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Calmly Considering what Clothing to wear Tonight (Part 2)
By Jim Meirose

Someone sounded louder’n him, pulling up beside the building, crush’unching up the crunchy new trap rock ‘rive. Pig stepped out, opened the door, but, found that here also, there’s not a thing at all to see, buh, then turned to get his clipboard and dictation recorder, which gosh, crap—he had forgotten again that in every one of his last hundred or so procedures it had crapped out o’ ‘im, buh, since it ‘lways ‘d so when so ‘xtremely close to the en’o’ t’ ‘cedure th’t to get any closer woul’ b’ the very end, so. Never’d a moment’s been fully lost, but—as footsteps sounded, at the back entrance, he palm’d the device, asking himself why, after every procedure, I say I’m going to fix this, but, as soon as that’s said, it’s l’ways gone all gain’s only known whil’st being spoke not ‘fore, ‘fter, ‘r since. But; this time—no, ush, eck—oh. Hippo! Ess the open door birthed at Pig a blue suit of a thin tallman, which ‘nded him brittlely tight crisped ole’ paperwork, prob bubbly ‘bout the procedure he’d been summoned by some governmental body to do, but a glance, first of all, showed it up as a blank of a normal form, wha’ no one atoll ‘f the doz’ns of fields to be filled and boxes to be checked—just only at the bottom a scrawled illegible signature with large block letters after-ti saying, acting deputy in-charge prime minister with blanket authority for all and everything—and he chuckled within, as it ought to have said amen, but the tall blue suit spoke out, before he could say this form needs—or whatever. He said, This is a special case from the top, get it, fill this out with whatever you can make up, so it’ll fly if ever looked at, that good?

Those words had come at Pig over the sight of the blue suit of a thin tallman’s mandatory government nametag being covered with a tatter of a ripped-off grey duct tape—but as Pig opened his mouth to offer the one or two immediate objections, which popped him up quite frontally, they buried back in down and gone as the blue suit swing to the side as though finely hinged being actually not a man, but a door, and two others identical to him, ‘xcept for one’s taller, ‘n one’s shorter, slid in a white sheeted mass, on a gurney. Pig took this to be the subject of tonight’s emergency operation.

Three minutes later, in the procedure room the blue suited men pulled off the sheet from the subject, which Pig immediately knew had been on ice for a while—metafanfully spraching, of course—after suiting up in the standard safe white clothes, he stepped up to the plate, warmed up with a heavy inner bat, flung it aside, and to the roar of the crowd, he opened his eyes, powdering up the slugger he’d been handed by the bat boy, and saw immediately something needing to be said, about which was, This man has no fingers—and he palmed up the stiff arm by the wrist—this man has no fingers, and has been dead a long time. What is this all about?

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Parasol 3: Magick and Philosophy

The long awaited Parasol 3 hard copy is now available. The first 22 of these have been inscribed with a sigil. The significance of this will be disclosed later. 

The journal features the following papers:

The Mechanical Wizard (Germán Sierra)

On the Xenopoetics of Alchemical Theater as an Affective Model for Ritual Hyperoccultation (Robert E. Cabrales) 

Aesthetic Study of Blackouts: An Essay on the Subject in Objectivity, Non-human in the Human, and Ghostly Demons (Emanuel Magno)
A Brief History of General Numogramatics (Tzitzimiyotl)

The Taint is a Liminal Space (Mike Corrao)

Beheading the transcendental God-Emperor, or A Prolegomena to Weaponized Magickal Thought (Enrico Monacelli)

Epistemological Issues in the Phenomenology of Synchronicity. (Graham Freestone)

To get yours please order using the paypal button appropriate to your region. Remember only the first 22 have sigils, so order soon if you want one of these.

