To have a lot of knowledge is not really something to be proud of anymore in the Internet era. All information is publicly available nowadays, everyone has access to it. What’s really bragworthy is being able to resist the temptation to wish to know everything.
It’s kind of like the fact that it’s something to be proud of when you don’t know how to code. I haven’t got the faintest idea how to code. That’s something I will happily brag about. Even more bragworthy is when you’re a young man who doesn’t even work in IT. Github? Never heard of it.
Similarly, it’s something to be proud of if you have no clue what virus variant the epidemiologists are terrorizing your mom with now. Pakistani variant? Mexican variant? I honestly don’t know. People don’t seem to comprehend that they’re continually bombarded with information they should just ignore because they have no meaningful and constructive way to engage with it and that internalizing that information regardless of whether it’s true or not is not something to be proud of. When you can’t figure that out you end up like Greta Thunberg.
I wish to focus my attention more on things that are genuinely entertaining. That’s what we’re doing today. I’m just going to hand you a bunch of stuff that will hopefully entertain you. You can think of this as me throwing random noise into your brain, to force your neural network to start generating new patterns as opposed to continually reinforcing the ones it has already come up with.
But first I want to discuss one more thing: Meditation. The reason you hear about “mindfulness” everywhere, is because it genuinely works. It’s more relevant than ever before in the Internet era. You can compare it to walking your dog, where your dog is the collective of your own thoughts. You can passively drift through the forest, following your dog around. You can also decide yourself where to go. The latter is practicing mindfulness. The internet essentially is designed to get you to do the opposite of mindfulness, that is, to passively obey our impulses and our mundane desire for novelty and comfort with minimal effort of our own.
Scientific evidence shows that practicing mindfulness actively changes the structure of your brain. The complex way of saying it is that mindfulness “improves the brain’s dopaminergic tone”. When you stop bending over and spreading your cheeks for the tiniest bit of dopamine your neurons have to offer you, they will first be upset, but then they become forced to offer you more dopamine (ie, the normal dose that your grandparents would get in their daily lives). In the Internet era, I would argue that not practicing mindfulness changes your brain even more.
The other form of meditation I can recommend is emptiness meditation. I’ve explained this to a friend before, but I’m increasingly inclined to think that the closest thing we have to an antidote for Marxism is Buddhism. I might elaborate on this in a future post. The point is that Marxism is based on the idea that man’s problem is material (hence dialectal materialism), whereas the Buddha explained that it is entirely a product of how our mind relates to our external environment.
Here’s some Japanese jazz. Not very original, I know, just passing on what the algorithm fed me. Here’s how this works.
Step 1: You prepare yourself a good cup of tea.
Step 2: You smoke some old weed with your vaporizer that you got a year ago and forgot about. Old weed is sleepy weed.
Step 3: Start the video.
Step 4: Lay down on your couch under a blanket and spend the rest of the evening being a completely useless piece of shit. It’s alright to be useless sometimes, as long as it is part of a process that you have conscious control over.
Thank me later.
I want to share an old classic, by Scott Siskind of Slate Star Codex. It’s called “Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person”. It’s a philosophical story about the ontological nature of DMT trips. I guarantee you’ll like it.
Also, out of all psychedelics out there, I do think you should try DMT. Just try a small bit, the smallest dose that allows you to experience an effect. I’m not going to spam you with a dozen studies to convince you, you can do that yourself.
If you liked the above story, another short story you will like (if you haven’t read it yet) is The Egg.
Yes, there’s a pattern starting to emerge here, but I also want to share a short movie about a deliriant experience. It’s called Requiem Psyche.
Now we’re getting to the good stuff. Here’s an interview with a guy who thinks his bird can pass on messages from angels:
It’s amazing how human beings can see messages in random noise when they really want to. Almost like epidemiologists who can see the effects of their measures in the seasonal curve of a common cold virus.
We’re not done yet. I like people who are bad at getting along with other people. I discovered a Dutch movie director who never really managed to break through, despite being talented. His name is Adriaan Ditvoorst. The two main returning themes in his work are Catholicism and death. He thought of cinema as a mixture of poetry and painting. I know it’s going to be irrelevant to an English audience, but I really think his memory should be kept alive. He died of suicide in 1987 at age 47 after a period spent addicted to drugs and alcohol, miserable because his work was simply too experimental for Dutch normies to appreciate. Basically, he fits every stereotype you probably have of Dutch men (except that he had no money).
A few days ago I told you about Tim Hofman. Basically, Adriaan Ditvoorst was the anti-Hofman. I’m posting his work De Mantel Der Liefde below. At some point, he realized he was never going to be succesful as a filmmaker, so he became bitter and made this movie. It was released in 1978 and it’s basically a ridiculous comedy movie that’s composed of two hours of shitting on Dutch society:
I know two hours is a lot to ask of someone’s time, but it’s the only movie of his that’s available on the Internet, except his debut movie. He also made a movie -with funds he embezzled while making a documentary for a municipality- where Jesus is a hippie who hands out weed to people in Amsterdam, but it’s not available on the Internet unfortunately.
If we’re going to do obscure film makers, I might as well mention Roy Andersson too. He’s not really that obscure, he’s just Swedish. My favorite movie of his is Songs from the second floor. It was made in 2000 and happens to be about the 2000 recession. By now we’ve had two economic depressions (I continue to believe we’ll terraform Alpha Centauri in my lifetime though, sorry doomers), but the movie is more relevant than ever.
Essentially, all of Andersson’s movies shit on capitalism and in this movie, the elderly decide to appease the forces of Capital by throwing their own children off a cliff. Very prescient, if you consider what the whole Western world (except Sweden) did to their own children in March 2020. Just because capitalism works better than communism doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching communists shit on capitalism. Making fun of communism isn’t as amusing, it’s like making fun of the kids on the short bus.
