Intermittens Issue 2: Submissions/Discussions

[Cramulus]

oops, typo spotted

under "Goat", change to

Goat - Goats are known for loving their parents, having friends, and working a steady job. They often have a box of old unsorted photographs in your their house.

Vex, sexy cover! I want to wine and dine it, then take it back to my place for "kindling"

[Manta Obscura]

oops, typo spotted

under "Goat", change to

Goat - Goats are known for loving their parents, having friends, and working a steady job. They often have a box of old unsorted photographs in your their house.

Vex, sexy cover! I want to wine and dine it, then take it back to my place for "kindling"

I actually sort of liked the creepy implications of a Goat having a box of unsorted photos in the reader's house, but I have fixed it, just the same.

And I agree, Vex, your cover makes me happy. I would definitely tap that ass:

[Kai]

Swote!  I'm glad you corrected the spelling of the word "sustaining".  It was starting to bug me in Kai's thread.

You could have just told me it was wrong. 

[Telarus]

Dang, I better ramp up the time I'm spending on formatting/layout... will do.

[Manta Obscura]

This is a little rough because I just finished it, but I thought I woud post it as a possible entry in Intermittens 2. I shall also create a new thread in which it may be critiqued and discussed.


Building Blocks, an Allegory in Three Parts
Or
The Wisdom of St. Teresa of Avila
By Manta Obscura

On the built-in wall shelf in my living room rests a dusty and bulbous protrusion of Lego blocks that, if one squints at them hard enough, sort of resemble the castle on the box in which they came. The toy has degenerated into one great, leftover battle scar of what it once was, its great spires crumbling after repeated exposures to hardwood floors while under the influence of gravity. The Lego persons within it all miss some sort of vital appendage, and are scattered throughout the broken battlements in various awkward, lewd or compromising positions. My wife, family, friends, and anyone else who has an ounce of decorative taste tell me that the whole eyesore should be removed at once and should be replaced, ideally, with a tasteful knick-knack, or at worst a fully functional Lego contraption. I refuse to move it, partly because I still play with it, fiddling around with the pieces while watching Bob Ross in the afternoons, but mostly because the castle has become a symbol to me.

Whenever I tinker with the pieces, I reflect on how our inner lives – our inner castles, as the Christian mystic St. Teresa of Avila would say – are a lot like the Lego pieces. We start our lives with just the base, the biology, the big green foundation piece on which the other Legos are built. As we grow there are others, be they friends, parents, bosses, leaders, lovers or whoever, who take part in writing our instruction manual, in shaping us into the strong, sturdy structure that the rules tell us we should be.

Follow the manual, and your castle will come out looking great, just like on the box. You will have two spires, one draw bridge, and a Lego treasure chest tucked beneath the dungeon trapdoor. Your two knights will be positioned at opposite sections along the wall fortifications, and your wizard will be in the leftmost tower with his wand.

When, at the tender age of eight, I first built the castle, I loved the original design. I loved riding the horses through the drawbridge, or hosting swordfights in the court. All was as it should be.

But after a while, the toy lost its charm. Having exhausted the fun of the design, I didn't want to play with it any longer. Having taken so much time building it up, I didn't want to change it. And so the castle was exiled for years on end, dwelling in closets, attics and basements, forgotten in the daily routine of life. At certain times it would sneak out to festoon my shelves, but never again did the old design entice me to play.

It is only by a happy accident – a misplaced brush of the hand, a sudden topple and the explosion of a thousand pieces – that the old design ever came to change. For as the old design was destroyed, I was forced to put the piece together again.

There always comes a time when something breaks the castle walls. It is during those times that one must seriously think about how to build, how to put the walls together again, for when the blocks fall down you have a choice to make: follow the plans, or just say "fuck all" and wing it?

When my castle broke it occurred to me, on a whim, that the only thing that had been holding it together was tradition. The stagnant stillness of uniformity and repetition had kept the walls intact. But now, like a minor miracle, was the chance to change things up, to make it fun again. I began to build.