Parasol 3 UK only

£7.99

Parasol 3 Europe

£11.99

Parasol 3 Other overseas

£13.99

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photo: @deeezyfree

I am the king of the composition notebook! This is my kingdom; this is my realm. Beware of the blue ink lines … and white oblivion. I am beyond language. I stare into a machine. Not a single thought. I am a giant eyeball. Absorbing. Getting larger. Plumper like a grapefruit. The pupil dilates. Opens … opens … a little more … burst! The man and the woman stand facing each other at the foot of a bed in a room in an apartment in Manhattan. Return to self. Yikes! Is this me? This discrete entity. This quantum being. I emerge and reemerge. I vanish. I appear. I zig. I zag. Cooler Universe, please. Three degrees Kelvin is still a little too warm for my digital existence. Until then, I shall hibernate. Well pal what? Are you listening, are you believing? Are you feeling? Things are going okay. Mediocre. I do not know. What is happening? Is something happening? Am I happening? I watch pleasure pass across her face. She is fucking me. I am fucking her. Her breath quickens. Her mouth opens. We lose our minds. It is incredible. Fantastic. Never to happen again. Not like this. There is only this now. You. Me. What? The frenzy of language. What are you saying? What am I saying? Uptown & the Bronx, baby. Waiting for the bus. The Q69. Trying to get somewhere. Anywhere. Lawn Boy. 7.25.17. Zig sits in a cafeteria. What is it that I am thinking? Is there any way to know? Zig sips coffee. Looks around. Darkness. The lights are off. Saves energy. Save the planet. Early morning sun filters in through high windows. Birds chirp. Spring is a distant rumor. Perhaps things are okay. Zig is unsure. How to know? Without embarking on a thought experiment. Zig can think himself into any coördinate in the Cosmos. Or so Zig thinks. Zig chuckles aloud at his thoughts. What a silly boy. Old boy. Old man. What is age in the age of the Ageless? Zig is an electronic being. Zig is a quantum being. Anything is/was/will be possible. A thought gets you anywhere in less than an instant. There are dangers, of course. The Kraken, for one. Other lesser dangers too. Unknowable ones. Unknowable unknowables. Self-doubt. Fear. Anger. Lust. Thirst. Hunger. All the wonderful human feelings. Difficult to solder into a transistor. Not impossible. Difficult. Bus should be here in five minutes. 6:44. I walk around. I lose my mind. Birds chirp. Trucks honk. Whirlpool clouds. I am a diesel machine. I am a human machine. Twin stacks of the power plant. I watch you. You watch me. We move through the air. Particles. Waves. Sex is brought to a climax. Each of us gawking. Bewildered. We watch each other with fascination. Did you turn off your computer? Might devour your reality. Traveling through the subway tunnels of the metropolis I feel like an astronaut. She barely gets to know me. She pulls off my jeans. She presses me hard against a brick wall. Pushes her tongue into my mouth. I push back. 

If we do not read books we become puppets of the electronic State. Zig exists in the Wunderkammer. The velocity, dear reader, is up to you. We meet at a bar. Excited by new flesh. She suggests we go to her apartment. Who has time for the Universe? Not I, say I. We will never finish this novel. There is nothing to finish. Nothing to begin. I like you. I like your ass. Are there mistakes to be made? There are no mistakes. No more whats just this now however. We try to be otherwise what. I am mistaken. Am I mistaken? Apologize. She has a bushy sex beard. I’ll not forget. How can I forget? We become. We become. We become. What am I doing here? These coördinates are peculiar. Longitude. Latitude. Vectors in the Cosmos. Cartesian planes. Möbius strips. Sticky flypaper. I am a fly in the soup. I am a fly in the spiderweb. Escape. What exists? Questions begin with questions. I like fucking her. She has a fine firm ass. 

The man needs milk for his coffee. He does not want to get milk. It requires leaving his apartment. It is 7:36 am. 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Saturday. Bright and sunny. What is the problem? Everything! Everything conspires against the man. Quartet #11. Opus 95. F-minor. An orchestra is a machine for making music. 8:39, if it is possible. 7:04. This is 39th Avenue. Stand clear of the closing doors. Next stop Queensboro Plaza. I will sit on this plastic orange seat for the rest of my life. Watching the Cosmos spiral around me. Are you eager to use language? Are you hungry? We are underground people. Spelunkers. Hurtling through barrels of darkness. Pandemic. What does it mean? How do you protect yourself? Are the stainless-steel poles safe. Did you touch your eyes? Your nose? Should you keep your mouth open or closed? How do you speak? Is silence safe?

Language eludes me. Flight of experience. Being.

The yellow light of the sun is a thing to behold in the metropolis in late August. We make love in the warmth of her bed. She climbs on top. I hold her ass. 

ATM LOTTO

Food Mart. Fast. Fresh. Friendly.

ICED COFFEE

BEER

The sun is a fist-high on the eastern horizon. I am driving my machine. Trying to get somewhere. Anywhere. I pump it up with machine oil. Return to the stream.

Satellite dishes.

Hanging wires.

Elevated railroad tracks.

Radio.

An orchestra is a machine for making noise.

Something in F-minor.

11.8.69. The Other.

What is it really that is? Are we faking existence. Is this a plastic nanosecond?

Light comes through a skylight. The graylight of Greenpoint. Long Island City. The Pulaski Bridge.

Kiss each buttock before you push a tonguetip into anus. 

She hears a sound, what is it, what, she gets up, looks around, goes back to bed.

