Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: Anxiety, Discontents, Gnosis of Mad Artists - pontos fathom podcast EP08

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 Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: Anxiety, Discontents, Gnosis of Mad Artists
- pontos fathom podcast EP08

Welcome seventh episode of the pontos fathom podcast - The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: Anxiety, Discontents, Gnosis of Mad Artists - pontos fathom podcast EP08. In this episode we begin the month long exploration of the Exegesis of Phillip K Dick as notebook and inspiration for PKD writing in works like Valis, Ubik, and Timothy Archer. Topics explored in PDK's Exegesis event from 1974 delving deep into the nature of Gnosticism, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Lacan's work on Anxiety. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! If you enjoyed this, consider giving a thumbs up and subscribe if you want to! Please checkout these links below to support the channel. Thanks!


Flowing the Tears of a Flesh Android: The Curiously Short Occupancy Of Obiden https://www.amazon.com/Flowing-Tears-Flesh-Android-Curiously/dp/1684747880

welcome everyone to pontos fathom press and thanks for joining our pontos fathom podcast episode eight the first in a month-long series of podcasts on the exegesis of philip k dick and we are going to go deep into the connections of dick uh not only referencing his own writing and how the exegesis texts and the event shaped his thinking how it relates to other philosophical and psychological things that we that we think are interesting but also the impact that it has in the sense of a writer's notebooks a friend of mine called the exegesis of philip k dick chernobyl for a white dude and i think it's uh it's impossible to summarize what this book is but we will approach it from the point of view of conversations i would appreciate your guys uh comments below as we do these and as you know we're joining this uh we're growing this channel not only as an extension of pontos fathom press and our book publishing but also just to have a place where we could share ideas talk about the books that inspired us and our authors and inspire you and get that conversation going while we were talking about the madness of philip k dick just want to talk about the madness of benzemagos this is flowing the tears of a flesh android the curiously short occupancy of obiden it is in severely redacted form from government regulation but it is a fantastic look and homage in some ways to writers like dick or william s burroughs into the salinity levels of a the first flesh android in chief and how the tentacle viability has been kept uh sufficiently saliented uh through the flowing of his tears by his uh ceo cog operative dr rhona crown who just descended from the cog low orbital satellite keeps the candidate viable for that curiously short occupancy so if you guys would like to support the channel i'd love you to pick up a copy of the benson magos book links are below in the description let's kind of talk about the exegesis of phil q dick let's kind of frame it uh you know this jonathan lethem pamela jackson edition of this book is fantastic there's even more stuff than this but maybe we'll just frame it for you uh quickly with the quote from foucault in his history of madness he just has this quote where he says madness the absence of an ubra right so we want to talk a little bit about that in the first round but i just want to frame things for us in the sense of hey there's always been these great writers who have had some kind of mad urge to write i mean if you look at this lacan's odd synthome lectures which are really about that same foucault quote except in the case of joyce right so you look at joyce's writings his ulysses his finnegan's wake as a you know a literary coming of age of humanity in a way into the idea of the places and spaces of consciousness and its relation to text and i think that that's a great place to sort of kick off the framing of philip k dick's exegesis because not only is it kind of a life's work or a life's notebook not only is it behind lots of his other novels i mean you see elements of it in valles you see elements of it in um emerging in places like ubik even but a lot of it is the shakespearean notion of the world is not what it seems but then sort of fused together with let's say political activism almost where the idea of is it satisfactory for us living in a sort of fallen world or even living in a gnostic world what's our position in a gnostic world right and finally what's our relationship to the sort of the sci-fi aspect of dick which is you know there there is a progress happening or seemingly progress happening you know science fiction has always been a hopeful projection into the future of mankind right so you have this dick as the science fiction author who's prophesying in some ways the future through technological means and then you have dick this sort of political social commentator who's sort of looking at the black iron prison which comes out of this too the looking at the idea of there's always something a bit dystopian about everything and in the middle of that you've got this event that happens for philip k dick and this cover the the designers of this book put together is just fantastic um it's somewhat of the infinity symbol but it's also somewhat of the christian uh ichthyos figure the christian fish so quickly