How to Make Your "self" into a Vortex or: Towards a NeoVorticist Theory of the Body (Preamble and Preface)

 How to Make Your "self" into a Vortex or: Towards a NeoVorticist Theory of the Body

Preamble:

At the limits of "pretending" (all stops pulled out), we do something (in)authentic, a new habit is formed, and our previous personality is blurred into something weirder.

Only a kind of "fool" or artist would apply a kind of generic analysis of practical reason to ALL his activities. Because this would subject even the pure irrational of experience to reason. You cannot subject the absurd or the poetic or even the hilarious to reason. And, hulking boobs that we are, it's like our brains are terribly overweight. How get into shape? How be in harmony with all the stuff around? How be in time and space geometries??

Kant's revolution has made us all crazy, in this precise sense. But that's nothing that should get one's panties in a wad, or whatever. We ought not to wig out about this, we shouldn't worry.

Preface: on the Possibility that Life is "merely" a Joke:

Postulate: Life is, in the most literal sense of the word, a joke.

Life is a joke in the literal sense of the word. Allow me to explain. Everything about life is utterly ridiculous. Life is stupid fiddling and pointless lusting and  yearning after phony goals. You do better to doggedly pursue things you know to be at least somewhat pointless. Only by straining your will in this way, your intellect likewise, and, if you're not too bright, your emotions as well, to their highest tension and, as Nietzsche puts it, producing artificial epileptoid states, "feelings of power", in other words, mania, can you make it seem like there is meaning. There is no meaning. Sure, there's knowledge and objective truth. And there is even moral truth and transcendent religious capital T truth. There is pleasure and pain. There is hard work and laziness. But none of it is actually satisfying in any spiritual sense. Once one gets one's fill of physically satisfying (over)indulgence one tries being an aesthete. Being an aestete is okay, but let's quit the decadence and get serious, so you get ascetic, you get pious. But that's even more of a joke, because either you just parody previous saints and prophets, wringing your hands at some cheap-ass crucifix or end up in an insane asylum or you just sort of vaguely follow the rules and respond tropistically, dovetailing into things as an insect would, still suppressing so many tics of the jaw, so many nervous tics to suppress in every part of the body... to the mother hive of the Catholic Church or the Jewish Temple or whatever kind of religion you like. You can even be a sort of misanthrope, a mystic hedonist who practices yoga and tantrism or an esotericist or eccentric Satanist of some stripe or other, with revolutionary demonologies galore. You can be totally orthodox, conservative, or you can try to startle people with your strangeness and perversity. None of it actually leads anywhere. That's the thing that queers the whole deal of life. However, the suffering of life cannot be redeemed. Yes, in a sense Christ does redeem it, but it's so damned obvious and boring that it doesn't count, and ultimately it's completely false anyways, for that very reason. If the truth were that obvious and basic well, life would be easier. But prayer is just dissociation. Taoism goes without saying but that is more of a practical reason thing. So you're left with humor, flippancy, but you must not reveal this to ordinary people, because if too many people realized that life were a joke in which we merely lurch around lusting at fetishes, whether sensual or of or pertaining to the intellect (a joke, but not the kind of joke that it's worth laughing at, it's the world itself that laughs at you; dignity is the most artificial thing in the world), the world would come to an end, I'm sure of it, everyone would just go on vacation and that would be the end of seriousness. This must never happen.