I think I understand loneliness now.

I wanted to know her and I have,

she's a comforting blanket,

that chokes you to death in your sleep.

I wish you got it,
you do get it,
you don't care.

Human connections, increasing fluency of our tongues it belies lies lies the distance of our bodies
and the cold hard computer text that wraps itself around our faces
like that atari teenage riot video

What was it you wanted again? 



 

There is no wide open like you, you don't exist. There is no wide wave flats, moving out from the center under the endless sky. Even in the dankest places, the depths that I saw in your eyes that I didn't know, never to be touched, never touched by me, like the hot stove of your tears burning my mind. What have you done to the doing I am? the process I wipe from my body like mercury, like poison civilization transforming the toxic interned corpse into cybershaman done with and fashioned weapon of myself. You hit me with the hammer of your mind sparkling sparkles of disco nirvana inside the out.

I cannot ever enough of smoothness. The babychild jesus wasn't in these makeup ads, like perfect Adriana Lima crucified on my cock of glory, there is more impulse foundationally under what I want to be than that for you to recreate, the tonalities and shifts rioting inside the colors of my endless landscape. You feel the edges of my nations of painful wondering, the maps I made of the intricacies of your mind too much for the territory of the fire shifting in the interior. Womb me, like the only death I wanted, with the livid redution of my intellect inside the rightieous pain that you think is so valuable, so cutting and calculating. I like the leaving, and I am the leaving. I am forever the desert.

You have illusions of containing the me that I am. You have the best allplan for reducing the gradient to categories, the rainbow to a striped jello mold, the hooves of the horses I rode naked filling out the boxes of fruity for now. I am not for now, you are the only thing that I see in my predator vision, you are the lateral kill of my wide bomb of mind.

Fuck this. Keep fucking it.
 

Like a white snail the toilet slides into the livingroom, demanding to be loved.
It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets.
In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.
And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you,
you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace...
The toilet slides out of the livingroom like a white snail, flushing with grief.

- Russell Edson

In all the lands I made into the animal people I put desire that was real. There was no wrong bending the straight lines and heroes heroes heroes heroes. All down the mountain platforms one above the other they stood, layers of armor layers of gold layers of magick, wings and sex sex sex with their furry tails. No one touched their specialness. There was never any reaching their exquisite tenderness or wonderful stupitdity; no real world gets inside.

No maps made who I was, stories and artifacts inside with no chance no chance getting our out suffocating in me. Want to lock myself in the locker and be the lizard lithe to escape you pre-sexual and free.
 

I wish it all started this way, but really it started with Stonehenge. It was inside those stones that he found what he was looking for: looking for.

I think you get it. Stop avoiding knowing and know.

So he was the little boy, little penisboy playing with himself, in the best possible house  of the small Springsteen John 3:16 Mellencamp. The hated songs on the hated radio, and the pizza-spattered shirt smell of dishwash. Blah blah bleah. Instead of thinking that this was all real and could go somewhere, he thought it was him, it was wrong.

The boy come in the front door into the divers downs family in which every perfect catalog picture made Woman's World magazine in place of Time. All the fair bills to be payed, all understood as the only way. The loving figures were people too, but hidden inside their statues status mamama dadada.

Brother small grows overlarge, makes the penis small, makes the muscles weak. Life does the same, everything is nothing now with reaching out towards some otherwise. Always reaching into nothing in the desert, in the endless, the endless, the endless

He thinks. This is bad and while all the big smelly black gryphon books make him into something useless, the seed grows in his testicles. This was the reason for everything, not art and symbols but fuckfuckfuck. This was the bad and the hate grow.

Everything on his plate was disgusting. Please sir can I have something else? You stupid don't read those kinds of books.


 

There is what, not better? I understand not better. Integrate the diving down, the slimewater penis of dead seaweed into the eye that you wanted to redress, blood, pus, pink and infected. You play in shit like happybrownclay, filter filter filter shut the fuck up. Because if you wanted to, you'd do it. It isn't a secret anymore in the mind of man, monkey, man, monkey, monkey, monkey. Fuck you you filthy monkey. We know what you like, what you did, bad monkey. Healthy god-statue with muscles inside his head, nothing but motionaction. I love you, in real ways, in the best real ways.

