Thursday, May 24, 2012

New Best of the Hopper III


From the warped brain of Hopper, October 15, 2010:


Seeking Something Weird


I need to read something weird.

I need to be dropped into something strange and bizarre. Something mind-blowing and quixotic and warped and weird. I need to be subsumed by something sublime.

“Hopper,” you say, “what do you mean by this?”

Here’s what I mean:

Something that will open my eyes to something new. Something that will give me a different way of looking at the world. Something that will force me to put the book down, stare into the distance at nothingness-aeterna, and utter in my best Keanu Reeves voice: “Whoa.” Something that will raise goosebumps on my arms.

Something like Nietzsche crossed with Philip K. Dick, with PKD convinced that Nietzsche is still alive and running an underground global government.

Something like Gurdjieff after Gurdjieff commits Gödel Escher Bach to memory in a yogic trance.

Something like Lewis Carroll updated and adapted by Richard Feynman made into a movie by Terry Gilliam and then novelized by Ray Bradbury.

Something like Kant reinterpreted by Robert Heinlein, then the whole thing done up as a rock opera by Pete Townsend.

Something like Jorge Luis Borges unifying the thought of Thomas Aquinas with that of Martin Heidegger, in a series of 2,500-word vignettes taking place in a South America transplanted to another world. Oh, and the whole thing will be translated into English by Kurt Vonnegut.

Something like Colin Wilson developing a new theory of human consciousness after reading H. P. Lovecraft – wait, that’s been done already (see The Mind Parasites).

Something like a transcription of a 12-hour acid trip conversation between Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley, Albert Magnus, and Anaxagoras.

Something like an inverted and upside-down Tolkien trilogy, where 21st century America is as magical, mystical and ethereal to Middle-earth in the same proportion that Middle-earth is now magical, mystical and ethereal to shallow, vain, and dullish 21st century America.

Something like a Miltonesque song-cycle recapitulation of the dozen or so strains of quantum mechanical thought couched in the language and metaphors of the pre-Socratic philosophers.

Something like Ramanujan and Riemann and Russell carving out a multi-dimensional mathematical world which uncannily mirrors human psychology and historical-eschatological development.

Know what I mean?

Can anybody help me here, or do I have to write these things myself, and most likely make a complete damn fool of myself in the process?

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