CosmiKnot

Will I AM is allegedly not locked in a legal dispute over the copyright infringement of Pharrell William’s I Am Other brand. He is merely defending the territory of his trademark. I Am forms “a significant element” of Will I Am’s professional name according to his lawyer. All this self-assertion is confusing. It’s rather like being trapped in a mirrored elevator with the essence of ego incarnate. “I am I am no I am I am!” claim the new Spartans of popular culture with “entrepreneurial spirit. I AM what I Am? Does Will know about the Iams cat food range which may start getting all territorial tom cat on his ass seeing as he is potentially threatening the individuality of their registered trademark with a “confusingly similar” mark. In fact if they all just agreed to spray their territory it would be a lot simpler. “I am” it says in a non-verbal kind of entrepreneurial spirit. Yay it’s great that there are these free spirited people out there reminding us how individual we all really a...

We continue to ask how does it work? Is this not like a white imperialist receiving a beautifully carved shrine then sending it for analysis instead of trusting. Ah faith is the dunces hat of rational Britain. Did we learn nothing from TV episodes of Star Trek about the limits of rational thought? Placebo is the placebo escape hatch of the enlightened. We are still stuck on Freud - analysing away the monster under the bed. How about befriending the monster under the bed? Artists on telly are psychopaths - cue close up of overly slick facsimile of mad elaborately filled leather bound sketchbook. We still want to stare ourselves into oblivion. Analysing your own consciousness puts me in mind of a table rapper unable to hear the dead spirit screaming in his ear but still giving a very convincing performance of channeling. A teddy is not a real creature but we don't tell the child that because that would be idiotic. A child understands different levels of consciousness in a way that as...

Why is life like this? An amal-gum An amalgamation One big analogous remnant Look there...it's gone Before you've turned to look The gift horse was right there Studiously avoiding eye contact WIth the gift rider. Hello you want to say To all of them Those poor dears Looking through you You're alive right? you're here now? But now I see you're not You are already a glimpse Which makes you older than the hills Remember them? Where you walked arm in arm With your father The long man of Wilmington The gathered hoard at roadside May as well be in period costume Catering off to one side A bombed out house facade Instead it's a doubled up volvo A volvo! You double up. Female middle aged driver Sat on Ercol chair on the pavement How neighbourly Pine teeters on paving slab Can you retrive my keys? She enquires (supercilious old bag) My garage key is on it you see. You're all alive right? Here now yes? That is absurd isn't ...

I now see that, yes, consciousness as self-defined “I” is a necessary illusion. The patriarchal God of monotheist religions is an outward projection of this illusion. Or at least it is a clumsy-complex method of trying to shoehorn spirituality or loss of self into a self-centred universe. This idea of consciousness turns the human body into a kind of armoured vehicle out of which the “individual” data processing machine peers as it trundles through life. Our civilised culture is based on separation. My own frustration is that I have always found this process of viewing life as a separation a rather non-intuitive act that I have non the less persevered with rather too diligently out of duty to the monotheist God that was indoctrinated into my data processing system by table thumping RE teachers. Self-awareness is not an integral part of being human but it strikes me that books such as "I am a Strange Loop" discuss it as if it were. The idea of indi...

Marcus du Sautoy's interactive lecture at the Barbican started with a brief and playful conjecture illustrating the absurdity of the search for consciousness. He joked about the idea of cutting off his hand and whether consciousness might be found residing therein. In terms of "self" exploration it seemed clear that we seem to have remained in flat earth territory since Kant posited that consciousness was located in the pituitary gland. I have written several times (I think) about the obsession with dissecting as path to knowledge that the artists and scholars of the Renaissance rapidly developed and once more I find my self thinking that expecting to find the self by physically chopping up and analyzing the brain in smaller and smaller pieces will not lead to a deeper understanding. We need to make a leap of faith in order to cross disciplines or like children at a party in celebration of our own intelligence we will be left having unwrapped the pass the parcel...

The skyline steadily ascends As the margin decreases And profits continue to soar One down The beanstalk climber Has a lucky escape I should be dead he sighs But I stayed in bed Jack’s a lazy boy The top of the tower is hidden Shrouded in 12 tog clouds A princess is stranded on the shore She awaits her winged fiery chariot Meanwhile back at the ranch The king throws a banquet You’re a wonderful mother Laughs Jack languidly Catching a pattie in his teeth As the old queen Frisbees them Out over the assembled unwashed soon to be stain removed masses Looking out of his high window Pale face sees red and white cranes Not the green shoots On his desk a beanstalk Creeps limply over the edge of a jam jar An earthing wire - the green fuse The fogs have mystified And the tower has buckled It’s all about luck repeats the rabbi Let them eat horse Whinnies the observer As fire rains down from the sky I should be ded ...

What is it that makes the juxtaposition of saccharine children's characters with the realm of daily struggle so full of potential to disturb? This was the question I asked myself as I sat waiting in the blood test waiting room when my eye fell upon this simple piece of subversive intervention. Far more resonant than a moustache on la Giaconda but sitting quietly neglected round corner after corner in a largely unused Victorian hospital. The reason I swiftly concluded was that the image derives from the commodification of childhood. I was thinking specifically of Disney . This is not to say that Disney cartoons are completely without merit for they have large teams of creative people confused enough to let themselves believe that it is somehow not the violation of culture they are involved with, who are, by the laws of probability bound to give some of their creative soul to the endeavor. But all the plots and images are ultimately shaped by the drive to commod...