The Bathos Of Modern Argumentation

So that was not any kind of clever phrasing - it definitely isn't particularly humorous. However I want to look at this word 'bathos' because it is the basis for my discussion here right now. 

Now we all at least know that the word is Greek and simply has one superficial, technical level of meaning that is simply 'depth.' Okay fair enough, that in itself is some irony right there: superficial but deep... I am trying desperately not to make stupid jokes but right now it has proven unavoidable for me!

What am I drinking, Bill? Nothing actually - just water.

Swiss clouds - screenshot from
the movie 'The Clouds of Sils Maria.'

Anyway, let me get back to the actual point.

There is no way I can hold serious sensible conversations in public these days, because people go look up Google-Search and there, they find 'TRUTH...' Right?

The Wikipedia entry on 'bathos' - if you take it all-in-all - says that this is a literary device that either deliberately seeks to create a ridiculous moment, or accidentally does so (and here is where I dispute with them all) by being ridiculous, abruptly and incompetently juxtaposing something that is common or vulgar, against something earlier which was lofty or grand.

The final example they (Wikipedia people) give is this, from a short narrative description by the English poet John Dryden:

"The cave of Proteus rises out of the sea, it consists of several arches of rock work, adorned with mother-of-pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds. Through the arches is seen the sea, and parts of Dover Pier."

Kindly, at least, I suppose, Wikipedia admits that what they are going to tell you, is that 'today, bathos refers to rhetorical anticlimax...'

Cartier 'scented cloud' in Paris.

...But then it never quite gets around to saying what it was, before, 'today.'

You see, there is definitely a way to apply the word albeit it is a droll way of applying the actual original word and its true ancient classical meaning - to the defining characteristic of American television humor: Frasier being an exact case example of it.

However the ancient Greeks who treated these things seriously though in very different ways than people do now (now, it's a box you tick on the way to a University English Degree), used the word the same way we use it to describe a 'bathysphere...' Namely: you go down deep. Deeper than you can naturally go, and maybe, deeper than you are really supposed to go, if you are in search of something in a given boundary. Therefore, you are really in fact, pushing a boundary the wrong way.

This has nothing at all to do with humor and it isn't funny, and it is never meant to be funny and it is, in fact, dangerous.

Many excellent modern movies - City of Angels, Clouds of Sils Maria, Siesta (1987) for three examples that spring easily to mind - draw intense emotions from the viewer because they are submerging them into an 'exceeding depth.' In both cases, the narratives have to resort to 'mystery' and/or supernatural and 'unreal' elements to get there.

In both cases, the lynch-pin of the human emotional depth - is death.

Siesta - movie starring Jodie Foster and
Ellen Barkin

In reality, you will observe, in fact we cannot, traverse into death - and get back from there!

Not actually. Which is the device then used to produce a completely false narrative about death, though one that we mostly all accept naturally. Mischievously, these movies convince people ever more so that death is genuinely a terminal, terminating, evil 'place/condition/event/outcome.' But, it satisfies the political system that thrives by making people full of fears or else refusing to confront reality in any actual, and practical, way.

Thus when people do not really know what lies in the depths there - Hamas can get away with inviting you believe that it is 72 virgins for the suicide bomber 'believer' (it's never the actual 'knower,' you will observe), and politicians can get you to behave yourself according to the notion that this is the only place in which, by our own devices, we 'might' (so long as you, behave yourself according to the laws they have made for you) create Utopia maybe for us in old age and mayhaps for those who come after us.

They all tell stories of the past and make promises for the future. Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.

Eyes Wide Shut never made the descent to bathos - although in every possible way whatsoever, the whole entire movie is set up to do it - by having either one of the two key characters, those played by Tom and Nicole, die at or towards the end, or even at any pivotal point along the way.

Versailles 'Masked Ball' - 
definitely still on this year, and soon.

However I will tell you, you should imagine that one or both of them (the movie characters) is in fact, 'dead' and in absolute real terms too. This is not something I am inviting you to suppose as far as what you would say was standard film literary critique method in any way at all!

But it is what the occult perception will absolutely say.

If you take it as an outright occult manifesto about human life and the human condition, then that is what the movie is telling you.

We are entering an historic moment, at which the 'official' (means you will see Wikipedia tell you that it is so... And Wikpedia is the source archive of all truth and knowledge throughout the Universe) - position is that there are sentient life forms that traverse time and space.

