More Notes On The Solid World
John Keats left the planet Earth in 1821. His work gradually
began to gain some prominence in the 1850s, 30-35 years after his death. Let’s
not forget how the Regular World works, folks— I would estimate that each year,
between 1821 and 1855, there were thirty major prizes, grants, and fellowships
given to poets in the UK, from Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere. Over 35 years,
that’s roughly one thousand awards. John Keats, during his brief lifetime,
never won any prizes, awards, or fellowships. John Keats was a Solid World poet
all the way, and righteously individualistic into the bargain. Righteous
individuals do not tend to be awarded or recognized by the Regular World at
all, who prefer (usually, and in the short term) clowns and dummies. Why the
Solid World winds up wiping the floor with the Regular World is that products
of the Regular World tend to have a built-in obsolescence— they are made
specifically to be ephemeral. This goes for high and low disciplines. But the
game against individuals is simple— to delude individuals into believing that
the Regular World approach is better, necessary, and worth making sacrifices of
integrity and creativity for, is one stated aim of the Regular World. The
Regular World is all about Devil’s bargains. The Solid World, conversely, is
all about a different sense of time and space— the whole purport of the Solid
World is to develop one’s brain and imagination to its fullest creative
capacities, from rock music straight through to science. Now that the Internet
has incised into America
some respect for the Solid World (and, in some sectors, for Philadelphia as a Solid city), it can be
registered how space, the spatial, registers in Solid World contexts. No one
individual, btw, can keep up with the Regular World— one of its strategies to
incapacitate individuals is to create a deluge effect so that, forced to keep
up, individuals have no time left to develop their imaginations. The Regular
World is there specifically to incapacitate individuals— but the Internet is
creating cognitive space around individuals which is difficult to disrupt, and
continuous imaginative flows are now possible as more and more Regular World
taunts and admonitions are ignored. The Solid World essential lesson is a
phenomenological one— that physical space, outside of our brains, is mirrored
and echoed by the cognitive spaces within our brains.
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