the true DADA spirit

Today I read a book called 'The Post-human Dada Guide'. I was relatively short but filled with info and ideas that at some points came to me as revelations. The basis of the book is that Lenin, the communist revolutionary and Tristan Tzara, the dadaist poet and visionary, are in a chess match. Lenin's communist ideas of establishing logic and order stand as opposite to the dada vision of creating chaos and madness, but both are opposed to the same thing - capitalism. For such a short book, there was a lot to it and I highly reccomend reading it.

I have been fascinated with dadaism for a long time and found it very hard to pin down as a movement. The dadaist wanted to unleash the human spirit in it's rawest form and were very nihilist. They were anti-art and anti-future, dedicated to shocking the bourgeois. Societies excessive rationality was what led to the devestation of the first world war, and dadaism was mainly an outcry againist it. However, how could such a nihilistic movement stand for something so humanistic? This is a contradiction, and the dadaist thrived on them.

Throughout my life I have encounters many contradictions within my own life and belief systems. I've talked about them on here before, and one of the things i've learned from the dadaist (though I don't think you're supposed to 'learn' from them) is to embrace these contradictions. The very essense of humanity and existense is full of contradictions, and dada strives to embrace the human spirit in it's most unadulterated and true form.

hello

Inside of their slightly cramped and noisy den filled with pungent smell a small group of youth filled each other heads. It was a rap session in the truest sense. Often 3 or 4 conversations would bounce of each other, occurring at the same time, gliding in divergent paths only to come back together. A genuine lack of ego kept one voice from claiming dominant authority. Some kind of pre-modern tribal conscience had taken form in the room. Often a complete silence would take over, and often the overwhelming laughter noise would fill the room. It was something real, something removed from the consumer centric life that they were raised to live. IT wasn't really anything more than the youth sitting around pining for desire as Blake would say, but at the same time it seemed like something more. There was a feeling that countered the lack of seriousness, a feeling that together with their youth and vitality and willingness to look beyond what they were taught to see that something new could be found, something beyond them and better than them. Maybe it was all an illusion - and it was. But as far as they could tell everything else was an illusion too. Between all their babble and idealism there was a legitimate sense of community. It was a community where everyone was equal yet was allowed to strive for the outer reaches of their desires. It was from this where the true sense of euphoria came from, the sense that they could join together yet be themselves. It was their secret church. They gathered here at the end of a week full of work and mundanity to experience something that stood in stark contrast to what happened before.

it's night now
the sky is smeared with oil
and occasionally shining
looking through to us
at our vast maze of inconvenience,
boredom, aggravation, and arrogance

the streets are filled with small talk and
wandering loners, who find inspiration
to romanticize despair
mumbling their rants and raps and soliloquies
of accepting the absurd till the edge wears off

some are skeletons waiting to break apart
when the time is right, to leave their heads and flesh
behind and shatter

while the animals of the id scream and moan
in their trances of pleasure, of frenzy and dissociation
mindless and proud of their deathlike freedom

is the spirit of our age an ugly spirit?

"According to Hegelian philosophy, all historical change results from dialectics. Everything takes place in what Hegel called geist, a collective spirit or consciousness. The prevailing spirit of a time is called a thesis. As we move through time, the thesis is confronted by something new and different, called an antithesis. As these two currents clash and mingle, the result is synthesis, something still newer which emerges from the conflict. Synthesis is the cutting edge of history, where past meets future and growth occurs; synthesis moves the geist through time."

Some questions I have for those who exist within my generation:
1. What is our culture? What defines us? What is our geist?
2. Are you one with the thesis or the antithesis?
3. When will synthesis occur? Will we know when it's occurring or will only hindsight reveal such a thing?
4. When the counter-culture (antithesis) becomes the prevailing culture (thesis), is it more common for human to degrade to the previous culture or to design an original culture and look forward?

Aliens: fact or fiction?

This is not a logical look into the UFO phenomenon using a scientific attitude. UFO's and alien encounters are a phenomena that science at this point can't get a grip on. However one cannot deny that it is a phenomena; the question is more about it's explanation that it's actual existence. There is no denying that people see inexplicable lights in the sky and have experience of being kidnapped by cosmic visitors. Many explanations for these various phenomena have been provided by scientist and public officials, but often they seem even more ridiculous than alien phenomena - for example, the explanation of UFO's by the Air Force as being clouds formed by swamp gas, or the unsatisfactory explanation of alien abductions as sleep paralysis. There is something going on, and it's something eerie.

