The Weird Studies Podcast

That was a really stimulating talk, JF and Phil and @michaelgarfield. You guys rocked it. I especially loved the dialectic at the end, between JF’s ‘ahistorical self’ and Michael’s ‘self as an evolutionary object.’ Where does the soul end and materiality begin or vice versa? I like the idea of a glass, which invites reflection, yet also suspicion (since there are always two sides to any surface). Doesn’t all glass, in some esoteric, masochistic kind of way, secretly desire to be smashed in the end? I am reminded of Dostoevsky’s (life-pivotal for me in my early 20s) Notes from the Underground, which I think brilliantly identified the poison pill within the modern project. His anti-hero writes:

"I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary..."

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive–in other words, only what is conducive to welfare–is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for … my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the “Palace of Crystal” it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a “palace of crystal” if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing. —

Which I think relates to why, in the end—re: your discussion of fairies—even godly beings want to be human again. Perhaps our intentionality is as or more important than our extensions?

Michael’s excellent concept of the Glass Age also brought to mind: JD’s Salinger’s famous fictional Glass family, which alludes to the Buddhist “mirror mind,” and the eldest (suicided) brother, Seymour Glass. Also: the composer Philip Glass, who I feel makes modernity ‘transparent’ to itself, auditorily, as well as synaesthetically in his filmic and operatic pieces. And let us not forget Corinthians: For now we see through a glass, darkly.

It’s also interesting to note that with advances modern material science and engineering, glass is becoming less brittle, and in this way is regarded as regaining qualities of the primal. Smooth, invisible, and yet shatter-proof and scratch-resistant. Thus we now have gorilla glass made by Corning, Inc. (formerly Corning Glass Works) which Michael mentioned.

In connection with McLuhan, I am interested in the idea that we have a media(ted) soul, which to me says that as we enact ourselves in virtual spaces, those space become animations—and emanations—of ourselves. Our physical bodies are a kind of media, as much as our subtle and digital bodies are. And so we receive and transmit on a spectrum of spiritual-material energies, through various prisms (which can also be prisons, see Dostoevsky^) of consciousness.

Lastly, I offer this bit below, which I would caption, How to philosophize with a hammer (redux).

Michelangelo Pistoletto. You may enjoy his manifesto.

3 Likes

Wow, thanks @madrush, you’re drawing out a lot more glass synchronicities. Signs that the concept has legs. This was a fun talk, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation with @michaelgarfield on his Future Fossils podcast some time soon.

I liked how you framed the last part of the discussion as an exploration of the dichotomy of the ahistorical self and the self as evolutionary object. Very perspicacious, because it shows how this stuff really depends on how you look at it. Michael have an ongoing, very friendly debate about the idea of free will. Basically he rejects it, and I think it’s key. I think this debate undergirded much of what was said (by me, at least) in this Weird Studies episode.

I haven’t been updating this thread weekly, but since last time we’ve released two episodes on music (here and here) and one just yesterday on the work of HP Lovecraft.

Thanks for listening!

2 Likes

Hello all

This week’s episode of Weird Studies may be of particular interest to some folks here. It starts off as a discussion of Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and develops into a conversation about the promise and (imo serious) perils of idealist metaphysics.

3 Likes

I just listened to Stanley Kubrick podcast. Excellent. And the one on Glenn Gould, one of my favorite artists of all time, was thrilling. I want to go back over the other podcasts on Ligeti for you get into deeper territory. As I was an usher in a cinema one summer, I saw Space Odyssey at least five hundred times and the music is imprinted permanently in my nervous system . No wonder I am so wierd! Music, for me, is one of the hardest topics to talk about but you guys make it come alive. You are carving out a niche for yourselves. Emanation emerges, not from the brain, but from the encounter with the alien Other. You guys make sparks fly and are quite wierd and I trust that you will take that as a compliment.

5 Likes

Thanks, @johnnydavis54. “Emanation emerges, not from the brain, but from the encounter with the alien Other.” What a spot-on formulation! 2001 five hundred times? That’s nuts. I’m imagining you as a kid, strapped to a chair with those instruments holding your eyes open and being forced to watch 2001 over and over again. Beats what Alex was forced to viddy.

3 Likes

J. F., at the risk of sounding over the top, I report a dream I had New Year’s Day, before I heard your podcast with Stuart Davis.