for the people who don't know the um the idea of dick's exegesis was um there's a quote here what can i do what best can i do exactly what i've done my voice for the voiceless right and so this defies summary but then again i will kind of try to summarize there was an event that happened a series of events that happened to dick some of its memory some of its dreams some of its experience right one of the key moments around this exegesis writing the triggering of this exegesis notebook writing is and guys if i get it wrong just kind of can comment in the comments but the way i understand it is dick had had some uh uh had some tooth surgery oral surgery done and he was waiting for some medicine to come from the pharmacy some painkillers so you can imagine he was in pain he was waiting for the sort of the drugs to come for to deal with that from his prescription uh the delivery comes to the house so you i i don't know if you guys know that you're in that post novocaine state you're in that post-surgery say everything's kind of off uh there's a bit of a pain high almost let's say plus knowing dick's character is being somewhat anxiety-ridden somewhat uh schizophrenic even not sure what his real diagnoses were i'm just saying something from my point of view of how he seems to fuel his creativity let's call it and the doorbell rings a package of of these painkillers arrives and the delivery person the woman was wearing that christian symbol this christian symbol as a necklace right so that ichthys uh christ the fishroom of men sort of thing and the way dick describes it i'm paraphrasing here quickly is uh the sunlight shines off of this pendant that the delivery woman is wearing and a pinkish purplish color out of space even beam of light shines into shines into dick's eyes right and and from that he gets the sensation of uh information being downloaded now you gotta remember this is 1974. there's no internet there's no concept of downloading i mean maybe the closest thing that this kind of equates to in in the zeitgeist of the time would be the the light montage of 2001 a space odyssey right so there was this is a time before there's internet this is people used to read newspapers had the phone connected to the wall you know put coins in the door to get out no no just kidding and uh so dick has this sensation that there's a stream of logic maybe like as patti smith would say cold streams of logic we're just beaming through this pink ray off the christian symbol downloading uh information into dick's mind and he kind of felt like he had been downloaded something had downloaded in a way from him that's how i remember the story and then from then on everything changed and he started to have the experiences that this book starts to explore i mean so some of those experiences were very informed by christianity and gnostic christianity for sure so a lot of those themes of gnostic christianity came through for example as if you know from christian mysticism there's a sort of circular time notion the idea that christ coming down to earth in a gnostic way if you look at the book of john it's like the the logos is above the world and the descending of the logos into the world the gnostic descent um you know we see this in gnostic text like the poi manges about like how the the universe was was a higher form and then the universe we live in uh was a lower form and a downloading of that is what happened when christ came to earth so this idea of the logos descending down into the earth was what dick started experiencing but more so than that you know if you look into some syncretism of the time you look at some of the essenes dicks started to be very interested in all of these factors um even existentialism which was big in the 20th century right existentialism is kind of like a modern day gnosticism it's a bit of a doubting of the world it's a bit of an embracing the anxiety of the world and so dick started to explore and have visions and some of the visions were very strange he had one experience where he had written about uh a diagnosis of his child before the child had gotten sick and then forgotten about it i think is how the story goes guys correct me in the comments if i'm wrong but he forgot about the diagnosis or this writing he had done like an automatic writing almost and then later on when his child was sick the doctors didn't know what the sickness was and the doctors were like we don't know what this diagnosis is and then dick had this strange realization that's like wait a minute i think i wrote about this so he goes and he goes through his text and he goes and finds this writing and he's got a diagnosis that he shows to the doctors now he had written this i don't know if it was years before or months before but before before this was put the time out of jointness of this right is that he writes something the sickness happens he forgets about it debris discovers this writing brings that diagnosis to the doctor and that doctor is informed by dick's mad writings and that is the proper diagnosis of his child and this is just mind-blowing for dick so dick starts to have this kind of a seri this is this one there's more than one there's so many different um experiences that dick starts to assimilate and explore some of them are about history so for example he has this idea that history is not what it seems to be he so he gets onto this idea that perhaps history we're still living in roman times and he's and as you know in um valles