Æ3

First of all, I wanted to mention that Æ is sort of like a nom de guerre, this is like you know Stalin or some cool name like that. Notice also the connected to stage name. But I like to say nom d’urgence, my emergency name, or maybe also nom mythique, my mythic name.

We also go back again to metonymy to drive home the theme that everything is god’s name, as in the short story about the names of god by Arthur C Clarke. In some traditions there might be endless catalogues of the name of God. This shows that everything is God, anything that can be named is a part of god.

This is to say that we are all manifestations of God, all avatars. Interesting contrast here:

The translation of avatar as "incarnation" has been questioned by Christian theologians, who state that an incarnation is in flesh and imperfect, while avatar is mythical and perfect.^[40][41] The theological concept of Christ as an Incarnation into the womb of the Virgin Mary and by work of the Holy Spirit God, as found in Christology, presents the Christian concept of incarnation. This, state Oduyoye and Vroom, is different from the Hindu concept of avatar because avatars in Hinduism are unreal and is similar to Docetism.^[42] Sheth disagrees and states that this claim is an incorrect understanding of the Hindu concept of avatar.^{[43][note 1]} Avatars are true embodiments of spiritual perfection, one driven by noble goals, in Hindu traditions such as Vaishnavism.

So is it real or unreal, if everything is such an avatar? Here we come up again on the creator-creation distinction. We are very against this.

I wanted to mention before that apparently Boann is even sometimes called Segais, which is the well that killed her. And also, there’s another name for that well which is Connla’s Well. The important thing is that this well is frequented by a group called the Tuatha Dé Danann who come from the Otherworld.

The other world also opens us immediate into Baudrillard. He mentions “another world” in his discussion of “the whites” and aboriginal Dream Time

The Whites will perhaps themselves disappear one day without ever having understood that their whiteness is merely the result of the promiscuity and confusion of all races and cultures, just as the whiteness of white light is simply the resolution of the melodrama of all colours. And just as colours become comparable amongst themselves only when they are measured against a universal scale of wavelengths, so cultures become comparable only when they are set against a structural scale of differences. But there is a double standard here, for it is only for Western culture that other cultures are different.

For those other cultures themselves, Whites are not even different - they are non-existent, phantoms from another world. Outward conversion to Western ways invariably conceals inward scoffing at Western hegemony. One is put in mind of those Dogons who made up dreams to humour their psychoanalysts and then offered these dreams to the analysts as gifts. Once we despised other cultures; now we respect them. They do not respect our culture, however; they feel nothing but an immense condescension for it. We may have won the right by conquest to exploit and subjugate these cultures, but they have offered themselves the luxury of mystifying us.

The strangest feeling one is left with after reading Bruce Chatwin' s Songlines is a lingering perplexity about the reality of the 'lines' themselves: do these poetic and musical itineraries, these songs, this 'dreamtime', really exist or not? In all these accounts there is a hint of mystification; a kind of mythic optical illusion seems to be operating. It is as though the Aboriginals were fobbing us off.

While unveiling the profoundest and most authentic of truths (the Austral myth at its most mysterious), they also play up the most modern and hypothetical of considerations: the irresolvability of any narrative, absolute doubt as to the origins. For us to believe these fabulous things, we need to feel that they themselves believe them. But these Aboriginals seem to take a mischievous pleasure in being allusive and evasive. They give a few clues, but never tell us the rules of the game, and one cannot help getting the impression that they are improvising, pandering to our phantasies, but withholding any reassurance that what they are telling us is true. This is doubtless their way of keeping their secrets while at the same time poking fun at us - for in the end we are the only people who want to believe these tales.

The Aboriginals' secret resides not in what they omit to say, however, but entirely within the thread, within the indecipherable filigree of the narrative; we are confronted by an ironic form here, by a mythology of appearances. And in the manipulation of this form the Aboriginals are far more adept than we are.

We Whites are liable to remain mystified for a good while yet. The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab, fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with the same affectation and inner unconcern - and are we not ourselves equally unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas all other cultures have already given their own response - namely, universal indifference.

It is not even remotely a matter of rehabilitating the Aboriginals, or finding them a place in the chorus of human rights, for their revenge lies elsewhere. It lies in their power to destabilize Western rule. It lies in their phantom presence, their viral, spectral presence in the synapses of our brains, in the circuitry of our rocketship, as I Alien'; in the way in which the Whites have caught the virus of origins, of Indianness, of Aboriginality, of Patagonicity. We murdered all this, but now it infects our blood, into which it has been inexorably transfused and infiltrated. The revenge of the colonized is in no sense the reappropriation by Indians or Aboriginals of their lands, privileges or autonomy: that is our victory. Rather, that revenge may be seen in the way in which the Whites have been mysteriously made aware of the disarray of their own culture, the way in which they have been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor and are now succumbing little by little to the grip of 'dreamtime' . This reversal is a worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return - not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense - and to reach the very heart of our ultra sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness - a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter.

I’m still looking for where he mentions challenges coming from “the other world.”

I would instead say all possibilities are actual, and what is out there is simply the rest of all the possibilities. So there is great plenty and also outlandish kinds of suffering. It’s again, to bring in haphazardly science, an idea of every possibility is actual, they are all in superposition on top of each other in the same moment of space and time, which is non-space and non-time.

But for any appearance to occur, there has to be some order to it, this is incarnation.

So, Æ is a symbol that I associate with myself which grows out of my appreciation for the album Miss Anthropocene, which ties into the overall idea of using great art as a means to have great influence, and turning the tide of this incarnational space from this dissonance and unhappiness to revelry and celebration.

But in order to celebrate what is happening, then it is necessary to walk with everyone in the darkness. This more Sedna, Adlivun, “This is the song I wrote you in the dark.”

The lesson is that it is perfectly at hand to live in paradise, but to do so it must also be as nothing to you, to me, to go anywhere and be with anyone and stand with anyone and go through what they have, and do what they have.

Æ the symbol is also associated with Odin, we can compare this again to Baudrillard and the idea of true simulation and false simulation in “Æsthetic Illusion and Disillusion” from The Conspiracy of Art.

Odin did a sacrifice to get access to the Runes, this was sort of like Prometheus as then others could use them also. Democratizing creative power. Baudrillard mentions true simulation simplifies the process of artistic creation. So does an alphabet, a language.

So where we are today is standing in need of some new simulation like this, and taking the name Æ is supposed to signify my wanting a place in all that. It is not merely a question technological development or power, but rather poetically beautiful and necessary influence which is coursing with all the force of fate and every story which has ever been told.