Strindberg’s Inferno (1896) and his encounter with Schizoparis, pt. 2 of 4.

Rev., May 31, June 1,3, 5, 6, 2023

Strindberg then receives some confirmation on his crazy theory as a friend points out that the individual named the doppelganger who has entered his life lives in two houses, curious.

Then, the breadcrumb path of his rrhexis, for that is what is happening here, several steps, in a sequence, pushing him further and further out, towards a break, he now picks up a copy of Balzac’s Seraphita, which is the most explicit example of the influence of Swedenborg on Balzac’s writing, and he is intrigued, why? Then, he has a biblicated reading, that is, almost a reading that is a form of bibliomancy, lifting random passage from the bible, and working with the coincidences twinfired into fateful breadcrumbs on the path. He entrains Swedenborg into his mania too.

upon further study he finds out that his friend, the doppelganger, not only lives in two houses, which cast Paris under the circulation of a Figure Eight, strongly suggesting to me that he is the master of the Figure Eight, the rhabdom which increasingly controls Strindberg, he also leads a double life, first evening with philosophy, second with whores.

Once again, as with Nerval, a psychoperiplus vision of Paris, left bank, right bank, right bank, left bank, doppelganger machine, city of the double.  

He Is Always Seen Late at Night in Bullier’s Dancing Saloon, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 44, Jun 2, 2023.

This is more or less an illustration of the previous scirpograph, the doppelganger generated by the split perception of Paris (Strindberg mentions later that he never set foot on the right bank), and then the discovery that there is a doppelganger thing going on, by a friend of his. This increases his paranoia, and out of touchness with reality.

The idea that I was working with was that schizophrenia develops when a wobble-box as it were, not unlike a White Out or a Black Out in ambience, closes off and breaks a part of one’s self away from the self, by the agency of the demon Pslamx, I think (see previous).

Now, I demand more machinery, a tyche has to have appeared, a pernicious operator, who casts a spell on one. Then, by a fixated power he empties out prior culture, and activates the mind in a Figure Eight, rattled between opposites. Then the world begins to deform. The sense I am getting, and this partly influenced by the way it was depicting in Donnie Darko (2001), is that in this condition, the embrasure, peripteral wall and the membrancy (sic) of periacqueduction all freeze or harden into a gelatinous barrier through which one breaks, but then cannot get back through. There is a version of this construct in the Beckinsale movie, Van Helsing (2004). But the problem is all these mental functions have stopped, been broken, and thus in friction increase the outward pull, toward being torn to pieces,

there is a distinct difference between entertaining pseudoparanoid theories to amuse oneself, or to render them in fiction; and really believing in such, and acting in one’s life accordingly, and having manic and breakdown episodes because of some imagined action in that locked in space. That is, I distinctly know that my little conceits are a fiction, and at no point believed them true. I did not go off the deep end, as they say.

But now, now, it seems like while Seraphita ought to have cured or at least helped him, in this context, on this path, zig zagging from breadcrumb to breadcrumb, Strindberg has gone over. He develops a full-on contra mundem, hate the world, persona.

This has been a kind of appalling rrhexis, from picking up clues in flaneuring about Paris, to linking them to alchemy, to then seeing visions of art, to then meet an artist who is a doppelganger, to have that enter his life, for him to convert to Seraphita, and now, to zoom off earth, and hate life on earth, this is serious.

And based on Swedenborg on angels, his life in Paris is now managed entirely by angels, superficially of a positive sort, but dangerous too, to envision one’s personal agency entirely drained away, requiring angels.

and now, angel Paris gets crazy.

this too is a real place (though I am not inclined to wallow in fin de siècle Paris again)

though I cannot place this one, as public art.

I don’t know, but it is not important. The nuts detail here is that behind Pisces, which would be the symbol of the figure eight, those sparrows that were afraid of his thrin of sculpture were nesting,

but then, and speaking of periacqueduction, which I define as when in ambience the materiality of space fractionates, then turns to cardboard, now, out of nowhere, a complete break to raw theory, he sees under the sphere two oval pieces of cardboard, with numbers on them,

I Found Two Pieces of Cardboard Cut In An Oval Shape, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 50, Jun 2, 2023.

This is such a complete break with the materiality of Paris in the day I can see where many contemporaries thought such a break to be a sign of the arrival of a sense of the world, the modern, completely at odds with the comforts of the previous Eyes Wide Shut regime. It does feel abrupt, and in suggesting that either the armillary, or an angelic force of it, or the clouds, had suddenly dropped into his world not only a clue, to guide his alchemy (so he is practicing alchemy based on clues picked up from random numerological content of sidewalk trash debris), and it comes in the material form, almost as a picture in picture emblem of the reality of this dematerialization, in the form of cardboard!

It feels kind of schizophrenic, with the additional suggestion that in this devolution, which is a simple disposition of the powers that be in various twisted ways, as an apport, an occult materialization, the storm of the Figure Eight has been multiplied through by the power of the Tyche ex machina that drives them, and then it spins in a moonfire scene, imagining coagulations in wobble goo of the peripteral wall and the embrasure screen, converted into the Blue Streak and the Purple People Eater, fall out forms of tychonic control, this is close to schizo.

And, then, it comes home. He makes a brave, but faltering declaration, in which the solution is worse than the proclamation

this is an art form that I practiced, in fact, in 1974, in college, I made a few such drawings of bedding that we could not get away from in the small room that we had sought refuge in in senior year down the hill from Mount Saint James. I do not know if such drawings still exist. But I do know that on one bed I saw that the piles of clothes or bedding looked like a whale, and at the time I kept in my room a tall flowerpot stand on which I put a small plaster statue of Shakespeare that I had got on our Grand Tour of Europe in the summer before, and so for me it became, Portrait of a Whale Spouting Shakespeare. This is fact (whether I have the drawing or not).

Bedding as a Whale Spouting Shakespeare, Senior Year, Worcester, MA, Jun 2, 2023.

But the actual scirpograph of it, that is, mapping out its dire psychodynamics, was that we had been chased off campus by alcoholic dormitory creeps who presented us one morning with a corridor entirely covered in shards of glass; thus in the dead of night we fled, to survive, to live last semester on the tarpeiian rock, contra mundem, in a tiny room (an event that eerily repeated itself later in my life), and it is on that sliding off the edge place that I had my “visions” of hyperpareidolia.

Whale Spouts Shakespeare as My Glass-Shredded Fata Morgana, March, 1975, June 2, 2023

And in addition to being a bit creeped out, to be reminded of this, it is also true it comes not long after learning that Artaud described the state of hallucination in which one peers into the closeup unseeable wobble of reality as like looking through a screen consisting of shards of broken glass. This may indeed be a deep brain trigger image source of my antipathy toward the glass-shard look of so much abstraction of late which I am just going to call brainwash abstraction. There is no other way to describe it, it pretends to make peace, but wants to us-them people to take sides.

But, then, Strindberg knows how to spin things to the danger point, not only does he see a pillow, the exact same thing I saw in 1975, though his rendering of it as a sculpture by Michelangelo is hardly creative, he says it happened after he had spent the night socializing with the doppelganger of the missing American healer of New Mexico. And then, pace Hannah Gadsby, he sees his bed as a giant Zeus lying in his room, this then a go-between or carry over image in time from Balzac’s unfinished painting to Picasso’s obsession with it, and my reading of the trope of the giant head as a symbol of a perikionis, or telemon statue, the part of self lost or jettisoned during a psychomachia in a sleep demon attack.

When I Return Home In the Company of the Double I Discover In The Alcove What Looks Like A Gigantic Zeus Reposing, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 51, Jun 2, 2023.

