The Gospel of Saint Marxx (Censored?)

 “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” 

Niels Bohr, founder of modern physics and co-author of the atomic bomb

Bridge: Particle & Wave, Spottless Marxx, 2012

Greetings chosen one! 

Regardless of politics or religion the vast majority of humanity continue to believe in and experience a realty that was shattered over 100 years ago. Specifically science proved that physical matter, as most of us continue to believe and experience it, is nothing more than an illusion of sorts… but it's a very compelling illusion that’s almost impossible for us to let go of because the underlying phenomena are very, very predictable, reliable and, most of all, comforting to naked apes. Who among us could tolerate a sun that doesn’t come up everyday and flickers when it does? 

Nonetheless, any High School physics teacher (who is honest with themselves) will admit that the idea that ‘matter,’ AKA ‘particles’ are like tiny cannon balls existing in a material universe governed by space, time and gravity is 19th century thinking. It is true that the materialistic, mechanical model has brought us powerful technologies like the steam engine, airplane, computer and smart phone. But that still doesn’t change the inconvenient truth that there are no “particles”. Nothing is solid, there are only wave functions and fields.

I’m here to welcome you to the present! As scary as it may seem, it’s wonderful place to be. A place where real magic is not only possible…. It’s already happening! 

Admittedly, the very language we use to talk about these things evolved in the shadow of… well, the shadow. What I mean by “shadow” is that Plato is perhaps the first person to discuss this subject in detail: what we might call the dichotomy between an ideal reality versus a material (but illusionary) reality. According to him we are prisoners in a cave that have never experienced the world outside or the real objects out there which are casting shadows into our cave. Because it’s all we know, we believe the shadows are reality. The truth, however, is that the shadows represent a very limited & superficial version of the truth… an illusion that pales in comparison to the real thing. By now the “fictional” matrix, holodeck or even our very own virtual reality should be coming to mind. I’m here to tell you that physics, biology and religion are all arriving at the same place you just did. In other-words, we are starting to see the pendulums swinging back (at the furthest edges of knowledge) away from materialism and back to idealism. It’s turning out that our universe isn’t a machine with moving parts but more like an information based hologram. The biggest barriers right now to progress under this paradigm are that it’s even harder to research and test these ideas than it is to talk about them. 

Currently the language being used are ANALOGIES, along the lines of “our reality is LIKE a virtual one generated by a god-like supercomputer.” This is not near as powerful and convincing as a METAPHOR stating that “our universe IS a machine with moving parts” that can be tested scientifically and perfectly matches everything we believe and experience. Perhaps the most powerful “evidence” to come out of this computer generated virtual analogy is the opinion piece published in Scientific American on April 1st, 2021 (lol) by Fouad Khan entitled  Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation. His “proof” is that even the most powerful computers ever made have a maximum processing speed. For us, that maximum processing speed is none other than the speed if light. 

Beyond that, the most accurate thing we can say with our current language and flimsy evidence is that our reality is made up of information (think mathematics), a set of rules for how the information can be accessed and experienced (program/code), and (more on this later) a network of consciousness (aka “players/ users”) to access and experience the information according to the rule set. Something LIKE the Internet but awake with a life and purpose all it’s own! “What is the source of the information, the rules and consciousness itself”  are the updated version of “where did the Universe come from, what existed before the Big Bang, etc.?

Beyond the problems I see with the word “simulation” (which implies that our reality is a model of something else)what these analogies lack for me is the warmth and texture of my existence… when I take the time and focus necessary to really experience it, that is. I’m terrible at math so the idea that this is all a computer program is cold, sterile and overly complicated to me. It’s too technical and lacks… well, magic. We are on the right track though but still haven’t found the metaphors, which will be necessary for us to mentally and emotionally step into and embrace our reality.

Since our limited beliefs and language admittedly keep us from understanding the true nature of our existence, I find myself going back to a time before our faulty language and limiting beliefs. A time before history. Back to (of all places) the CAVES!

Without question the mysterious cave painters exhibited a wide variety of intentions, motives, techniques and styles. The thread that unites them all (and them to you and me here and now) is a desire to both represent the cosmos and find our place in it. Their concerns span from our relationship to nature, community, the spiritual and the afterlife. All concerns that are just as relevant here and now (to you and me) as they were to them then.