there's a a recurring refrain in valles where the main characters of that book which is horse lover fats which is a name for philip k dick he keeps saying the empire never ended right so and and there's a cadence that kind of comes up with this chanting of that where he starts to perceive um iron bars and he starts to hear that tone about roman history is happening sort of in parallel layers sort of uh as they said in um cross cross chatter cross channel in the so anyway yeah the uh so he starts to have this idea that we're still living in roman times that reality is kind of holographic or simulated as you see from this famous speech he gave and that we're actually still living out the christ event so there's a sort of christian motif of it there's a gnostic motif to it and it leads dick deeper into that research in one way of hey well maybe the gnostics were right maybe the world is a and for you guys that aren't familiar with the gnosticism side of this so the gnostics were a group during the origins of christianity and they had a slightly so there were lots of different schools of christianity during the dawn of christianity and they were competing with each other and then it wasn't until a couple hundred years into christianity did the one that formed history um take place and that's the one that went on to be the middle ages christianity and the one that survived it today that's sort of a strain of christianity but uh and this isn't really taught i don't know if this is taught today guys leave me a comment if if people are learning stuff like this i mean i had some great classics classes uh i went to bu not particularly um i'm saying like a a liberal enough school but i think this is long ago enough that maybe these things aren't taught and i think they should be really taught it's really important for people to get a framework on these large historical these large historical movements like christianity i was talking to a friend of mine who was teaching philosophy and he said that you know when you go through these scholastic philosophers a lot of the students have a hard time when god is mentioned because we're sort of living in a largely in a secular age and and yet these sim systems are still very important to study and and he tries to posit it as i will just think of god as like the source code of something he tries to put it in a way than not like offend people's modern sensibilities because the underlying thought systems or the dead thought systems are very important to study and i think dick sort of has this experience which is a relevatory experience it's almost like a um you know maybe psychologically it's like a hysteria or sort of some kind of diagnosable event but in a in the context of even you know foucault's history of madness i brought up before uh the village madman used to be someone who was an oracle someone who had a vision right and i think this is dick sort of wrestling with i am the i am the voice i i am hearing that voice even in the biblical writing we had the acts of the apostles they had speaking in tongues and this book is a speaking in tongues but back to the uh the atman right uh piercing through the maya right so the uh so the idea here is uh in gnosticism the idea was the world was not created by a kind god in fact the world was created by a mad god and so the one gnostic sofia tradition as many of you will know if you're clicking on this you may know if you don't know i'll kind of summarize it as best as i can the gnostic idea was there was uh this arching hierarchy of of luminous beings these uh deities these you know like the logos that we have in the book of john the this uh pre-matter entities let's call it and those entities uh were in a disciplinary almost chain from logos down and that the different gnostic systems from early christianity time tried to map these out you know so you have reason comes first or even like the greek mythology like you know night chaos was first and then head sky and ocean and this so they had a similar kind of different schools of gnosticism would explore the origins of the universe let's call it right but when it came down to sophia she had a moment where she wanted to create something for herself right so she wanted to create something of her own and she created something but there was some complications in his creation and there was some anxiety and there was some fear and and because these are like deities um the child of sophia was born with anxiety and was born with fear and that was instilled in all of the matter of the world and and then the kind of the the big reveal big cliffhanger at the end of the season episode of gnosticism is sort of like we find out that the biblical yahweh is actually insane an insane god and it's really lovecraftian in a way a mad god with a broken world and as a result uh gnosticism really focused on in some christian gnosticism focused on how christ's descending into the world just was a connection a telephone back to to uh cord if you would back to the logos back to the heavenly logos bypassing the mad demiurge that controlled the world and then the gnostics would sort of use this in different schools some of them abstained from sex other other of them were more hedonistic there were different schools of these gnostic sense but all of them had this kind of similar thoughts where they would look at the world as a fallen place and that the truth was outside of the world past these archons who are sort of over us uh