And here I be, a nonrapist male whom women definitely got the better of in my time on earth, partaking of the orgy of defamation around Picasso at the Brooklyn Museum, musing with the obscene pictures of big-headed dick persona and rapist Minotaurs, in LIVE culture of the moment, June, 2, 2023 (Picasso-matic roundly dismissed by The New York Times and Art News, so, we’re not dead yet).

Then, the doppelganger, who may or may not have been present, Strindberg imagining the whole thing, he declares that this is a lost wonder of art, a pareidolia, and it is here in the garret that art classes should be spent, not in studios with Trilby.

Then, however, and this involves a mysterious friend, who may or may not be that doppelganger, we pass from a moment in pareidoilia, to escalate by reverse agency back to a perception that it is real, not just a trick of the eye. The artist proclaims that hidden inside realism, the aesthetic that Strindberg took up earlier in his career, there is a new art.

And I have also found, that, indeed, with another find, of which I said much over the years, that I lived entirely inside a whole culture of mirage at the time, 1975. And this culture of mirage, very much as it did for Strindberg (but he was Strindberg) I developed a number of art forms, and variations.

Another one, posted today, is a “diapositive” which involved fashion magazines, crayons, and then my practice of pen-squiggling and capturing pareidolia, which I called mirages then, on the page, then to print it.

yes, I get to pretend to be an artist too, as hidden evidence in the early going of my Papers Project is proving beyond doubt that my thinking about literature and my writing was permeated with an interest in contemporary art from the beginning, this one I think from early 1974, so 21 years old, utterly miserable in junior year, and so the spelunking escapism commenced. This was done as part of culture of the mirage, which is what I called pareidolia then, I was a mirage, life was a mirage, reality was a mirage, writing was a mirage, art was a mirage, it seems my master was Giacometti, as I put meaning into his every stroke. He was probably the only artist I paid attention to. I forget what I called these, though “diapositive” is what I called drawings seeking mirages. The method is, get a picture of a model in a magazine, turn it over, cover flipside with a thick, solid layer of crayoning, turn back over, with a pen start squiggling to create the “fine line” where subject and object meet, wherever I see a mirage, do the whole thing, lift, voila, a crayon print. My interest was, see closeups, only that in this way I captured a mirage figure for a fleeting moment, I can still see them. The overall theory was if I tried to draw them directly, I would chase them away, as mirages don’t like ego, they only emerged when you were “intending otherwise”, which was my motto. Very curious. There are others, somewhere, this one

and then Strindberg will not leave it alone, this surely is a modern problem! He says that the more he looked at it, the more real it became. In other words, a fear vector has switched to ON, and the pareidolia in his pillow has become a famulus, that then turns its eye on him. Then, it jumps to the Conjure Demon position, as he literally now imagines that his pillow is a creating artist who one day in its wrinkles creates one kind of art, and then the next day another.

The only difference from a routine fear vector in hypnagogy is that Strindberg (again, I hold no one to my graphs, every one elides and combines as they must) seems to superimpose over it a drop down from waking to sleeping, to suggest that he is now living, in the presence of that pillow, in a kind of delirium of fear, or wonder. This also can be construed as a transference of his discovery of the coal sculptures now on his windowsill to ward off the sparrows.

the only thing missing to make of this complete schizophrenia, that is, involving a break of the logic of the brain, is that the pillow becomes as if a tychonic figure controlling him and ordering him to do terrible things (rings a bell somehow).

but I think Strindberg leaves it on the level of natural art. The artist then calls one sighting the Madonna of Versailles. I suspect this could be a witticism commenting on the fate of Marie Antoinette needing the comfort of her hameau to stay sane at Versailles, and then he switches to Swiss lakes, an art made by seeing figures in the weeds.

then he goes full pagan. He identifies scrying, which is what this is, if taken as the aesthetic basis of making decisions and predicting futures, as clairvoyant, though by my reckoning scrying skill emerges in the fourth phase of mesmerist control, the sleep waking state, not full clairvoyance. In fact, Hamsun’s Pan (1894) was a popular book of the moment, and this was going on in the arts. But paganism would be resurrected only if some humans believed that such clairvoyance lead one to insight that discovered a new god, that is, a pareidolia, or what I call a demon (of the mind), then believed in as an entity, and as a god, which is to go far beyond pareidolia to full on fear vector body tunnel thought.

he quotes in fact a popular quote from Michelangelo, but perhaps this was a general belief in the belle epoque era of classical statuary.

he is now calling the friend, the seer, he suggests that he, the sculptor, is going to use a sighting of pareiodolia in the fountain as his model, to then sculpte a “group” which is a pair or more of figures in Rodineseque block. Now, Paris is filled with seers. The next time he is with the seer, his attention is again directed to a shop window.

the lithographs include an image of pansies with human faces on it.

his feels like it must be a Grandeville, which they were not familiar with. But, then, after this, it is as if they go on a seer walk through Paris and next up it is Strindberg that sees.this

in this

This seems easy, and suggested by foreknowledge that this is where Napoleon is buried, no? But, they move on, playing this game. Strindberg thinks such an idea might’ve been part of the architect’s plan until his seer friend points out that Mansard built it in the 17th century.

a dream reminds Strindberg that he was up for a stipend at the Chicago Exposition. Apart from the what ifs? it reminds one that, aesthetically speaking, in terms of mainstream official art, Strindberg is writing as a nonnative in a world between the Columbian Exposition and the Paris Expo of 1900 (setting for one of my top five favorite movies So Long At The Fair (1949)).

Then he has another coincidence between dream and life, between Atget and Breton, again involving the favored site of cultural insight in Paris, the shop window, a clock.

the 13^th of August is, of course, goddess day, in the calendar of Deep Summer, to be continued. He identifies with Job

but then begins another paranoid episode, starting with Schumann

Schumann’s Aufschwung, if I may insert my classical music expertise, sounds very much like the kind of music you wuold hear played over a silent movie, and so a little drama develops.While harboring a conspiracy theory and a fear of another might increase the break to schizo, it is also true that the scrying in that context is a bit more pulled back to rational, he sees omens in playing cards (this, then, relating, in recent reading to the Manchurian Candidate (1962), and to The Queen of Spades (1948). Except, that is, until he retreats behind apotropaic barriers, the rainbow on the shop window, and the Luxembourg, but then he sees two twigs that had fallen in the shape of the first and last letters of the villain’s name with fear and confirmation

the garden, a safe place

If Paris and its threats are positioned as existing in vigilogogic state, because he is already seering through it, this represents a retreat across the in-between into the Land of Nod, and the Woods of Lost Thoughts,

There are such safe, quiet places in the mind. If the conceit of the level closes in around itself. But, in this case, he is seeking refuge and then an intrusion drops down out of Paris, across the in-between, to invade, as if dropped from the sky, like the plane engine in Donnie Darko (2001), to let him know that this will not do. Then what gives this its modern character is not only that it breaks through a membrancy of materiality or oneirographic wholeness, but does so at an angle, like a lightning strike, to communicate to him in the ambient, as if through the wind in the trees, and just fallen as he is walking, dropping in front of him. Just as an apport is the appearance of a strange object believed to be sent there by a spirt, so a KATAPORT is something mysterious cast down from above. It has a long line of lore connected, including making a lightning struck place a perischoinismus, the place roped off.. It is a breaking through, in the context of a low sky fear situation, that causes fright as much as the rrhexislike letters. This specifically reminds me of the scene in The Omen (1976), when the priest is cast down by a spear, but first scared by lightning that appears to be directed at him.

