Conversations From God Knows Where#5: ZenoMarl

With Jason Michel

Zeno Marl is not a man. At his best, he is an idea. At worst a mask. In whichever state, from Grace to Damnation, he is a paradox. A philosopher without an audience. A square peg. Incorrect. He is out there at the moment; wandering around; writing his verse; lusting after maidens; draining life of itself.
We had a wee chat, him & me.

JM – Hello Zeno!

Where are you today?
What inspired your trip this time?

ZM - Greetings Jay, how are you?
Are you staying away lamp posts, scratching your black dog ears, and licking the seat of verbal art, I´ll be betting?

… Where are you today?

Me, where am I, I am in the middle of Bolivia between the Mountains and the Jungle, yes I am sitting in a suburb of suburbia! Why here? On the basis that the social norms change the further you go, I am still looking for somewhere where my personality is considered attractive and I am hot to women. What else would one do but look for misguided love?

…Have you found it?

South America is so racist that a dogs arse with semi-white fur is a bit cherished, but in this town all the women seem to get married around eighteen and are generally quite ugly as is typical of the pinched Hispanic women in the mostly horrid insect infested climate, plus there is a major type “A” flu epidemic, so it is a bit of a cultural experience. Have they all died of Pig viruses in Europe yet?

…What inspired your trip this time?

I am looking forward to slinging myself back up the mountains to the hills that have some soul, they have so much inspiration on the Andean Altiplano that they are giving it away, it blows in the overgrazed dust and runs in the rivers with the arsenic.

To be honest though I was fired and thought it was time to spread the virus of capitalist consumption that was richly funded for knowingly providing impossible sub prime mortgage credit further around the world. Am I not the man who proves everyone else´s cloud can be my silver lining and the world is a great place for someone else? Generations of depressed artistes should line up and kiss my ring, should they not?

JM - Most people are more than likely trying to make ends meet than worrying about some black hooded epidemic knocking on the door. If you talk to people in Britain, there’s now a healthy distrust of every institution going as they have all seemed to have shown their true putrid colours. Especially the media.
But healthy people ARE beginning to fall to “la grippe porcine” here in Europe, so there’s still hope for some kind of post-Apocalyptic scenario à la The Omega Man. One can but wish.

So, this voyage is one of purge and redemption, eh?
A lone ex-financier searching for love in jaguar-infested jungles falling for pygmies at every new turn?

ZM – A giant among pygmies or a pygmy amongst giants, who will be able to survive the fall of civilisation and the pretences of art? Not me, that´s for sure, why else write “The Fragments”. The words are written for an AI historian, one who can analyse structure, meaning, and perception in total brevity, possibly with these words he will be able to resurrect me into some virtual world. I am inspired by my namesake, his works “The Fragments of Zeno of Elea” and his belief, his ancient monism lives on, even today millions wrestle with how the world cannot be one, unmoving and permanent.

Why do I need redemption? I enacted the faith of your society to its logical conclusion and was rewarded, I temporarily assisted in selling people homes that they owned, they briefly became whole humans, citizens by the definition of your society; you are just the new apostates. Like bankrupting an empire to build a pyramid, we bankrupted an empire to build a pyramid scheme, and its name is home ownership.

You may hanker for the re-emergence of a raw human reality from beneath the slimy veneer of our institutionalised society, for is it not governed by men with models, dumb IQ10 cyborgs with their synthetic profits, but I´d rather not be any more of a hero or individual, ´cause as a dystopian, I ask you, do you not think you should be careful what you wish for?

JM – Less of an apostate, more an ingrained heretic. A born traitor, if you will …
I am also sometimes weary of the trials of the individual, it is always a fierce definition AGAINST something else. To quote Heraclitus, “War is the father of all”.
I just read this yesterday, “Civilisation is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit”. By this definition, the so-called “liberal” society that we have been promoting in “Anglo-Saxon”(to borrow a turn of phrase from the French) countries has been less a civilised than those before it. The veneer of the promotion of FREEDOM(TM), while trying to have other rights of privacy taken away has led to a fine messy equilibrium based on tension.

Which way do you see us as heading?
What do you see as the fundamental changes (if any) needed?

ZM – I will leave the hypothetical to your readers, after all they may be the ones who create the culture of the future. But only looking backwards I do not see anything new, but more of the same woolly radicalism, which was not new in the 60′s, fighting the same wilful self-advantaging ignorance that was not invented by the Bush-Bin Laden-Netanyahu triumvirate. While we allow idiots, there will be idiots.

Perhaps while we allow the politics of politics, there will also be grubby war. Do you really believe that any of the worlds problems at any time in history could not have been solved within ten years if people had wanted to solve them? People don’t, that is the truth.

…So we are headed nowhere?

I do see that monotheism is dead ideas walking, but then it may always have been. The difference today is that we are more educated, have more information, have less reason to believe total rubbish including new age clap trap and the right to oppress heresy.

In the longer term I see a return to Pagan Animism, my next book is on the topic and is mapped and half written, I personally do not see how a man can read it and claim to be rational and still believe in the Biblical God. But there again it does not contain any new ideas from the last 2.5k years of which I am aware.

Heresy, even yours, has usually occurred before, even the work of Zeno of Elea was destroyed, for monism is also heresy in the three monotheistic religion, in fact any religion that decrees there is a creator.

-So… you are in good company, his book was destroyed and lost in history, unbelievable and surely not coincidental, hence all that remains are the fragments, echoes through the minds of others. Let us hope your work stands up better and we do not have to go through another 2k years of bull and murder, scrapping by on the scraps of truth, before we recant on the beliefs of some very dead nutcases.