causing our suffering mr misery in some ways and so what dick sort of started to become obsessed with was time is wrong maybe the whole middle ages all of history are just an illusion it's just a a um just a vision you know so so in that gnostic sense dick really is wrestling in the exegesis with um that kind of level of historical place things are not as they are what how it could be that i had these experiences if i if i felt like information was downloaded if i felt like some of these um i'm piercing through the veil through using drugs using my own schizophrenic thinking using my own writing are all methods to break down the illusion right and this is like in vedic vedic literature there's lots of this too the idea of maya right the idea of maya is the world is an illusory place and we see this you know even in um maybe i'll go next to sriber you know in schrieber's memoirs of my nervous illness uh daniel paul schreiber was a judge and he started having visions he started having visions of god talking to him god wanting him to be a woman to he would god would send rays of light into him and he was going to be impregnated with some kind of knowledge uh some understanding of the universe everything was raised for him for schlieber everything where he had this whole cycle and then he became incarcer incarcerated but he became institutionalized and he wrote these memoirs and eventually he had to sort of come to grips with the uh the nerves of god and all of these visions he had and then the reality of well you know we're as as you know the gnostics kind of put it or dick would put we're kind of in these meat sacks right we're we're so trapped in the light and a lot of this um inspiration is what fueled dick to write his exegesis you know and um for schrieber for this book to be called a memoir of his nervous illness it starts out almost like a dickie and novel like it it starts almost like dick's exegesis it starts out like a gnostic text god talking to someone it's madness but we look at as a notebook and look at it as text and separate it from psychology for a bit we start to see that what is the source of all this inspiration right what is the source of this divine inspiration and like again that goes back to the foucault the idea is in the past there was a village madman there was a village prophet there's shamanic traditions even to this day where people who are touched or people with have some vision and i'm sure everybody watching this can at least point to an experience they've had personally or experienced someone else had in which something strange happened right this is why we love strange stories right this is why dick's writing is so great but something strange happened that defied the logic of the structure of of business as usual world okay and and and this is kind of like a place where we can kind of jump into let's just talk about it as society and its discontents okay so foucault says where there's no work there's no madness where there was work and and this is sort of like dick's proving ground for so many of his novels it's a place where he starts to look at these weird breakdown of the universe like look at this list here there's a list here illusion real sleep wake mechanical purposeful blind sentient formless beautiful rule exception just making lists here um he starts getting into eastern thought he talks about babylon gnostic acts the nature of god ufos christ and then he even looks at his own writing um where he sort of looks at you know like this idea in ubik of being alive but being dead right so in ubik they're they're in cold pack right and they're and they're finding reality is breaking away chapter by chapter the money has different faces on it the cars are regressing to old model things aren't working correctly the more you're awake to what yubik's world is the more it slips away from you and this is what this is what what dick was wrestling with and i think he found that there was some kind of break point back to roman times back to the christian event and for him this is where he sort of just kept digging and kept digging but i want to take a pause here because we brought in schrieber and maybe just bring up well there is the ethics of psychoanalysis by lacan but that also focuses on this work civilization and its discontents right so you have sigmund freud talking about civilization and its discontents and this is a fascinating there's a little fascinating gem for those of you who don't know the work if you don't know it please read it civilization is discontent i'll summarize a concept from it that i i always a nugget from this civilization and its discontents the nugget is this we were once without civilization right we if we believe how history formed humans rose from uh settle of hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture and then we had we built farms and those farms kind of freed up resources to build cities and we got books and we started learning things and studying things and civilization was born right the dawn of civilization settled agriculture they called it to us right so and at the same time all of the old world fears freud this is freud paraphrasing freud here all of the old world fears or all of our past human fears were slowly dismantled we used to be afraid of the rain we built roofs we used to be afraid of being hungry we got not only did we have crops but we learned how to process our food to have food through the rainy season the dry season the cold season