They Formed The Two Greek Letters, P and Y, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 59m Jun 3, 2023

Then, immediately after, at a café, he enters a talus formation, that is, a kind of microcosm where everything in a plot is played out. Not only does a fire start directly above where he is seated, but there is a water pipe offering emergency exit situated right to the right of his seat too, so every stage of it, as if in a dream.

at this point, possibly to ratchet up the speed of things, that is, to announce, by a contraction to immediacy, the imminentness of the incidents, he switches to diary form, early June, he immediately is greeted by aricebo communications from the trees or the devils of life in the city, hearts.

when he visits a Danish painter and takes him out to dinner, the painter has a nervous attack. Strindberg thinks maybe it is caused by hiim having put his coat over him, because he said he was cold. The reference to Nessus is to the story of Hercules, dying because given a coat laced with poison which he then threw himself on a pyre to be done with the torture.

while Ezekiel could refer back to the pillows that made faces at him, it seems that what this passage is talking about is those in religions where the headgear and the rank and order is what it is all about, and Ezekiel is saying that that sort of religion is over.

There Comes A Heavy Solemn Peal, As Though It Were Issued from the Bowels of the Earth, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 65, Jun 3, 2023

This reminds me of a theory I developed in Paris, why does kitsch rot tourist sites in particular? And the answer is that tourist go to places hoping to commune with them to the extent of stepping into the history of them as seen for example in the movies. But when in reality there are all the obnoxious interferences of tourism or just real life, they always come away “a little disappointed” as they always say. At that moment, they grab for a soothing little piece of kitsch to bury that disappointment in it, and thus feel ok again. That is, to grapg this, one should go to a place, and enjoy it. There should be agency in your going.

but you are not going to the place because it is a place in daily life which you like, which has solid agency, but because you saw it in a movie and it will hopefully make you feel the fantasy of the place that you liked so much in the movie

since that place in the movie is a counter image to the real thing, it can only turn away from the real thing and rest over it like an angel or a demon, depleted. That is, as one goes to it, it recedes and deflects.

as a result, it depletes, empties out, is kind of disappointing. This does not however eliminate a cult goal, which is to, again, say, experience Paris. And what happens at this point is that some tourist concern comes down in over the disappointment to offer you a totally twisted turned inside out version of the thing, in kitsch, reverse agency reverse engineering of an experience none but those who lived it can grasp.

I was particularly attuned to this time rot in Paris, and especially in Montmarte, thus the bell that peals from as if the bowels of the earth, which turns out to be the top of a hill all the way across town, is fitting. It is a bit sad, too, to think of Strindberg, living in Paris, and having to waste so much time nursing his sickness, and then him sitting at a window overlooking Paris and not seeing Paris but being obsessed with his four stones in the shape of hearts. It is reverse agency cult dropped through the depletion of his dream of Paris, sad.  

I Compare The Four Stones Together Before The Open Window, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 65, Jun 3, 2023.

What he is experiencing, in Paris, is the bottomless pit, with the bells providing both the base of the bowels of earth tones, and the endless static, equivalent to tv visual snow, as above, and this is more or less precisely the trope of the Cemetery of Paris that you see out of the window in Last Tango (1972), as I indicated.

But it exists rendered not in rooftops and chimneys, but in bells and peals. And, yet, for all that, he is so turned inside out on his disappointments and fears, that all he is paying attention to is the four heart shaped stones he has arranged on the windowsill, the classic tourist, always “a little disappointed.”

Only, then, does he realize if the bells are sounding this must be the festival of the Sacred Heart, and he feels the coincidence as a good omen,

this means it is June 16, At the same time, meditating, he then thinks he is a wizard again, who can hear birds cuckoo from Meudon, The outskirts

I have left my project to discern the degree to which Paris emptied out in history and thus developed in its vacancies a strange sort of haunted world space. This was a project of the 90s, culminating thirty years ago this time. Strindberg seems to be feeling it, somehow. Had culture begun to empty Paris out as early as 1896? Certainly, the hidden room trope in So Long at the Fair (1949) would fit in perfectly with this scenario. As a result of the emptying out of the space, it also becomes echoing space, that is, the central envelope of Paris becomes a vast echo chamber, with sensitive whisper spots that allow of hearing at great distances. Though attributing to himself a superpower might indeed indicate schizophrenia for Strindberg, I don’t know.

There Is Always a Vibration in Town…. One Must Have Very Sensitive Nerves, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 65, Jun 3, 2023

I picture this shaking of the earth, or the fact that there is vibration everywhere, to the mobius circulation of the purple people eater, fall out of the Figure Eight and the awareness of being lead by a tyche of uncertain motive. Seek freedom as you must, but in a world capital, I now see, there is always a tyche figure messing with things. In a more precise rendering of this image there would be a black cloud indicating the Figure Eight. I consider this a partner to my scirps of Nerval at the Louvre. Strindberg may indeed be right, as per Nerval as well. It may be that as history passes over a site over and over and over again that its substantiality as a perceived safety against aggression or whatever, as humans see, for example, entirely illogically, the covers of a bed, that the cityscape begins to become embrasured, and then peripteral, and, finally, begins to dematerialize, in a periacqueductal fade to ambience. And as too a talus is fashioned out of a deadfall that too, all that drama, all that memory, all that life, that too thins out the space, and causes one to lose a grip on the self on solid ground. This likely developed to an extreme extent in Paris because it was also the seat of power as well as wealth and fashion. So, it is possible that Strindberg is not feeling schizophrenia, but the high of Paris Fata Morgana.

One of the most tried and true bits of kitsch that tourist sites devised are paperweight globes. And here is Strindberg, in 1896, experiencing the same.

They, of course, still make them. This snow globe has special pinch because it is the site of a miracle sighting, which is enlisting the snow globe itself to preserve, and to recreate. It is also grottoesque, and religious. It can, then, quickly shift between secular and religious purpose, so a built-in wobble. But he experienced strange shadows. But then, once again, possibly what he thinks of as a break, the front of the snow globe only casts strange shadows, as if suggesting a transportation of the manifestation to his room walls, but then, what he pays attention to is an unintentional face of Jesus on the back.

On The Back of the Grotto the Plaster Had Accidentally Formed the Head of Christ, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 66, Jun 3, 2023.

This is a scripo because the snowglobe is a classic example of the glass onion, an enclosure in second level hypnagogy that can haunt and put to sleep. In my guess, the strange shadows it forms on the wall comes from the front and the water, and casts as if a distorted wobble sight of the virgin again. It is strange because as if emit from a Sleeper. And then, to take it away from him as soon as he gets it, the snow globe offers him relief from nervous condition he is in, but then it casts a shadow that once again makes him think his windowsill is the place of sacrifice on the edge of Paris and life, where he suffers. This represents a teratomic formation as well, a once doubling image in an image, now surfacing as a tumor of it.

Then, this Potofsky is arrested for murder and Strindberg has a hard time hiding his joy at having been released from the threat. It turns out that the Danish painter painted a picture of him three years before. So, once again, in Paris, in a studio, we describe a picture. It is now haunted, as such

The Decapitated Head Makes Us Shudder, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 67, June 3, 2023

In my (not very good), scripograph, again, the portrait is in the glass onion, but it was painted due to an attack of the PPE on the painter, and then premonitions of death from hell on earth. Its decapitated nature associates it with a thought of a guillotine somewhere in Paris at the time, still.

But then, no grief, and relief, but, still, a hangover of the negative energy. Again, this sounds fairly normal, and not schizo, though the form is assigning an occult power to the Russian tyche over him in a way that is at least formally similar to the same zap of negative energy from space to Schreber as he slept.

