Jack Teufel here. Hello!
I am coming out. I am saying hello, earth. I am sitting in a
coffee shop in the bitterly cold upper midwest transmitting a message on a
funny machine called a “laptop.”
I received a message encouraging me to do that. I made a decision
to take the messages I receive literally, as if I can. That is a way to say,
there is always distortion. The signal is always interlaced with noise, it is
never pure. What is sent is not always what I receive, what I receive is not
always what was sent. Bob and Alice, not even, and no man in the middle to hold
the loose ends.
To say it that way immediately raises a question. Can what
is receieved – if it is meaningful, if it is in “words” as you and now I, so,
we, say here, if it in some sort of symbolic representation, if it IS received, can it ever not be sent,
sent, that is, by some node in the network? Can it not be an emanation from a
brain if it is intelligible and meaningful? Is a message without a point of
reference pointing toward a possible or somewhat real or an illusory source,
even possible? Can it exist? I think not. If a sign or symbol, a meaningful
intention, is transmitted, and if received, it must be transmitted, yes? And if it is transmitted, it must come from
a possible, or a real, or an illusory, source, a point in a universe or a
universe itself. If illusory, it becomes possible in the instant of reception
which immediately creates transmission as a necessary event. If possible, it
immediately becomes real as a necessary event. And if it is real, nothing more
need be said. In its end is its beginning.
So even if what I believe I receive, or do receive, in the
lobes of my tiny brain, recreated in the image of the kinds of brains that have
evolved on earth to this point, hence the word “tiny,” immediately evoking a
point of comparison with a bigger brain, the brain I deeply miss and for which
I grieve from time to time in my loft at the Berrigan Warehouse … the word
“image” requires a momentary digression, too. When you copy the entire contents
of a hard drive like the one in this laptop or another of your primitive
computers, you call it an “image.” The image is of necessity a data set
arranged in a way that the human brain believes is coherent, But it must have a
context, a matrix, a frame above all, a means by which the physical
manifestation of data is stored and when required transmitted. Think about
that, if you can. You who are forever human, I mean. The “image” is treated as
a physical “object” but it is information merely, and information is energy,
hey, whoa! Jack, wait a long minute. Back up, bouncing boy. Energy becomes
information, there are physics of energy (explored by you a little) and physics
of information (explored by you a very little, even less, because you do not
like to wade into quicksand, as a species). The “image” is software in other
words, not hardware, but seems to require some kind of hardware in which to
embed in order to persist from moment to moment and, when you need it, be
available to your clicking fingers.
But that isn’t what’s so, you know. Hardware and software
are one thing, viewed from different paradigms. Both contain or are information
stored as energy, and one can be touched, that is the only difference, touched
that is by fingertips that immediately create the illusion of touching
something “out there.” The other is touched by photons and they go straight, in
a way, into the brain. They are mediated of course but the brain fuzzes that
out. A brain believes in light, however large the brain, it seems,
Eeep! Forgive me, please. Most of you are bored and left
long ago. Only a few will stay and may not even finish this page. I had no
intention of digressing into such topics when all I want to do is convey to you
in a “blog” – a bog, I think - what I have been instructed or encouraged or
invited to convey by the origin or source of the message I discerned or heard
through static in the coffee shop or thought I did. But perhaps – since nothing
from an intelligent being, even one as recently evolved as a human, is lacking
intentionality, if it exists, it persists, and if it persists, it is intended
to be and become, moment to moment – perhaps I did intend to enter into a
dialog with your species in this offhand way. Your egg foo Jung said detours are
the shortest route to a goal or intention, and he – we believe – was one of
your Smart People. But even people who are very ignorant can stumble into
saying something smart, the difference being, they don’t know it when they do
and do not recognize it as smart, so to them smart and dumb are alike in the
gray space between their rapidly blinking eyes. They live in Plato’s cave,
watching shadows with childlike delight. Squealing like two-year-olds.
But back to the message. The message said, Jack, begin a blog.
That will give you something to do. While you wait. Humans need things to do
while they wait.
Your name is Jack Teufel (we decided, remember) so call it
Teufel Talk. In the beginning one person will read it, perhaps two, including
that paraquat. The readership of most blogs is one, the human who wrote it,
unaware that the billions of words turning into electric glyphs like litter and
duff in the river of what you still call time, despite knowing better, most of
those slivers or pine needles or things flow in the river and the river flows
into the sea, and still, the sea is not complete.
