Random Non-sense

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...

 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...

  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...