Tuesday, November 27, 2007



Hi friends,

I haven't really told you a great deal about the cute little female hominid I've met here, have I? I was all lonely and filled with remorse about losing my wife, but now, that's forgotten.

It's forgotten because I've got Betsy now.

Oh, the day I first saw her, she wasn't very impressive. She had her mouth down in the most pustulated piece of carcass I've ever witnessed...The stench was overpowering...(as I'm using the word "overpower" in this instance,I think even Nietzsche would side with the lambs instead of the birds of prey - the girl could use a tooth brush!) She was gnawing out the guts of some hooved herbivore that had keeled over due to communicable disease...Betsy didn't care...The girl had hungers. She was shoveling it in...Not even discriminating between the edible and the inedible. I mean, when she bit into one of the herbivore's four stomachs and it gave out a poof of methane and who knows what...Not many would have perservered.

Betsy perservered.

That's when I knew I had to combine my DNA with hers.

Hominid Splunk

I haven’t got a stream of consciousness.

I lost it when I went hominidal.

Man, not having a stream of consciousness almost makes up for everything wrong and bad in my life.

Losing "stream of consciousness" is a precious gain.

I was, from the moment I heard of “stream of consciousness”, which happened in a high school English class during a lecture on James Joyce, exceedingly fond of the idea, of the image, of this beautiful way of imagining thinking and writing.

But....“Stream of consciousness” never panned out very well for me.

Swirling the image of a stream of consciousness around in my mind didn't stimulate me to write like James Joyce.

Or to think-feel with vivacity.

If anything, what I started to notice was the obsessional character and recurrence of the same crap, over and over, in my "stream"...My shit stream, more like.

I needed a flushing mechanism, it turned out.

I would like to change the phrase to “streaming vicious circle of consciousness…”

That’s more what it is like for me.

The waters of consciousness flowing around my ankles seem pure and fresh until I look more closely….

Sensing more astutely, I see the stagnant film of oil, filth, and pollution--I'm standing in a sewer! I’ve been standing in this sewer “stream” a long, long time.

“You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.”

You were an optimist, Heraclitus.

Now, as a hominid, the stream isn’t a trickle, even, and I’m happy about that.

As a hominid, there is no stream, there is no theater, there is no performance; though my butt itches and I’m sick and sore, I’m happy about that part of becoming hominid -- at least. At last.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Stroke me, hominid…

Oh, I admit it right now…The whole “hominid” schtick is designed to be didactic…I might as well be Aesop, my intentions are the same as his…I have a lesson to give…A form to impart.

I have an experiment to perform, to practice, if you will…As well.

I will climb onto the stage of the theater of the mind, but I will do so with the conceit…

That my performance is a practice, a praxis…Get it?

I can dodge the egoistic connotations and denotations of “performance” if I get you to call what I am doing up there, all alone, but alone in the lime light, (and hey, baby, being alone in the limelight isn’t really what we properly call alone, now is it?) my practice, my praxis? It’s a verbal sleight-of-hand…But it’s a verbal sleight-of-hand which informed a century.

I’m up here on the proscenium stage, my voice is clear, my clothing revealing, my diction quite sophisticated…

It’s a narcissistic display, but I’ve jiggered in some suffering, some confusion, some sweat, some indications of adversities overcome…

The expectation is that it will be you who will be “overcome”, you’ll be moved…You who will forget what’s apparent…(we’ll give this nonsense the charming name of "suspended disbelief", and with this deft and skillful move philosophy will be castrated for hundreds of years..)

I’m not an actor and this is not a spectacle…I’m a worker, and dingnab, look what I am producing:

Geez, man, the Serengeti GNP is increasing at a rate of 8.9% per annum! Wow!

And I’m a hominid, scratching myself in Olduvai gorge, Wow! That I could get this big!

I’m a worker, not an actor; I produce, I do not dramatize; I’m a socius, not an ego; I’m a force, not a sublation…

I’m a hominid now.

Hominid didactic praxis now.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Hominiddity Quiddity

Okay, I’m a hominid – but what is that?

I’m not the stripped down essence of the human being.

I don’t carry within me some “most human element – seed of humanity” which waits for the fullness of time to unfold, to develop.

I’m not a human being, even.

I’m not the childhood, innocent or otherwise, of humanity, either.

I’m not a tabula rasa upon which some epic new cosmic novel will be scribbled.

I’ll get down to brass tacks with you – I know it is not pleasant to be in my presence:

The hominid is a radical fall and break from the animal. A fall from animal grace, if you will.

(We're still animal, though. I admit. We're incredibly shitty, inferior ones.)

I do not carry within me the heritage of any of the other primates.

I did not get their inheritance of grace, dexterity, deftness, skillfulness of movement – joy of movement – their swing.

I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear.

It seems so natural to assume that at least the hominid had what the chimps or apes have.

But, no.

