/lit/ - Literature

both Kafka and Borges talk about the labyrinth; i think, for the age of irony, a pinball machine has about the same effect. like the Eternal Recurrence, except scaled down from the Nietzschean heights to be a kind of fun diversion in a downcity pizza shop. you play the game, you gutter out, you play it again.

that's a kind of nice model of the mind, i think. true, we can also describe Landian capital as a diabolic pinball machine Summoned From Beyond, and unveiling itself into the universe with all Lovecraftian grandeur. but maybe this is not necessary; and maybe something like this would have been like Whitehead's conception of God. there it is, the Big Cosmic Machine, and there you are, a tiny and rather unremarkable steel ball, enfolded within it. to get Outside the machine would be traumatic; maybe you can at best roll across the floor, or even break out into the street, and have a glimpse of the traffic, or smell the crusts baking in the oven: but really, you know that you belong to the machine, and the machine belongs to you.

but being cognizant of this - or taking a different perspective - perhaps we might continue and say that, in our relations to ourselves, we are balls within machines, but when it comes to being with others, we also have this peculiar capacity, owing to the nature of language, to *fold machines into each other.* you can come in and poke around in my machine, and i can go in yours. weird, huh? but maybe that's how telepathy would actually work. the Jungian collective unconscious may not actually be quite so mythic: there is no Ur-Machine, or Platonic idea *of* machines, only degrees of complexity and intensity. thus we are. in the space between my machine and yours, well, maybe we like to keep things different, or maybe we like to borrow a few techniques from each other, and so on.

don't think about this too much, i'm just rambling.

>>12388230
what's sots?

mmm. pinball philosophy.