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.
As for the Solid World and the temporal— what Keats calls
“silence and slow time”— the way we experience time in Regular World contexts
is invariably a frog-march towards an ever receding target, and/or the monotony
of carrot and the stick games. We must remember that, with the brain equipment
that human beings have, and their abilities to tune in on high frequencies and
recognize and assimilate anomalies, the whole idea of a Regular World is a
fallacious one. The Universe is not, strictly speaking, Regular. It is too
diverse and too complex as an organism. So that leading a frog-march life,
forced or not, has nothing to do with anything. Solid World time or temporality
is psychedelic— time has different ways of passing or not passing, depending on
what we are thinking about or whatever we happen to be creating. The vicious
Regular World versions of time, where groups and conglomerates pulverize time
into a sense homogeneity and singularity against individual endeavor, are
circles which the Internet can break, by introducing individuals to the
algorithms and algorithmic endeavors of other individuals. Imaginations can be
kindled by other imaginations, from individual to other individual, and the
Regular World will stand by helplessly, hoping no one notices that their
hegemonic reign is over. The Neo-Romantic endeavor was initiated and sustained,
from Philadelphia
on out, because we all had ways and means of tuning out the Regular World.
Philadelphia’s superior architecture not only helped (Conshohocken has superior
architecture too), it created a mirroring, echoing spatial dimension in our
brains which could be used as a template to follow; thus, Abby’s superior
compositions and the Cheltenham Elegies in totem. Philadelphia’s superior architecture is one
of its many insignias of Solidity, and the Regular World goes out of its way
not to notice. But Abby and I both had susceptible brains the right way.
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