The Fate of the Imprisoned Russian Makes Me Suffer Like The Electric Fluid From a Dynamo, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 67, June 3 2023.

Ignoring the accidental pareidolia of Strindberg here, reduced to prostrate by the hate of another of him.  This feels like it is edging toward schizophrenia. Schreber thought that his pains were caused by aliens on a faraway star sending shocks his way, by way of the sun, the wires running all that way, to attach to and attack him. Likewise, R. Sharpe Shaver thought that the daily pains of living in his body were caused by zaps coming from lasers in the hands of “deros” attacking him with rays from below earth. The idea that he is being attacked by a man in prison and that these negative thoughts directed at him have electric power feels like a stage four mesmerist sleep waking epigogic seeing of monsters episode. It is also sounds like he believes that, indeed, Svengali could by his evil eye send rays over the rooftops of Paris to control Trilby, the evil operator of the mesmeric event being a trope that had developed in popular culture in the 1840s. In the same way, it would seem that the theosophical idea, developed at this precise time by Blavatsky, that astral body travelling could entail evil fights through the sky, and air and even by an envoutement, assassinate victims, took hold. Strindberg’s paranoia, that is, flows in between several currents of thought that were haunting Europe at the time.

End pt. 2 of 4.

Strindberg’s Inferno (1896) and His Encounter with Schizoparis, pt. 1 of 4.

Rev., May 31, June 1,3, 5, 6, 2023

Strindberg’s Inferno (1895) falls halfway between Nerval’s mad breakdown in Paris and Artaud’s breakdown amongst the Tarahumara of Mexico. My process will be the same as with both. Going through his visions, or hallucinations, I will try to map them on my graphs, to see where they fall, with the gradual goal of seeing where schizophrenia falls, if at all, in a psychodynamic universe (meaning that there is no psycho and no dynamic, but only a neurodynamic break).

What exactly happened to Strindberg remained a question for some time.

that Strindberg entertained some unwholesome ideas, more so in retrospect, is an issue.

such a belief as Nordau’s is a rationalization, subject to categorical thinking, which locks in into a fixed position, which then develops into a prejudice. There is little question that, in my graphs, there are globalists, who have found a way to let the mind wander within itself,

and then localists, minds which find a safe place in its wilderness and thereafter rest there

then, follows the arrival of a tychon, or suspect operator, which weighs down on the minds of others with deleterious events: emptying out, the Figure Eight, the Blue Streak, the Purple People Eater, and mondos, all external things pressed into and onto minds by brainwashing, or by other means. which rots a mind in many ways.

and, then, somehow like this, and I will argue that by the premise of the negative influence of others, something further fixates, and breaks away

and I would imagine that schizophrenia, by its title, still seemingly envisioned as a splitting in two, lies out there.

For the record, Strindberg had five psychological breaks in Paris in 1985 and after

and then according to the suspect narrative that literary criticism has apparently created for this period, he recovered, found god, and all was better

the Inferno covers attacks of 1895 and 96

at the start, Strindberg is in a bad place,

due to a string of bad luck, and negative events, he recoils from life into a black hole. Let’s set this in his loft, in his private life, in the glass onion of a vigilogogic state. And then he suspects that there exists an unknown power, to blame, the first hint of a suspicion of schizophrenia. He sends out a vibe of self-protection in which he refuses all contact that might lead to him discovering who or what that unknown power is. He repels them, in a sort of negative parenthetic carving out or emptying out of culture space by the invisible unfluencing tychon, sensed but not apparent,

in this way, he is surrounded by silence and loneliness. That is, no one to talk to, no one in his life. He has, however, a familiar alibi formation, in order to deflect his suspicions. He thinks that he is poisoning himself ,as a result of his work in alchemy, with chemicals, in his Paris loft. So, his arms swell

The Veins on My Arms Began To Swell Visibly, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 12, May 31, 2023.

He regularly practices bibliomancy, or what I would term, if it was an amazing coincidence, just to strange to ignore, synchroetherrhoe. I do not know if at this point this could be construed as nuts, it IS a way in which ideas can come to you, a form of fantasmata.

though certainly the idea that Strindberg is recategorizing his feelings or thoughts in the language of alchemy suggests this as sort of a crazy form of his own spectral analysis, in a more metaphorical, psychological way.

Then, however, he needs company, so he wanders, here he bounces off some temptation to visit a low-down alley, a place of prostitution. But then, much like Dickens describes Scrooge’s visit to the poor part of town, he comes to a shed which emits smells of flesh, unclear if human, and bad vegetables.

Recoil From A Shed Which Exhales An Oduor of Raw Flesh and Bad Vegetables, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 18, May 31 2023

Since this is only situating, best to keep it as a pure scripograph. As I read it the shed is encountered on the verge or shore of deeper dreaming, in the Land of Nod, Paris at this point but a city in that land, and out of it a repellent smell of bodies and sauerkraut, which disgusts him. This I place at the edge of the Luor, whatever he called it, the in-between, where turbulence is building, and his response to people brushing by him is a clue of his upsetness.

This, however, indicates a deeper drop, as the small street, to have an end like that, must be the devil’s road, a place of life or death, and the gate perhaps a drop of deadfall, preventing him from entering out into ambience, he just sees it as a glare, as if headlights blinding him.

At St Martin’s Gate, Strindberg, Inferno, 1895, 19, May 31, 2023  

But that only a prelude to a true omen, on a shop window, in Rue de Fleurs, initials, a cloud, a rainbow

Omen Accipio! Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 22, May 31, 2023

His refuge is a garden, also a familiar trope. This could simply be an expression of enthusiasm, and not to be read literally, I won’t.

Like I did in 1989, so Strindberg in 1896, he enters little churches for solace and comfort, In the one near the Sorbonne, a Madonna smiles at him, the Cross leaves him cold.

Virgin Mother and Child Smiled At Me…The Cross Left me Cold, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 25m May 31, 2023

This is an all but teratomic depiction of Mother and Child, him coming to them out of a talus maze, to the place of the Blue Well, but constricted by the too soon emptying of the coldness of the cross, making of it a deadfall in the mind, tilting into ambience, in Utrillo Town, in the various labryinthan talus places that are created to seek refuge in. But because he more or less strips mother and child of its relation to the rest of the story it all but makes a Blue Boy image of Jesus as the eternal good little boy, a problematically escapist, domesticating rendition. I picture some of the labyrinth, by teratomic I mean the miracle of the womb has been absorbed into plain biology to render a miracle image as a maternal one only.

Next up he begins to see a pattern, a monument to a chemist of the past, and then a hotel named after that chemist too

On the surface, seeing such things as omens is by no means a symptom of schizophrenia. The pattern seeing is apophenia, a vigilogogic, altered waking state, and then the omenology too. Orfilia is in fact a real person and there is a monument to him in Paris, And a statuesque tomb, though the father of toxicology is so forgotten I am guessing I could ask the man on the street to ID him and it would take a week for a pharmacist with the knowledge to come by. In itself, then, this sort of thing is simply a slightened heightened state of awareness of the meaning of things, omenology, or scrying, which accords with second magnetic sleep stage of mesmeric awareness. Entertain such things to help you make a decision, fine, take it as a sign that you should act on a love, fine, no problem. It is an element of culturing. But, the problem is, he is tending to a secret garden, and by that I mean he is beginning to build up in his mind an alternative view of Paris as his city connected entirely by his meanings and seeing this in a garden and then a hotel and then moving into the hotel because of it this entails the entrainment of a talus, and the first beginnings of creating a village of dreams in the mind, that is, he is letting his mind drop

this is what people do, when in the enchantment of a period of life they hope will work out, and in the living of which it takes up everything and speaks to eternity. He is dropping breadcrumbs, to convince himself life has a way out, a path.