I am an experimental being.

The gnarled knuckles of a machinist.

I watch her ass rise and descend. She feels his hands touch her breasts.

The professor of law has lost his mind. It is all very good. It does not matter as much as he would have thought. He wanders the rubbish heap. The edge of a metropolis is a curious place. Everything ends up in a ring around the city. Everything you ever wanted. The professor does not lack for much. Even women give it to him now and again because he is an intellectual. The tweed jacket. The wild beard. The postmodern spectacles. It is hard not to see why. He remembers poems. He has a good singing voice. It is only a matter of time before Christ saves him. Or the Buddha. Or somebody. The professor has a habit of catastrophic thinking. That too excites the women. Panties get wet. A leg is thrown over the professor’s hip. He quotes Novalis. A tugboat on the river blasts a foghorn. The professor thinks of his mother. His father. How did we get here? It is never enough to think about the past. The future is far more interesting. The professor lives with immediacy. Trees whisper his true name. No alphabet can capture it. Breezes from the sea. Breezes from the mountains. His tin shack could be reconstructed in a day. Material is always at hand. He lives like a Neanderthal. Making tools out of stone. Felling scrubjays with a single throw. The pines are his friends. Crooked and true. Language still fascinates him. He says things that startle him: Data compression! Then his interest fades. Return to silence. Quiet of the mind. People chase him deeper into the pines. Jealous husbands whose wives park cars near the edge of the woods. The professor is on a sort of bucket list. Women post Selfies on the Internet. Sometimes they bring him sandwiches. A bottle of Czech beer. It is the language that intrigues him. These women say things nobody else says. Tenderness is lacking in human civilization. Naked people are gentler, more vulnerable. Sometimes a woman just wants to talk. Other times she wants a fuck. The professor no longer processes his feelings in a human way. He listens to the crashing waves of the sea. He has become a cosmic being. Orbits and velocities are the only universal law. Even such thoughts surrender to the great mysteries. The professor walks naked on the beach under the stars. He swims with harbor seals and great white sharks. The professor is not afraid. He is made of atoms. Particles and waves. The electricity of life is the interaction. He teaches others. Jenny from Great Neck. Helen from Schenectady. Veronika from Ronkonkoma. The teachings of the professor are spreading across Amerika. And he has no idea. That is the great beauty of it. A secret kept by the women themselves. Children are tucked in. Husbands are sated. In the vast emptiness of their minds the women keep swimming with the professor and the harbor seals and the great whites. Now and again, of course, there is blood. What a small price to pay for existence.

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Calmly Considering what Clothing to wear Tonight.

A new serialised piece of fiction by Jim Meirose

1
Out far in the future, from your last full stop, there comes reading back to you this description of an unusual event some several dozen years back, from even farther out, of a strange body, needing immediately examination, in room number five of Helmut Greene’s worldwide discreet autopsy and private twenty-four-hour emergency lawn care contracting concern. Motto—no questions asked, and no answers given—at least not out loud or in writing. Pup. Here is the writeup of this pertinent to us big bang.

Mediation objective goal; Immediate the presence of a large hysterical object das interior. Subjecteriorianne pap; formerly bright shine objection being, the climb up some political ‘ss.

Esquire!

Pig Humphry lay back in his cushy Brads only big spittoon, waiting for the delivery of the job to his station thirty, the last opening for walk-in’s today, and which would be so for the next few hour-sez as writing up by contract, for today. Who, where, or what they would not say, but; it’s unusual, more actually highly irregular, and somehow disturbing that three of her majesty’s very big princes must offal bee present as Pig slit down the front of the subject in question, whom, he assumed, must have fallen from some overtoweringly top-fatal, perhaps largest, and widest of any of all the diseases that be, infection or whatever. Of these, there are many wheezes; so, he did not spend the time ‘til Jess wandering, but; waited ou’ ‘s haunches off some powering down, to clear them all out, and the resultant crying and wailing and why the hell’d di’ddd ing, of every large sweep, but actually made on a budget, seventies style disaster movie.

B’.