Spires rose from courtyards. The dungeon filled with gold. Brave Lego knights were dressed in princess hats and put on the backs of dragons. Doors were built that led to nowhere, and the wizard escaped his spire.

The castle was no longer the sterile, dusty tomb it had been. The walls were replaced, rebuilt elsewhere, the tenants changed and charged with new duties from their former deadened vigils.

All was as it should be.

*   *   *

I take apart the castle now and then, putting it together to suit my tastes at the moment. The current motif is medieval techno rave party. I hope the Lego men are having fun.

After you take the first step in pushing through the original design, it gets ever-easier replacing blocks, changing bridges, and pulling apart the treasure inside. It gets easier stealing pieces from the Space Station Lego set to turn last week's cowboy ninjas into dragon astronauts.

The newness lasts for awhile, and then interest and use subsides. Something new must be built.

That's when you turn on Bob Ross and start thinking of whether your Shaman Troll will look better in an industrial city or in a dark moon's chasm, hidden from the stars.

*   *   *

St. Teresa found God behind the innermost wall of her interior castles. As I play with my Legos, building new spires from broken bridges, I wonder what I'll find in mine.

[LMNO]

Here's a re-interpretation of an old piece.


THE NEW CHART

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the Ancient Chart of Order and Disorder.  Well, if not, here's a quick recap:

Principia Discordia, 00063, "The Curse of Greyface".

THE CURSE OF GREYFACE AND THE
  INTRODUCTION  OF NEGATIVISM 
      To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only accept creative disorder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to destructive disorder.
      The Curse of Greyface included the division of life into order/disorder as the essential positive/negative polarity, instead of building a game foundation with creative/destructive as the essential positive/negative. He has thereby caused man to endure the destructive aspects of order and has prevented man from effectively participating in the creative uses of disorder. Civilization reflects this unfortunate division.

POEE proclaims that the other division is preferable, and we work toward the proposition that creative disorder, like creative order, is possible and desirable; and that destructive order, like destructive disorder, is unnecessary and undesirable.
      Seek the Sacred Chao - therein you will find the foolishness of all ORDER/DISORDER. They are the same!

Now, while that is very interesting, several of us were thinking a few things:
1. It reeks of hippiedom.
2. It is still dualistic.
3. Some of us like breaking stuff.

So, we thought about it, and made a new chart:


Now:  Possibilities arise fourfold.  The original pattern remains, Creative Order/Disorder, and Destructive Order/Disorder.  But rather than limiting one's observances to an essentially two dimensional outlook, we may expand upon it.*

Orderly Disorder:  The means and methods of predictable chaos, a false front; often used by cabbages to pass themselves off as wise.  They force them selves into carefully planned actions which may look Eristic at first glance, but are almost entirely Aneristic.

Orderly Creation:  Architecture, Mathematics, Haiku, Fugues; Creative energies bound by strict rules, yet yielding great works that bring beauty into the world.  In this light, structure and boundaries are not the enemy, they are merely tools with which to create.

Orderly Destruction:  The triumph of the Aneristic Illusion.  Everything is rules.  No freedom exists, for it is bound by carefully crafted commandments.  The creative spirit has been vanquished, crushed.  Kafka wrote in this spirit, where precise order destroyed the world and the people who lived by them.

Disorderly Order:  Complex arrangements that appear to be Disorderly, but follow a specific set of rules; Chaos Theory.  Also covers the 80/20 rule (for example: when cooking, 80% of the time, you use only 20% of your available spices, which eventually gravitate to the front of the cupboard), and the clutter of a desk where only the person sitting there knows where the stapler is.

Disorderly Creation:  Using Eristic means to Create; Cf. Jackson Pollock, John Cage, Free Jazz, etc.  There is no box to think outside of.  Notoriously difficult to pull off, due to the lack of reference points most humans use to understand Reality.

