Great novelists are usually great social thinkers, by which I hint this might not be a particularly great novel.

Inspired by Gore Vidal’s Messiah in imitation and awe.

As student artists replicate the masters, in I wade. It’s no more than that, comparisons should end before they start.

The storyline?

Simply what if a twenty-first century prophet .. ? Not of course Vidal’s storyline, though this was written whilst reading his.

His Messiah sat lonely, moldering in the bookcase for thirty years after bought second hand for a dollar. Dusting it off in my 59th year, it made me rather gasp.

You see, I had known of Vidal since student days.. With social and political interest I quickly stumbled across him, intuitively categorizing him as a keepsake for further study. If an object has foundations, rooms, walls, roof - it must be a ‘building.’ Cursorily, then, Vidal was for three decades in my vague awareness of him, an independent, original, like-minded, thinker - and America’s articulate social conscience.

Vidal’s fame as author a given, still Messiah’s originality of phrase and tenor of words delighted and amazed. Further, a layer of wisdom - lessons realized by even the most thoughtful often only when facing the grave - laced and graced this tale written, I imagined, at a relatively tender age.

There he had sat in my mind, proxy for that territory demanding intellectuality of me, and now, here, were words written by this legend at its most creative - a time during which I was off doing I know not what in my would-have-been prime years.

Tragically-wasted years.

Credentials as novelist? None, other than a pleasing series of compositions marked well by an aged English master who, it seemed, accepted the seed of his once fine ambition now lost to the barbarity of teaching high school miscreants.

Two years of cadet reporting introduced this mere feeble intellect to the real world of real men. Rapidly succumbing (aghast) to the discovery that journalists were egomaniacs - or at least people with fluid social skills, for me totally lacking - and having not discovered the whereabouts of my ego, I fled, terrified.

And now, forty years later, I want to write.

Like any wannabe author, the first focus is impossible to discern till it leaps from the matrix and clasps scruff, or scrotum .. as did, and hence, Messiah.

And, like growing a beard, every thinking lad should attempt at least one grand effort in literature, placating if little else the guilt for an otherwise pathetic life. Thinking lasses should send the equivalent to the editor, as he can’t see right now what females aught grow.

If messiahs still tend to overwhelm, some mild disrespect might place you at ease.

The Python crew set in concrete the quip "Of course he’s the Messiah. I ought to know, I’ve followed a few."

Which effectively ordains us (or just Californians?) to stand down, get a grip, some perspective, and even a life.

Utopia in the ‘modern’ mind is a perfect society, and that is our interest.

Emergent - like most ancient bodies of intricate concepts arriving from thousands of years consideration by the finest philosophers - Utopia stands digested in public mind and press as a simplistic single idea.

Sadly, it’s not actually standing, but sits out of sight, over there in the corner with its friends History, Religion, Philosophy, Socialism, Ethics …

While IM’s focus and quest is reviving Utopian thoughts, then defining and finding this proposed resting place of human effort, we aren’t blind to a utopian destination of societal stagnation, effectively civilization’s death, or even proof the concept is impossibly, unattainably, flawed.

If everything has a start and end, and the end is a death, and not only we individuals but our civilization, planet, galaxy and universe are also to die .. then to what purpose, to what point, Utopia?

To hypothesize Utopia is, like all topics comprising Incontiguo.us Magazine, to confront the meaning of existence, to question even the source of our questions, to doubt if mind sets obsessed with the rational can ever understand the unknowable, to suspect truth of our gut feeling that conscious monologue mentations are bubbles of reductionist duality-nonsense in non-physical reality.

If we see patterns in mathematically random noise, might not seeing paradox in existence’s fabric suggest another futile construct?

Achievable?

Sustaining human will amid toil’s drudgery lies a promise of lottery winnings.

Visualizing halcyon life with spoils - done less frequently with aged-impending demise - provides knee-weakening, anxiety-melting euphoria. Contemplations so pleasurable they are best avoided.

So, too, Utopia.

Vastly more improbable than lottery-winning odds lies the chance that all people might suspend obsessive greedy scrounging for just one epiphanic instant to, in unison, envisage something magical overcoming what are (all would agree in rare moments of lunatic self-honesty) lives of sheer derangement.

Sure!

When seriously beholding Utopian visions a pleasurable excitement arises and threatens, if I don’t cease forthwith, to render meaningless everything every striven for, by my or your self.

Were Utopian vision placed magically on the agendas of every corporation, council, government - and household - what steps would it include?

Tags: utopia

Row, row, row your boat, 
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, 
Life is but a dream..

Innumerable American films have taught us to expect this ditty, coincident with that ubiquitous yellow bus full of school children - shortly to be commandeered in sacrifice to an oft inane plot.

Despite obscure origins, much has been made of this nursery rhyme - much, sadly, that the children [in whose lives it cements the fabric of the American dream] mature in total oblivion to.

Sadly indeed, as it embodies personal philosophy that would inure them to the patched quiltwork comprising their society’s faltering, fragmented faith.

In simple terms if they were taught to ponder the implications, not just sing it on a bus, the U.S. might be a greater and more benign civilization.

This anonymous nursery rhyme has infinitely more significance than just rediscovery as rally point for dreamy self improvement - under the umbrella (if I might, and do forgive me for yielding to the urge to, call it) ‘California dreaming.’

