Children of the Atom

Modern streamofconsciousness meets the postmodern signifying event, splitting the atom, nuclear fission, becomes reverse osmosis dialogue coition as one, the monologue:

Y'know, lately Ive been thinking about all of postmodernism, and even the beat movement etcetera that preceded it as just straight up a reaction to thermonuclear war like, just the very notion, the unthinkable idea that in seconds we could destroy our entire planet, everyone just completely threw the notion that things were important out the window and decided to live it up with the time we have left on this doomed planet and maybe even the contemporary environmental movement is the same sort of instinct of trying to preserve whats so delicate exactly, the trinity tests, life in a post-atomic world, everything changed but maybe that puts too fine a point on it though, to say its just a straight up cause and effect relationship, but maybe not, yeah, exactly when we saw ourselves from the moon, we realized how small we are but when we realized that we could just destroy ourselves, our accomplishments, our big fucking skyscrapers none of that mattered, was noticeable from space: this is it, this is where the postmodern condition comes from, even if we never use it like, so much just comes back to this idea, all of game theory, most of ethics, especailly contract ethics: it all comes back to the mushroom cloud, irreversible, hair-trigger responses to others actions, living life under the gun, mutually assured destruction, reasoning in situations of ignorance, risk, pure competition (zero-sum games i.e. we both are destoryed), mixed competition, co-operative games, it really was all invented after the bomb. Duck and cover. Talk about a pathetic resistence to your own futility: "you're not helpless!! Get under your desk, you're still in control, we promise!" It's the culture of fear, we have to scare our own people into submission: the commies will kill you, the terrorists will kill you, drugs will kill you-- and there is one person who can save you: me: "look just let me take all this money ear-marked for ummm medicine and education give it to my buddies...ahem the military industrial complex and we'll keep you safe, we'll go kill them over there!" Everything is kind of a result of this atomic moment-- what it really means that we can be destroyed in seconds. The phrase "atomic children" comes to mind, is too familiar, how this thing capable of blowing us all into stardust is really the key to great strength.

Modernism I: The Spatialization of Time I

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

--Revelation 8:1

Our Worlds at Word

A letter to "Henry Flowers" Leopold Bloom:

I am sorry you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

My oath to postmodernism:

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

--Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita

We knew the world would not be the same.

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the word would not be the same.

A Question of Aesthetics

Thoroughly Post-Modern Millie

This sort of a treatise on the postmodern ethos. Although, all of it entailed, I'm not completely happy labeling it as postmodern per say. Rather I think it lies somewhere between modernism and post-postmodernism, cut-ups and intertextuality aside.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

- Pablo Picasso

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

- Ecclesiastes 12:12