The Newtown Pentacle

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Shaken with the potencies of blackest revelation and shattered faith on a July evening, one found himself back at the loquacious Newtown Creek and once again straddling the currently undefended border of Brooklyn and Queens. Slaked with sweat, stricken by those fiery emanations pouring forth from the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself, your humble narrator decided to “lean into it” for the final push back to Astoria after a productive but quite humid summer day spent wandering about the Newtown Pentacle. An alarming lack of awareness of my surroundings overcame me, and I found myself fixated once more upon the sapphire tower.

My feet may have been moving, but my eyes never left the Megalith.

from wikipedia

A fugue state, formally dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue (DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders 300.13), is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (ranging from hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity.

After recovery from fugue, previous memories usually return intact, but there is typically amnesia for the fugue episode. Additionally, an episode of fugue is not characterized as attributable to a psychiatric disorder if it can be related to the ingestion of psychotropic substances, to physical trauma, to a general medical condition, or to psychiatric conditions such as delirium, dementia, bipolar disorder or depression. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor (dissociative amnesia).

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It must have just been the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself glinting off the artless blue glass as it dipped toward the terminal horizon beyond Manhattan, sending crepuscular arcs of refracted red and yellow light along unknown and incalculable parabola. For a moment- your humble narrator thought that that which cannot possibly exist up there was visible.

A quick change of lens on my camera allowed a vain search and fruitless attempt at a second look, but the phantom image was recorded nowhere else beside my own fevered brain.

Dehydration must have been setting in, with too many hours spent while marching involuntarily through the concrete devastations of North Brooklyn and Western Queens in the summer heat- causing hallucination and overt credulity.

from wikipedia

Theories of deindividuation propose that it is a psychological state of decreased self-evaluation and decreased evaluation apprehension causing antinormative and disinhibited behavior. Deindividuation theory seeks to provide an explanation for a variety of antinormative collective behavior, such as violent crowds, lynch mobs, etc. Deindividuation theory has also been applied to genocide and been posited as an explanation for antinormative behavior online and in computer-mediated communications.

Although generally analyzed in the context of negative behaviors, such as mob violence and genocide, deindividuation has also been found to play a role in positive behaviors and experiences. There still exists some variation as to understanding the role of deindividuation in producing anti-normative behaviors, as well as understanding how contextual cues affect the rules of the deindividuation construct.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Paranoia is omnipresent by default while scuttling about, as certainty states that one is being photographed every moment by automatic security cameras while out in public. Whether there is any single human watching or noticing these recordings is another thing entirely. It occurs that the stream of raw data captured by passive surveillance alone in New York City on any given day- the ATM’s and Deli cameras alone- would take years to catalog, let alone review. Likely, it will be artificial intelligences of the near future that will perform high speed analysis of such tasks.

An articulated and artificial thing which cannot possibly exist at the apex of the Megalith, of course, sees all. No utility can be found in hiding from it, as it casts its three lobed eye about and watches the world of men.

from wikipedia

Sigmund Freud considered that ideas of reference illuminated the concept of the superego: ‘Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form, thus revealing its genesis…voices, as well as the undefined multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the [paranoid] disease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively’.

In his wake, Otto Fenichel concluded that ‘the projection of the superego is most clearly seen in ideas of reference and of being influenced….Delusions of this kind merely bring to the patient from the outside what his self-observing and self-critical conscience actually tells him’.

Lacan similarly saw ideas of reference as linked to ‘the unbalancing of the relation to the capital Other and the radical anomaly that it involves, qualified, improperly, but not without some approximation to the truth, in old clinical medecine, as partial delusion’ – the ‘big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words’, in short, the realm of the superego.