If life is a dream we undoubtedly fail to become lucid within it and drift, more than row, downstream. As few attain lucidity within nocturnal dreaming, even fewer grasp the notion that waking state might be a dream, and that self-awareness within that waking dream ("lucid living") might provide enigma’s key.

Consensus in this context presents duality: compliance with majority opinion is meaningless nightmare of unquestioning acceptance, yet such harmony may be the waking dream-of-life’s aim.

Is consensus harmony with thoughts of the master dreamer - or failure to harmonize, failure to be aware of its dream, and we are instead autonomous actors blindly miming till our character’s demise?

Is individual quest a selfish disruption - or attaining enlightenment?

Dreaming

Science and technology have provided most known miracles since the dawn of man, yet pursuing their minutiae toward ultimate knowledge is a futile path down eons - a breadcrumb trail of technical trinkets promising the theory of everything.

Stepping from the path of theory and proof leads quickly to the land of charlatan, fanatic and fool. A land, nevertheless, of golden frontiers where incorruptible and disciplined minds might find greater truth - preferably before the end of time.

Hindu Mayan, Buddhist Dzogchen and Christian Resurrection reveal the eternal nature of such ideas, and "lucid living" is no novel concept of the modern.

Fruitful it is, therefore, to ask one of time’s greatest questions: Are we dreaming?

It might be arrogant to assume we can out-think masters of the ages, but like any descendent we have the advantage of our ancients’ hard labors. Two thousand years of refined Buddhist thought become a ready pillar on which to base the next step - or reject an entire field of unlikely directions.

Let us focus in these pages on the depths of consensus and what it might mean.

What could consensus be if life is a dream, or our universe a computer simulation?

Is it Gods all the way up - or turtles all the way down?

Consensus, and its relation to the dreamlike nature of our lives, is but one step removed from the ultimate knowledge that life, the universe, and everything, cannot exist, does not exist, will never exist - and all is a bubble of non-reality turbulent within the void, negated by its negative shadow.

Consensus: Acting for the common good - or willingness to believe the mob’s nonsense?

Tags: dream, life

Everything I have learned of Life, the Universe, and Everything, is riddled with doubt and uncertainty, and stands in the eternal shadow of a really big question mark.

The entire dialogue of humanity constrained by our common DNA, outlook, planetary environs, and language, comes from a very narrow place.

We desperately need not only that instruction manual for the human body, if not the entire frikkin Universe, but a word in its author’s shell-like.

What is going on?

And how can it ever, ultimately, taken to the nth degree, either mean anything or be real?

Since I stumbled from childhood’s eternal dream, the one thought that freezes me with abject fear is the deep-down anguish that there can never be a reason for existence, nor a source.

Traveling from the centre, where we each reside, there can be no outer ring to the onion.

Even if Omniety formed nullity into an essence, what Omniety? Religion has the only answer, an ultimate onion skin: faith.

And there our quest, in these sacks of carbonated water (less the fizz) ends.

.. about you.

There’s the problem.

”About Us’ covered core values that can only ever be ours, editorial staff consensus, itself a subset, or superset (unknown), of the one true path - whatever that may be.

And, likewise, detailed polling by an inter-galactic agency must reveal about six billion other ’subsets.’

You may be about any of the ‘isms’ or ‘ologies’ dismissed, and even if IM Magazine stumbles more frequently that it should across their territory, we strongly wish to avoid being labeled.

If we promulgate some Marxist tendency, and you agree, then as a sympathetic reader you would -not- produce a label, flag, or club, and claim to sit in its shade along side us.

Kindly murmur to yourself "oh, sure, hmm," leave us alone (or positively contribute) - and leave it at that.

.. about humanity, and the mystery of life.

We are NOT ABOUT Scientology, Intelligent Design, Atheism, Humanism, Communism, Communalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Islamism, Christianism, Rheumatism, NeoTech, Mad Magazine (well, maybe a little), or any social wheelbarrow of snobbish intellectual baggage.

The editor and staff have viewpoints and sexual fetishes, but articles seek coincidence with Incontiguous Magazine’s mission to further the ’cause’ - which is, of course, a mere pipe dream.

Incontiguous Magazine’s stance is, ironically and admittedly, from a consensus derived from ‘western, progressive, liberal’ thought. Not the ideal - nor necessarily the most numerically popular - viewpoint, but nevertheless the dominant cultural vector of emergent ‘modern’ attitude and expectation, both driven and illustrated in the global plazas whose billboards clutter the Internet.

Our starting point, like it or not.

As a child I wondered if everyone on the planet jumped up and down together would it push us out of orbit - or at least scare the crap out of the ants?

Now as a grown up child I wonder if everyone on the planet did a reality check and got a conscience, in unison, would it erase crime, corruption, and greed?

Humankind should get off the consumption and growth wagon and plan its future. Mankind should listen to womankind and stop thinking with its genitalia.

We should all refuse to be the misinformed foot soldiers of our Governments’ pathological ignorance - and take deep offence at being no more than life-blood of mindless commerce.

We should - we must - put aside the ego and cargo cults and craven consumerism that are our consensus culture.

We should - and must - stop thinking only in language, verbiage defining our gilded cage of blinkered science, self-entrapment no more than a wet paper bag of recursive thought ..in which we roam, unaware the most delicate and virtual of mental fingers might pierce its soggy barrier to reveal the true universe.

Oh, and wait.

Incontiguous Magazine is for something else, an old-fashioned, ridiculed concept .. called utopia.

We are about everyone on Earth being fed, clothed and educated.

And getting some morality.