we figured it out right so we had plenty we had food reserves we had roofs over our heads we were afraid of the hordes we made laws we made standing armies right we're afraid of the we were afraid of uh death we made religion we gave ourselves all of these things and this is the beauty of civilization right and yet freud says every one of our sort of in a way uh every one of our anxieties whether it is being hunted by animals fear of the elements fear of death fear of hunger right all of these things were solved by civilization and yet freud says and yet the big and yet why is it that civilization produces so much anxiety as a side effect right so you would think hey before we were being chased by tigers we were having to go hungry you know we were dying of diseases right we've we've stopped all those things but why is it so why does the idea of getting on the well maybe nobody does it anymore right but getting on the crowded subway right you're lying in bed and you have to get up i remember i was a bike messenger in boston years and years ago and i i remember having that anxiety where it's a winter's day it's freezing rain out right there's a winter's day it's freezing rain i had to go out to my bike career job and i'm laying in bed i didn't want to get out of bed i didn't want to go out into the world like i didn't want to have to do the job i didn't want to face the elements and then you have this weird realization right where you you force yourself to get up and you overcome this anxiety and then once you got out into the world you're like oh this is great i'm riding a bike i have the coffee on the handlebars you know i'm i'm doing a front wheel really i'm doing all those things right talking to my friends delivering packages exercising feeling like a beast in the frozen rain suddenly it was all gone right but the but the point of it is is civilization is the cause of our anxiety right and this is what freud writes on his in his civilization it's discontents so um i want to frame that with dick because you know in the opening we talked a little bit not about you know not only is dick this visionary writer who's wrestling with all of these topics from his exegesis but he's also a political activist type of a writer because he has many of his works you know think of a lot of the what resonates with popular uh normie viewers in the film adaptations of dick's works are this exact story of wrestling with anxiety you know so uh and i think that it's you know let's let's kind of frame it we'll kind of go into it from an anxiety point of view first let's keep going down the anxiety row so so let's take this same concept from freud's civilization and discontents and let's grind ground and we know we have this another kind of mystic madden man would be schrieber right another one who's a person who has a medical issue and maybe dicks was medical also there's lots of indications of this and i'm not commenting on that for per se just commenting more on the work of the exegesis and how it fueled dick's imagination in his writing some of that fuel is back to anxiety again right so that same existential dread that same civilization it's discontent the same gnostic dread it's a long tradition you know it's maybe it's back to civilization's discontent but what is that anxiety right well um frau maybe freud speaks of anxiety in a great way where he talks about um what are the things what what is anxiety like and it goes into uh i i remember there was a passage that's about okay when we're hungry let's talk about bodily things something is affecting our body right when we're hungry you know your stomach is rumbling and your body starts to send you see like the ghrelin in your body's produced right um you know and then uh what you do when you're hungry is your body starts sending signals to you to get food and the cure for hunger is eating right when you when you are fed you no longer feel that feeling of hunger so that kind of bodily reaction that stimulus from the body of hunger is solved by food hunger solved by food right when you're uh when you want sex for example same thing you know the the the having of sex uh removes the desire for it right once you have that then you're you're you've you're full you know you want ice cream you have ice cream you don't want ice cream anymore right so hunger is food uh uh arousal satisfied by having sex the um and then we get to you know even something like say when you have a fear reaction something where you're you have a panic attack you know you can be you know taking away the thing of fear safety can remove you from fear so so there's a lot of these there's a one-to-one correspondence uh the symptom is an effect you know hunger comes up and food removes it but anxiety is a very strange one because what is what is if if if anxiety is like a hunger right your body is having an anxious moment well what's the food to take away the anxiety right and and i think this is you know one has to know that one's hungry right and usually that's the rumbling in one stomach or the weak feeling or you don't have energy or you have the low blood sugar in the afternoon crankiness whatever that is right but with anxiety it's very strange because you don't know what it is what the itch is right and i think it's not the um it's not the first the it's not the first um dick is not the first person to wrestle with these i mean we brought up srira as an extreme example but you know if we look at like i mentioned before