This is all for today, I hope some of this will be as enjoyable for you as it was for me. I encourage you not to be a passive slave of your impulses. If you’re reading this, think of something you should be doing. Then turn off your phone or your computer and start doing it, with your thoughts focused on it, fully immersed in the moment itself, not letting your mind wander and be absent or distracted. If you do this, you learn to control your thoughts. This doesn’t just help you deal with distractions that waste your time, it also helps you resist negative intrusive thoughts. Practicing mindfulness is the closest the average man can get to spraying napalm over Silicon Valley.
Parts of Requiem Psyche kind of reminded me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPI2vk_9TzI
I wrote a post some time ago identifying various motifs that I consider (near-)universally symbolic.
https://mentaldescent.wordpress.com/2020/05/24/essential-symbolism-masks-domiciles-mirrors-shadows/
I had identified one of them as “domiciles,” yet in the text had acknowledged that that was probably a little bit narrower than ideal–while writing an article on Taxi Driver and noting that Bickle’s cab functions the same way, I found that “enclosure” works a bit better, but living spaces do seem to be especially poignant (“Homes make the most sense for a symbol of the mind; they are the resting place for our selves as we may interpret it most literally ((our physical bodies and entirety of being)), and our mind is the dwelling place of our selves as we interpret it more abstractly ((our consciousness, personality, stored memories and beliefs, everything that we hide from others, everything that we hide from ourselves)).”).
I don’t really think you need a film critic to tell you this (the “you live here” exchange giving it away pretty clearly), but it did strike me just how the main character’s apartment seems to function as a sort of allegory for his headspace; apparent as the initial revelation is, there is some room for extrapolation on the theme considering just how foundational it is to the narrative. The use of chiaroscuro is another concern, not only in the lighting but in Vincent’s wardrobe–this would identify him as not just the lingering guilt/preoccupation in the protagonist’s mind, but as a sort of personification of his Shadow, sort of like what I said of the Mystery Man in the article.
His “suicide,” then, could be construed as him escaping from his mental prison, finally leaving his headspace. The beginning of the film depicts him fairly healthy despite a glimpse of his corpse–pardon me continuing to shill my writing, but consider my revelation regarding Taxi Driver’s conclusion here:
https://mentaldescent.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/paradox-layering-and-irreality/
“Another approach could be found in layering the paradoxes, having not one storyline that disagrees with itself, but one with a few paradoxical “levels” of truth to it. I touched on this in my discussion of Taxi Driver, though without the same lucidity that I now have on the subject. I had suggested that the “true” ending was not that Bickle had gone on to live the happy and fulfilled life that was put forth most apparently in the ending, but that that ending was in fact symbolic of his passing on, the vision of heaven invoked by a dying brain going into warp speed and releasing chemicals as a sort of final dream. Then, as something that had come to me as I was typing, I also put forth that the symbolism could be brought further to suggest that his dying was in fact a symbol of rebirth, that it was that incarnation of himself that had “died” such that the newer, more rounded Travis Bickle might rise from the ashes. My mistake laid in figuring that only one of those reads might be “true,” or perhaps in having the mentality of “truth” in the first place.
What I would propose now is that multiple given reads can all be “true” (my prior disdain for the notion of “truth” in this case comes from how it often necessarily seems to imply being contrary to extant falsehood, and that there might only be one “truth” as opposed to one, two, or limitless “falses,” but try to apply the notion of “truth” to multiple interpretations here). In a certain read, or rather, on a certain level, everything that you see in the film did indeed happen; I no longer believe that any work of fiction is outright trying to deceive the audience, i.e. I would no longer come to the conclusion that despite appearing to get his life in order, what actually happened is that he died. There is no “actually” because while it is just as legitimate of a read to say that he did in fact die and this is his mythologized passing-on, it is only just as legitimate; just because it is more abstract and makes us feel smarter to believe does not overrule the original conclusion as it was presented. Thus, I would suggest that extending the symbol for that third and final interpretation of his death being symbolic itself is not then invalidating the second nor making it into merely a stepping stone to the “true” interpretation, it is instead layering yet another on top (even if sort of bringing it full circle in a sense). There is no “correct” or “accurate” interpretation of the story; all three potential “stories” are integral and essential to the narrative.”
Basically, on one conceivable level, he gave in and killed himself, but on another, that’s representational of his getting over the whole ordeal–after all, in that introductory segment, he does “finally” achieve the forgiveness and closure that he was after. Less of a downer ending than it might seem, I suppose.
Neat little piece of work; I might just do a short write-up on it, maybe once I have more of an idea of what the time motif is all about. I’ve been intending to address some more artsy stuff for some time now, as most of the art film I’ve covered thus far has still been fairly mainstream, and especially because as of late I’ve mostly just been trying to come up with profound commentary on arguably less artistically ambitious fare (still a fun challenge, but I like to imagine it’s not moreso what I’m about).
OH GEEZ THEY ALL POSTED
yeah uh feel free to delete all but one of those and this along with it
I would like to recommend a book, De Kloof by Jan Terlouw. I read this as a kid and the whole Covid thing just feels like the story in the book:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_kloof
Thank you for this post. I remember you did one about something that helped social defeat induced sleep disorders but I cannot find it. What did you recommend?
It’s not praiseworthy anymore to have information – what is instead praiseworthy is to have accurate information.
Centuries ago, nobility had information and normal peasants knew nothing, but at least they knew they didn’t know anything. Today, peasants have a firehose of low quality info and think themselves informed, while the modern nobility have information that is actually curated for quality.