I’m a clod. A bungler. A klutz.

We hominids – we’re stooges of the Serengeti.

If you could see us in action, banging into each other, accidentally tripping on flat ground and pushing each other into the dirt, hurting and injuring each other through our remarkable inability to coordinate our motions, you would never ever bet on us for survival capability, let alone future predominance.

You’d see us as flukes, one of nature’s bungles, destined for a rapid extinction.

There’s no redeeming or telling gleam of intelligence in our eyes, either. Nope. Sorry.

We’re dull, man, we’re damned contemptibly dull.

How did we survive, then?

Ah, we were dice falling through the air, never hitting the table though…We’re an event of probability…Think of us that way.
We’re an event of probability more than we are stink, meat, struggle, breath, or fear.

We’re never ever far away from risk, from sudden disappearance.

No matter how we might stink, struggle, fear, or think.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Hominid Gruntles

I wished to wave goodbye to my wife.

I couldn’t.

She was receding from me, now.

Trailing off, fading.

I couldn’t wave. I had lost the gesture.

I began to lose all gestures.

I began to lose words.

I began to lose language!

Language itself was receding, being lost!

(How I will be able, without language, to continue relating this to you is not a problem which will be engaged here.)

I’m going back, back, back.

I’m going back before language and gesture.

I’m going back 3.2 million years in time.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Becoming Hominid



I am a hominid now.

My wife’s not happy with me.

Our social standing suffers.

I smell terrible. Fact is, I stink.

I’ve got shit impacted up my entire butt crack; I lack the manual dexterity to get it out.

My wife isn’t going near that mess. She didn’t sign up for this sort of thing.

The truth is I’m only dimly aware of the need to clear feces from my body.

I don’t notice my own bad smell most of the time.

My social awareness is so poorly developed, if it wasn’t for my wife puking and crying, I’d probably wouldn't know anything was wrong, even with the all the terrible itching, scratching, and puss-filled sores “down below.”

I blame Deleuze for what’s happened.

Technically and legally speaking, he’s probably covered from liability.

But see, I’m a hominid now from trying to think philosophically.

It was that “becoming animal” stuff.

I knew if I was going to make it, become animal, I had to go all the way…I had to deterritorialize “absolutely”.

I had to be bold…I had to leap…I had to let go and not look back.

I thought I could.

“I….thought….I….could”-- famous last words.

Instead of flying absolutely, I deterritorialized relatively.

I didn't make it all the way to animal.

I'm in between now.

I am a hominid now.

Friday, November 16, 2007

PANTA RHEI -- All Things Keep Flowing


We both step and do not step in the same rivers.
We are and are not.


Heraclitus (400 BC)

the old pond
a frog jumps in--
water's sound


Bashō (1686)

It is as if one were casting a net, but the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding himself in the open sea when he thought he had reached port.

D&G, What Is Philosophy (1994) p. 203

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Distance-Intimacy Conception


As I want to unbuckle any mentalist, intellectual, personalist, or consciousness-centric preconceived notion of concept creation, I also want to untask and scramble the more obvious motivating factors behind concept creation as these have typically been conceived.

There has been a motivation for creating a distance, an abstract separation, between knower and known, subject and object, between the thinker and the plethora of phenomena the thinker quietly and unobtrusively observes. This retreat to some metaphorically safe and sheltered place in the mind has had to be created created conceptually at some great cost – but also for tremendous profit in terms of the ability to control and dominate that from which the thinker has been able to separate.

I’m trying to concern myself with my own peculiar desire to stand apart, to crouch under a protected eave and silently watch the rest of the world scamper and scurry, wet and miserable, in a downpour they don’t know enough to get out of. It’s a desire to stay dry against an onslaught of reality which would drench everyone to the bone. It’s a desire for a little worldly sanctuary where I could rest and recollect and stay out of the rush of phenomena long enough to give them, in my mind, a more satisfying solidity and substance and stability.

This separation, distance, abstraction is all created through ascetic processes – it is accomplished at the expense of the sensuous.

And this leads me to the other major countervailing motivation…For creating immersion in phenomena, for delving as deeply and sensuously and unknowingly into them as can be, for diving into the rushing river regardless of any risk of becoming smashed on the rocks below, or being dismembered or blinded or destroyed in the sheer force of water falling in rapids and over waterfalls. This is a desire for unbridled, heedless union which makes no calculations and takes on any chance. Out in the storm, screaming.

I say I want to scramble these motivating factors. Part of what I mean by that is I want to destroy any idea of one being superior to the other – for example, one representing a moral or psychological superiority to the other—and I want grab out the creative and real processes of both and see how these might be recombined so that we might have both at the same time – distance and intimacy, knowing and gamble, simultaneously. A sensuous distance, a contemplating involvement. I don’t think this involves ignoring contradiction, and the fact that it looks on the face of it impossible is really the best reason for trying.