Again and Again, Orfila! Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 26, June 1, 2023.

I know of this state of mind because I instinctively do it every time I have to relocate, and have had to several times in the last  twenty years. Until you make the world yours, and map out your safe places, and your places, and the unsafe border, and the wild space, and the other places, a talus in a city, where a whole life is lived, I was never able to feel safe and secure. The most pronounced form of this that I built up in my mind was when living on Spring Street near the Bowery, especially as there was a strange garden growing with monuments down the block.

The fact that, however, these monumental discoveries are directly related to Strindberg’s interest and practice of alchemy, suggesting that this might be invented history, that is problematic. The problem immediately emerges as Strindberg claims to have written Antibarbarus, which all wiki tells me is a work by Erasmus, not him, so, he is mixing up reality and fiction, or is he?

The literature seems to have decided that though an amateur, Strindberg did study and practice alchemy, and it somehow contributed to his art,

the problem is, and, again, of this I know, is that he made use of it IN A WORK to symbolize his alienation from life and others, and upon which to forge a shoulder chip out of which would grow a spear of resentment and the feeling that the world was ignoring his  genius, and his greatness, and etc. If he had been rejected by mainstream science, see above, then that positions two or three symptoms along the path of developing a psychokiller contra mundem resentment, that can lead to schizo. It acts in passing in the text, and I do this sometimes too, as what I call a Two O’Clock response to a problem, rather than address the issue head on you claim further radicality and a truer answer trumping the mainstream expression of it, and, oh, but it is buried in a work of genius hidden from view and which is unlikely to see the light of day. That he is melding this into the psychological alchemy he is beginning to submit the city of Paris to is problematic.

and, psychodynamically, it sinks Strindberg down to a hypnagogic place, he concedes to living after two nightmares, in a splat or bounce, and thus in the position of syngogy, confusing waking and dreaming, in search of a talisman as a solution to his problems, and increasingly seeing himself situated vis a vis the world in the place of sacrifice, as Paris’s pharmakon, at the edge of which he will die for its sins.

A Devouring Curiosity… Caused By My Frightful Loneliness, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 32, June 1, 2023

That is, the green snake of the second nightmare spiral and fall out, recorded in my studies (see Sinister (2012), and then the lantern of the search for the talisman which is the primary plot trope of that state, leading to various resolutions, but in his case he all but creates morte nature of his beakers poised on the Tarpeian Rock of his tortures, he in a state because of his mental and emotional predicament.

And, then, a really problematic turn

he is saying that he used a picture of his darling daughter as his lifeboat, his pinax, a picture of an ideal, and he had this “unwholesome instinct” now that if his search for alchemic gold was to magically transform his life and get his daughter back, it becomes a kind of black magic, demented.

The problem here is deeper still. I have, over the years, discovered a number of places in the hypnagogic level of the mind which can be kept as safe or quiet, to calm one down. They exist not like lockboxes but as clouds, as it were, where calm interests can exist, to serve the purpose of chilling one out. One of the major such spaces is the Kingdom Porcelain, which I have written of extensively. I imagine it existing in the lower reaches of the glass onion as it, nearer than farther from the central core, it rests into lattice form. Somewhere, around here.

there are also marked the kunstkammer which exists under the edge of the lattice, as see in Suspiria (2018), and then, too, the redoubt under the lip of splat, where one can be unconscious, but still sense horrors above, see Blood Delirium (1987). Sometimes, tropes develop into such situations. The Blue Boy trope, which includes Pinkie, that is, the trope entails the picturing of the good boy and good girl of the middle class imagination, because I picture such pictures hung in houses or even tents in the Village of Dreams, is higher up in the Land of Nod, entoptic, moving down into the glass onion, as see my treatment of this in the Scrooge last December. This is where the pinax as a picture trope rests, the pinax being a salvaged picture of a lost ideal when everything else in your life has been torn apart (meaning, this must be discoverable only in syngogy or epigogy).

This is precisely the trope that Strindberg is now tossing into the mix, as his lifesaver, a single picture of his lost daughter, separation from whom he cannot bear, nor can any father.  

An Unwholesome Instinct With The Picture of My Dear Little Daughter, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 32. Jun 1, 2023

“My only comfort in my cursed existence” is all but a textbook definition of a pinax,

My Only Comfort In A Cursed Existence, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 32, Jun 1, 2023

This one almost too easy, the problem is, he writes one thing, one sentence in hope, and then, next sentence, or very often in the same sentence, before he can get to the end of it, and it is a difficult impulse to resist when you are on the edge of screaming, his POV on his situation is much worse than his apparent situation in his life for real. He catastrophizes, and thus I have to really spy this picture abandoned, and almost invisible, down deep, headed toward a black hole, in the bottomless pit of hell on earth, she too to become, if she germinates as such, his Angel of Milk and Honey to Come. I have to also comment here that Strindberg shifts from one hysteria to another from paragraph to paragraph, it is like he is manic, here, he vents despair, then, very next paragraph, scratch that, I will present my results later

but, then, almost before he can let the dust settle on that manic pronouncement of despair, he gets to work and it only makes things worse because he has a micro psychotic hallucination, of a hyperpareidoliac, or worse, form, gazing into a microscope, he sees the hands of his daughter reaching out for him!

Oh dear. A rrhexis. In April, I looked for a moment into the horror of the Fly )1957), finding that its ontogeny, if you will, was linked to the body horror tropes flowing through Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. This led me to revive an idea that volatile fluctuation in scale in the imagination is a sign of losing it. The depiction of the husband with his fly hand and fly head was terrible enough, but the uncanny horror, which the movie captured better than the book, the book being of the imagination of a French resistance survivor in postwar France, remember, was the having to find daddy’s head on the funny looking fly flying around the garden, and, in the end, shocking Marshall and Price, having finally got caught in a web and being attacked by a spider monster, truly horrible. These sightings have to be considered waking nightmares, and, thus, psychological breaks in the zone of epigogy, or the seeing of monsters. And it is not the whoosh or splat you see, but simply the violent suddenly top to bottom or bottom to top ephialtic leap that you see, and since viewed from on such a high and in such an impossible manifestation that one crushes the impulse to even look at that reverse or negative form of ophthchthony. There is a trope of this, the Cyclops eye, being driven mad by making too much of what one sees in the micro zone, see Suspect Zero (2003), recently worked out, as such, it must be taken as a hallucination, because the connective between top and bottom are not visible, and in this one can have a epigogic bounce out or epigogialtic leap, horrifying to experience.

In Suspect Zero, the Mad Cyclops Eye is shown, a trope going back to Curse of Frankenstein (1056), and then the thing he is zeroing in on with way way way too much wrong thinking, which leads to a kind of madness, and all of this is here, trying to visualize what is going on in this disturbing incident.

I picture here a double event, ophthchthony rebuffed by a reflux, causing the eye to be as if hit back by the shock of what is seen, it being so impossible to see; but then, the dynamic crashing a second time to explosively bounce out into sheer ambient emptiness, before even the growth of the Tarpeian Rock, just a pure raw encounter with the phthchth, the desert of meaninglessness.