I think that's what you didn't want inside with all the bad mommy things daddy made in his secret penis basement place. Without all the livestock interesting of your stupid cow country there would be no FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FOR WHAT YOU DID TO ME  YOU DON"T  UNDERSTANd inside the interior mind of little boy lizard animal oh oh oh oh oh oh cum cum always come don't fucking talk to me stand in the corner strip knife beat clothes tear tear tear if you know how you stupid bitch but you don't you don't know how.

If ever there was sadly interesting without the life of everyone in this stupid love then it was that night, that girl me and she I we shwe it I AM  I OHM there it is for you godmanwoman woman of fucking mercy wing tears.

There are cliches only them only the thing over and over beat the thing the penis cunt thing I love that thing that thing you do do do doodoo oh shit
 

There is a certain adventurousness, a certain desire for new experiences and new sensations, that is easy to fake but very rare to actually find in someone.

I  get taken in a lot. I think someone's really a lot braver then they are, and then I find out that with me, they're in way over their head. I usually pay the price for this. I usually have to shoulder the load when, finally, my expansiveness, openness, and the fact that I have the strength to put myself out there mean that I have to clean up the mess when everything goes bad. They're too busy hiding under the bed.

I wish, just once, I would meet someone that was totally honest with me about what they wanted. That's all it takes. But really, most people don't know what they want, and if they ever figure it out, they sure as hell don't want to tell anyone.

This is the terror with which we confront one another every day. So afraid of both rejection and acceptance that we try to occupy some razor-thin space in between and end up nowhere.

There are so many things to be left behind, so many losses and heavy, wet bundles to throw over your shoulder. Get started now and maybe by the time you meet someone new the load will be light enough for you to take on more weight.

This walking death, this acquiescence to failure, has somehow become safer and more desirable than the alternative, the simple confrontation and purging that I like. I prefer to pull up through my chasmic center the dark weeds of my hangups, my loves and hates and attachments and perversities. To lay them clump after clump out in front of me, to dry out in the sun.

Let the weeds choke you if you want. Let the dark miasma of your own indecisiveness block your vision and swim in your head. This is what you wanted. Is this what you had in mind? 

Devin O’Neill

Eastern Europe’s Teenage Years:

The Development of Media Post Cold War

            It is at first difficult, from an American perspective, to understand the nature of Eastern European media after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism, simply because the West, and America in particular, have never experienced anything remotely analogous. We have no reference points for the behavior of media in that environment. Because of this there is a tendency to assume that, in such a political and cultural situation, the media would serve much the same function it seems to serve in this country—to provide running updates on the process of change and the series of cultural events occurring, albeit speckled with commentary but nonetheless, at its core, an exercise in information provision.

            In assuming this, we forget a crucial detail: media in a country, and especially media in Eastern Europe during this time, is not some detached entity, immune to the cultural tides that surround it. Eastern European media and journalism (just like media and journalism everywhere) is subject to, not just observer of, the changes taking place in its society, and reflects the shifting psychological and ethical foundations of a people just as much in its behavior and ethics as in its reportage.

            In order to understand this situation, we will sketch briefly the political and cultural milieu of the region in the years up to and following 1989.

The degree to which Communism and Leninism in particular was entrenched in the identity of the Eastern European in the years preceding 1989 is also difficult for a Westerner to grasp. While the foundational ideas of Western Democracy and capitalism are far from flawless, they have built into them the idea that questioning, aggressive constituent participation in policy decisions and the individual motivational instinct are cornerstones to a rightly governed nation and a rightly expressed culture. Necessarily, proper participation in a capitalistic democracy includes assertion of individualistic thought, and although social and political  circumstances at times dampen this personal agency and critical reasoning (as in the case of McCarthyism), it is generally accepted as a familiar, not an alien, concept. By contrast, this very individualism and ideology of entrepreneurial involvement in both government and commerce is viewed through the Soviet lens as decadent, presumptuous, and antithetical to the spirit of communism. In Lenin’s model, submission by all to the overarching ideal is required so that a bright utopian future can be ushered in. Conveniently, this lofty, overarching ideal is represented by a quite solid earthly government, capable of enacting equally solid material policies, a government that is, of course, spotlessly faithful to said ideal. Communism can be characterized as a religion in this sense—it required of its participants unwavering faith in an intangible vision that had very tangible consequences. One might even draw comparisons, specifically, to Roman Catholicism—one of only a few dogmas that posit a completely infallible earthly mouthpiece of their sacred ideology (the Pope). Despite the fallibility of the people involved, the rightness of the whole communistic exercise was, somehow, never to be doubted. Doubt is a Western luxury.

