Missing Tarot Cards
Incomplete list of the missing tarot cards
(Demons of Condominium edition):
- The Unmuffled Chopper
- The Insomniac Drummer
- The Masturbating Solipsist
We are madness
Wachowski has served as my personal computer for four productive years, but as my life is turning toward a more lap-top oriented rhythm, my new friend Tinytim (of the respectable Fujitsu-Siemens family) has taken over as my primary information processing Sancho Panza. Lucky for me, because trusty old Wachowski is losing it. Something with the AGP bus, the DDR video ram, or just maybe the fact that I lubricated the GeForce256 cooling fan with crude bicycle oil in rage at a point where Wachowski was making very distracting noises interfering with my ability to add value to data (which ultimately is how I get food and shelter (even love and sex, perhaps)).
Despite serious dysfunction, Wachowski is still able to function in the society of my home as a lowly internet gateway and mp3 player, but despite this serious drop in productive value it seems to have gained some elusive property which I can't remember to have attributed to computers since Windows 95 passed on to digital hell. As Tinytim does my every bidding with the consistency of Windows 2000 (which is quite considerable, despite what MacOS or Linux advocates would have you believe) it is practically invisible to me. Using it I perceive only my purpose and the data I am processing. However, when changing play list on Wachowski I have to wrestle through its particular way of rendering things, and in the grand scheme of things this computer's way of seeing things, of mixing up the data is not terribly interesting (it's about as interesting as conversing someone on acid) but in a very small way Wachowski is more beautiful and interesting than it ever was fully functional - it has gained idiosyncrasy, the humble beginnings of a personality. Its transparency as pure utility has been compromised. It is high on bicycle oil, eating at its wafers.
Wachowski has gained a soul just as grainy 8mm film of the late uncle Knut's safari in Kenya has it, as the egg tempera of yonder master painters had a life of its own or like the unique depth and timbre of a Stradivarus. The nostalgia of representations are always directed towards the media whose artifacts has become evident to us. In time the kids of the 80s have developed the same sense of "soul" towards the blocky graphics of Pac-Man or Defender, and in due time the chroma-instability of VHS, the occasional macro-block artifacts on DVD-films, the crude mpegs of internet porn and the narrow-band, tinny sound of your voice over a present-day phone line will be subject to the same nostalgia.
Artifacts are the idiosyncrasy of representation; they are the personality of the medium. And what do I remember about my grandmother? She put a piece of gum in place of her missing tooth. She couldn't deal with the life-like representation of people on TV, so on a few occasions she threw her sets out of the window (she had to resort to low volume radio via a tiny single earpiece). She smoked South State without filter (pure death), and she told me that only very stupid people are bored - great men like Albert Einstein, my grandmother and ideally me can fully entertain themselves by mere contemplation - they don't even have to look out of the window for distraction. Her idiosyncrasies, her artifacts, constitute her personality.
Then, take Steve Lightfoot, the editor of www.lennonmurdertruth.com. A walking, talking idiosyncrasy in his own right. Not a man in step with consensus-reality: He claims to present irrefutable evidence that John Lennon was murdered by horror writer Stephen King as part of a grand conspiracy involving Reagan and Nixon. His evidence consists of vague "codes" and peculiar coincidences gleaned from the media. I don't want to make fun of him, he is no doubt a good man in a tight corner, but please take a look at this excerpt from his personal biography:
A few weeks later I awoke at four am from an intense dream about the girl from Georgia. I was reminded of the intensity of living she had and knew that she , with all her faults, would have acted on her suspicions and done something to avenge the truth and John. And so it was, a few days later, that I found myself steering my bicycle towards the Pacific Beach Library to get a bearing on how Chapman went from the murder of the century to obscurity. The date was July 26, 1982 and I burst through the doors like a torpedo and snagged an Us magazine that happened to be on the first table I passed. It had John and Yoko on the cover. [...] I first read the Us magazine article and learned that Nixon tried to illegally deport John in the early 70's because of his high political profile and pronouncements against the Viet Nam war and Nixon himself. John invented the term "Tricky Dicky" in fact. [...] I also noticed that most of the bold print headlines read like a code about John's assassination. In Time, for example: " ...Watching civilization slide into barbarism and banality...All The President's Magazines...Death Trail....Doubletalk...Silencing An Almost Free Press...Jailing The News...The F.B.I.'s Show Of Shows...Unholy Ministry...A Gambler's Luck Runs Out...Death Comes From The Prime Minister... Defiant Widow In The Dock..."Who's In?""Who's Out?...Fitting together the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle..."
It was the ominous headline "Who's In?""Who's Out?" above just elected Ronald Reagan that made my heart sink. After all Reagan was'in' and Lennon was 'out'. I then noticed the smaller headline below the photo "Fitting together the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle..." as well as the fact that Richard Nixon's book The Real War was in the foreground of the picture at Reagan's right hand side. I pulled that book off the shelf and, literally, opened right to the page where Nixon writes: " The 'Trendies'...who say 'war' is 'bad' and 'peace' is 'good'...must be removed from the stage of public debate...by whatever means...a flyswatter...are needed..." (See website) I felt I had just stumbled, indeed, onto government codes about John's death hidden in the headlines of Time magazine.
Reading his expose you could say Mr. Lightfoot is scoring a full personality disorder jackpot, and... yes, he might need a little help. He has this jumbled way of seeing things, this skewed perception of how facts work, how to construct meaning from information. But a significant part of my world-view is too gleaned from "codes" in "headlines" - and in a certain philosophical sense none of us have any solid reason to believe our personal way of interpreting information is more reliable. The relation between the signifiers and the signified are established by general consensus, and there is no manual, no code-book to resolve meaning.
When people like Lightfoot pop out of the woodwork, we see the artifacts, the macro-blocks, the film-grains or the line-noise of the human condition. Of our relationship to anything. Artifacts are what make a medium in itself perceptible to us, and humans are in a sense media too through which the world is recorded and represented. The occasional extremes compromise our transparency: We are narrow band media, and our personal inability to fully represent reality constitute our individuality. You are your artifacts, the rest of you is transparent - insignificant.
Thanks, now I'll be a good boy and head right back to the looney bin. But remember: take the blue pill!