“These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids – the Abraham Lincoln one in that book – and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man."
—Philip K. Dick, “Man, Androids and Machine” (1975)
Ye thirst slaking evening skies, ye hilly dews and mists, distill your moisture here!
The bolt hath passed; why comes not the following shower? —Make her to weep!
—Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The ambiguities
here is a patchwork of referents in a feeble attempt to connect to your collective threads:
///mystic ocean///
“It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’ This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems. . .One may, he thinks rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.(19) {Freud}
The oceanic feeling is an emotionally aesthetic event one may rightfully call sublime—so subjective and arcane that it is beyond which words can define. What distinguishes the oceanic feeling from belief is the felt nature of the lived experience: the oceanic feeling is “unbounded” while belief is bound—bound to set ideation belonging to doctrine. Here we may further highlight the ontology of religiosity as feeling phenomenologically realized as unbounded experience."
The Ontology of Religiosity:
The Oceanic Feeling and the Value of the Lived Experience by JON MILLS, Psy. D., Ph. D.
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/mills_jon.htm
///bots///
I’ve been listening to a lot of music by Robyn lately and she has a lot of robot-esque tune-age such as: robotboy and fembot.
fembot:
///schizoid///
Reminds me of Deleuze….
example:
“Deleuze and Guattari argue that schizophrenia is a product of capitalism because capital itself is schizophrenic; it can move into any identity, but tends to resist identification altogether. Just as capital fragments labor into specialized units, the schizophrenic process is of decomposition and segmentation: molar unities are continually broken into segmentary parts. I argue that Gravity’s Rainbow follows capital into this schizophrenic process, and that the self-awareness with which it does so enables it to form a political critique that is schizoid, not revolutionary or utopian. The novel breaks down the structures that control our lives or, even the idea that there is such a control. The novel uses a unique regime of signification to constantly enact this schizophrenic process, and in so doing, opens a space to escape from the seemingly inescapable They-systems, when simple resistance or revolution would only reinforce those systems.”
Paranoid Organs, Schizoid Regimes: Captialism and Pynchon by Jed Bickman
http://www.jedicist.org/Thesis1.html
/////art art art art art art///
“Like the Surrealist avant-garde, Deleuze and Guttari are fascinated by the notion of transgression, the breaking of limits, the undoing of rules. Smashing through the boundaries of ordinary life, schizoid desire is pure production: desire turning in upon itself to further the production of desire.” (pg. 159)
Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction {Second Edition} by Anthony Elliot
oh and boogie.
Am I cursed? What did you say?
huh?
one’s man white whale is another man’s box of sausages. have you ever seen ‘the kids in the hall’ tv show?
@brady and the space nazis – who was your post directed toward?
Yes. So, to recap:
Blade Runner/Moby Dick—Philip K. Dick—Pierre—Pola X—box of sausages
hahah. i also thought of the ‘kids in the hall’ skit after watching the pola x… the whole mysterious industrial warehouse thing.
“Well, I (cough) gotta go now; I’m due back on the planet Earth.” – Woody Allen.
We already have an absmurdity thread. But I like chicken, too.
(Actually, I like the quote on the Pynchon thesis above because it’s absolutely true. Pynchon both understands and describes post-modern global influence and the fact that it’s simultaneously controlled and completely out of control of many forces).
Not that that really helps Blade Runner’s other approach to post-modernism, the deconstruction of what separates organic, inorganic, maker and creation. Don’t see how that makes Roy Moby Dick, though. Interesting thought but I’d like more examples.
“KAWAIIHIPSTERCLASSICLITERATIPOSTMODERNISTCINEASTEZEITGEISTWAVESURFINGBLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER”
OBVIOUSLY it’s CHINATOWNFILMNOIRSPACEOPERACLASSICLITERATIPOSTMODERNFUTURISTSIMMERINGBLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER, haven’t you been paying attention?
—PolarisDiB
POLA X = Pierre ou les Ambiguities — 10th Draft
^ Yeah.
:::::::::::::::
OMNISCIENT SYNTH-SAXES
ROUGE AND GLITTER,STRIPPERS AND COCA-COLA,BLACK POLYESTER AND SPIKE BOOTS, TEQUILA LIGHT THROUGH THE VENETIAN BLINDS, ARTIFICIAL SNAKES AND FAKE OWLS*
Maybe Melville never told us that Moby Dick was pregnant with a black universe and
he kept it secret and would think about it sometimes at night, shuddering.
::::::::::::::::
But srsly, it ain’t no absmurd joke! This is the only way I can talk about these things. What might be nonsense seeps in like guitar feedback, because there is a lot of things I don’t know how to communicate.
Roy as a white whale of oblivion makes sense to me in a sort of dream-logic way, but this is all probably more about vast emotions or the “mystic ocean” of experience than about clear reasoning.
And then there’s this whole thing about lived experience (ending up as memories) and replicant implant memories of unlived experience. Could we talk about movies kinda being replicant implants? So many times I leave a theater and vaguely feel like I am still living as the protagonist.
I don’t know, I get so floored watching certain movies…
:::::::::::::::::
Gymnastic psycho-girl: “We’re stupid and we’ll die.”
And later, Roy’s half-formed taunt, “You can’t play and if you don’t play…” (coughs and stops)
*(THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM)?
Go with it Judy. I often think art is best described as a sort of Folie à deux. A derangement of the universe shared by two, the artist and the viewer, literally. Catharsis is the effect of the work on the work outside it. Most works leave little effect or simply reaffirm what is already felt or known, better works create a temporary reordering of the way we understand things, but great art can create a permanent “psychosis” which gives us a new lens through which to view the world. While we may write or talk about artworks in a distant, organized and coolly rational manner, it won’t capture the full effect of the work so replying to art with a more impressionistic take can give insight not gained otherwise.
I hadn’t thought of Melville having a connection to Bladerunner before, but once you brought it up it made “sense” to me, so shine on you crazy diamond, I’m all for it!
Melville understood Shakespeare in a not-too-dissimilar way, Judy . . . and Carax Melville.
Philip K. Dick <———> Moby Dick . . . makes sense to me.
-guitar feedback . . . dream-logic . . . mystic ocean-
Folie a Deux… I definitely like that, Greg.
If VALIS: MOBY DICK
then
The myth of fixed identity: The White Whale
Moby Dick certainly has something to say about the myth of monolythic national identity, yeah.
JUDY∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
KAWAIIHIPSTERCLASSICLITERATIPOSTMODERNISTCINEASTEZEITGEISTWAVESURFINGBLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER BLADE RUNNER
TINY LIGHTS DEMON SKIES TEE-VEE EYES
“… lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it”
—Herman Melville, MOBY DICK
–––This is Deckard searching the steaming Oriental futurescape for the unfathomable white-haired antagonist and enigmatic prophet Roy–––––white whale of oblivion!:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time…
… like tears, in the rain…”
There are things that can only be learned in solitude, in a room suffused with the blue glow of the television–––though thee pale German prince of mysterious wisdoms has sung of an abyss that stares back and it is possible to fall into an isolated state of paralyzing, imploding self-consciousness where you sort of stop feeling real. The white whale of absolute zero. He’ll eat your skull up (pip-pip-pip-pip-pip).
Unicorn-vision, come pierce my soul.