Likely Not All

 

Painting by Carol Sandin Cooley

 

Topics for essays that I have had rolling around in my head. We’ll see how many of these I actually get done.  

·         The world really does resolve around me (for Carol) 

·         Forever eventually comes for a visit and doesn’t leave (For Michelle Harris) 

·         Convos with adoring fans 

·         I’m a pervert. Where’s my parade?  

·         Maurice Louca can do no wrong 

·         Staring down cars

·         For and against solipsism

·         The Wokes and me 

·         Fear well taught (for U-Ron Bondage) 

·         What this isn’t 

·         Sitting in Alvin Lucier’s room (for Lisa Cameron) 

·         How many times do I have to tell you that I am not a musician? (for all my bandmates and collaborators ever) 

·         Must we burn Peter Sotos?

·         Yes, you really do need more improvised music in your life (for Damon Smith) 

·         Tired and old and need to die 

·         The importance of Leonora Carrington

·         Trash films reconsidered (for Sean Ramirez-Matzus) 

·         On collecting 

·         Keiji Haino is dead, long live Hideo Ikeezumi

·         Reviews of stuff I’ve heard, read, watched or otherwise been exposed to 

 

That’s enough for now. Hyperlinks to be embedded as I finish them.  Patience is a virtue; procrastination is a vice.  The perfect is the enemy of the good.

 

 

Doubt Will Set You Free

I KNOW that I don't know more than I do know. In fact, it is one of the few things that I am certain of.

I KNOW that I don't know most of what has transpired with respect to any event that I did not witness myself. What I don't know outweighs what I do know in virtually everything. That is the nature of reality as constructed by humans. None of us are omniscient; our minds take morsels of information and fill in the rest, constructing the reality that we live in.



I KNOW from my work as a scientist that certainty is the absolute enemy of truth. One can remove uncertainty and test hypotheses with new evidence, thereby removing more uncertainty, but what one can never do is eliminate all the uncertainty. I believe this to about a 9.5 on a scale of 10. Certainty scares the shit out of me because it is a mental trap. One may be able to know something beyond a reasonable doubt or one may be able to know something to where it's more likely than not, but knowing anything beyond things that have gone on solely in one's own mind to certainty is very, very questionable. In other words, some doubt will linger in my mind in virtually all instances. But is this undesirable?


AT ONE POINT in my life, I was well beyond just contemplating suicide: I was planning it. A friend gave me The Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson as a Solstice gift and luckily I read it. Over the course of reading it, I realized that life was worth living, or at least I was reasonably certain that it was. Before I read this remarkable book, I had the time of my suicide planned to within a few days and was working on the method. When I finished The Cosmic Trigger I wanted nothing more than life. While I am sure that there were other factors, that book was the catalyst a huge personal change. As I further delved into Robert Anton Wilson's work, I took away a profound, sublime yet simple message: embrace uncertainty rather than shun it; it's evil twin, certainty. is for fundamentalist religionists, Neocons and other cultists. Certainty makes most of these individuals comfortable and uncertainty makes them extremely angry.

ROBERT ANTON WILSON summed things up nicely when he said, "I don't have beliefs, but I have many suspicions".

I WAS FURTHER CHANGED by William Reich in Hell, Robert Anton Wilson's excellent play, which delves deeply into the nature of uncertainty. The play itself makes the audience think about the nature of reality; Mr. Wilson's introduction spells things out. The essence of his thought is this:

• He rates all his suspicions on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being complete disbelief and 10 being complete belief. My example would be 0 is the sun rose in the west this morning, with 10 being the sun rising in the west.
  

• Whenever one of his suspicions hits or closes on either 0 or 10, he tries to come up with reasons why said  suspicion, which has morphed into a belief or disbelief, shouldn't be so absolute.

• He pays attention to the suspicions that are close to or at 0 or 10 as they are the ones that can bias his thought the most.

I AM VERY CAREFUL with belief systems. They are dangerous, as dangerous as a drug that one comes to craves. It is very easy for me to fall into the trap of believing things uncritically. I have worked hard to expunge this tendency. I recognize the paradox in subscribing to RAW's method for optimizing his consciousness - isn't it yet another belief system? Unsurprisingly, he warns of the dangers of belief systems elsewhere in his writing. Yet RAW's words ring true on this account.

ONE'S ATTITUDE about uncertainty really gets to the heart of belief and disbelief. One must deal with uncertainty every moment of one's life; how one does so strikes right to the core of the being, one's weltanschauung. Acceptance of uncertainty goes hand in hand with thinking for oneself: it is the very engine of intellectual curiosity. Embracing uncertainty is one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning and makes life worth living to me. So yes, doubt has set me free.

I am reasonably certain of that.

A Quick Note

I have couple of blog posts under construction right now. When I started this I wasn't going to publish an entry until it was done. It has come to my attention that this is inhibiting me from publishing at all. When is anything done?

No answer, eh? I didn't have a good one, other than, "when it's done", which is less than satisfactory as far as answers go.

So I am going to post blog entries when they are close to done. I will come back and tweak them as I see fit. So if you really, really like every word of a post, save it to your hard drive when you read it. It's all subject to change.

About the Name

I chose "Euronymous Dust" under pressure. I was setting up this blog and got to the point where I needed to name it - if you have created a blog on Blogger, you know what I am talking about. So I ruminated over it for a moment then came up with this name. I have used it before as the title for a song inspired by Michael Moynihan's Lords of Chaos. In this instance I liked the sound of it more than anything else.

Having a name that has no special significance appeals to me because it allows me to write about whatever moves me at the time. Whether it's a review of a record that I like or the most intimate details of my thoughts that I really shouldn't be sharing in a public forum, I can throw it up here, literally and figuratively.

But enough about me.