This kind of conditioning, extended over decade after decade from the Bolshevik revolution onward, creates a population with absolutely no sense of their own agency in the shaping of the nation they live in. Active, risky involvement in the direction of politics, culture, and commerce is switched for a substitute, a kind of safe involvement, where human beings are viewed less as individual participants and more as fuel for, or components comprising, a massive machine. Your intrinsic value is completely dependent on your ability to be the kind of gear or cog that the machine needs, not your ability to guide the function or craft the workings of the machine yourself; this contributes not to successes but to malfunctions.

Although to a Western mind these are all very oppressive metaphors, we cannot stress enough that they were in many ways precisely the opposite to the people that practiced them; they were seen as liberating and empowering. This is probably best understood, again, in the context of religion—participation in something that large and important is a potent drug. The meaning, purpose, and sense of narrative that belief in the march towards paradise can supply are not easily replaced. Despite the secular nature of communism, this is analogous to religious ecstasy—the ecstasy of worship and reverence with regards to the shrine to Lenin, and the cathartic ecstasy of religious confession experienced by the zealous (sometimes not even truthful) political informant. In addition, the simplicity of submission is often preferable to the vast, intimidating landscape of agency and personal choice, and having an identity as tied to a hegemonic institution is, vis-à-vis the human anxiety over self-elimination, better than no identity at all.

All these psychosocial complexes were firmly in place in the media just as they were everywhere else when the wall came down in 1989. Media and journalism had had no function besides propaganda press and policy trumpet for the Communist machine since the regime’s inception, and media as an institution experienced the same crisis of faith and identity that individuals did. This process can be characterized effectively by the metaphor of adolescence, and the adolescent rebellion a teenager acts out upon exit from a repressive, religious childhood (an experience with which I am intimately familiar, and thus is effective as an empathetic tool). In “The Denial of Death”, Earnest Becker discusses the process of growing up as one characterized by deep survival-anxiety during the process of shedding the comfortable imprisonment of the absolute parent-child relationship. He paints the world of infinite possibility that exists beyond that shell as a traumatizing and terrifying place to the newly-exposed, still developing independent identity of the adolescent, and often, to the person involved, permanent childhood seems preferable. Often, replacement parent figures and role-models are sought, and any ideology definite enough to provide an identity can be adopted, since the teenager has no practice at self-determination and self-motivation. In the same way, the people of Eastern Europe turned to the media after the end of the Cold War, and the media turned to the leftover, warring scraps of political power structure that were jockeying for position in the recently vacated ideological landscape.

Newly un-repressed adolescence is characterized by high-running emotions, rash infighting and clique-wars, and the newly-discovered impulse towards critical thought warring with the overwhelming emotions of identity development and new stimuli. In this same way, the newspapers, television and radio of the post-soviet era had no way to contextualize the world in the absence of an infallible party line. As a result, journalism and media continued to play the same roles as propagandists and political criers that they did before the Soviet collapse—but they played those roles for the schizophrenic array of new economic and political interests that were emerging. Certain journalists were in bed with certain politicians, and cults of personality and personal agendas took the place of the search for facts. In addition, sensationalism, hypersexualization in the form of pornography, and high-running emotion in media rhetoric characterized the communication style of the newly free Eastern European media—all characteristics of metaphorical, recently unrepressed “adolescence”.

            This metaphor is not meant to be a condescending one, but one that aids the Western mind in understanding the process of self-definition that had to occur in the post-Soviet media. While it’s easy for a lazy American thinker to categorize the behavior of the fourth estate in Easter Europe as merely puerile, this would demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the state of mind of the journalists, and the people, of those countries, and betrays a number of underlying assumptions implicit in the American worldview. The most important of these is our definition of journalism and our standards of journalistic ethics, which we automatically, almost subconsciously apply to the media of Eastern Europe when we regard them as “immature.” Based on generations of experience with the Soviet machine, they had no such illusions about media. Just as we here must be introduced to the idea that a media outlet (Fox News, for example) can function not as a provider of information but as an outlet for propaganda, they had to be introduced to the idea that the media could be anything but. The two societies are operating from two entirely different default assumptions, and it should be noted that both characterizations of the media are useful when we are deconstructing the information that we consume. The problem lies in the media’s awareness of its own status.