And on that basis, I am suggesting to you, that the 'standard religious narrative texts' are that there is an 'identity' without known father or mother, who is not locked into one particular usual lifetime. Muslims say al-Khidr, Christians and Jews 'the King of Salem.'

But the problem is, the texts do not say this is a 'supernatural' figure you see only in your dreams and visions - but an actual real physical person.

So here is where I am going to tell you the problem with 'spirit channeling' people and mystical visions and 'meditation' and all of that. These are all about 'imagined' or 'envisioned' things.

And yes for sure you can 'see' something with your 'mind consciousness' and I will tell the secret why...

'The Green Knight' - by
Alexandre Chaudret

Light is the fastest thing our senses employ but it is not by any means the only sense pathway. Boeing engineers - pilot ergonomics designers - know that the human has what they call 'highly optically-claimed sense channels.'

If you go looking for what lies beyond death, and you go in a 'bathyscape' you will end up in bathos, and you will be emotionally dragged under. If you go in a 'impossibly' very fast space rocket you will run out of dimension. (Try it - draw a line with a laser pointer across a wall, and then imagine the wall retreats into Eternity and then tell me what happens with the speed of light across the horizontal 'line on the retreating wall' at some point...)

Why would anyone have to do a Monroe Institute full course or something - to 'see,' that is, to really encounter al-Khidr? Where does it say that in any of the standard narratives?

Well my answer to the ordinary person is, well it will get you to the 'seeing' part, at least.

But some of you are not ordinary people. And you want the whole nine yards.

The first thing is probably you feel the throbbing and understand it (this is music), then the truly clear thing is seeing, and that is via light, and because it is the quickest thing to get to your mind.

Olfactory sense is not, about chemicals, as much as it has been standard theory to date to say that - it is about electron spin polarity. And that is because if it were just about the movement of tiny chemicals through the air, then it would be dependent in the discrete 'brain labeling' function on atmosphere, and air-current or movement or flow, and it isn't. It is dependent on whatever the data signal is that compounds carry with them - and the chemical 'keys' are just not sufficient by a great magnitude to account for olfactive functioning.

al-Khidr always dresses in green and we can adduce from that, that 'somehow' we are being told to look in the middle, and not at the ends, or in the depths or even in the heights.

Unless you completely substitute your standard passing physical sensory and brain/memory pathways, with something that is not weak and failing or subject to external disorder and chaotic and random interference - you will never see al-Khidr.

It isn't 'orbs of light' I am suggesting people go after. It is geometry, and algebra, and trigonometry, and music.

You can do no better beginning right there.

You watch our very good friend tell us right away that standard symptoms of schizophrenia includes hallucinatory olfactory experiences. And yes it does - but these are not experiences in keeping with waking reality anyway: these are kinds of synaesthesia but where well, a lemon exudes the odor of - a gherkin...! For example!

Unless you have a good firm grasp of reality as you are in your existential mediocre sense state - how are you going to perceive actual reality; that is, permanent existence?

This is about toddlers walking and getting up on their trikes.

Your new steed-of-war - 
by Aston Martin

Senses are trained. They can be nascent but to use them functionally as 'adults' they have to be trained. A baby cannot really 'comprehend' vinegar. Sugar in the form adults consume it, tastes like poison.

If you see god you die.

And that's really, a fact. That is, it is a fact unless your senses are trained and are strong enough to accommodate what they are 'holding.'

And that is also the reason for so much subterfuge: 'for some have entertained such beings unawares.'

You, however, will not be, unaware. Because you are in training now.

Aren't you?

An ordinary person, average in all ways except maybe too average, too symmetric, not a 'grey-skinned skinny creature...' Even in vocal tone. Fairly pleasant. Calm. Relaxed. Unperturbed by what perturbs ignorant people.

Comes out of clouds as their only known source of being here at all, steps back into clouds and disappears again.

This kind of thing is presented in the Clouds of Sils Maria but as a metaphor for death.

That is bathos. The surgeon Maggie Rice dies in City of Angels and that is bathos.

Well, I am sure I 'could' entertain Meg Ryan too, but I absolutely assure you it would not be 'unawares!'

You want experiences, you want reality, and you moreover, you want agency too - the question is, do you know how to entertain?

And that is why you train. And that is the only reason, kids. And I never use words casually.