chat up line?' and 'how do I get past level seventeen on Manic Miner?' and so forth, and in the end he just invented a search engine and sodded off back to Neptune.

But the last me had the good question, he was burning with it. His house, as they used to say, was on fire.

It was the wordless question - the impossible question - the question that only everything can answer.

He looked at me, saw that I was still asking it, shook my hand and left.

And that was the last I saw of myself.

How Things Feel

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:06:00 +0000

The stars are sad the city can't see them. The pencil trembles with anticipation as it is poised over the paper. Crumbles of mud tumble with giggles as they fall from bashed boots. The sun loves to shine on politicians. Lashes are fame for a snowflake. Lightbulbs unshaded are ashamed. Keys are tragic lovers. Curtains always part reluctantly. Unlit candles sullenly withstand. Beds are favourite uncles, pillows their patient friends. Forks writhe and sigh upon your lips. And all things, when ignored, pray to the space between them; for men do take the cups they lift for granted. So when you are held by distracted hands, follow their example, and then you'll too know, my love, that life loves you sometimes secretly.

Laughter

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:21:00 +0000

There is the laughter of relief, making the train and slipping through the doors Indy-style, farts at funerals and tiny crimes that take tension away. There is the laughter of exhilaration, throwing yourself into the rapids, and the laughter of emotion, fear, awkwardness and approval. There is the laughter of newly formed groups, binding by creating butts, the laughter of superiority over the out-group, and the laughter of letting in, showing approval to the newly joined. There is the laughter of anxiety, trying to make it all okay with a smile, the peace-keeping lie-smile or rictus grin as you listen to one “it was good / big / weird / bad / interesting / uncomfortable / tiny / beautiful" advert-anecdote after another. And there is the laughter of emotion, of sex and murder.

Personally, I prefer the laughter of recognition.

I recognise large status reversals (the boss suddenly becoming the butler, or vice versa), I recognise dead things becoming alive, I recognise human character- istics given to animals, I recognise the indestructibility and innocence of a fool, I recognise perfect appro- priateness, spontaneity, exaggeration - or hyperbole - the serious reduced to the absurd and the sacred profaned - or farce - far distant ideas linked by puns and subtle surreality, strange timing, strange sizes, strange behaviour, and great beauty. I recognise the insights of a hyper-observant comic-master, here to show me myself, at a slight angle to the universe. I recognise all these things because I am an indestructible fool in a strange world, and it makes me laugh to see this.

But what I recognise most of all, is reality, what is happening. I am not a stranger in this universe. The objective world is my friend - and do we not laugh when a friend approaches? This is why genuinely innocent children and ancient tribes spend most of their time merrily sparkling with amused delight or ringing with bright laughter. When the world is seen as it is, it is surprising, bizarre, grotesque, savage, wild, apocalyptically alive and gayly butcherous; not demented and cruel, but mad, hilariously mad... and I am with it. We are friends, the universe and I. In all joy and horror - friends. This is the laughter of the whole truth.

Reality, Level Yawp

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 21 May 2011 14:30:00 +0000

As you may know, I've been working on a computer game called "Reality" which, now that I live in Japan, I'm going to sell to Nintendo, and they're going to sell it to everyone. The level I'm working on at the moment, which is called "Yawp!" is a driving, running, hunting, swimming, cycling, platform-type affair set across a few different "zones," and, the novel thing about it is that when you lose a life - when you fall off a cliff, or get hit by a car or an asteroid or whatever - the computer - the actual computer in your actual room that is - sets fire to your house, wipes your bank account clean and transports you, naked, to a random country. Or it infects you with a rare parasite that eats your brain and lungs. Or, if you're young and beautiful it makes you physically hideous. Or the reverse. Sometimes it showers you with money, sometimes it endows you with a strange and wonderful talent, like the ability to see all-round 360 degrees, as if your whole body were an eye, and other times it blasts off a leg and beats you to death with it.

My Invention

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sun, 01 May 2011 11:13:00 +0000

A few years ago I invented a machine that enabled me to instantly and accurately express my true nature as it changed from moment to moment. Through it I could display, without doubt or delay, what was happening in my heart, in all its infinitesimal subtlety and continental variety.