uh lacan synthol is talking about joyce so the idea of james joyce he took his mad exegesis of you know a merging of what we're thinking literarily literary again where there's a work there's no madness he took the idea of the odyssey and mapped it to an everyday life with all of the conscious and unconscious chatter inside the mind and kind of mapped it to this huge uh epic voyage you know just kind of going out to the shop for the day stopping at the pub kind of thing all that became an epic voyage you know and then finnegan's wake even more so it takes like the whole it almost echoes the whole it's almost a gnostic work too that echoes the whole biblical creation to um revelation and maps it to a night a long night you know and uh all of the strange language that emerges so uh lacan explores this as a again a way to do something with madness right we have these mad thoughts you know schriever had his rays joyce had his literary genius and his also his his madness and he channeled it into work and here we have dick channeling his work there are sections of exegesis that it looked like they were just turned into the you know the timothy archer and vallis it's like whole sections of this almost made its way right into his creative writing so it's almost like he was constantly writing in a sense that he was also becoming the text in a way right so and again we were saying that this is not the first person i mean i think that in a way the analogy can go to baudelaire right baudelaire another discontent and anxious in the world and yet finding a a way to to it or even beckett right we talked about joyce beckett's work uh doesn't have that charm that dick's work has maybe but it does have funny moments i mean it's great if you know samuel beckett people love samuel beckett so i think that um where we're going with this is like the reaction to the anxiety is to give it some kind of voice you know and then finally maybe we'll wrap this up with the uh so so dick's urge to explore these concepts there's also this kind of notion of you know he found the the automatic writing of it all like almost like an edgar cayce thing where he predicted something he was finding that by writing he could shape the reality right i mean in a lot of the same ways that the you know that they flow the tears of the flesh android just by measuring the flesh android's tear salinity they could keep those tentacles firmly attached to his spine uh and the tear flow lets the uh alien handlers continue the uh the viability of the candidate right so i think with dick's case uh he's he's not the only one who's turned uh some madness into writing you know we see that with beckett we see that with baudelaire but maybe i want to end up with this theory of religion and the accursed share by george bataille just i i want to end on this one and listen we'll keep going through on exegesis of dick i think i just wanted to sort of frame it in some of these broader topics but let's you know in future podcasts i will kind of dig deep i have a couple examples that i really want to go into and i think you guys are going to really like them but to wrap up with this theory of religion idea there's two concepts i want to talk about from this battalion that relate to dick one is this theory of religion there's a small quote in this that says the animal is in the world like water is in water and i think that there's this idea of dick his vision the world and the writing and it sort of forms this pyramid and this focal point you know he talks about that beam of logic where in some ways he is trying to turn the text into the reality right one of the uh you know we see this in the stigmata or palmer uh eldritch we kind of see some of this but in in exegesis he's very good at slipping in things right right like you know even in martian time slip or in ubik where you suddenly he starts pulling the carpet out from under you he starts pulling the world out from under you his own world he starts to pull out and he just does it with some few words sometimes it's threadbare plot sometimes it's oddly clothed characters just jumbled together he just seemed like he was writing this stuff full stream consciousness almost and then there's this expert of you know pulling the rug out from under the eyes you know pulled the rug out from under us right and suddenly we have uh i think the great example for me was in was in valles where he's talking about you know uh horse lover fats is a renaming of himself his name is philip philip k dick and philip means horse lover and dick he called it the fats right he called dick fats so he has this analogous character that he places into the world of alice calls horse lover fats and there's this one part where you start realizing when he's describing what horse lover fats would do so like say for example horse lover fats kind of like in a weird almost lifted a bit by the fight club where you have um the characters off at the the different clinics right there they're they're fighting over the different nights that they're they're going to go to the you know one's got testicular cancer when one's going to another clinic and they're basically glomming off of the experience of being part of the group to fill their empty lives right and in in an odd way there's a passages in values that are that predate that where in values they're talking about someone dying of cancer they're talking about some ex-girlfriends some kind of human interactions that horse lover