Create Your Own Semiotic Profile

This is kind of cool – Walker Percy’s book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book has this fantastic section about semiotics. Armed with a really basic understanding of the field, he poses several questions that require some pretty heady answers. Here it is:

“Thought Experiment – Draw up an existential-semiotic self=profile or diagram indicating the self’s relation to its world (transcending? Immanent? Intact self among other selves?), identity of self (success or failure of self to perceive itself as a self), self’s relation to other selves (world community? elite community? loss of community?), movement of self vis-a-vis world (types of orbit, difficulties of reentry), placement of self in world as evidenced by mood and utterance…Such a profile mind be called an “existential semiotic graph” of the self.”

Self’s Relation to the World: Extremely high and annoying level of transcendence. Maybe not enough to truly stumble into the realm of suicide, but certainly enough to fucking laugh a lot at the preposterousness of everything and lie around hating myself. Intact self among other selves, but as it relates to general philosophical principles — not related to theology or any bureaucratic entity. Scared to truly transcend to stratospheric heights because he may either disappear right there or really want to kill himself afterwards. Real life is a pain to deal with — would just as soon crawl up and transcend to the higher plane forever and gawk at all the cool things.

Self’s Relation to other Selves: A reluctant member of the transcending community. “Ignorance is bliss.” Feels alienated from many members of the transcendent community for their ridiculous self-aggrandizing and pompous behavior. Comfortable as an island rather than a participating member of any pre-existing community. Values a local community of good ideas (and abilities to implement them) perhaps at the expense of social or emotional stability.

Identity of Self: There is a correspondence between the self’s usual mode of transcendent existence and the immanent world of people, consumer items, etc., but it is scrupulously regulated by the basic needs required to enter the transcendent world as much as possible. Life, the world, and the things in it seem to exist only insofar as they allow more transcendent activity. I.e. Roof, basic food, piano, would choose top shelf over well if money wasn’t an issue, but certainly doesn’t derive any identity from drinking the better booze. But then again, booze isn’t exactly required to continue transcendent activity. Shitty argument.

Movement of Self in Relation to the World: Physical location is unimportant insofar as it provides the “immanent raw materials” for further transcendence. Change of physical location is accompanied by anxiety of trying to maintain access to these basic needs.

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Using my template and Percy’s instructions, be a dork and do your own if you want. If you think yours’ are sweet, let me know and I’ll post them.

Randoms 8.11.09

1. The only problem with being raised properly, with self-respect, a strong foundation of confidence, and etiquette is that no one taught us how to deal with the other %90 of people that don’t have those things.

2. How can someone be so deeply aware of the purposelessness of life and the universe and yet succumb to the very petty social trivialities that would a imply a narrow minded and closeted philosophical mind? What is that stupid contradiction? Can I suck my own philosophical dick? What?

3. I would like to be around forever just to see all the cool shit that people produce.

4. When placed in a setting where the human mind is forced to revert to basic survival mechanisms, what part(s) of the mind become(s) either closed off or active? Is this the same part of the mind that a narcissist taps into all the time? Is the narcissist living in a perpetual survival mode? Only his means of ’survival’ would be narcissistic supply, not simply food, water, etc.

Improvisation 8.7.09

This is a messed up little improv that I did on my Wurlitzer against a groove provided by Billy Martin that he makes available as a template drum beat for DJ’s. I just took it and recorded over it.

First track on the list.

At the Hamptons

I teach lessons to some kids on the Upper East Side, and apparently they like me enough to have invited me out to their house in the Hamptons for a few days. I taught them a couple more lessons, went in the ocean, and drove them around to go bowling. Two cool things happened:

1. The first cool thing that happened was my discovery that I can never, ever, have my own kids. I would deliberately let them starve after a few days of modest annoyances. These kids were 10, 13, and 14 years old. The mental energy required to make sure they didn’t kill each other wiped me out. Also, I found that getting around East Hampton and having to rely on the mental map of a teenager in the passenger seat was the equivalent of asking a bear how to compute and execute a successful financial model. However, apparently even people can’t do that.

2. The other thing that happened was I realized I sucked less

One of my students was talking to me by the pool and listening intently to some advice I was giving him. I feel like an asshole nowadays when I give advice because its like I haven’t done a whole lot yet for my advice to come across as anything but parroting other peoples’ smart sounding wisdom.