My fascination with the UFO Phenomenon has lasted almost my entire life. At this point I'd say it's at a low, but there are faint traces of it in my thoughts that I feel a need to explain them. Space in general was a topic that I obsessed over as a child, so my particular need to learn about every facet of man's supposed encounter with extraterrestrial beings seems to be expected. Memories of this time period are very disjointed and sparse, but I have certain recollections that still affect me quite a bit.

For example at one point I had thought I was abducted by aliens - an idea that seems ridiculous today, but seemed very real to me as a child. I got out of bed to use the bathroom, saw an alien (of the 'grey' variety) and then woke up the next morning. It was strange, but so long ago I have trouble believing it even happened. Ever since then UFOs were an object of intense fascination. I read everything I could on the internet, which was when I first started to use it. Everything about UFOs, fascinated, yet terrified me.

I read more and more about about alien abductions, close encounters, ancient astronauts, and all kinds of kooky and whacked out phenomena that made my parents think I was a lunatic. I got yelled at by a teacher for talking about Roswell because I was apparently scaring my classmates, and was punished with any mention of 'spacemen' or 'alien invasions'. It was my thing - my obsession, my hobby. I wanted to be an expert on UFOs. This continued for a while. But fear kept me from delving too far.

I was just as terrified by 'the greys' and their craft as I was fascinated. That classic image of their faces - with the cold black slanted eyes and clammy skin - haunted me. Whenever I saw it a jolt of fear would rush down my spine. It made it so that when I watched documentaries on the topic or visited webpages I would have to look in a state of absolute fear.

Nightmares were also clouded with aliens. Sometimes I had to run from them because they lived in my closet, sometimes they were the anchors on news channels, sometimes their crafts parked in my backyard. It was the product of an imagination that wasn't taught restraint. There were occasions when I'd wake up and think the aliens were right by my bed, only to wake up again finding myself rolled in a paranoid fetal position. My subconscious mind was haunted by space aliens. To some extent they still are.

My next period of UFO fixation occurred in the earliest years of my teenage life. I had developed much better logic and reasoning skills and had learned about the scientific method. Questioning religion and god became ordinary things for me to do. And for some strange reason my UFO obsession was returning. I was still terrified, but now I had a grasp on it. The idea of sentient beings from other planets watching over our cities and farms and simple suburban communities didn't seem right. It freaked me out in a philosophical sense. When I was younger, I was more afraid of being the victim of an alien encounter. By now I was just bothered by the very idea that those kind of things even happened.

Essentially I didn't want to believe in aliens. I convinced myself that they were all hoaxes, natural phenomena, the products of minds gone astray. Doing as much research possible, wasting my summer reading books and webpages, I found ways to convince myself that the greys weren't real. It only lasted for so long. Around the same time I stopped believing in god and I started to believe in aliens. For some reason it seemed impossible not to think something beyond Earth was going on. It's hard to explain exactly. I wanted to think god was real, and I wanted to think that Earth was for humans and that no one smarter that us was coming down from the skies and messing around with us.

Now it seems like UFO's are a topic that I rarely devote time and research too. They cross my mind and I think "whoa, that's kinda strange". But I suppose it's because my years of obsessions taught me one thing - in the world of a fringe topic like UFOs, it's impossible to separate the lunatics from those legitimately interested in the truth. They both mingle and often they all come out the same. Sometimes they are the same. With a topic as bizarre and mysterious as UFOs, filled with stories and theories that sit firmly outside the mainstream media as forms of urban legends that have yet to be contested it's hard to tell what is real and what is not.

As of now I don't have a firm stance on UFOs. I don't think there's enough information to know exactly what the saucers over Mexico City were, or what certain police officers reported seeing that one New York City night, or what kind of psychological phenomenon is going on when people report alien abductions. I acknowledge the existence of this phenomena, but I also acknowledge that it's dealing with the unknowable, and one can only venture so far into the unknowable without losing it.