Dreamed about numbers. I look at a chart with squares and triangles in combinations. I think simple arithmetic. 1+1=2. I then write the number 2 in the square. I multiply 2 x 2 . And write 4 in another square. I am in a large community of people working with numbers. It feels like a gigantic stock exchange. I notice a bit of scrap paper that float down from an upper floor. A young black man picks up the scrap paper and calls out a series of numbers. The last digit he calls out is 3. I recognize this as pattern, and that we are embedded in a vast network of computational systems. I am engaged to help coordinate these systems. I am discussing a project with another man and intensely aware of our internal process as we communicate, it is sort of telepathic. But I no longer can remember the entire number except the last digit is 3.

I report this dream because of your interview with Stuart and the obvious serendity. As I dont like math, I find it exceedingly odd, that I get so many dreams that generate formulas I cant understand in my waking life.

At any rate, after listening to your podcast, I felt relieved of a terrible burden, that I have been carrying around for years. The great depression that paranormal events can arouse, which each of you are familiar with, is probably produced by the cultural taboos surrounding such events, inhibiting our responses. Not being able to share with a community of the competent creates a sense of havoc in sensitive nervous systems. A lack of expression can freeze these potential insights and they become morbid symptoms. I wonder if we can start to speak out, find the patterns that connect? I sense that we are each of us engaged in this vast social dreaming project.

Your podcasts are becoming a community service. I am encouraged that you guys are taking us to a new level. My only gripe is that you took the conversation with Stuart behind closed doors, to protect your privacy. I hope you kept recording what was conveyed in private and will follow up in future podcasts. I hope we can vibrate with these scattered reports and start to turn them into something that has a size and a shape we can work with. How do we extract something that is at human scale? I agree that attempting to convey through art is probably the best we can do.This morning, I am feeling the healing.

I am looking forward to Timaeus. I’m also studying Plato. I recall the great Atlantis. It is, of course, highly ironic, that in my current life I live in Manhattan, very close to Wall Street, in the belly of the beast, feeling that we are soon going to be floating under water.

1 Like

7 posts were split to a new topic: Moderation Modulation

Where does this belong? So I’m sitting on the balcony and a bald eagle soars above, over my apartment complex, then on my iTunes playlist John Denver’s song comes on. John Denver The Eagle and The Hawk - YouTube
And then Mr. Denver died in a plane crash, the plane of which he was the pilot.
I could go on and on but I won’t

1 Like

Heinz Pagels wrote in the Cosmic Code about a dream he had.

‘‘Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. What I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed.’’ He continued: ''It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars."

He died in an accident while mountain climbing. He was married to the famous , Elaine Pagels, one of the great authorities on Gnosticism.

The dream I shared felt like a synchronicity as the number 3 is discussed quite a bit in the podcast. Synchronicity, rather than a mere coincidence, because the dream happened a day before I heard the podcast. There is an acausal connecting principle at work, perhaps?

1 Like

Elaine Pagels has a new book out about her experience re: her son’s and then her husband’s death. It is excellent and very very moving. I related strongly partly because I lost my partner and her experience was, of all the memoir’s on losing a spouse, the one most similar to my own. The night before my partner died, I dreamed that his room was entirely empty, no furniture, bare walls, echoing… I did then and do now feel it was a dream preparing me for the incredible shock of his death. Likewise with Heinz Pagels’ dream. And so many many variations on those times when invisible worlds/realities do seem to enter into “ordinary” lives and gives us gifts.

2 Likes

I have had those kinds of weird experiences, too, and though traumatic, I also recognize that the boundaries between future and past, inside and outside is permeable. I can’t wait to read this new book by Pagels. I admire her a great deal. I am glad the weird podcasts bring forward these anomalous experiences. As we are moving rapidly into uncharted territories it may be that we are entering a liminal zone on a grand scale.

1 Like

Hey @jfmartel ~ if you’re still tuning into this thread, I’ve been meaning to send my appreciation for the episodes you and @phord did with Stuart Davis and Jeffrey Kripal, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I really like the way you guys are framing these tricky, and often fraught, discursive waters. It seems there may even be something of a non-ordinary experiences ‘#metoo’ movement on the rise, as more people find receptive venues for sharing their suppressed stories.

I don’t personally have any very weird paranormal experiences to report, but I tend to regard the very fact of my existence as exceedingly non-normal. Moreover, I have enough to deal with in my daily life without adding in these components. However, I believe in an open ontology of multiple worlds, dimensions, forms of experience, and radically diverse intelligences—all of which are subtly, causally, and physically (in the quantum) interconnected within the whole of manifestation (birthing from the unmanifest, mystery, or void) which historically we call “Cosmos”—and when I am writing poetry at my best (at least a certain kind of poetry), these are the realities I tap into.

