Life in Karl’s head on a Wednesday night:

Here’s an odd one. I was just sitting here thinking about my amelanistic corn snake. BJ was saying he wasn’t a true albino because obviously he is partially pigmented with a sort of umber scale. The part of my brain that handles knowledge about how language works said, “Well, that makes sense in the context of the name because istic – or at the very least the “ic” is a Latinate suffix meaning “like”. So the snake is like an albino without being fully albino; sharing some properties with.” Here I am off on some Aristotelian classification jag.

I don’t know if that is accurate with regard to breeding – it’s reasonable argument and what a linguist might call a folk etymology or good bullshit that might actually have some truth in it. So then I was thinking that there were a few years when everyone was saying like between words instead of pausing, but now everyone is adding istic to everything so that I have to hear people say Buddhist-ic instead of simply Buddhist. So people are still getting their likes in but they are sticking them everywhere as word endings even where they are redundant as in my Buddhist example (on the model of reoccurring and recurring), unless of course they were in fact talking about something that was like Buddhism but not Buddhism. Even still, wouldn’t you say that Jain philosophy seems Buddhist? You just don’t need the istic.

Perhaps the perpetual like-ing of everything has something to do with the mediated aesthetic and the way that all experiences are framed with a kind of post historical parenthesis where everything is a quasi fallen form of the historical version from the time when we were all participating in events instead of just watching them; hokey pokey voyeurs with only one foot in and one foot out of our own experience. Nothing is anymore. It’s all like or akin to what once was. But then life, language, and my snake are all skin shedders working their way through the infinite onion of improbable possibility so I don’t suppose it matters much if people get into an istic habit.

It’s the exponentially increasing rate of change that is the most noteworthy aspect of this “post-historical” period. Theorists who get into this stuff used to contend that history ended in Nagasaki because we first realized the true Mayan zero of our own obliteration in opposition to the historical one of the past and then present. Regardless of the now pervasive presence of our own negation we are faced with the surprise of being Zeno’s Arrow; heading towards that disaster but somehow never reaching it. We don’t get zero, we get the postmodern paradox of shedding our skin almost faster than we can grow it, and shedding our skin in response to the act of looking at it such that as soon as we are able to see anything “like” identity, it is no longer our skin but only some recent past, thus everything must become a “like” in that the very act of framing it moves it out of the real.

Blah, it’s sad that one Baudrillard quote got so many smart people to sit through those two sucky sequels.

What happens when your culture becomes a Koan? You realize that is always was one. I suppose there are several hundred undergrad philosophy papers that follow the above line of thinking with references to Akira and The Matrix all through them. I wonder if any of them ever get anywhere interesting with these thought puzzles. I need to get myself to sleep obviously. Against the blank canvas of a silent universe all this etching is just another form of self stimulation.