            Little by little, journalistic ethics have begun to take hold in the region, driven largely by profit motive and advertising—producers of media have discovered that there is a market for attempts at objectivity and Western journalistic ethics. The media, despite being subject to precisely the same psychosocial forces as the rest of the population, are still (somewhat ironically) viewed as a guiding hand through this type of cultural identity crisis, by an uprooted people with little else to cling to—so the extensive popularity of the media and the money that comes with that is now, symbiotically, a driving force behind reform. But the years following 1989 serve as a powerful object lesson in what it takes for an infant system of media, abandoned by deceased Father Communism, to make it through a difficult adolescence to adulthood.

Sources outside class:

Becker, Earnest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973.

The primary argument of reader-response critics, especially the later ones oriented towards what our text calls “Subjective Criticism”, is that the evocation of meaning that occurs between text and human is an active, participatory process.

            In order to fully explore this idea, I decided to push, arguably to an extreme degree, the amount of participatory work I would do in the interpretation of my selected text. I chose a song (the lyrics, specifically) by Tori Amos entitled “Icicle”, which I believe provides a rich buffet for criticism, especially reader-response criticism.

            In my quest to explore the degree to which I could participate in the process of meaning-creation, I made several decisions about the environment in which I would encounter the text.

            First, I decided that instead of just reading the lyrics, I would listen to the song, music and all. I was as first worried about the involvement of the music in the interpretive process, and this is what actually led me to select reader-response criticism as my method. This is because with the more rigid forms of criticism, such as New Criticism, song lyrics like this would be rendered completely unavailable to literary critics for interpretation at all, due to the symbiotic relationship between the music and the lyrics. The more a text can be isolated from any apparent emotional tainting, as simple words on a page, the easier it is for the New Critics to justify their position. But song lyrics like these cannot be examined in isolation from the music that surrounds them, just as texts cannot be examined in isolation from the emotional state of the reader. Concurrently, it is far harder, I contend, to separate listener emotional response from music than it is to separate reader response from the content of a text. The most important weapon in the New Critic’s arsenal is the ability to say, “Nope! That’s not in the text! I don’t see that anywhere!” But in the case of music, the evocative content of the notes and rhythms is supremely connotative; no denotative message can be derived from it at all. Music makes the New Critic throw up his hands in confusion and despair.

            My second interpretive decision was to ingest about four dried grams of psilocybin-containing mushrooms about two hours before listening to the song. It’s difficult to judge the exact amount of time elapsed, both because the song came on during the course of an eight-hour-long playlist and because the sense of time-distortion that occurs during a trip on four grams of mushrooms is rather extreme. I have a fairly accurate idea however, because I was able to add up the amount of time represented by the songs on the playlist, that this song came on during what is termed the “peak” of the psychedelic experience, when the effects are the strongest. I would also infer this from the intensity of my reaction to this particular song.

            The decision to interpret a text audibly, along with music, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, may seem like a frivolous cop-out or a deliberate conflation of academic procedure, if not a simple excuse to party. I assure you, it is not. The assertions of reader-response criticism, in this situation, have been pushed to their limits—the actual words of the text, the English words, have not been altered at all by these circumstances. The words I am hearing in this situation are the same words that I would be reading otherwise, and the very foundational idea of subjective criticism, I will restate, is that reading is an active process. This is an experiment to test the boundaries of that assertion—how active can I make that interpretive process before even the reader-response critics begin to object?

            There is the consideration that the ingestion of drugs or the listening (as opposed to reading) constitute an altering of the text, but if this were so then shifts in my hourly mood would also have to be taken into consideration in interpretation (this is a result of brain-chemistry), as well as the room I read the text in—a million other factors, given that assertion, might be considered an “altering of the text”. Reader-Response allows for inclusion of these considerations into my response…will it allow for my modifications to self and environment in relation to the words as well? In keeping with its premise, I argue that it must.

            The final consideration, before we actually begin to deconstruct the text, is Subjective Criticism’s sometime emphasis on the corroboration of a peer group in order to navigate through personal reactions to a socially agreed-upon meaning, according to David Bleich. Though I have my doubts as to whether this dialog necessarily arrives at an interpretation any more valuable to greater society that that of an individual reader (which is presumably the point of that activity and which would depend on the actual people in the room, involved in the discussion), I see its value as a cognitive exercise. One of the most fascinating results of this experiment of mine is just how accessible and critically coherent my experience of the text seems to be, despite my experiment in re-orienting the external and internal “lenses” through which the text is received.

