12/6/2013

Hello into the deep void of silence...

Looking at the number of viewers, who might have actually stumbled across the PhlegmTurtlePalace, I see that 4 are from West Germany. the reason that I regard this as significant, is that, up until this discovery, I believed that the record of 'viewers' simply referred to my own forays into my own blog. As this is not the case, I have to assume that those who stumbled in, stumbled back out without leaving any vestigial trace of their visit. Since I regard this blog as existing primarily as an archive--and a very incomplete one at that--I shouldn't expect that anyone would even know of its existence, much less want to visit again once they have found it. This is probably attributable to the fact that I regard most blog-viewers as seekers of entertainment, or facile sound-bites and other quick thrills, and I am not someone likely to provide that. Then again, I am probably entirely wrong in this assumption; however, my assessment keeps me from stumbling upon the realization that I may simply be a mediocre writer. let's not all protest that assertion at once...I am sorry, I didn't hear that, can you say it more clearly please?

Well, there I go, talking to myself again...The soundproof booth syndrome, or maybe I am having one of those very tiny, un-measurable, nervous breakdowns; like the emotional equivalent of innumerable minute bone fractures suffered by professional soccer players, which don't manifest themselves in any visible way, until years later, after so much bone has chipped off of one's ankle, or femur, that a mild limp, and arthritis are almost assured. In such cases, as with my infinitesimal 'breakdowns,' they are never apparent enough to be noticed by anyone else; and even if they did, it is easy enough to dismiss them as they remain below the level of conscious awareness most of the time. Those that do intrude on consciousness, tend to recede quickly. My point, being that such tiny shifts in one's physical or mental homeostasis are only unsettling enough for the individual afflicted by them to notice, and are therefore beneath the cultural radar, but no less important for not being seen. This is not a Public Service Announcement for the concept of mental health, which I regard as pure kitsch, and not worthy of serious consideration--another version of that common tendency in western culture to reify conceptual categories and thus transform them into bulky, physical, organisms, which will eventually need to be fed and enhanced, despite their being largely of an apparitional, conceptual nature.

I may be wrong about many things--although I cannot think of any serious intellectual miscalculations that I have made recently--but not about this. If America is characterized by one serious intellectual flaw--which, as the most 'modern' of the modern countries, it is most thoroughly indoctrinated into--it is that tendency to take ideas, turn them into things, and then transform those things into codified formulas, that even when not implemented as 'law,' still reign as de-facto 'truths' that grow in the minds of most Americans--and Europeans--like parasitic nematodes proliferating in dirty reservoir basins. Such 'entities' have twisted and warped, our notions of reason, the way that heavy cosmic objects, like Betelgeueseian stellar masses, bend light into sinewy arcs of photon-engorged energy. If my metaphor makes the process sound 'naturalized' then I am doing my own argument a disservice, as few of our commonly held conceptual paradigms are as dangerous...

Still listening? 
Well, I think that I will leave it at that for today
Enjoy!
The steward of the PhlegmTurtlePalace.