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Among the Architects of Illusion

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I have walked among their ruins, among the gilded marble balconies and cardboard stages, and I have tried to decipher the truth stitched inside their playbills. The wealthy madmen. The myth-makers. The ones who—by grace or megalomania—attempted to construct alternate realities not merely as art, but as interventions into the Platonic cave of our shared hallucination. I have studied their productions, their false fronted temples and trapdoors. I have heard the echo of their whispers in the sanctum of a thousand ages. Sometimes I imagine them as a secret brotherhood, though they never meet. Each builds his world alone. There was Conchis, of course—the most ancient, or the most recent, depending on your angle. The god-actor of Phraxos, who showed Nicholas Urfe that meaning is a costume worn by appearance . Conchis was a doctor. A magician. A fraud. A truth-teller. He revealed, through his shifting theater, that the price of freedom is the willingness to be manipulated and then to forgi...
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Becoming, the Internet and the Shadow of the Singularity

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 I have always believed, or rather suspected, that time does not pass, but circles. That we do not move through it, but are moved by it—as if by a sentence we do not understand, but must recite. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, that solemn architect of spirals, posited a universe not made of things, but of transitions. He called this process Becoming: the ghost that haunts all substance, the verb that animates all nouns. It is no coincidence, I think, that this metaphysical murmur has found its latest incarnation not in theology or poetry, but in the Internet. Let us begin with contradiction, Hegel’s chosen tool. For him, all things are born in opposition—each idea contains its own negation, and through their conflict a new synthesis emerges, which in turn conceives its contrary, and so on, ad infinitum. The self, in his view, is not a monolith but a battlefield. A process. Now consider the modern man—or woman—on Facebook. The "profile" we are offered is a fiction, one we autho...
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The Infinite Mirror of Dracula

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  The Infinite Mirror of Dracula: A Fairy Tale in the Form of a Myth (After viewing Nosferatu 1922) It is an old and slippery superstition that myths belong to the ancient past, preserved in ossified form by scholars and storytellers, like insects trapped in amber. This, as Claude Lévi-Strauss once reminded us, is an error of both history and imagination. A myth is not a fossil; it is a living pattern, forever reproducing itself in new configurations. “A myth,” he wrote, “involves all instances of itself.” In this sense, even a parody, even an episode of The Simpsons or a Mel Brooks comedy, if it touches upon the shape of the myth, becomes part of the myth. Its substance is not diminished by laughter or exaggeration. It grows. Let us consider Dracula, the vampiric prince of darkness, not as a character from a specific novel or film, but as one of those mysterious and mutable structures that inhabit the dreaming mind of humanity — a fairy tale, a myth, a meme, an idea. In the labyri...
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The Labyrinth of Freedom

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 It is said that in the early 5th century, a minor theologian of Alexandria composed a treatise, now lost, titled On the Freedom of the Deceived. In it, he proposed a troubling paradox: that a man who freely chooses an illusion is no less imprisoned than a man who is forced to accept a truth. The heresy of this idea was not its logic but its implication—that beneath the mirror of human choice lies an abyss of manipulation, so subtle and intricate it may be indistinguishable from volition. I think often of this Alexandrian and his forgotten scroll when considering the apparent conflict between "free will" and what moderns call "propaganda." The notion that a man chooses freely presumes that his desires, values, and perceptions are his own. Yet what if the very structure of his desires has been fashioned by another—by a con man, a cult leader, or a state with vast machinery of persuasion? Does the hand that turns the key know it forged the lock? Let us consider th...
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On Randomness

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  The other day, I was reading a small book about "Randomness" and it mentioned the history of lotteries and how they became popular in Europe through the Middle Ages. The word "lottery" refers to the distribution of "lots"; in other words, land parcels, and chance was used to determine "which lot you get." The book also mentioned how CHANCE / RANDOMNESS was seen as a way of "consulting the gods." In other words, a form of magical divination. By coincidence, that same day, I came across Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon" when I wasn’t specifically looking for it. In the story, there are constant drawings on a central mysterious lottery which determine where each person will end up within the vast network of possibilities that exist within the city of Babylon. At any moment, any one person can go from regular worker to rich king, to pauper, to exiled outsider, all in a matter of a moment. I thought to myself:  if my friend en...
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The First (and Last) Jedi

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Who is Luke in The Last Jedi? What has he become? Why is he so troubled and angry? Why has he exiled himself away from the mainstream of the galaxy where the battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness still rages? Can he be the last hope for a dying rebellion? Or is he a battered prophet who holds only bitterness and rage in his heart? From the very first Star Wars movie (”Star Wars - A New Hope”) Luke has been a stand-in for George Lucas. (Lucas = Luke)  We first meet him as a young clueless boy living on a farm (the small town of Modesto, California) He dreams of interacting with the world and making his mark on a vast universe that seems so distant and unreachable to him from the vantage point of his isolated desert farm. His yearning for race car driving and his memories of racing at fairgrounds near Modesto are reflected in Luke’s ability with (and love for) his Landspeeder. “the dusty Central Valley flatlands provided the model for Luke'...
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