Werner Herzog’s incredible must see documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) explains that "We are locked in history and they were not." Unlike us, the mysterious people of this time period were also surrounded by a rich and diverse landscape filled with WILD animals and, as theorized in the film by researcher Jean Clottes:

Paleolithic people “had probably some...two concepts which change our vision of the world.  They're the concept of fluidity and the concept of permeability.

Fluidity means that the categories that we have...man, woman, horse, I don't know, tree, et cetera...can shift.  A tree may speak.  A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around, given certain circumstances.

The concept of permeability is that there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of the spirits.  A wall can talk to us, or a wall can accept us or refuse us.  A shaman, for example, can send his or her spirit to the world of the supernatural or can receive a visit, inside him or her, of supernatural spirits.  If you put those two concepts together, you realize how different life must have been for those people from the way we live now.”

How different is that from: 

“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world… all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.”there a time when humans behaved like the inside of atoms? YES THERE WAS!The question before us now is “how do we get back there?”That question leads down two parallel paths; 1) Human Nature and 2) Paranormal / unexplained phenomena.Before going down any paths I have a simple meditation for you. Imagine a billionaire came to you and let you know he had inherited two islands that were set up as a scientific experiment by his tycoon grandfather and he wants to hire you and your family to spend the rest of your lives (all expenses paid… but sight unseen) on one of the two islands and report back how the experiment is going on that island:One hundred years ago, the inhabitants of the first island were, from a young age, taught the laws of the jungle. All life consists of winners and losers. Survival of the fittest. Status and self-worth are directly connected to how much wealth and power one can accumulate which can and should be achieved by any means necessary, including the the amassing and exploitation of limited and scarce resources and of the losers themselves. In fact, the winners demonstrated superiority and strength entitle them, by the will of both God and nature, to have more than the losers. One hundred years ago, the inhabitants of the second island were, from a young age, taught the laws of “all for one and one for all”. Life is an interdependent system where either we all win or we all lose. We should only take out as many natural resources as we sustainably replenish or life will become unbalanced. From each according to their ability and too each according to their need!Sight unseen, what island do you choose?Regardless of your answer, I’ve tried this exercise out on Twitter and the vast majority of participants believe the islands will be the same, often sighting the collapse and tyranny of socialist countries and always sighting “human nature.” As hard as it is for me to admit, this argument isn’t without merits.One of the greatest minds of the 20th Century that nobody’s ever heard of is the rhetorical theorist, poet, essayist, and novelist who gave us powerful tools to both understand and study human knowledge. Those who have heard of him most likely know him as the guy who predicted the Holocaust but nobody would listen. If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, check out his essay The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle.” You’ll be shocked and scared by how much it parallels our current moment.For our purposes here, we’re only gonna concern ourselves with his bullseye definition of “man.” Burke's definition of (hu)man states: "Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection".If I were going to write an instruction manual for this “man” I’d look no further than the now infamous The Prince written during the Renaissance by Niccolò Machiavelli on how to secure and maintain power and the much lesser known, but equally relevant, The Book of the Courtier written by Machiavelli’s neighbor, Baldassare Castiglione, on how to serve those wielding power. I’m sure you’ll have no problem predicting which island you’ll find Burke’s man on. Sadly, a great deal of human social behavior can, to this day, be distilled down to what I call “naked ape Court intrigue”. And this gets down to the central problem of the second island. If this is human nature, how can we possibly escape it?My answer is that we (including you and me) have another, rarely used, but exceptionally powerful and influential gear. This is the gear the likes of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad and our mysterious cave painting ancestors were in. A gear of magic! A gear of miracles! A gear of radical equality! A gear if love and healing and NOT fear and manipulation! A fluid, permeable existence, grounded in the present moment but reaching deep into our shared cosmic consciousness(s) that both nurture and sustains EVERYTHING! 

 Czech Please! - My fantasy pilgrimage 

As a kid, like millions of children before and after me, my sacred ritual was eating cereal while watching Saturday morning cartoons. Along with this came fantasies of making cartoons myself. As I got older I let go of this dream as I came to understand the labor intensive (and often boring and monotonous) work necessary to make animation and the outrageous cost of going to art school. In other words, I came to realize I was to practical, poor and lazy to make cartoons. 

The Adventures of Flash Gordon, 1979-1982

Fast forward to smart phones and Apps and animation is now literally at the fingertips of anybody who wants to do it. In addition, I’ve been making paper collages since I was watching Saturday morning cartoons and phone App filters, soundtracks and animation templates lend themselves to layering/ collaging across platforms. In addition the pandemic has given me the time, energy and enthusiasm to play with these new toys. I’m happy to report that at the tender age of 52, I’m now an animator with over 1600 followers on Instagram!  