The problem of big-little macro-micro fluxuation is that it will unsettle the brain, if it lightning-strikes and thunderclaps too often, just like can happen across the Luor, so, too, here, in the vial as it were of ophthchthony gone bad,

this, can, then, induce a flip, in which the sight of hypnagogy, the little, becomes, momentarily, the reality of the realm of the macro, vigilgogy,

It is also true that Strindberg has said that gold is created by a kind of ontogeny in the process. An example of ontogeny in the process is the fact given by wiki that just as humans have, so fish have, in a certain phase of their embryo development slits and gills, the break of this, the horror of this, almost on par with teratoma, through a kind of death to a discovered ontogeny, is unspeakable. Think of a baby born with an ontogenic regression, gills, or slits where his ribs ought to be.  Thus, an ontogencpsychotic break.

A word. Again. In my writing of this sort, I seek to maintain a certain sense of science, that I am describing real things. But on FB posts I play with the ideas, often purposely making mistakes. And then when I decide to think it through in a verse, I am playing with all the ideas, pure and simple, taking it wherever my mind in the passing moment takes it. It is very possible that Strindberg understood that he was playing too, writing Inferno, but it does get worrisome.

Graphing this out,is the problem.

I saw On The Glass-Slide of the Microscope Two Tiny Hands, White as Alabaster, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 33, Jun 2, 2023.

In Three Adjoining Rooms Pianoa Are Playing, Strindbvrg, Inferno, 1896, 34, Jun 2, 2023.

This is a classic thrin, that is, a three part separation of self, either by mirror, or, in the case of the vision in The Lodge (2019), a house of three parts, here it consists primarily of music, that is, tonality, but as it comes to him to annoy him causing him to imagine that he is stuck, while trying to sleep, in a deadfall, falling in a talus formation of repetition from the Village of Dreams, into Utrillo Town, into, at last, the deadfall, as in all such descants, a sign of mental strife.

Then, he wakes up the next morning, and hears knocking (like I did this morning at 730, they are installing rocks behind my window to keep it all from flooding), and after going a little crazy about where the noise is coming from he decides that some ladies are doing some rapping, This is not 1980s Black music, but table rapping, which developed as a curious poltergeist way for spirits to communicate with the living through tables and the like, and it of course world cause a lot of noise. In the book that The Quiet Ones (2014) was based on,the rapping becomes he primary means by which the presence of the group-crated Peter was known to them. But as the source of a general possession by rapping spirits, it sounded paranoid. That said, it is fun, when you hear a noise that you do not recognize, trying to figure out by visualization what is going on, so,

To Make Me Believe That There Are 3 ‘Rapping Spirits” in the House, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 35, Jun 2, 2023

Again, this is another drift from vigilogogy to hypnagogy, in the Paris of Nod, and it again seeks to push him or press him out into ambience, by way of a vision of a deadfall, in this case, borrowed from the book source of the Quiet Ones (2014), the Philip Experiment, creating an egregore, to him imagining, frantically, that the entire room is clattering all over with tables.

I cannot say yet if these are driving him out of central consciousness, into ambience, and if that would be a threshold of madness, but….

Nerval did this too, especially as involved the crossstreet headed down to the river in which he hung himself, but this evinces a pressure on him pushing him down into crawlspace as much as out into ambience. The fact that he sees something in an alley, this is the devil’s road, meaning that things have become life and death, and he is in a nightmare haunted state.

the central envelope of Paris lends itself to such urbanomancy, it becomes a forest of signs, both by its uniformity of decrepitude, and its air of history, wherein everything in the central city in fact dissolves in ambience into a cardboard palace of world space, as I wrote about in 1993. But, here, while the original sighting is not worrisome, he sees a love token that tells him everything will be ok with his wife (I had similar sights attuned to the Bangles soug Dreaming, which I kept hearing over and over again wherever I went in my 1989 visit, when I first discovered the rot of Paris in time), but then he doubles up on it to think it also the formula of an alchemical sort that will solve the ultimate problem of making gold, and just like Horbiger and his vision of world ice theory, so here, kind of nuts. It is the doubling up which suggests that a monocultural peripteral wall is closing in around him, like the wobble wall in Donnie Darko (2002), and he is beginning to break out into and past it, far from reality.

She Loves Me, Still! Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 38, Jun 2, 2023

As a scirpograph, this pictures him splat after a second nightmare, thus in a state of syngogy, unclear whether or not he is asleep or awake. Then, he is in an alley, that is, he splats onto the devil’s road, and in this narrow crawlspace inside Paris he sees what he imagines to be as if a relic of the Roman era risen up out of the ground by magic, and not a cast away piece of restaurant decoration, and IT then gazes on the wall, almost in the manner of a projector, and it imprints on the wall the initials FS, which firsr signifies his wife, then, the secret of gold. To entertain such omens poetically, fine, to believe that some supernatural force in that Roman bust is speaking to him, problematic. It is, in any case, a very nice placement of a type of statue I call a Cassandra statue, bespeaking truths revealed after some time drifting in ambience.

This then drives him back to his garret to try to solve the problem of gold making, but he is once again interrupted by madness, as he sees rise out of the boil a figure of a demon, shockingly, in terms of personal synchroetherrhoe, where the hippalektryon is symbol of the manic frame of mind after covid, he sees a twisted hunk of coal which has a cock’s head and a human body.

I Take Out A Mass of Coal Of Fantastic Shape, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 39, Jun 2, 2023. ‘

This is, given my recent interest, and the fact that at the moment passing time is under the aegis or epistasis of the “floating rocks” in an enclosure of static mode, the bottomless pit, this is rather easy, a mass of coal, and then not just a pareidolia, the cock, but a hyper pareidolia, with twisted human figure below. This is, then, in fact, as he says, a “demon” (of the mind), giving figure to a mental state, and when the hippalektryon emerged in 2020 I saw it as symbolizing a chicken with its head cut off topping a horse neighing nonsense, it is still my avatar image on FB, even though I did not intend it as self-criticism. This would read, possibly, as mad in 1896, though this kind of scrying was no doubt the end result of most amateur alchemy made use of simply as a field to offer up pareidols with meaning, but also as a symbolist thing. The extra issue that I have is that Strindberg with his Swedefro looks kind of crazy too, this might be a hyper-mondo, in that he is seeing only himself in the boil of the magic alchemical pot. And if this followed on the same night as his vision in the alley, a manic episode.

Then he makes an art gallery of it, drawing out of the boil, two more pareidols,

He Asks Who “Made” Them, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 39, Jun 2, 2023.

Who knows whom he mentions, but it underscores the idea that sculpture then was, in fact, tableaux of figures in locked embraces in the Rodin mode (and even Crowley visited Rodin’s studio and wrote poems about him, all the fanfare of cultural interchange, dissolving as it does in time,). But would a Norwegian sculptor of the era have worked in coal?

this ensemble not only exposed his alchemy is but a metaphorical practice, given a semblance of reality by the mystery of pareidoliac apophenia, stirring up figures that might have been at a medieval witches sabbath, is a masterpice of primitive art, in all cases hee superimposes over pareidolia a reading ffrom alchemy to see the figures as cyphers drawn out of nature itself and thus communicating to him secrets that might lead him further down the boil. Indeed, when next he plays with his discovered amateur works of art, no doubt in some museum somewhere, if we are saving pictures of Strindberg’s production of gold, he

puts them on the windowsill to see how the sparrows will react (and this then pinging off discovery of the wisdom of Roberta Sparrow this week); and when they shy off, much like a bird shies off the hanging DVD foo fighters outside my window, where men were digging in under the wall to enter my room by the floor this week, and then too statues of owls routinely used to shoo off birds, the birds react, therefore, he thinks, some years before Uexhull, that the sculptures must have in them some conjunction of dead material and fire, thus, essential truths. But, of course, he is off target in zeroing in on gold.

