NO. 5

Recently I had a magical epic wig out I might tell you more about later. It involved a cocophany of wild sensations (including that of being a dolphin) and mechanical re-enaction of significant events from the past. In the morning I felt like I'd turned back into a baby, did a wee on the floor then accidentally took a bus to the beach in Williamstown instead of going to work at Handsome Steve's. There I dropped my phone into the sea, saw the sun turn into ocean and sparkle dust flying off everything and was pretty sure of my mad skills in the field of wizardry. Over the next few days I acted out (in my own small way) what seemed to me to be events from the future.

Right before it happened I filled up two pink journals which I entitled Showtime Synergy and just now have read an excerpt about synergistic thinking. Would you like to read it too?

Fifth chakra thinking adds a dimension of reason that transcends, yet includes, the holism of the fourth chakra. What now emerges is synergy--a word for situations in which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. Once synergistic thinking is in gear, relationships among events or ideas are no longer proportional, nor are they additive; rather, they are seen as part of an emerging global order. Meaning no longer emerges from definition, but from interaction. Events are caused as much by a pull from the future as a push from the past. And the very act of playing the game has an unsettling way of changing the rules.

Like a rocket boost into high orbit. fifth-chakra thinking enables a person to mentally soar above any system of which he is a part. Once there, he contemplates the whole from a vantage point inaccessible to any component of the system. This allows him to devise ways to manipulate that system once he is back inside of it. From this panoramic view of reality, there is truth-seeing at a single glance. He places each idea alongside numerous others, envisioning how its truth or falsity influences the truth or falsity of the others. This whole-systems view broadens even the wide-angle perspective of the fourth chakra. It enables him to encompass a network of ideas and coordinate their relationships to achieve a specific purpose. He no longer interprets events in terms of his personal feelings about them, but in terms of where they fit into the grand scheme.

From Chapter 13 : Madness and Creative Genius

-- Healing the Split by John Nelson

To say sorry to Steve for not coming to work I gave him Tape Man Goes to Outer Space on CD, an original piece of The Manifestival and an R.D Laing book about how no-one is REALLY crazy are they? with a drawing about the special day I had inside the cover.

He was cool and decided not to fire me.

WEE-OO-WEE-OO-WE

Hi everyone. Today I'm starting a new life again. Being a Leo (cat sign) I find it difficult to stop starting new lives all the time. Also a tell-tale trait of practising party artists. This time I will be perched upon a hill overlooking one of my favourite bodies of water (the sea) with some of my favourite humans, all of whom have been aforementioned at this P * A * R * T * Y. So I'm majorly psyched.

To celebrate I will channel another of my favourite humans, Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) directly from his book Wampeters, Fomas & Granfalloons, a collection of essays and speeches and interviews and whatnot. This is about what writers, and artists in general, are doing here. From an interview in Playboy magazine :

PLAYBOY: Beyond the fact that it's become a profitable way to make a living, why do you write?

VONNEGUT: My motives are political. I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. I differ with dictators as to how writers should serve. Mainly, I think they should be - and biologically have to be - agents of change. For the better, we hope.

PLAYBOY: Biologically?

VONNEGUT: Writers are specialized cells in the social organism. They are evolutionary cells. Mankind is trying to become something else; it's experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life. I don't think we're in control of what we do.

PLAYBOY: What is in control?

VONNEGUT: Mankinds wish to improve itself.

PLAYBOY: In a Darwinian sense?

VONNEGUT: I'm not very grateful to Darwin, although I suspect he was right. His ideas make people crueler. Darwinism says to them that people who get sick deserve to be sick, that people who are in trouble deserve to be in trouble. When anybody dies, cruel Darwinists imagine we are obviously improving ourselves in some way. And any man who's on top is there because he's a superior animal. That's the social Darwinism of the last century, and it continues to boom. But forget Darwin. Writers are specialized cells doing whatever we do, and we're expressions of the entire society - just as the sensory cells on the surface of your body are in the service of your body as a whole. And when a society is in great danger, we're likely to sound the alarms. I have the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over. Nobody important cared. But I continue to think that artists - all artists - should be treasured as alarm systems.