            So, without further ado, let’s get to the text.

            “Icicle” is a song that I have much previous experience with, and this, of course, informs my reaction to the piece and its lyrics. I also have a great deal of knowledge about the text’s creator, and this influences my thoughts about it as well. This is an interesting conflation of authorial intent and reader-response. I know, for example, that Tori Amos was raised in a strict Christian household and later rebelled against this upbringing, much as I did. This has special bearing on my interpretation of this text. Often I’ve listened to this song in order to cathartize those emotions associated with that aspect of my childhood, especially as they have to do with sexuality. We should not, of course, conflate the speaker and the author. Except that, in the throes of this experience, I conflated not just the speaker and the author, but the speaker and myself. Whether or not reader-response allows for this level of identity deconstruction is yet another fascinating question posed by the entire exercise.

            The song begins with some rather cacophonous piano chords that threw me somewhat pleasantly off-balance, emphatically disconnecting this song (and this part of the drug-trip) from that which came before it. These fade out, and a gentle, lilting, searching melody line, rather quick in tempo, begins, along with the line “icicle, icicle, where are you going?” These two elements together evoked in me an extreme, near-longing desire for the answer to that question, which remains unanswered during the course of the song, at least explicitly.

            It is answered implicitly, however—“Icicle” is a song about Tori’s habit of sneaking off to a back-room and masturbating when she was supposed to be in church with everyone else on Sunday, and “icicle” refers to her cold finger. Where it’s “going” should now be obvious.
            This is both my explanation and the one put forward in interviews by Tori herself; the two interpretations have obviously cross-pollinated.

            The next few lines, “I have a hiding place when spring marches in…gonna lay down” evoke an incredible need for privacy, along with a sense of inevitability—“when spring marches in”, the awakening of her sexual desire, does not seem like an event that can be avoided. This speaks to me of the need for personal space, for private place of the feminine annexed from the religious authoritarianism and social consensus that surrounded her. But the strange thing for me about this was how much I relate to it, despite these emotions being piped through a feminine lens. I remembered (and this feeling, as with all feelings, was heavily amplified by the drugs) feeling my own desire for the same kind of tender, intense privacy when I was young; my parents would often hold church social events while I would hide away in my room.

            One of the most interesting effects of the psilocybin, as I said, was how easy it made it to mix up the identity of the singer with my own. During the vast majority of this song, due in part to the similarity between my own experiences and those I’d heard voiced by Tori Amos, I had the intense sensation that I was that little girl—or at least that I knew exactly what it would be like to be her, that I somehow felt the childlike feminine part of myself come to the surface. This has fascinating implications for gender and feminist theory, all tied up in the question of how “valid” these feelings were. I don’t feel particularly qualified to render judgment on their validity, but of course they seemed overwhelmingly valid at the time.
            The next stanza of the song, “Greeting the monster in our Easter Dresses…good book is missing some pages” emphasizes the conflict between the speaker’s actions and the giant, patriarchal creature that is the church and the obligations and restrictions it levels against its constituents—particularly its female members. The line “phalluses bow your heads like the good book says” implies both the environment of hyper-masculinity and the idea of resigned subservience—an incredibly difficult combination of emotions to pack into one line, yet accomplished gracefully with this image of a church-full of wilting, impotent penises.

            The line “I think the good book is missing some pages” is innocuous on the surface but extremely powerful. This is not a simple examination of the inherent incompleteness of patriarchal religion (though it is that). This line radiates smugness and wit. This is the first childhood assertion of feminine power right in the face of a masculine God; a little girl rejecting everything she’s ever been taught in the face of these feelings welling up inside her. New internal knowledge challenges old external knowledge.

            This assertion is pushed even farther in the next stanza, “And when my hand touches myself…I think I’ll take from mine instead”. The first two lines are simple relief at finally finding a private place to act out desire (“I can finally rest my head”), but the next two are open rebellion. “When they say take of his body/ I think I’ll take from mine instead” is direct disobedience, a defiant choosing of the speaker’s own private religion over their public one. This is not open rebellion in the sense of being public, but in many ways, in the context of religion, the private rebellion is the difficult part; the overcoming of powerful feelings of guilt and forbidding that have been introduced to the young child as the very unavoidable workings of the cosmos. This takes courage to reject, even in a room by yourself.

