Lawrence Kwok

deterritorialization:

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”— R. Buckminster Fuller

Michael Tomasello on Shared Intentionality

I read Harlan Ellison’s short story, ‘I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream’ last night, and I have to admit that it’s just about the scariest thing I’ve read in a very long time.  Upon falling asleep, I had a nightmare the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I was about 4.

To clarify, I don’t think it’s Ellison’s imagery that is effective as much as the fact that the imagery can’t be placed as real, symbolic or imaginary.  In that sense, the unknown always remains unknown, even to the reader.  It renders your omniscience useless, placing you no better or worse off than the characters themselves.  The imagery stands as merely a placeholder for things that are supposed to have meaning, and yet meaning is always deferred by another nightmarish image. So you the reader, ultimately survive the imagery, but at what cost? Only to have nothing left to read.  The main character has no voice and your eyes have been glued open.  A true nightmare.

All of Ghandi’s worldly possessions.  Photograph was in some book, I don’t remember where or when, or by whom.

My Portfolio, finally done.

Blade Runner Sketchbook

McLuhan probably coined the terms, ‘Speed of Light Society’.  I would say that for however many explanations the terms have, I don’t really know any.  He may have said it, but I won’t ever really grasp at what he meant. I may tend to more easily understand Flip Wilson (“What you see is what you get”). I mean, all I feel is a kind of Alzheimer’s, but not the kind of affliction one has physically, but almost the kind of mental abstractness one might feel after having died, and then say, gone back to work.

Every image I see before me, moving or still, is something I can instantly take for granted, and can equally take me for granted.  Am I supposed to know what this is? I’m supposed to know what this is.  I’m supposed to take it in and digest it.  And like Olestra, it just passes through me, on to the next destination.  I just continue to sit there, helpless.  I’m either socially unified in my praise, or unified in my disgust, but I must be unified.  Or else, why would I be sitting here subjecting myself?

So then what is this feeling if not an actual Alzheimer’s? Some kind of post-dementia? What’s the difference between a mind that cannot hold on to what it knows, and information that merely washes past it, like a babbling brook?

Perhaps when it comes down to it, maybe Flip has a point: When you watch a, ‘time lapse’, that’s precisely what you get.

Back to work.