Everyday I wake up surprised that I'm still here, still comfortable, still breathing. I don't know if I would call it enduring, seems more a de facto existence, a base line abscissa by which other points are plotted while quietly refusing implication in any specific equation. The feeling is of restlessness, listlessness, an ennui without borders more humanitarian than any doctor, not so much a malaise, more reminiscent of something from my youth, experienced during those moments of seeing through the scrim, hearing the clear cold chord of concrescient consciousness ring out through the mundane fog of daily war, like a reminder of the stark reality and flat inaccessibility of a reality more authentically real than that which has been served up before my senses. It has nothing to do with the recent election, or maybe it does, but not in the way you might think, no shock of spectacle or awe of mass idiocy - I'm always sitting clean in such observations as you know - more like a turning point, a smoke signal on the horizon, for the first time in my 'adult life' being able to observe directly the encroaching onslaught of psychological chaos emanating from a gullible public 100 years in training. Yeah, not a big reveal, just validation of the worst that was already expected. Plus I'm writing this goddamn opera, a total work of art yah, a singularizing interweaving of all those potent aspects unique to each medium within a unified vantage (hopefully without becoming utterly monocular). Trying to read about what it means, where it comes from, what it's capable of, what it amounts to - opera that is - why I have had this stupid vision that the only thing that can give purpose to my purposelessly autopoietic existence is to attempt something somehow greater than the sum of its parts. You would think that equating to zero would signify having to do so very little to equate a greater-than-null void, but alas I am consumed with concerns for every detail at every stage of every discipline, the whole universe sung by a choir of every transcendental subject whom has ever existed played back through some circuit bent Kurzweil posthuman sampler amplified through the core of the earth to quiver and shake all remaining mortals "in to" or "out of" some sort of awareness. I'll be the first to say it's too big, but fuck it, the rest of the world is too small. I need a new universe to keep my attention affixed upon and damn anyone that tries to take it away from me. It's probably because I'm reading so much - you know, that I'm suffering, or that I'm refraining from suffering, whichever it happens to be at the moment. This weekend I binge watched a mountain of documentaries by Mr. Adam Curtis - HyperNormalization, Bitter Lake, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, and Century of the Self - all stuff I've heard and known, some deeply, some not deeply enough, but to take on such a barrage of information, of televised media that reads as dense as any text... well fuck man yesterday I was quivering on the sofa for hours trying to sweat out the heat emanating from the spectacularized anthropocene. I listened to a video lecture of Žižek espousing some Hegelian comforts wrapped up in Lacanian linens and felt a little better. He doesn't make me all creamy in the pants but do find his neo-Marxist enthusiasm in calling out the terrorizing mediocrity of neoliberalism rather charming. Yeah yeah and in your last letter you reminded me that I've been wanting to read What Is Philosophy for something like 10 years so I went and read that and was smoothed over real gentle and calm, all those clean delineations of planes and forces, D's giant corpuscular retina looming large and oscillating over the minutiae of the glossy sensuous manifold, G's propensity for dispensing schematics and technical calculations of psychic physics, all folded up so neatly into the locus of my daily concerns for knowledge and language and aesthetics undulating in its own center like a gently kneaded bread dough baking inward/outwards from the exploding star held in its gut. Yeah it's guttural, and it got me all worked up, intellectual indigestion for a week, couldn't stomach any more fluids, in the best way that is. And then that book reminded me to finally read Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double which I just finished before sitting down to write this letter and holy shit now the sky is falling, my girlfriend's face is contorting into a Dubuffet, and the MD40 street lamps are turning the gray grazing Oslo world outside the window into 10,000 new shades of purple like all the things that the Buddhists described while sitting in their caves calling each other Buddhas so they could slap themselves on the wrist for believing it. Plato's allegory holds up, but its more like an ecology of prehistorically-sized cockroaches rolling around in a literal mountain of bat shit, like that hole down in Mexico yonder, turning around in a tireless Blattodean yoga predating the carbon record, sipping the nectar falling from the sky without questions and without any phantasmagoric torch and most certainly without the proper olfactoral receptors to have any lasting or meaningful memories. Right, that's another thing I've been watching, trying to zone out on these David Attenborough docs about animals and ecosystems thinking they could serve up some late night moments of Zen only to realize days later that my consciousness has become riddled with reveries of absurd birds of paradise and those bowers that cut leaves