            The next section of the song was, for me, the most emotionally evocative. At this point, the music takes on a galloping, joyous quality, as Tori sings the section from “Getting off…” to “…feel it”. Here she has finally secured her private place and is reveling in it; going about her business of pleasure with excitement and a sense of vigor and discovery. Even more that pure sexual pleasure, thought, I was struck here by the excitement she feels about the exclusivity of that pleasure. The lines “getting off/ while they’re all downstairs” and “singing praise/ sing away/ he’s in my pumpkin P.J.’s” express a joy at the separation that has been erected between the speaker herself and the patriarchal self-castigation going on in the next room. In addition, the reference to “he” being located in her pajamas implies that she considers herself, in this place, the solid possessor of what the others are all still searching for in the wrong place (as she tells them, again smugly, to “sing away”). But all this is framed as childlike excitement by both the music and the word choice, so that the emotion conveyed by this whole part of the song is less about a feeling of rebelliousness and more about the giddy excitement of Christmas morning. She is discovering herself.

            I, of course, discovered myself along with her. By this point in the song/trip I was completely unable to distinguish between the experiences related in the song and my own reveled experiences hiding away upstairs during church parties when I was a child. I don’t even necessarily identify that feeling as sexual— I began to “recall” (even this word is tricky on drugs—am I recalling a real memory? Are we ever?) that the feeling of sexual discovery and childlike wonder were, at that stage of life (nine or ten?) not so easy to separate. I got the same feelings from exploring the attic and reading the fantasy books I wasn’t supposed to that I did from secretly looking at the occasional impossible-to-obtain naughty picture or reading the Song of Solomon. This is the feeling that this song identifies, for me—that hazy space between pubescent sexuality and the mysteries of childlike wonder. The “getting off” stanza so intensified these feelings that by the stanza that begins, “I could have/I should have…” I was almost completely incoherent, gripped by a near-orgasmic feelings that felt like nothing so much as the sensation of catapulting down both sets of stairs in my childhood home towards the giant pile of presents under the tree on Christmas morning—that fleeting sensation extended over the length of time it took for Tori to sing the entire fifth stanza. The lyrics here barely registered with me at the time, but in retrospective examination, they break off from the rest of the narrative of the song into a kind of desperate longing; an eruption of emotion. I think this portion of the song could be interpreted as both the literal and figurative “climax”.

            After that, the song winds down emotionally with a reprise of the first, subdued stanza about her hiding place, and the “icicle”. The use of the word “you” in the fifth line of the stanza is interesting…who is she appealing to? This hints at a presence, a power, other than the God being worshipped in the other room, that she is appealing to—either that or a direct appeal to the listener, since it seems unlikely that others were included in these activities, though it’s possible. In any case, the line increases the intimacy of the song by lending it the additional intimacy of a shared secret.

            This whole experience, for me, was accompanied by a barrage of memories of my own secret and treasured experiences of childhood. While I generally experience this to some degree while listening to this song, this barrage was no doubt amplified and enhanced by the addition of hallucinogens. This places hallucinogenic drugs in a unique position with regards to Subjective Criticism. If the interpretive process is acknowledged to be a transaction between the text and the reader, with a certain amount of information coming from both sources and being synthesized, then psilocybin seems to increase, dramatically, the amount of information coming from the reader. I say “seems to”, because we really have no way of knowing that this same barrage of information isn’t coming from the reader in general, during the course of “normal” interpretation. It is entirely possible that it is, and that the “average” reader has simply adjusted his internal processing to external, social consensus-reality to the point where the caveats and constructed realities imposed by his inner life are no longer obvious as such—in other words, we’re “used to” that kind of internally generated information, so we accept it without question. So psilocybin either alters the amount of this information, or simply alters the nature of that information so that the distinction between the internally and externally generated information becomes more obvious: whatever normal experience is altered by the drug is obviously internally-generated usually, since (as far as we know) psilocybin does not alter external reality, only internal reality. This experiment neatly demonstrates how much “reader” there really is in “Reader Response”, and it’s a lot more than most people think.