As for FREEDOM(TM): I do not think we are free, we are a product of our culture as are the French. Our culture is owned by media distribution, Chomsky says we are being more tightly controlled, who am I to disagree? Any manager worth his salt is trying to control “Culture” so the evidence that we are being manipulated is obvious. Changing one culture for another is all that we are doing, heretics aside, we seem to be mostly quite happy about it though?

The only way to restore freedom is free debate in free media with the free distribution and free control of information and cultural products. That means giving up copyright for cultural products, I do not think your readers want to be free, I suspect they just want to be the program dictator, paid to be the bitch with the whip, what do you think?

JM – There are inklings of your Pagan Animism, or at the very least Pantheism, in Deep Ecology and The Gaia Theory, although society will have to shift from its current secular Liberal Humanism to Jeffer’s subtle Inhumanism first. I’m afraid that societies and cultures, in general, do tend to grip tighter to their mores when menaced by the thought of them being pulled apart.

As for us all wishing to be dictators?
In the shadow of every anarchist lies a fascist, and vice versa, I’m sure.
Our language is being dissected, imbued with morality and thrown back at us in fine “newspeak” style under the banner of freedom. And of course, with language comes thought. The middle class “left wing” are showing their puritanical underlying ideology and accusing and finger pointing at everyone who dares to disagree with them.
The right are just sitting back and letting the putrid smell of their farts waft over all, and people can’t get enough of that stench. Not in Europe, they can’t.
Bread & circuses as always.

Enough of this nonsense! Tell me of the last thing of beauty that you saw!

ZM - Last night I saw a mug of tasty cold beer in a proper glass, a chop glass with multiple chips, but had a proper handle in thick chiselled glass and I held it in my hand, it was almost as good as holding Lake Titicaca, although for that, five days later, I was forced to wake up, sit bolt upright, and write down straight off, a silly sonnet, and it is the only one that my mother likes. I was just disappointed upon re-reading it that it was not about an ex sin ropas [without clothes], that I had been dreaming about, I changed three words for it is complete with the intended break out. Previously I had just treated my mother as illiterate, you can print it if you want.

Does amazing beauty do such disturbing things to you, I imagine more that disturbing things make you feel beautiful?

Your Black Dog book is quite interesting, although you are clearly more insane than my mother, I am slightly concerned it has inculcated in me an unfulfilled fetish for killing all the missionaries because they deserve it and would love to be sanctified. Do you think this will be a problem for me or do the effects wear off?

I am now reading “Swann´s Way” as an act of control, Proust is the fey anti-Michel for he controls his sweet dreams and does nothing more than take a sweet walk in the country, well at least in the first half, perhaps in the second half we will enter a noir world in a landscape littered with the morality of suicidal mental decay, rather than the drawing rooms. Can they both be beautiful or is that the contradiction that breaks the concept?

JM - A Romantic poet (can’t remember which one) once said something along these lines …
Beauty is the Awesome disguised, for us to not be blinded.
And yes, there is something of the Awesome in Ugliness too. It is the sacred feeling of profanity. The holy taboo. Blasphemy in excelsis.

Missionaries, eh …
Oh, off as many of the Missionary bastards as you can. They deserve as much scorn as you can muster. Just think of them as the pathetic Jehovah Witnesses we get here, knocking away on your door, intruding into your life, while you’re trying to sleep the Saturday night hangover away. Brush them away like spiritual dandruff.

I had a vivid dream two nights ago, in which a young Oliver Reed sang Puff The Magic Dragon in the Sixties and a group of men, seemingly in a TV show sat around and discussed it.
The important feeling is that moment when you wake up. When you realise the dream. To indulge yourself in the sensation the dream left you with. Reverie residue.
Never try to analyse the fucker, don’t you agree?

ZM – Maybe it is telling you to create a great moment and discuss it forty years later, I could go and find another beer.

My personal view differs in that perception is analysis, meaning is perception, and analysis is meaning. Yes that is right. I think that a single neural activity would be analysable with OOD, however with each transaction the design changes to accommodate the data and the new objects, it also expresses its newly discovered relations, so true intelligence needs meta-OOD, and a new mode of holding data, so I do not think this has been invented yet.

Just saying – so to know it is to analyse it, okay, you have convinced me, thanks for the interview, I have things to do. Where do I find a Magic Roundabout and a chop of beer, first I will attach the sloth to it… possibly a few missionaries… then we can talk about it once we have been resurrected in the 33rd century. It has been an honour to talk to a really decent author, I do of course recommend The Fragments for anyone who likes poetry, I recommend reading all of them, it is reasonably short, you could analyse them, but it is not worth doing so if it means you will not get to the end as they are really a single work, fragments of.
So Ciao!

JM – The pleasure was all mine, I ‘m sure.
Now where’s that bloody sloth gone?

A Poem.

Have I travelled a thousand thousand miles
To feel at home in a strange stranger’s land
On rattling roads in mountain air with smiles
Of strange new gods, christ´s blood in witches´ hand?
Have I travelled too many many years
To think how strangely flat is our England,
To think how crowded with its salted tears
Unexalted to this tumultuous expand?
Oh Nevada to the sky, I look upon
Deep waters blue, birthing the world blessed
In brassy processions of mournful beauty cry
Upon the life of loss and love and hope
And tears of Peoples bright and dark, in whose
Foreign words I hear the tender meanings and passions
Of burning sun and frozen huddled moon.
Oh these Andean dreams I live awake,
I love, forsake, a passion’s fever break.

His work can be found here:

INSPITEOFLADYLILLETTE
YOUTUBE
FRAGMENTS

Jason Michel

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Tags: Conversations, jason michel, zeno marl