Seq 8: Topiary Babel > Hikikomori > Obeah
topian tomes read like personal ads: Determined idealists longingly "seek perfect places" (compare the Perfectionists in Seq 2 and see Leibnitz's le meilleur des mondes possibles). These by turns opti- or pessi-mistic thought experiments are abstract, conceptual intellisocially engineered solutions ("intentional communities"[!] [ if you're ready to rumble, sequitur or sashay down into this fertile valley (bearing in mind Voltaire's closing prescription in Candide [ou l'Optimisme; punch line spoiler alert]:
"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible [auth: note impossible, or non-normal {in which "the laws of logic fail"}] worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts." "Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."
[And this, it may be understated, is good advice.]), where you will encounter such provocative concepts as
e*sequitur 51: voluntary simplicity,
wandering monks and even hominid charlatans]) to address the nettlesome persistent imperfection of humankind's divers states, and the persistent pleasure male adults (vicious apes, including dictators, philosophers [abstractors lacking any moral hazard: see*sequitur 43], et al.) are seen to derive from playing with (dismembering) dolls and human chess pieces. Examples have run the gamut from benetopias (eutopias [eu as in euphemism; apologies to those who consider knowledge of classical Greek fundamental to human education])("good") to caco- [for real], dys-, mala-, anti- and negatopias (only one of many of your busy correspondent's hapax legomena, no doubt) ("bad"; observing that in almost all of which good and bad are attemptedly defined and/or reconciled [theodicy, which concept and its numerous {i.e., most philosopher and all theosopher} agonistes an educated person should pursue for their historical, if obsolete {in that theodicy assumes and accepts the truly lame concept of Manichean dualism} importance] [also note Bentham's hedons and dolors]) many of which are well known to schoolchildren (and self-erased by elders). And of course there is Libertatia (alias Libertalia), a pirates' utopia (jollyrogetopia?) possibly located in Madagascar. You can, of course, create your own quaintopia at Max Barry's (nomenclaturally passé) NationStatesTM (noting numerous troublesome micronations, including the Republics of Indian Stream and Whangamomona [presidents including Billy Gumboot, goat, and Tai Poutu, poodle]; the Kingdoms of Araucania, Lovely and Redonda; the Principality of Outer Baldonia; the United Federation of Koronis, and others).
((Do not read warning: It is notable that ideal societies [optopias] as envisioned by history's greatest thinkers are accountable/collaborative [= socialistic; binoting that this is represented by interested detractors as an extreme approach; verily, a balanced model offers more divergence/diversions, trinoting that no approach so far has overcome genetic corruption-by-power or innate destructiveness], and that dystopias are totalitarian and ban ideation, but we mustn't even think these forbidden thoughts, so we won't.))
(All clear!)
How much
One dappling day in New England
when nature favours all
We stop by woods and watching see
the painting of Creation
One humbling tree on the Guilford Green
Which one, you say;
you must've seen it, too
Eponymous - just tree, I say;
it wasn't purchasable
One decent poem before I sleep
Whose words are these, I think
in falling leaves and snowflakes
swept from heaven's floor
I didn't write that, either
Just borrowed it to ask
how much
we, our craving selves,
need, body & soul
Let's say enough;
each day will do
* * *
(Note that Lennon's apparent advocacy for the elimination of nation states implies anarchy, communes, gangs [e.g., corporations] or a single world government. Assuming any of these configurations, "the world living as one" [if abstractly appealing] may require sophisticated citizens and, certainly, altruistic leaders.) It may be remarked that they tend to be Western, raising the question as to why the Eastern philosopher authors haven't created equivalents to the U's (note More's Utopia of Ga 4.570001516 [alternate method: relative to the Age of the Universe = Ga 14.700000001516 {in which year Hanno (the company of historic elephants being substantial, including Abul-Abbas, Kandula, Suleiman [namesake of the sultan] and Icy Mike [noting elephantine Ivy Mike, the first, and cryogenically-cooled h-nuke]), Pope Leo X's white elephant (his favourite animal) died} so stop complaining about your correspondent's Ga thing; note the Hindu mahamantavara time unit of 311 trillion years {and note 1000 mahayugas = 4.32 billion years, the approximate age of the Earth}] [in his dreamland, capital punishment for serial adulterers], Swift's satirotopia Gulliver's Travels of Ga 4.570001726; Butler's Erewhon [the eponymous contrived outopia {no- or fictopia; see nirguna next}] of Ga 4.570001872; Huxley's Brave New World of Ga 4.570001932 [see*sequitur 93]; James Hilton's Lost Horizon [Shangri-La] of Ga 4.570001933; Orwell's essentially realised 1984 [It is true that this book damned Stalinist bureaucracy in apparent refutation of the claim of collaborativism as most potentially utopian. Damning collaborativism based on the single example of monkey-mating {see Seq B} totarch Stalin would {and did} demonstrate wading-pool logic.] Ga 4.570001948; [But wait! How can we omit the ludicrous