            If the experience of the text had been reduced to incomprehensible gibberish by this experiment, the whole idea would be much easier to dismiss. But the very fact that I can write an academic paper about the experience, and that the concepts that arose therein can easily be subjected to academic discussion and peer corroboration (and will be; that is the point of this assignment) lead us to conclude that, especially in the context of Subjective Criticism, this experiment presents interesting problems of subjectivity to the postmodern mind: since Subjective Criticism is a participatory process, readers can experiment with themselves just as validly as writers can experiment with the text, and with results that can just as effectively stimulate academic discussion.

"Icicle" by Tori Amos

Icicle, icicle,
Where are you going?
I have a hiding place
When spring marches in
Will you keep watch for me
I hear them calling
Gonna lay down…
Gonna lay down…

Greeting the monster in our Easter dresses
Phalluses bow your head like the good book says
Well I think the good book is missing some pages
Gonna lay down
Gonna lay down

And when my hand touches myself
I can finally rest my head
And when they say take of his body
I think I'll take from mine instead

Getting off
Getting off
While they're all downstairs
Singing praise,
Sing away…
He's in my pumpkin p.j.'s
Lay your book on my chest
Feel the word
Feel the word
Feel the word
The word feel it

I could have
I should have
I could have flown
You know I could have
I should have
I didn't, so…

Icicle, icicle
Where are you going?
I have a hiding place

When spring marches in
Will you keep watch for me

I hear them calling
Gonna lay down
Gonna lay down

You vibrate sleeping
you vibrate dreaming
and you will not wake up.

I am screaming in your ear
I am screaming in your ear
I am screaming in your ear
and you will not wake up.

There aren't enough beaches in the world, love.
Not enough far-off places,
unfamiliar faces.

So what makes you think you can satisfy me
all by yourself? 
What makes you think your demons
can lock horns with mine?
Where did you get the idea
that I wanted you wasting my time?

Due in equal measure to persistent inquiries and my complete lack of ability to effectively summarize, this is an essay on how I deal with spirituality/religion/philosophy etc.

Though I’m bad at being concise (as my ex will tell you), I’m going to plead innocent here—I can’t summarize not because of my verbal proclivities, but because the way I deal with spirituality is really fucking complicated.

This is assertion is not pretentious egomania (or is at least somewhat more than that) for the following reasons.

First: I think everyone’s spiritual practice is complicated. In fact, I think that if you encounter spirituality as simple and without inherent conflict, you should either seriously re-examine your ideas or you should start taking on disciples. Spirituality should always, likewise, be exclusive and personal. You should not have the same relationship with the divine/infinite/universe/whatever that somebody else does, because you are a different person.

Second: I assure you, it’s really fucking complicated.

I'd like to start by deconstructing words like “spirituality” and “religion”. Although some dismiss these experiences outright, I believe that having spiritual practice in your life is important. But this, as you may have guessed, is not your grandma’s spirituality. This is spirituality and religion very loosely defined. In other words, I’m padding my ass in case someone argues that what I do does not constitute a “religion” in the conventional sense. So here we go.

Human beings cannot stop constructing narratives. Our identity as conscious beings is dependent on the fact that we do this. Using language, symbolism, and story, we build the archives of memories that make up our lives, and in order for there to be a narrative, there has to be someone to experience that narrative. To that end, we create “ourselves”.

This act of creation is a very important moment in the history of human consciousness, and the ability to conceive of the self plays an important role in the traditional narrative of most (if not all) of the major religions of the world. In the garden, Adam and Eve ate the fruit, and they were “separated from the Father”, knowing “Good and Evil”. They knew they were naked—in other words, they became “self-conscious”. In order to know “good and evil”, you must be aware of yourself to the extent that you can psychologically punish yourself for doing “good” and reward yourself for “evil”—pre-conscious “oneness” split into the post-consciousness dialog and binary opposition that we know so well, and our impulses became something that we could regard and judge, rather than being nothing but the pure precursor for action. This event is narrated in Hinduism as well, by the monistic Brahman’s play at dividing him/herself into all of us—the split that occurred when we became self-conscious animals.

So—we necessarily build narratives and we build ourselves moving through them. What does this have to do with spirituality?

Well, a common critique of spiritual practices is that they are not “true” or “fact-based” in the scientific or "rational" sense. Most spiritual pursuits (except yours, of course) are couched in certain assumptions about how the world operates that are generally founded more on emotional realities than on empirical ones.

The problem, however, with applying scientific logic to spirituality is that spirituality is not purposed to deal with problems of science—but with problems of narrative.