Many who sat to play did not rise

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Mindless Thinking

I've been thinking a lot recently about the free energy hypothesis of consciousness.

This hypothesis, for those of you who don't know, says that organisms evolve to minimise energy. That means we basically want to fit in our environment - be comfortable. And if we don't fit into our environment, we'll make the minimum adjustments, either to the environment or ourselves, so that we do fit in.

All organisms then embody a set of predictions about the environment, and have sense organisms to tell them whether those predictions are correct or incorrect. If the environment differs from the prediction, the organism changes either the prediction or its behaviour until the environment and prediction match.

Those moments when the environmental information and the prediction don't match are the only moments, according to this, that consciousness actually happens, and the highest goal of every organism is to exist in an unconscious state. Consciousness - thinking - is pain.

This is why meditation helps some people become less stressed, because it's turning their thoughts away from an unpredictable world to a predictable, repetitive, sensory input - the mantra, your breathing, the word "Om" -- until they literally turn off their mind.

I've been thinking about that. And I've been thinking about what exposure to more environmental information than ever before - through social media, the news, and global communication - all algorithmically chosen to be the most unpredictable information imaginable, does to a species that has evolved specifically to be stressed out by thinking, by information, and to want to make it go away.

And I have been thinking about this week's UK council election results, and about people who've been comfortable suddenly having to think, and deciding they don't like it, and they need to make it stop by any means necessary.

I've been thinking a lot.

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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“Walk to your front door and knock” - Being John Malkovich (John Cusack, John Malkovich, Spike Jones, Charlie Kaufman, 1999)

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You're best to watch your front

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

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I THINK YOU’LL FIND I’M undercompensating ACTUALLY

I do however have a huge set of keys with a Creation Matrix (I dare not use as a) bottle-opener, what have you got there pal, I’m sure yours is good too.

MY EXACT TASTE IN EVERYTHING IS: ‘WILFULLY GAUCHE’.

So but what were we talking about, porous boundaries I’m sure, and how all music nowadays sounds like it exists within the matrix GZA created when he rapped 'I’m trapped in a deadly video game with just one man'.

THIS BUT LIKE UNTO WITH A ZEBRA AND A TIGRESS - HE LIKE NOAH OR BWANA BEAST, BUT MAKE THEM DO INTERSPECIES CONGRESS INSTEAD.

The synth is the riff machine now and has been since Pretty Hate Machine maybe, think on CHVRCHES borne of rock group Aereogramme, think of these

lickle, clues. Kim Petras samples or emulates the Nine Inch Nails ‘Closer’ drum pattern on Heart to Break - aside from the many times aforementioned Playboy Carti, you have RAGE artist Slayr (that is easily the stupidest song I have heard since 100gecs, 10/10, recommended) and NINfluenced pop mogger Slayyyter running off the name of - genuinely, still - one of the most evil sounding bands of all time. 

What’s the album art of? Hell. 

What’s the album about? Oh, also hell. How to get there, what like, etc.

This is all absolutely brilliant so far as I am concerned - worries about “does maximalism = fash? 🤔” aside - as a teen it had seemed to me that girls took an insufficient interest in Arkham Asylum and the paracosm of Warhammer 40,000 and such like - when we could simply burn together in synthetic Hades like the protagonists of Surface Detail.

Take a Lucifer, take away the life support, click, over.

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Epoch: The Esotericon by Peter J. Carroll and Matt Kaybryn (Arcanorium College/Kingsown Publishers, 2014)

Bodiless from ritual burnout, masks strung along the loom, suspended between the interstices where different spatial shades of black and indigo touch each other. (An eight-sided diamond's resistance to shape and form, seeing inward, closed off, refusing the fundamental injunction to entangle object and subject, destroy the superposition, and bring existence back into existence.) The masks become shells and rot into entropy, decaying atoms of meaning and memory collapse, open, release unseen depths of psychic radiation, strange anti-lightforms demanding to be seen, telling you their name, savouring your fear when you recognise the sounds.

Living out the sickness of his local earth-curse - the new world irreparably bespoiled through contact with the old - H.P. Lovecraft had heard them first, harsh music like a witch’s cackle cut short by a noose, and the broken oriental syllables he half-remembered from the theosophy pamphlets they handed out for free by the docks in Red Hook. (Palimpsest, bricolage and synthesis are the three fundamental tools of magic. Postmodernism emerged on day two of human consciousness.)

Half a century passed before Carroll gazed into the quantum geometry and observed the Old Ones in their native environments. His tradition of English protestant magic had long used grids and numbers as spirit traps, disinterring alien intelligences buried in mathematical space and chaining them to the greater industrial project, for at least the preceding four hundred years.

The cartographic plan described by his resultant deck is only half-successful. The chaos school’s insistence on model agnosticism never tempered the same urge to systematise and demystify which had made Carroll’s early writings so vital and his vitamin business so successful. So in their attempt to model the cosmos inch-by-mile the cards’ reach exceeds their grasp - further hobbled by Kaybryn’s fractious and ungainly digital imagery.

But the major necro-arcana shine with a sickly interior light, and remain a towering achievement: definitive and undeniable, the most lucid and horrible map of Lovecraft Country yet completed.