Then, right on time, he begins to receive suspicious mail

the odd thing about this sudden rrhexis is that it starts in a fairly safe place in the mind. I would have thought having three self-made miracle sculptures placed on a table to ground his practice in them, and make of them eurekas, places them in a kunstkammer under the lattice, which usually leads to good things. A eureka is a waking vision of solution and magic that has the shape of a nightmare but is not a nightmare, but a daydream vision. Perhaps it has an element of fata morgana, or of eschatia, in either case, it is positive; But now he immediately sees the presence of an occult power, a tychon, an operator, pulling strings behind the scenes, trying to undo him. This is problematic.

Perhaps because Strindberg now fancies himself an artist he has some bohemian moments, right out of Trilby, which I have left for the moment, This artist and this picture might be real,

one hardly knows if this is a real hope by the artist, as the Salon by then had become an official art world that with that sort of patronage conformed it to the mainstream of taste of the time and as a result, and we have made the same mistake, produced a lot of incidental and conventional junk.

rather like the idea of a figure on a high ladder hanging a painting as the real-world machine or tychonic rhabdom behind a symbolization thereof, an ersatz secular crucifixion

endless painters, this one site focuses on an unknown

then, Schlatter

and Strindberg gets a case of twinfire! The problem with the idea of the double

my understanding of the aspect of a double in the occult with a theosophical tone at that time was that a double was as if a tulpa created by a person having a twinfire moment to then think that the person that looks like the other one is a double living by astral projection in another place in the world, allowing you to travel back and forth. Crowley had some encounters of this sort too. Though I acknowledge pareidolia as a normal aspect of vision, seeing a double, and imaging it to be a doppelganger, or a person one knows to be a doppelganger of another famous person, is problematic. For me, it announces the activation of the tyche, or figure of fate, or operator, this creates the figure eight, out of the binaryizing of life of which twinfire emerges, an error of thinking and seeing, but such a deep, deep trope, lying at the bottom of so much distress. And here is Strindberg now thinking that a painter friend, wiki says it is Paul Hermann, is a doppelganger of the gone missing Francie Schlatter (see later).

This is a pure improvisation, but it figurally submits the Blue Streak and the Purple People Eater, forces fallen out of the Figure Eight, for the Figure Eight to be itself made over as a giant form of Dioscurious, or Gemel, he who, by activating the two forces simultaneously, causes Moonfire to generate from ambience back into core vigilogogy, something like this (without going further into it, to be continued)

Francis Schlatter Is the Double Who Leads an Independent Life Without Being Aware of It, Strindberg, Inferno, 1896, 44, Jun 2, 2023.

With apologies to any mention made that this too is a “masterpiece of primitive culture” 39.

End Part 1 of 4

Chayevsky’s Altered States (1978) and visualizing the Ommatidium, pt. 3 of 3.

Rev., May 29, 2023.

Still strangely communicating through coded vocabulary, Chayevsky leads us through the bruits, spreads of wounds, or papilledema, or swelling of the optic nerve due to tumor, as he is tested.

he communicates in writing, just like in The fFy,

Parrish thinks externalization theory is shit,

Then, of course, the bottomless pit is represented, usually, or at least its foyer, by basements and tunnels. These empty spaces are such a trope in movies that I even got excited when in White House Plumbers they hid out for a few hours in the empty ballroom of the Watergate Hotel, then entered by surreptitious means.

the suggestion that he is an akinetic mutant suggests him as a “rhytchron” of self, but at the point when a fear vector switches to on, as akinesis is when one is paralyzed and unable to move, construable as like to the deer in the headlights freeze state. It may be that the presence of puppets and automatons at the vanishing point of the whoosh below a story of psychic powers is this form of zombie, to start things off. But this conversational opener is immediately shot down. Jessup’s explanation of what happened is germane. He argues that he had a hallucination, and then walked into it, to make it seem real. Since he had willed himself to become his essential self, what I call a styro demon, making of his remaining self above a frozen periokiontic self, this would take place in syngogy, if under the High Light, more awake. But then he stepped out of the hallucination, and his idea is that the hallucination had become something like ectoplasm clinging to him and it spilled out with his body into reality, and that is what it was. Since he is saying that his hallucination surrounded and decomposed his body, replacing it with a body tunnel, which wandered that dream world in its most essential form, not unlike the wandering in Wolfwalkers (2019) when she became the trace of her smell, he then coming out had an encounter with another5 demon,TIND-TIRH, and thus spilled out.

but because iti went so far back in time, apparently, he wonders if some sort of time warp did not occur

then they took xrays, and Jessup is, of course, excited that the hyoid bone, which supports the tongue, another Chayevsky word, confirming actual transmogrification. Parrish, of course, as in the movie, says it is impossible,

he is then nonplussed when the x-ray expert utters a line I remember from the movie,

Eddie has gone further with the physics angle, now he went to a black hole

he also believes that this was an event of consciousness. This, I consider. In modernist thought there was conscious and unconscious, awake and deep REM, only (in general terminology, though Jung et al did explore hypnagogic states). By contrast I identify the word consciousness with the consciousness of the rational mind, awake in the world today. But, then, there are altered states, vigilogogic consciousness, and hypnagogic consciousness. There is also, in deeper sleep, syngogy and epigogy ,as one moves through nightmares, and at the end of it cosmogogy. So, six, and then I supposed I can classify all manipulated awareness, such as mondos and et al, as false consciousness. So, tre seven consciousnesses. What he is figuring out here, that is, giving figure to in fiction, though Chayevsky is talking it to death, is epigogy, he saw himself as a monster because he had advanced past the third nightmare to see monsters.

And he anthropologizes the unconscious, if it hides buried things, then it can hide all buried things, including a genetic code going back millions of years, and, therefore, inside the head, or hypnagogic, and able to be travelled back through that storage to then step out into a million years ago. This is comparable to LR Hubbard’s previous life fantasies and does not sound believable. Worse, this would be raw brain, the world of the millions of dormant atoms in the brain, which can come out.

The idea that each individual of the species contains within it the whole history of the species is the microcosm/macrocosm, phylogeny/ontogeny problem, a romantic ideal, not, I would think, real.

then it happens, he turns

and the word for the surface or incline into the bottomless pit, of the pit, covered in stones, is SCREE

The problem here, and in the movie, is that things switch to general POV at this time. The humanoid is depicted as if an animal seen in contemporary reality, a real being, when it remains, however physical it is, the result of a complicated twists and spins of hypnagogic states of mind. If a case of radical reverse agency, and extreme ostension, but also an example of an apport, or the term for an object in a dream brought back as a physical object with you, it carries with its POV a halo of the rest of what it went through to get there, and those states had to be considered in the seeing of it. This treatment, and in the movie, makes this creature less scary even than in American Werewolf in London.

its POV would have to be transitional, or, if the things experienced below were toxic, a teratoma, hybrid, part one dream state, part another, but then the form having decayed in the elevation.

it is only because Jessup is made into the ultimate hippie god fucker who wanted to touch upon the essence of life in all things that he comes back at all, and intact, is changed. The debris of the process of his dereglement of the senses has to continue to exist in a half-life form in the framing or shaping of the visual world seen by the beast. A landscape consisting of those elements, scattered about, and especially if from out of the bottomless pit, I will call the SCREE. It is elements of the pit and the nightmare that come back to be real, in reality. All PC says here is that the creature had less interest in mechanical objects then a cat for a tv. Though a park looks like grassland to him.