My animation work is, of course, nothing like Saturday morning cartoons. They range from 15 seconds to one minute and often contain dark and surreal themes and content. My aesthetic has developed intuitively but I have learned the tradition it belongs to is experimental surreal avant-garde animation. Perhaps the most important and influential experimental surreal animator alive today is Jan Švankmajer from the Czech Republic. His signature style is grotesque stop-motion animations of objects reminiscent of the Cabinet of Curiosity’s of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II who returned the court to Prague in 1583, after it had been relocated to Vienna. His animation also draws on the regions rich tradition of puppetry and folklore. 

Sculpture from Jan Švankmajer. The Alchemical Wedding

I spend many hours now doing this art work for no money and very little attention but a quote from Švankmajer keeps me going:

“There's a lot of misunderstanding about surrealism. People still see it through the prism of certain works of art, by Dali for example; they look at it superficially in terms of aesthetics. But there is no surrealist aesthetics; it's a psychology, a view of the world, which poses new questions about freedom, eroticism, the subconscious, and which  attracts a certain sort of people-subversive types. It offers an alternative to the ideology offered by most modern societies, and it's a great adventure; it's tried to return art, which has become representational, aesthetic, commercial, to its origins of magic ritual.” 

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer 

I’m performing magic rituals! That’s what drew me to animation and made me interested in prehistoric cave painting. The High Priests and Mecca for this art form are in Prague where The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II once created a culture that seamlessly blended myth, folklore, the occult and true science (he employed over 200 alchemists and Johannes Kepler the astronomer & mathematician best known for discovering the laws of planetary motion). He also amassed the greatest collection of oddities the world has ever known including automaton‘s which were clock like moving mechanical devices intended to imitate life. The first animations? Yes! 

Prague Astonomical Clock

 

Part of what drew me to Los Angeles is that it houses the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I first heard about this unlikely and unusual place when I was living in San Francisco and received the book “Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology” by Lawrence Weschle as a birthday gift. In a way, I have already made a pilgrimage by moving to Los Angeles. 

There is much more I could say about the Czech School of animation (including an epic tale of Walt Disney studios, capitalism run amok, a black and white print of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves stolen from the Nazi’s, and a group of unknown Czech animators who shocked world at the 2nd Cannes Film Festival (really the first because the Nazi’s invaded Poland on the same day the first one was scheduled to begin). 

My ultimate pilgrimage would be to Prague to visit the Czech School of Animation and retrace the steps of animators whom with I have a mysterious connection. Hopefully this pilgrimage will occur soon so I can meet Jan Švankmajer who is now 86 years old. My wife, who has no interest in any of this, has met him. But that’s another story. 

Writing Tips from Silent Mic (aka Spottless Marxx)

I’m 52 and have had quiet a full life. A life that has included many rigorous writing lessons. My first and hardest was from my High School English teacher, Ms. Williams, who flunked me twice before finally giving me a “C-“ so I could graduate. She was the only black teacher in our almost all white public school and one of the few black people in our almost all white town. A town with deep roots in the hippie and, later, new age spiritual movement known for organic health foods, psychedelic drugs and alternative medicine and religions... but not discipline. 

Although I grew up in mostly Latino low income housing projects (another story) she really stood out in this idyllic world filled with beautiful laid back yuppies with perfect tans who were really into fitness and hugs. She was short, fat, grumpy and very disciplined when it came to writing. At the time, I despised her for it. Today I love her for it. 

Beside pummeling us with grammar, Ms. Williams also taught us the basic structure of a five paragraph academic paper: 1) Introduction, 2) Three supporting ideas / paragraphs and 3) Conclusion, with each paragraph being a microcosm of the whole, having a similar five sentence structure. 

What I remember the most, however, were her teachings on emphasis and rhythm. Things I’ve never heard from anybody else, then or now. It was important to her that we knew and understood that we weren’t tasked with faithfully re-creating the actual world we live in with words but, instead, creating a model. We learned the three universal principles of modeling behavior: 1) Deletion 2) Distortion and 3) Generalization. In other words, she taught us “the map is not the terrain.” 