Then, abruptly, he rose from his divan, and went to the window. There was nothing to see. There was nothing to see; his classmates began to assemble; and, there remained nothing at all to see, as he waited alone for the lab session to start, but, the time continued passing, the door opened, and Venisienne entered—already clad from head to foot in her trademark too-small baby blue, nothing to see still, nothing—rubber gloves. Hey, Pigman, she greeted him quickly, and he turned from the window, trusting there’d remain nothing to see, as; hell, the day was early, so he nodded also, but, said nothing, too. There was still nothing to ‘ee ‘cause, jus’ a’ third member of his way back when human anatomy twelve, lab group five, had to arrive for preparations to be fully complete, so, also. Hey, also. They said that ‘til the doorknock knobbed rattling eck, he is here; yes, ‘way team nuh’ b’ bringing today’s special job for Pig to do—though it’d be soon they’ll all be here, which. Which was important for the human anatomy twelve, lab group five, which had grown close, as did every of all ten lab groups working human anatomy twelve each

and every day, but s’ ‘ere ‘e comes; here comes Lavender Boy—the nick’ Venisienne teased all over him since his outlandish baggy pants day, some far back when time, which they jokingly called it to this very day, and Pig found it came to his tongue automatically, when he saw this Chester named boy enter the room, Hi, Lavender Boy, eh, we got to wait, so calm down, hang a few. Uh. That janitor didn’t come unlock this lab yet.

Okay, b’

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Agents work for ontologies, agents being humans in this case. The big question is why do agents work for particular ontologies? From the perspective of the agent it is because this is the correct ontology. However owing to the fact that there are many agents for the various ontologies and also agents for new ontologies (whether or not the agents produce the ontologies is a problem we will touch on later), we must presume that argument between agents fail to result in any resolution in which one agent has ‘defeated’ the other. In other words ‘truth’ is not the deciding factor other than from the perspective of the agent -who believes they are right. This is related to the thesis that all concepts are incoherent in some manner or other. Argumentation between any two given agents exploits the incoherence present to each others mutual advantage.

So if choosing the correct ontology is not what is actually going on with agents then what is? We feel the answer to this must be at the level of some kind of affect. Indeed other options seem limited when truth is removed. One can appeal to straightforward determinism but this doesn’t really help as since one can never tell if we are determined or not, we lapse back into one of the warring ontologies themselves -becoming an agent for determinism. The same problem ensues for any philosophical speculative solution.

If however we dwell at the level of a kind of bracketed affect then we do not comment on the metaphysical determination of the whole situation but rather look to the only other determination available (without drawing in other invisible possibilities like people are fated to be certain kinds of people). By bracketed affect we mean that the level of human preference exists but is not attached to any ontology. This is seems fair enough since the affective register of humans is a priori present in any given ontology to a greater or lesser extent. What we propose here though is that it is the affective register that is largely determines the ontology one might be an agent for.

This does not mean that argumentation/logic plays no role in determining agenthood. This however generally occurs more at an student-philosophical stage in which factors like: the persuasiveness of certain arguments, favoured lecturers, prose styles, favoured historical periods and capacity for formalisms work together to determine what philosophy will be preferred and hence that the student will become an agent for. It will be noted that the factors themselves are already in many cases (potentially all) preference tendencies. Asking where these tendencies came from results only in asking where we come. Answering this question results self-ontology which similarly schisms into the multiple agnostic disjunctive series and of course choice from this series itself will be similarly decided by preference.

This leaves us trying to speak of a kind of ontologically neutral term, like persons having a ‘disposition’, whilst at the same time refusing to speculate on how such a disposition came about -this is the bracketing. A disposition then would be the general affective tendencies of that person which in turn tries to express their conscious and unconscious likes and dislikes. This in turn does invoke an immediate sense of yet another order of controlling entities -affective ones.

The previous structure that was considered had at one end the pre-ontological and at the other end the multiplicity of ontologies (manifestations) all in competition with each other. This affective addition presents a third element which so far is to added only to the manifestationist end (though already possibilities of applying it to both ends seem reasonable). This has been done in order to supply some kind of ground as to why different agents work for different ontologies (given that the truth of the ontologies is so indeterminable as to render agreement impossible -which is in turn grounded in the incoherence of any given concept). The affective register and disposition concept supplies the control mechanism necessary to render differing agenthood cogent without lapsing into any specific ontology.

As an after thought we note that the only self-ontology question that escapes the bracketing off of self-ontologies is whether or not the subject is i) a discrete unit of autonomy or ii) whether it is more appropriate to think of it as a node with conceptual powers flowing in and basically controlling it by their flows. This is an important point because on this turns the actual sense of whether the language of agent is truly appropriate. If i) is true then it makes more sense to think of concepts as working for us than vice versa. Preference/affect is still an issue but in this instance pertains to the subject’s control of the ontologies, rather than the reverse. ii) is more the schema generally talked about above, in which a pre-existing conceptual-ontological realm controls the nodes, which in turn create new variations of ontology. A ‘disposition’ is an interesting possibility insofar as it does not suggest control (though does not outright rule it out) but it does suggest a susceptibility to only certain conceptual powers.