Disorderly Destruction:  Most Natural Disasters.  Many cabbages consider this the only aspect of Chaos.  This is the scary, unfeeling Abyss of the Irrational Godless Universe.

Creative Order:  The means and methods to which one brings the Aneristic Illusion into greater perception.  The establishing of rules.  Somewhere, someone had a new, creative Idea about how to put things in order.  The creation of written language, for instance, is a  brilliant and insightful way of codifying thought into an orderly system.  Of course, this is also the realm of justifications for repression.

Creative Disorder:  The intended results of Operation: Mindfuck-- that is, one creates a clever and specific kind of disorder, whose purpose is to turn neophobes into neophiles.  Like Creative Order only reversed, it's the willful bringing into existence of things that go beyond the rules, which escape classification. 

Creative Destruction:  The answer to the usual objection to the original Creation/Destruction chart: to wit, "you have to destroy in order to create".  In fact, if one moves beyond the merely physical into the conceptual, every major artistic breakthrough has come from breaking/abandoning/destroying the "rules" in a creative way.

Destructive Order:  When the rules and paradigms that repress and inhibit Freedom and Creation are followed or used.  It's not the rules that are harmful, it's the application of the rules.  "Just following orders" without thinking.  However, could also be the methods used by Gandhi and MLK; Civil Disobedience.  Causing Disorder through non-chaotic action.

Destructive Disorder:  Behavior and actions that are harmful; various psychoses and self-destructive habits; temper tantrums.  This relates to one of the squares on the Old Chart, and generally carries with it negative implications.  There is no Joy, or purpose; there is no greater good.   

Destructive Creation:  The process of building things that have no purpose but to destroy.  Oppenheimer, creating the Nuclear Bomb; or Bioengineering new viruses that can wipe out the planet.  In general, these are poorly directed creative energies.

Which leaves us with 4 spaces left: Orderly Order, Disorderly Disorder, Creative Creation, and Destructive Destruction.  What do they mean?  The fuck if I know.  And there lies the first clue.  They are also the purest forms of these aspects.  That is the second clue.  You can come up with other clues on your own.  Regardless, it soon becomes obvious that if one takes the four purest elements and combines them simultaneously into a fifth, Eris is born.  She is all things, all conflicting ideas, all concepts, all aspects.  Hence, the 5-fingered hand of Eris occupies those spaces.

Of course, when you take the New Chart to it's obvious conclusion, you can create an even newer chart with things like Destructive Disorderly Order, and Creative Destructive Disorderly Order, and Orderly Creative Destructive Disorderly Order etc.  I leave this exercise up to the reader, as it's getting late, and I'm almost out of scotch.




*The wise-assed among us would like to remind the reader that ultimately, every single square in this chart should contain the Hand, as this is merely another exercise in Illusion, and these aspects are merely interpretations of that which is Chaos.  Fair enough.  Turn the page.

[Telarus]

Excellent LMNO. Whenever I read this material, it reminds me of the "5 Windows" graphic (can someone tell me what that was from?..oop, found it, it's part of the "Random Stuff" portion of DrJon's Apocrypha). You may think of including it:

[Manta Obscura]

I really like that piece, LMNO. Really well done.

[Cramulus]

Dang, I better ramp up the time I'm spending on formatting/layout... will do.

I may be incorrect, but I think Vex is laying out his issue on his own. Still though, plz ramp up layout! It'd be nice to re-release the november issue before Dec is ready.

[LMNO]

Thanks, guys.

Apart from helping birth the BIP, this is one of the only things I really ever did.

And it was four years ago 

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Jenne and I are doing the final review and we'll have our submission posted by tomorrow!   

[Cramulus]

I think Vex wants you to PM him your submission rather than posting it

that way people have to actually read the magazine. 

[LMNO]

Ah.

[Jenne]

  It's basically done.  And it's fluffy as hell.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

I thought Payne was editing this edition.....

Okl, I am PMing to Vex