Something like that also defines my general notion of the limits of experience; so I am really enthused by hearing your recent talks, which bring so much sensitivity, as well as an aesthetic sensibility (which for me, as well, is primary) to the topic of the “exo,” or what is outside our current conceptions of the real.

Anyway, I wanted to reconnect because I just heard a podcast, featuring someone I’ve known and respected from the Integral Meta-Theory world for a long time, who has recently popped out of the closet as a TOTALLY WEIRD FUCKING DUDE. Just kidding: He is an incredible scholar who is bringing the full force of his prodigious intellect, with great sympathy, to bear on the topic of alien contact:

The Prince of Metatheory, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, has been an alternate-realities geek all along! I love it—and I just want to suggest him as a guest for your show.

3 Likes

Thanks for this. Sent the talk to my grown son who reads everything he can on this topic!
Asked him for feedback on it. He’s not really had any experience with Integral Theory, but he’s kind of a natural in that direction, so we’ll see what he has to say.

2 Likes

I’ve never had anything like a classical UFO experience, but I did spend more than ten years writing a novel centered around a multiple otherworld being experience via Dreams. Interestingly the otherworldly being “herself” appeared to me in a dream. I’d work on the novel, run out of steam, so to speak, then eventually have another dream that gave me fresh ideas. It also helped me enormously through my Season in Hell when my partner died, I was evicted AND diagnosed with a life-threatening illness all withing a short period. Working on that book and also writing poems for my partner, keep me sane. Or at least, partially sane!
I just lilstened to the talk on Salzman’s show and agree with Jeff that: I am agnostic but open on the topic.
My son and I have some long interesting talks around all this. One thing I like to say is that we have many “alien intelligences” right here on Planet Earth and, in my view, don’t pay enough attention to THAT reality. I also am a big critic of the Colonies on Mars frenzy. Etc. So maybe the aliens don’t want to talk to me, anyway…or …at least, maybe only in my dreams?? :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Hey @madrush – Yes, still tuning in! Glad you enjoyed the eps with Stuart and Jeff Kripal, which were super fun to record. We’re going to do another one with Kripal soon, after the publication of his excellent new book, The Flip.

Yeah, it does seem like talking about anomalous events is more acceptable now than it may once have been. If nothing else, openly discussing the more spectacular instances of the paranormal some of us have been (un)lucky enough to experience might make us realize exactly what you are expressing here, namely that things like poetry, art, and love also belong to the order of the paranormal – they do not conform to any purely mechanistic conception of reality. There are philosophical reasons for this, I believe. The world is a lot more enchanted than some would have us believe!

I look forward to listening to Sean Esbjorn-Hargens talk about aliens! Will report back afterwards. Thanks for the link!

3 Likes

Hi J.F. - I’m afraid I’ve gotten behind on listening to the Weird Studies episodes. I have every intention of catching up, and will have some comments when I do, just to let you know that I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, or dropped you guys off it either! Soon, I promise!

1 Like

Ahh, I remember loving this poem the first time I read it <3 It is wonderful to reencounter it again and in this context! I just signed up for this forum and I can already tell I am going to enjoy it immensely :slight_smile:

2 Likes

@jfmartel I just listened to a few of the Weird Studies podcast episodes, and wanted to thank you personally for bringing Sun Ra to my attention and also Mountains Walking. I also re-watched Silence of the Lambs (I hadn’t seen that film for well over a decade) and it was a great pleasure watching it with your interpretation in the background of my head. Also, wonderful theme music! Reminds me of the theme of Stranger Things with that eighties electronic vibe. One of the few CD sets that my dad owned back in the 90s which I remember listening to in the car a lot because he never swapped out his CDs were these electronic ballads which always made me feel like a UFO was about to land or hover above our car, and both themes remind me of that CD set. No idea where it is now.

2 Likes

Hello Jud…if I may call you by this name.

Yes…

Come on in and sit for a spell. Welcome!

We are a friendly bunch
and a bit obscure at times.

I would say we are currently in a sort of hibernation mode, letting the busy year seep in… maybe more of a composting. But don’t let me speak for the others; that may just be me! Glad to have you around. Hope you continue to find some gems hidden in this forum and reach out if you ever need anything.

2 Likes

Thank you Douglas for your kind welcome. Hope we’ll see some other activity in a bit.

1 Like