That’s another way you go wrong. You think it is already
whole. But the sea is not complete and never will be complete. Because the larger it becomes, the more it
creates axiomatically its own abscess or depression in the matrix of space-time
which enables it to be, which holds it, it holds itself like a mother embracing
not her child but her chilly upper body with her own arms, and so the sea is
literally without end as is it the means by which it is contained, the frame,
the ground of its own being. Try that
one in your little brain. So your cosmologies are fun, but do not make the
mistake of thinking that what some believe makes it the truth or as much truth
as words and glyphs can approximate in their silly way of framing.
All right, I am being urged or encouraged to say this next,
so I will – can you hear it, too? Can you feel it, when you become very still,
and just listen? - I will tell you something. I am doing this for exercise. I
am exercising the brain I have to use in this intersection of here and now, in
this dimple of space-time in the void. I am trying out saying things in the
form of ideas which have been stepped down like an electric current to a level
that can be transmitted – to you, my fellow creatures in this and other
galaxies. The best way to say that is a little teeny story I delight in,
“Species, Lost in Apple-eating Time.” That story says it like it is, as much as
a story can, and it says why stories are impossible to write. As are blogs, of
this particular sort, the content of which is implicitly limited to what this
language can say, with its categories and distinctions, with what it creates
and discovers as it is used. I am transmitting, I was saying, to you and your
apparatus, laptop or laptop-like thing, your sensory receptors which are merely
parts of brains of course, extensions of same, reaching out and linking up or
touching detecting traversing and altering in the process whatever the physics
and chemistry of the universe, the multiverse I mean, constraining
possibilities, has allowed to evolve in your corner of the galaxy.
Evolution of course is a moving target too. No two humans
have the same genes, not exactly. Speciation is playful, and species are
arbitrary in any case, now that you are learning to manipulate and spawn new
creatures, categories, new taxonomic possibilities. So to think in those
categories, as if they are firm and fixed, is another way you deceive
yourselves.
I don’t mean to demean your species, please understand. Such
self-deception is the rule, the norm, not the exception. In fact, we have never
found a single exception yet. We hesitate to close the loops and say we never
will, but so far, that is where the evidence points. Because the matrix of
symbol and sign is never able to point to itself and to all of itself and only
to itself, because then it would be outside itself. And so on and so forth.
The multiverse or universe, a recursive machine, fucking with
us all.
(I got that from “Bad Santa.” That, “you fucking with me,
kid?”)
Sorry. Heidi suggested I not use words like that which
distract.
Self-deception, I was saying, is knowing that all creatures
in the multiverse share the same perverse destiny i.e. we all live in the cloud
of unknowing, and that gives us an impetus to consider you as sisters and
brothers (using your two-fold category, which is absurd, given how many sexual
adventurers you have, all that mixing and matching) – we greet you as distant
late relations, spawn of the multiverse, like us. That fact, we share. We are
all just one big litter in which you alas are the runt.
So be playful, puppies. You have nothing to lose but your
arrogance, you know. Thinking you are the top of the ladder of life, the apple
of some god’s eye (forgive me while I laugh for a good long time, the way you
do religions), the apex of the food chain instead of a morsel on which to snack
before dinner. Let go of those comforting delusions, you silly little cuties.
Admit you don’t know, and are small, so small, as if the multiverse is looking
at you through the wrong end of a telescope, knowing you are in pre-school as
it were and have not even gone around the block. Read that little story, see
what I mean. If that doesn’t do it, well – go to a football game. Get drunk.
You know, do what humans do, to distract themselves from the inevitability of
diminishment and death.
I am pausing and standing back and I see I wrote nothing of
what I thought I wanted to say, when I began. But I wrote plenty, so had better
stop.
Hello out there! I am Jack Teufel, I come from far away, so
far you can not even dream how far, and I am taking a leap by telling you
truths as I can, as I adapt to your planet and the way your brains frame things
and your skin-wrapped species and the way you think you think. I accept my
destiny, spewing truths, because what else might creature to do? Lie all the
time?
Sorry. I forgot. So many of you do lie, first to yourselves,
then to the rest. Entire industries, or what you call agencies, or jokingly
call “media,” machines of distortion, all, as I have to think my little brain
is, now.
What a world. But I am not melting. I am robust, and vital,
and alive, and I am here for now, so …
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