Hypno-Noumenal Somatrons: hyper-flow ensembles: Part IV: Affect & Memory (Shame)

///A short write-up on "What Is Culture?" won the twitter poll last night, but I'm busy today with GRE studying so that'll be up tomorrow. For now we'll move on to Part IV of the Hypno-Noumenal series. In Part IV we move to the second phase, Affect/Metanoia. A brief processional and theoretical write-up of this phase can be found in section 5 of Part I.

The experiment here (Shame: EMDR Kaleidoscope) was by far the most fun to perform, & I definitely encourage trying it yourself. I called it "EMDR Kaleidoscope" because at the time I created it I was undergoing EMDR treatment, and something about this experiment resonates with that form of treatment--a dredging-up of repressed personages, a vivid re-engagement with past self-bundles which feel foreign to yourself. In memory, often, we hyperstition our current selves retroactively and allow that to rule the narrative of the memory. The "hypno" element of EMDR brings you back to that place much more vividly, without room for the same sort of fictionalization. It's somatic, bodily: old angers flare fresh, and in confrontation with your past naivety you cringe. But it's precisely this cringe, and a strange sort of shame, that fuels the repression which has caused you to forget yourself; it felt, to me, that a confrontation of the most intense moments of that shame was in some way important or significant: thus the goal of this experiment--a confrontation with an image of yourself that makes you feel that shame, intensified by the poppy soundtrack of nostalgic alienation (Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," an anthem of libidinal youth, the soundtrack to standing-quietly-in-the-corner or else making a public fool of yourself). If you aren't near enough to my age (22), I encourage you to replace "Teenage Dream" with a different but similar pop song from your adolescence.

As always, thanks to @youtubeartifact for the image below, and feel free to post the results of your own experiments in the forum section of the blog, or send them to me at my e-mail.\\\

***NOTE: Can't believe I've forgotten to mention it til now--a significant amount of the words and phrases I use in this poem series are adapted from a selection of twitter bots whose tweets are procedurally generated. A full list of these bots can be found here. I find using/adapting words & phrases from these bots helpful, especially when struggling with writer's block, because, obviously, algorithms don't have the same blockages when it comes to connecting disparate things & concepts.***

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picture by YouTubeArtifact

AFFECT//METANOIA

Affect is a magnitude, a power for acting. It is a result of an interaction between bodies, objects, ideas, a generation of meaningful haecceity, which fluctuates within networks of metanarrative trauma-schematics. Either the two objects (sets of relations) harmonize and coalesce, or one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. Affect is also a power of being acted upon: we are derailed, pushed into a stratified zone of experience and cognition—the sad passions maximize our power for being affected while severing us from our power of acting: in exultation we are overwhelmed and borne weeping; or, in the case of the joyous passions, we harmonize with the set of relations we interact with, and our power for acting and our ability to be affected are both increased.

Metanoia is an affective process of a different order, in which we are slammed out of frame, overwhelmed—and yet, our power for acting, once rutstuck in the drudgery that framed our lifeworld, is rocketed off the rails and ground, open to fresh potentiality. Metanoia is the sublime decoded: a breakdown of the simulacra, and a service hatch into its parts.

AFFECT:

MEMORY (Shame) Experiment: EMDR Kaleidoscope

1. Find a picture of yourself from high school that makes you feel extraordinarily embarrassed. Sit with your notebook open in front of you and become conscious of how you feel in response to the picture.

(need for the hated, dissolved into mechanics; banish revolt entomb; morph into a bleat for absolution; live in fetid, fertilized nostalgia; a fusion into an irradiated frontier; foreclosed already)

2. Begin playing “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry on your speakers loud enough to be heard by others.

(faux pretension to something jugular; forgive the crimson youth which handles the harp past truth; dredge the colonic tank of my memory)

3. Write quickly without reflection for a full page. Let your associations flow—any image or somatic phenomenon that occurs—related to your adolescence/Katy Perry or not—should be included. Follow your trains where they go—don’t worry about staying “on topic.” Keep the song on repeat—if the song ends before you reach the end of the page, let the song play again and add another page. Continue listening to the song until you have filled two pages.

(a dull wanting and an anger; forgive; a lack, an imposed desperation; forgive; a hyperstitioned degeneration; forgive; spirals mourning lack and themselves; forgive; dissolve into nervous disgust; forgive; revivify; move)

4. Revise what you have into a poem.

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MEMORY (Shame) EXPERIMENT

Stimbug at the Middle School Dance after Katy Perry

Its livery’s scuba glistered, sloughed in stigmatic prance & wallowing skintight.

A self-spat bleat bumps flushing,

waxy while sweat-haze rinses its canker sores.

The bog’s revived as bodied stagnate— Stimbug yawns griefed at the dreadborn baptism of a fauxfilled flightline & worships the humid crowns of alcoholic fen-dwellers: it drinks a glass of hot water on an empty stomach.

Caught yawping in a son’s bucking snare rush,

a butcher’s lumbering war,

Stimbug trembles a hopeful succession & distances a wise inch a jetway

a killing.

Teenage dream of totality delta’d between a shorn circuit rent futured: Stimbug is

a headstand by the soda machine at the 7-Eleven.

Crushed lustripped before objected blotgirl,

motormale flings clicking a hundred jowls,

growling strobefrags, slathering mothshells,

slouchfumed braingroping & breachloaded.

A release which clings, calcifies.