from trees and flip them over so that they're all the same color thereby accenting their psychedelic trance-induction plumage and other stupid thoughts like if one were to record their shepard tone-esque squeals and play them back through amplified underwater speakers to those artic seals that live under the ice in that Werner Herzog film about the edge of the world would the animals recognize the patterns of the other and could some kind of interspecies communication be initiated that would turn the tides of global non-human consciousness like creating a sphere of radiation that would positively influence and increase animal intelligence and offset the universal stupidity being beamed through every being with radioactive cellular technologies, or could we take the 1% of surviving coral reef and put it inside of a geodesic-type dome space ship module modeled after the molecular structure of psilocybin mushrooms thereby combining the visionary theories of Paul Stammets and Bucky Fuller with the most sensitive and endangered symbiotic animal-mineral and botanical-neural hybrid organisms on the planet and shoot those fuckers up into space in a salienated self-oxygenating bubble, and would their combined pure liminality and pseudo-corporeality be able to transmogrify through the absence of gravity and human stupidity into some new super-organism which could then break the codes of our naive quantum physics to travel beyond the scrim of our galaxy and perpetuate life? Right, so Artaud is kinda cracked but you can't really blame the guy because he suffered from a fucked up spine since birth which resulted in a life long opioid addiction and he was writing his manifesto for a theater of cruelty in May of 1933 right as Hitler came into power so it kinda makes sense that he wants to design a new theater that puts the audience in the center of a huge warehouse bunker painted all black with giant spot lamps burning hot and red like a technological sun while all the actors giggle around on the cosmococcic stage organized according to the cardinal directions of a mandala with larger-than-human-sized instruments trying to invent unheard of tones with others screaming in their ceremonial robes and all of them writhing about like some apocalyptic ritual of communcal transcendence, of language primarily, but also all the other stupid terrestrial illusions that humans manufacture to keep the cogs of war turning. His descriptions are all really quite beautiful and I think you would enjoy the 100pg read if for no other reason that to shed a different glow upon D+G's Anti-Oedipus which I guess was inspired by this cruelty, which by the way is not cruel like torture but more like existence, like Sartre's nausea or Kafka's terrors but coming on like a hallucination of the reality to come, before the war. Have you ever read anything by Blaise Cendrars? I picked up his trail from my avid consumption of all things Henry Miller, who can't speak highly enough of this guy, and shit was he right. Hmm yeah I'm always thinking a lot about Miller too, his beautiful little pocket of unashamed autobiographical scrutiny coagulating with a robust philosophical fresh air, living so unapologetically beyond all moral imposition or social consternation. Shit he was a genius, my kind of genius, mostly I think so because of his courage to say 'fuck you' to the world and go his own way without getting involved, at least in any kind of pointless martyrdom kinda way but just hiding out with friends in poverty and in love and in wine to write these books which he knew would be so important for the minds all shaken up flooding back into the cities after all the terrors went back into hiding. How he was anticipating the after, considering all that came before, while somehow managing to stay so firmly rooted in the present without quivering himself out of conviction, shit man I want to be that. The world is coming down all around us as I always knew it would and it should be making me thrilled but instead I feel the terror that everyone else is describing and I think it's because of empathy or some mythology of the virtues of altruism, and I convince myself that I don't want to throw out that baby with the bathwater while also feeling like it's holding me back from realizing a potential that I've already tasted and will always be engaged in remembering and re-embodying. If I were to die in my struggles I think my dad would think it was because I didn't try hard enough because our generation "is good at generating ideas and alternatives to how things are but horrible at acting upon them to make some change in the world" but I would say it's because the world wasn't really that good at anything except producing palm oil and petroleum and canned lard and other industrially distilled essences with infinite shelf life. Don't worry, I don't plan on dying anytime soon, not until I make some headway on this goddamn opera. I just downloaded some pirated software of sampled orchestral instruments that I can compose with. Some Viennese clarinet herder took all these tux-clad lungs into a Baroque concert hall, three microphones to each performer, and had them all play long and short notes in every key from the highest to lowest register, transcribing the whole thing onto your standard chromatic keyboard, so I can sit in my whitewashed box and tickle my noodle with one hand while modulating the harmony of the spheres with the other. I guess it's not all bad eh? Thanks for the letter, glad you are well, keep fighting the good fight.