e*sequitur 52: heterotopia,
offspring of the mind of a latter-day philosophe {Diderot, en pleurant, se retourne dans sa tombe}, a space "of otherness {linked to those outside the tribe ( Seq 3) and zombies ( Seq 9)}... neither here nor there... simultaneously physical and mental....," corroborating Keynes' contention that the ideas of philosophers as well as economists are indeed "dangerous" {or stupefyingly annoying} {see*sequitur 72}. Proposing the concept with a straight face would, admittedly, require a sense of humor akin to R. Mutt's {the*esquitrist's canine kin and fellow chessman (and, we see, transvestite Rrose Sélavy)} {Fountain (Fontaine)}.] [and also note
e*sequitur 53: uchronias
{uchroniae?}{!}, uniquely-attributed times rather than places {this transposition nimbly transforming space-time into time-space (nice sleight of hand, n'est-ce pas?)} imagined in the historiography {a publishing subindustry} of counterfactual histories {and nuanced} alternate histories {but wait! This just in... Intellectual correction fluid = historical revisionism and negationism, introduced early in 1984. Although this isn't typically in honest hands, it can expose omissions or other historical denials}. Wielding electronic tools, human Virtual Social Engineers {more accurately, escape artists} now construct and populate electronic dollhouses {more accurately, doll civilisations, (e.g., Eshraval) and shared universes} with immortal poppets {vodouns}, extinguishing their own temporal allotments forever {wasting irrecoverable time} in whirlpools of avatariskepsis. In these cases, is loneliness {this timeless (and major concern of Internalists [thinkers in themselves], the seduction community [see*sequitur 13] and even, on the rare occasion, of the reflective reader?) concept word a gift from Shakespeare: Coriolanus: "I go alone, Like to a lonely dragon..." Coriolanus, Act IV, Scene I, and shortly thereafter Milton} by choice, or are they not lonely when engaged in worldbuilding {actual term}?
* * *
April gift
(Do you know what you gave me?)
Tuft of grass
in terra cotta
on the table by the window
spotted sheaves
jut
time lapses:
a red tulip,
assertive and hiroshimal,
reaches for its floral kin
outside
I come home to this
in an uncertain year
* * *
Here we must insert the concept of the combined form
e*sequitur 54: chronotopia,
{and see chronotype in e*sequitur 41} your e*sequitrist's neologism for the location of time-space or, if preferred, time-spaciness; this derived from chronotope, M.M. Bakhtin's time-space matrix, which, along with its allomorphs, might be a useful trope for physicists {while begging the question as to whether e*sequiturs is itself chronotopical}.]
Stepford Wives of Ga 4.570001972, a combined form in which male pseudotopia [cunnitopia: see*sequitur 25 and Image in Seq 9] intentionally brings about female annihilotopia [see next; should the females subscribe to
e*sequitur 55: the Six Samana
of the Pali Canon, they might not or not not care {cf. Taoist wu wei (non-action) and the NaN (Not a Number; e.g., ∞/∞; also quiet NaNs [qNANs])}]) except in religious teleologies (way too much to even skim in humble*sequiturs; see nirguna [attributelessness {see Ness-Ity-Hood in nullsequitur 37}] in e*sequitur 18; moksha [release], the cycle of samsara [confluence] and shunyata in Seq F), leading us, inevitably and in thrall (Nordic slavery), to the onomatopoeic Antillean
e*sequitur 56: shak-shak,
jumbie drums (aka balaban, french reels and e*sequitur 42) and other instruments used to summon jumbies (dark spirits, including
e*sequitur 57: Jack Lantern
[also the blacktorch madder {Erithalis fruticosa; this specimen apparently arrested in New York City for a "Floristics" violation}]) in the jumbie dance (the "Goat Skin Woo-Woo") (and the unrelated Book of Jubilees [a jubilee being proclamative ram's horn trumpeting; Jubilees themselves triggering spontaneous communitarianism]), an accelerating fiveset of quadrilles (for four couples), incorporating glossolalia (cf. clang association), flailing and collapse.
* * *
> Seq 9
* * *
Image: Rubricated U
"Wild tulip in the steppe of Kazakhstan steppe" by Carole a (Wikipedia).