But because my new invention was so faithful to my fears and desires, I refrained from using it. In displaying my feelings so truthfully it completely exposed me. I was horrified and ashamed to discover that that violent cravings, cowardly fears and much else wretched and abominable resided in me - and was being broadcast to the world. Not all the time of course, but with this extraordinary tool even a momentary flash of anxiety revealed itself to be hideous; in a way, moreover, that I couldn’t hide from or excuse. Much safer to put it away. Leave it be.

But in recent years, my life has improved. I don’t mean outwardly; nothing much has happened there. Rather I’ve realised that the insecurities, worries and wants I’d spent so many years trying to deal with just aren’t here anymore. I no longer make dreadful social gaffes, say things I later regret or miss opportunities. I don’t fear other people’s company, nor do I particularly need it. I am at home in the world, it feels, yet not attached to it.

And so I went to where I had stored my earlier work and got it out again. It seemed the time had come to put it to use - it seemed that I didn’t have anything to hide anymore. I have therefore started to use my incredible machine, to broadcast the strange and lovely sensations and intimations that pass through me, to share with the world the miraculous feelings that I am daily - hourly - host to.

I’ve also decided to give my machine a name. I call it my face.

It is...

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:32:00 +0000

Oiling my psychic parts smooth of psychic rust,
Washing my psychic surfaces clean of psychic dust,
Potlatching my psychic draws free of psychic tat.
Exercising my psychic body lean of psychic fat.

The Gentle Apocalypse Empathy Enhancement Programme

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:47:00 +0000

Can't talk to animals? Having problems responding instantly to the needs of your one month old baby? Unable to creatively respond to the subtle demands of the wilderness? Wondering what's causing your oddly repetitive emotional or physical problems? Do you experience clunk as you walk onto the improvised stage? Love death sex god talk tad tricky? Is there something plodding, pedestrian, predictable or postmodern in your creations? Are you restless, jittery or unable to still your chattering mind? Do you frequently overlook the sensuous life of pebbles and pencils? Having first-impression failure problems? Has it been a while since you fell to your knees in shattering gratitude at the beauty of this very moment? Then you need... The Gentle Apocalypse Empathy Enhancement Programme!

Yes! In just three months you'll be taken to a state of blended harmonic fusion with the present moment, able to feel out the subtlest of vibe pulses and respond instantly to them with awe-inspiring spontaneity! Wow your friends as you read their feelings - before they even know they have them! Amaze your colleagues as a startlingly apt metaphor erupts from the volcano of your heart! Complement your partner perfectly, instantly replying to the vaguest wafts of offer with boogy! Dink precognitive volleys! Opt with apt and act with tact! Make her moo! Blend ingredients with the subtlety of the hundred-nostriled! Know, for certain, without evidence!

Yes, in just three months you will become an enigmatic superhero, sweet, sincere, humble, brilliant and splendidly confident. In our ten-DVD programme we'll take you through the shame, guilt, canalised mechanical mediocrity and atomic fear that lies quivering in the depths of your soul, reveal the stories you tell yourself about yourself as the absurd conceits they really are and blast the poison out of your system through rigorous and agonising austerity until you wake up in a bright new wonderland of awakeness. We'll gently breathe the warmth of universal alrightness back into your bones, reintroducing you to the spastic joy of creative action, lovingly reconciling you to the wilderness, guiding you to the unique pleasure you once had in simply existing and opening your eyes so wide that your whole body becomes a gently humming, delicately responsive, all-seeing globe of strobing nuclear blue atomic EGG-LIGHT!

The Gentle Apocalypse Empathy Enhancement Programme: Be Everything Else.

A Walk in the Park

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:17:00 +0000

Had a nap, then went for a walk in the park. The trees were not static but erupting and flowing, expressively twisting like hands offering oranges up to lovers, like energetic russian brooms sweeping cobweb-free the ceiling sky, like spurting fountains dripping puppet branches down to the grassy stage. Everywhere sticky buds were being born as if trapped for ten winters underground, ten winters-all in unhappy love affairs, and now together pulling themselves free like fairies from cracked heads. I stood showering under a cherry blossom lampshade, in front of an orchestra of dingling daffodils trumpeting their birthday yellow to my conducting eyes.