But what I found instead was that I had quite a bit more actual experience to back up my words than I thought. Question after question he would ask, I surprisingly found that I could use a number of actual examples from my life to demonstrate a point. I kept waiting for him to get bored and run off to play with his brothers in the pool, but even quick distractions he would quickly brush away and he’d keep prodding.

The kid is 13 and thinks a lot about shit – sometimes to the detriment of his mental health – much like I do. I was tempted to sadly inform him that he’s doomed to a life of constant self-doubt, vague and omniscient insecurity, flying inconsistently from interest to interest with zealous passion, coupled with infinite uncertainty as to whether he’d be successful at anything, financially or spiritually. Even better: meanwhile, he gets to spend his younger years watching society’s conventional accomplishers out at bars, able to afford drinks and leisure to pick up women and take vacations and enjoy life…why the fuck am I doing this again?

There are two forms of solace. One is healthy. The other is, well, probably healthy as a secondary element:

1. Through the massive hard work and effort, you will accomplish miraculous things that expand the human soul and use this earned wisdom to enlighten and inspire others.

2. Just as you reach your peak, you’ll watch as the others (lacking substance, but having had enough looks or talent to get a certain distance) eventually crumble and be exposed (or ignored) for what they always were – possibly bright, talented, but lacking the work ethic and a real understanding of the personal and emotional challenges they faced in order to take action when they could.

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Out by the pool with my student,

There are a lot of random moments in your life where you may briefly dip into the triviality of our existence here. If you want to do things well, it helps to avoid thinking too much about that shit though. A little awareness of that stuff kept at arms-length is fine, but some casual delusion is a good, good thing. Regardless, in those moments you kind of hope someone with awesome breasts and a sundress will walk up and give you some nicely wrapped gift with the inscriptions “Meaning and Explanation of Life and the Cosmos.” Thanks, pretty girl in the sundress. You have a sexy scarf and legs.

Instead, those gifts come in other, less obvious ways. Mine came out by the pool talking to my student, and legitimately being able to reach someone else for 10 minutes. I warned him that my advice was weird and unconventional, and as such should be taken cautiously, as I’m also weird. His response:

“Right, but the weird stuff you’re saying makes more sense than the non-weird stuff most people say to me.”

I mean, try and put a price on that.

Purposely Channeling Other People

Until now I didn’t really understand just how valuable of a tool this is, beyond merely the fact that you are at some level “acting.”

I had a brief and awesome correspondence with the guy who writes for The Last Psychiatrist. I sent him an email about a week ago – I won’t go into details, but my question had to do with emulating television characters, and at what level it becomes unhealthy, unproductive, retarded, etc. He was nice enough to send me a private response and he posted this today which helped answer my question.

Emulating Peoples’ Actions

The purpose of doing something like this is to achieve something that either one’s biological/psychological makeup previously prevented them from doing. In other words, my channeling the mind of A or B allows my mind to head somewhere that it wouldn’t have on its own, and therefore may get me closer to whatever ‘answer’ I’m looking for. I used to think this was stupid and a cop-out. I figured that doing this suggested a weak foundation of character on my part; an insecurity and personality fault, this pretending to be someone I am not, not being true to myself, etc. But this demand for absolutism in regards to oneself is apparently the type of thinking that is generally fucking up the population. And it makes a lot of sense, really. How do you know who you are until you’ve actually done things? Done something tangible that can actually be affirmed by people that aren’t…yourself? Its great to “be” something, but if you’re endlessly free to define yourself with things other than actions, that “being” could be anything, literally. Even if it doesn’t reflect reality at all. And (now I’m beginning to understand this) I guess the inevitable issue comes up – what happens when reality actually decides to fight back? Things to think about.

Consciously pretending to be someone else to in order achieve something is okay, as long as the thing you’re trying to achieve is somewhat good.

“A narcissist isn’t someone who tricks people into doing what he wants; a narcissist is a person who has tricked himself into thinking he is a type of person, who therefore doesn’t need to trick anyone else.”

Its so bizarre, it actually makes you feel bad for the real narcissists. I mean, they’re seriously trapped in their own world, completely oblivious, cannot fathom the intentions of others unless it directly impacts them.

EDIT – I know this is reiterating a lot of TLP’s ideas, or at least the stuff he writes about, but working through and thinking and writing about the ideas helps me understand them.