fats is having interactions with and there's one passage where and i'll just try to paraphrase that i don't have it the quote here from it but they're talking about yeah horse lover fats would often think about her and he would think about when she was dying of cancer you know horse lower fats was thinking about was he doing this for himself or was he actually being altruistic and horse lover fats and so the right and so dick keeps saying horse lover fats would do this and horse lover fats would do this and he'll say and horse liver fats would call into question what it meant for him to have human relationships and when i have human relationships i mean when horse lover fats has human relationships right so suddenly he does this weird thing dick's writing does this weird thing where you realize it's an untrustworthy narrator right you realize the world building is untrustworthy you realize that even the person talking to you you've listened to his voice for a while you've heard the rhythm you know when he keeps saying in valles the empire never ended it's just got a rhythm to it where you're you're expecting you know another antidote about horse lover fats then this other subtext so is horse lover fats the author or is he a different person you know and then it goes right back to the empire never ended and it starts to build this cadence where dick turns the reading experience and the writing experience into a uh something that's summarized by battai's theory of religion as the world is in the world like water is in water he starts to break away you know that gnostic realization that he's had through the exegesis how do i show my reader this gap how do i show this gap the layer the strata of reality finally we have um the last battali note here just the idea of the circulation of energy on the earth he's talking about in this beginning chapter the idea of sacrifice you know so the aztec world worldview so in this he talks about aztecs sacrificing things seemed very strange it's like why would they ha sacrifice you know and then they became addicted to the sacrificing right and i think what's interesting about this accursed chair point is uh we at first the sacrifice in aztec culture was about gaining more crops right so we want to have a good crop year maybe they would sacrifice a you know an animal at first right so we're sacrificing an animal uh and then it worked so we said well hey what if we sacrifice a person and that works right and suddenly there's so much food that now the sacrificing starts well hey if we got so much food what if we sacrifice 10 of the most beautiful humans like the 10 most beautiful virgins will sacrifice and now suddenly a modality change is happening where we're no longer fueled by necessity right so the so where does this lead so this aztec sacrifice this this idea of starts to become what bataille calls out once we have too many resources the only thing to do with it is to waste it right and this is and this is a very strange counterintuitive concept but the idea of it is this is why wars happen right so bataille kind of talks about war as a it's a cursed share it's like the idea of there's so much excess that we then destroy it and now uh so we go into these boom bust cycles right where the world consumes itself and then the world comes out of itself and i i kind of bring this up here to offer a different example because i think the i think that that's an anxiety and i think that fits in with civilization and its discontents and i think that that is opposite to what art does and i think here we have the khan talking about the synthome which is joyce and the creation of the work we have foucaults where there's work there is no madness what dick's exegesis can kind of represent politically is the idea that hey if we create more art if we can shunt that negativity into this sort of a creation suddenly you start seeing that there's a new hope there's more information there's a beam of light you know that something gets going into this and i really want to continue this conversation with you guys uh in the next um in this in the rest of this series so um i think that's going to call it for today let's um uh please guys uh appreciate you listening this far if you've made it uh like or subscribe uh share this with people would love to grow this channel turn it into a live chat um come back for more exegesis if you've got a topic or a question you want to ask please leave that in the in the comments i'd be happy to um answer it hey before camel at christmas uh get your copy of following the tears of the flesh android it is a curiously short occupancy i mean the salinity of the tears cannot last forever i'll do some readings of the of the flesh android uh maybe give you some insights into what's been redacted in some cases you know it says declining substance impartial crying android tell you what lummic is up to up in the cog uh satellite and that would really support the channel also we have patreon uh we'd love to uh continue the conversation on our patreon um thank you for listening and we'll talk to you guys later let's continue the conversation in the comments in our patreon and in the next podcast if you ring the bell you'll get the notification but i try to do these weekly and i also do some book book reviews and book readings elsewhere on this channel so looking forward to talking with you guys and we'll talk to you soon take care bye bye



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