still, Jessup goes all primal on this. It was the most supremely satisfying time of my life. This is a gross misunderstanding of what gives a human being pleasure and satisfaction. Being reduced to primal needs, and only those needs, is poverty. To have to worry about those needs all the time is misery. There is nothing primal about it, or even about so-called primal man. No human being ever on earth in any era since the development of full brain was ever able to get past the brain to the primal. That is because the world is perceived in a POV according to certain constructs. Mimetic animal behavior adopted by man, or inherited from animals, can ground a human behavior in a way that exudes agency, but it is still based on imitation or inheritance, rearranging mentally. This means in humans these impulses are layered over in cult, intercessional, votive and apotropaic ritual forms, which is the layer where agency appears. By contrast, contemporary interstitium life is so frantic with self-generated toad road formations that it represents a kind of relief to regress to simpler ways. But they are still human ways. I use the model of Uexhull’s Umwelt to circumscribe a territory for human behavior that is intense and meaningful, but a drama about a man living in a bush without contact for eighteen years until an animal happens by to kill, the fate of the tick, would not make an agentic movie. From Burkert’s Creation I derived elements of the averruncate vector, in imitation of pars pro toto defenses that animals undertake to save themselves from predators. Bur, to follow Deleuze & Guattari, that vector is a human machine, part of the process, not nature. There was something so disorienting and confused about the 70s that I suppose that this sort of reactive essentialism felt good, but, though there is a strong retrograde movement back to this, this is silly

But this forbidden region between does sound something like Artaud’s zone of decomposition

Then Jessup goes cosmic

It is somewhat interesting that they chose Walpurgisnacht for the night of the final experiment

and, finally, an event,

Scream So Piercing and Agonizing That It Brough Emily’s Hysteria to an End, Altered States, 1978, 161m May 23, 2023.

It may seem a bit much that Chayevsky is attempting to recreate Munch’s Scream in a work of popular sci fi, but there it is. I place this in the tank room, that is, this is controlled by the tank as the tychonic machine which has exploded, but the way it is worded, it makes me place the event inside the kenosis of the Rings of Saturn dream form, for the Tank and the High Light would empty things out. But then it wages the war as if the attack of a sleep demon at the closest in wrung of a sleep demon attack, where, as the attack occur, a part of the old self drops away, the perikionos, or telemon, which is Jessup as that white figure, and then a part of him separates out to seek victory, if it wins a Corposant, if fails a Crepusculate, the scream here seems to suggest a loss.

But, then, a pyrrhic victory, and thus the overture leading to the finale, the victory of love over all. For the scream finally calmed down Emily, and then she enters the room.

this description of his changing color again invites me to make use of my decomposition graphic, using all colors involved in a descent and ascent from the bottomless pit from and to he rings of saturn.

Form Itself Seemed to Be Dissolving in Shimmering Vibrations, Altered States, 1978, 161, May 23, 2023.

Enough? Nope.

in the vector resolution, if a perikionic statute of self drops away, the Blue Angel appears, to lead you out, as a Corposant, if one loses, one implodes to become a Crepusculate. The fact that his bowels erupted into flames suggests a pretzeling destruction of self.

Bowels Erupted In Flames, Rekindling the Maniacal Carnage of Colors, Altered States, 1978, 162, May 23, 2023.

So, then, it bottoms out, sort of,

Emily Flung Herself Upon the Shuddering, Shapeless Antimatter of her Husband and Embraced Him, Altered States, 1978, 162, May 23, 2023.

I have stripped bare Emily and speckled her in blue because in this role, though I seriously doubt Chayevsky had in mind Neoplatonic psychomachia, she becomes as if the Blue Angel, promising a good outcome, she is pink and blue because she in this action represents the saving grace of the Blue Boy and Pinkie

soulmating, which remains the persistent trope of middle class notions of true love as a kind of saviourship. No, really, this is what it says

The Fluctuating Extensions of Matter That Still Retained the Barely Distinguishable Shape of Arms Flowed Out and Enfolded Themselves Around His Wife, Altered States, 1978, 182, May 23, 2023.

Taking him home, in between further after shock body zaps and body melts, Emily finally figures out which type of the 1960s America Jessup was, a god fucker, He finally got it off with god. 

the embrace of the absolute. We were all bits of transitory matter to him. This I have to contest. Jessup is obviously a body with organs, molarly attached to the world, and to such an extent due to his preposession of selfhood that in order to validate himself he has to identify with the primal, the original, the ur, the absolute, this is all, as D&G would say, ego psychiatry. By contrast, it is the body without organs that fails to connect with people, who are merely transitory atoms to it, not that he likes it that way it is just not possible for him to make such attached connections.

But this prompts in her a revisiting in nightmare of the horror of it, causing her nude body to arch and then whence exposed lunge at him to give him a vampire kiss, all while asleep. A parasomic nightmare, are. But it seems to indicate that Jessup really does not get it.

She Was Sucking at His Mouth with the Rapacity of a Vampire, Altered States, 1978, 173, May 23, 2023

I suspect something going on here, in the seeing of it. Whilst reviewing Artaud’s visions in Peyote Dance he discerned a split nature of hallucinatory sight that I had not previously known, but experienced in January. I was beset by an overcast of endless numbers and letters, the system of the world bearing down on me. I took it to be a response to too much stimulation caused by the world of signs that hospitals are, and which I limit my exposure to. But, then, propofol stimulated my phosphenes, and being twisted around three or four times topsy turvy during the course of trying to salvage a failed surgery, perhaps that added to an internal dizzy attack, and thus caused the spillage. But, then, just as Artaud described it, when I peered in to make a record of it, it was as if there was a film of liquid in front of my eyes which made it impossible to read it, as described above. It then follows that the mechanisms of popular culture or the culture at large exposed to raw brain in order to subdue you. Artaud described the upper level as shards of broken glass, the lower level of a mass of little bells held together by leather falcon jesses. Chayevsky seems to want to catch the viewer in between these spaces, first with overwritten scientific exposition, and then with a recurrent run of perfect words, vocabulary words that the average reader has to look up, vermiform, effulgent. helix, annulate, neural tube, lapilli, geosyncline, bruit, hyoid, scree. It is another case of synchroetherrhoe that after reading of Artaud calling the filmy blurry level as held together by jesses, and thinking to call it the jessum, I then pick up a book, very next book, and the main character’s name, and a hallucinatory, is Jessup. But I wonder if Chayevsky’s art is paperback writer popular culture at heart, and that it rather belongs in line with Bradford Boobis who manipulated the double ply of such visual presmyopia with outofgenre literalism and then a slick pure visual effect equating the blur with depth and deepness

And the problem being that though the Filmy Blur is a real thing, and occurred in my case during a hallucination, it lends itself to being exploited by an artist who can find an easy trick in making it work as a product of an artistic hand.

And I sense this blur effect in the rather uptight way in which Chayevsky depicts nudity, here she is nude, and perching on a chair, and she is “gracile,” meaning slender and trim in a charming way, and then her nakedness is “shameless”

even when Jessup has an idea of how to exorcise the thing from him, Chayevsky calls it an evulsion, which is a plucking out, but by violent action, like a tooth pull

and you know what that means? He doesn’t want to fuck god, because HE is truth, not god

In the final scenes, of course, this resolves into a metaphor for true love, which strikes me as 70s nonsense. This is as far as I need to go, having tried to visualize, playing the descriptions against my graphic system for mapping out dream states, all of which indicates, while Chayevsky got carried away with scientific jargon, making Jessup an entirely unsympathetic character in the book, he did indeed try to visualize strange altered states, and this was my reading of these vivid moments in his only novel.