The key to making a good map was being in control of these principles and making conscious decisions about what we manipulated and controlled through emphasis. According to her the most important ideas should go first. The most important sentences are the first and the last. I re-wrote my first sentence of this document when I remembered that lesson. The most important words, according to her, are the words at the end of each sentence. She would highlight the last word of every sentence we wrote and make us rewrite it if the last word was boring. The most important word of all was the very last. I also vividly remember her drilling us to vary our sentence length and use active verbs. The previous sentence said “drilled.” I just changed it to please her ghost. 

As some of you are already aware, around this same time I would have been destroyed from the inside out had I not been rescued by a band of drug dealing hoodlums on skateboards. As a moody poor kid on the outskirts of this pristine and wealthy college town, I was an insecure misfit yearning to belong. I had almost given up trying when I was adopted into the “do it yourself” ethic of punk rock and graffiti. I learned to embrace my informal education gathered bit by bit from thousands of hours of watching TV, reading comic books and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. 

Before becoming a punk, I had dreams of becoming a world class filmmaker. The more I learned about that path, however, the more I realized a poor kid like me had almost no chance of making it to the top. Living in Hollywood for the last 10 years has only reinforced this early impression. I’ve come to experience first hand that the film industry is not only dominated by white men, many have gone to expensive film schools and started off as interns with long hours and low (or no) pay. Their wealthy parents have had to subsidize their near mandatory apprenticeships / initiations. What I also figured out during my punk days was the accessibly and affordability of words and paper. I discovered zines! Since most punks couldn’t afford merchandise and magazines (we saved our meager funds for vinyl albums distributed out of the back of the vans of our music idols) we made our own “do it yourself” hand painted t-shirts and xeroxed publications. 

Although I’ve done much writing on a professional level since then, I am still to this day, more proud of my zines than any of my “professional” writing. They defined me as both a writer and a person! 

My next big lesson in writing was as a radio journalist. In short (beyond what I already learned about emphasis from Ms. Williams) journalism is all about efficiency. Although I worked in the realm of non-corporate community radio I was constantly being encouraged to produce what was described to me as a clear, natural and professional sounding news product. What that meant was hours and hours of editing interviews, removing any and all “umms”, pauses, interruptions, awkward phrasing and, most importantly, “cutting to the chase." In other words, eliminating all tangential information and making people sound concise and articulate even if they didn’t actually speak that way. It still fascinates me that nearly every person I interviewed believed that is how they actually spoke. Pro editing tips I constantly struggled with also included the unofficial requirement that no single soundbite exceed nine to fifteen seconds (much shorter today). Anything longer than that was considered indulgent and distracting. If you haven't seen the movie ROMA I highly recommend it. When I hear people criticize the extraordinary long shots in that graceful film it reminds me of the criticism I used to take in the newsroom. This process of making things “professional” was one of the reasons I got out of journalism. It was particularly painful when I was interviewing nuns who were organizing labor in the unholy maquiladora factories in Latin America that NAFTA gave birth too. These strong but peace loving women were receiving government sanctioned death threats as a reward for addressing toxic working conditions, extremely low pay and violent union busting. Meanwhile I’m being forced to censor them to make sure they sound “clear and natural” to respect my audiences short attention spans.  I'm not saying this is wrong. I appreciate journalists more than ever now that they are being demonized & attacked by elected officials, arrested by dictators and even killed. One of my favorite protest signs I've been noticing says "Then they came for the journalists and after that... we don't know what happened." Nonetheless, you've probably already guessed that I'm the wrong person for making complex realities bite sized and digestible.  

A few years after leaving radio, Blogger was created and it was all the rage but had many critics warning of the "Vanity Press.”  Back then I didn’t think too hard about what "vanity press" actually meant but certainly agreed it was tasteless... and probably something I should be doing. Years later Blogger has gone the way of AOL and MySpace but maybe it's only problem is that it was ahead of it's time? I currently spend many hours watching strangers from all around the world on my phone talk about their menstrual cycle, do their laundry, draw a picture, rant, rave, dance, feed their bird and pet their cat. And I’m not alone. A literal army of  virtual peeping toms are doing the same thing. Why? I think it’s because we crave all that vain, overindulgent, tangential and awkward information that has ended up on the cutting room floor without our knowledge or permission. We’re tired of being force fed rehearsed and hollow talking points coming from corrupt politicians and corporations. We’re not interested in “clear, natural and professional” ... we want the awkward, ugly and often boring truth!