And as I stood a tremendous power started tingling in my muscles, a fire in my solar plexus began to roar, the air around me suddenly iodised and a thunder crack erupted up my spine, blasting my hands outwards, setting my eyeballs on blue fire and whum-whumming outwards in a series of vast juddering pulses. I rose up, a few feet from the earth, and then exploded in a blinding ecstasy of light.

All my bits slowly floated back together and I came home.

I Die

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 08:16:00 +0000

Every now and then I pretend to die grotesquely from an insignificant injury - an accidental head bump, an ever-so-slightly remarkable piece of news - and my girlfriend gives me a mark out of ten. Until today, my best was an 8. She is a surprisingly tight-fisted judge - but it makes an 8 all the more valuable. I think I lost a point from the slight smirk of satisfaction as I gasped my last.

Today I rather turned the tables on her by actually dying.

A fish bone got caught in my throat and, while Peligro watched blandly on, I thrashed about wildly trying to get it out. As my brain suffocated, my consciousness separated from my body and bloomed into the fifth dimension, destroying my agonised self and expanding time and space into a flower of infinite awareness that connected everything and nothing in a multi-dimensional uber-conscious universe of exquisite, profoundly annihilating, super-abundant emptiness. I had no memory, no sensation, no self as it is usually experienced, yet felt more me than ever in a void that, if I could adequately describe it, would make you weep with the horror of genuine awe.

Just then my diaphragm convulsed, the fish bone shifted and my throat swallowed. My consciousness shot back into my body and I came round as if flung from a centrifuge; feeling simultaneously exhausted and rejuvenated.

I still only got a nine though.

Aptism

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 02:53:00 +0000

Aptism |ˈaptɪz(ə)m| (noun) The principle or view that all* religious, moral, ethic, aesthetic, political, psychological and philosophical theories, systems, ideas and principles are appropriate, beautiful or useful in context; and inappropriate, ugly or useless out of context. Obeying the context before any plan, definition, theory or authority. Use or love of the right tool for the job.

Apt |apt| (adjective) Appropriate, beautiful or useful in context. (verb) To listen to the context. To act or perceive appropriately or aptly.

Aptist |ˈaptɪst| (noun) A person who is apt or who apts. Not a label: a state.

Aptic |ˈaptɪk| (adjective) Possessing the prerequisites for an apt life; the ability to perceive the context (sensitivity) and always do as it asks (courage). While the needs of the context shift, the need for sensitivity and courage is constant.

The better a system functions on paper, the worse it functions in practice. The better able you are to explain your decisions, the worse those decisions will end up being. The closer the virtual world gets to reality, the more the real world starts to seem virtual. The more intelligent your mobile phone becomes, the less intelligent your brain becomes. The better able to you are to describe reality, the further you are from it and the more doubtful and subjective it seems.

These truisms do not ignore the equilibrium impulse inherent in excess, nor call for reality to the exclusion of description, representation and analysis. They are merely further demonstration that Aptism is the only healthy theory or anti-ideology - because, like healthy cells, aptism willingly destroys itself so that reality can be more clearly heard, and a more appropriate idea can appear.

Having said all that though, all isms and ists are pretty daft aren't they? I just use the word "Aptist" when someone who needs a definition asks me for one.

Here, by the way, is my favourite responses to this post... I think you will find philosophers are not easily fooled by such nonsense. Aptism is vacuous, because it lacks a mechanism for choosing the most apt "ism" to apply in a given context. It is morally bankrupt, because it explicitly rejects any moral compass. It is also intellectually bankrupt because it requires the suspension of critical faculties, and belief in unprovable claims.

All true! (except the belief part, which I'll have absolutely no truck with.)

*Although some ideas and theories such as Eugenics, Nazism, Juche and wotnot obviously don't fit into any context.