Housism is a philosophy of confronting the irresolvably absurd. But don't take our word for it: Take your deeds, take the train, take this large gingerbread house, for example, and see the absurdity of its own dependent arising. The world needs housism like it needs a hole in the head.
Open things wider. The tenets of housism are nonexistant:
everything. Let's tell a story: There's a Hasidic homily about the evolution of
mystical tradition. Originally, the rebbe said, we had the keys
to open the Divine doors. (These referred to Jewish-gnostic
means of mystical ascent.) Now, we can only break the lock.
(This referred to ecstatic mysticism.) Well, as housists today, we may
not be able to break the lock with pietistic devotion. But we
can pick it. And if we can't do that, we can look through the
keyhole, or better yet, the peep-hole, looking at the dancing
ineffability of voidness through, may we suggest, a convex lens:
it all looks like sexy, disco lighting in there.
Once your eyes are adjusted to being open this wide, you see,
don't you, that the world is crumbling around us. Some say,
millenarianally, that this is the apocalypse. But as the
Philolexian Society resolved in 1992, the apocalypse has already
happened. In fact, it's always happening. The world is always
splitting itself apart at the seams. Why? Because it is
laughing. It's busting a gut.
So you just gotta see, man, the world is one kind of place. You
can't do lotus sutras anymore, so you eat pancakes. Brown sauce.
Pink sauce. Coincidence. Liberte, egalite, absurdite, etc.
Mystic shit? You must still be a virgin; that's just a cliche, man.
Now put that aside, together with all the rest of the mantras of
eyes wide shut that you've been taught, since that's not a thing;
it's an idea. Now look at this book made of trees from Japan,
ink from Indonesia, content from an academic's study where he
once got blown by a student -- and it is much more absurd than
whatever claims are written in the ink itself.
In fact, like the zen mountains that are again
mountains, the housist's world is the same world everyone else
eats, consumes, and shits in; it may be colored a little more
brightly, but other than that it's similar. There's no
otherworldly dimension to it. This world is absurd enough.
Stare, for example, at a public space: a college campus, or a
plaza, or whatever. See the conic sections of light shining down
in the rain? See the black sections? What are we keeping out?
Hear your organs making that sound? Watch the Doris Day show?
Djever notice all the cracks in cement in New York buildings?
Maybe now's the appropriate time for our foundation myth. It's true, of course. Rob Mitchell, the story goes, sallied up to the Hartley study lounge at Columbia University, probably to study. But staring him in the face as he entered the lounge was an obscenely large, meticulously decorated, and brightly colored gingerbread house. This was absurd. There was no explanation, no justification for the house's instantiation in the Hartley Study Lounge. The lounge is on the way to nowhere. Indeed, it was hard to see how the house even fit through the door, like the bull in the zen master's meditation lessons. But the house was "like" nothing. It was, itself, so rich in absurdity, that it seemed as though it had to be a hallucination. It was like a large chunk of marzipan so sweet that it could not be real. But, as I said, it was not "like" anything. Rob, meanwhile, was jarred out of his "normal" state of sleep-consciousness, and suddenly viewed the world in its absurdity. He was existentially alone in doing so. There were blitheringly oblivious students sitting right next to the fantastic, ornate gingerbread house, none of them taking notice of it, or seeming the least bit disturbed by its incongruous and inexplicable presence. Rob wanted to shake them, and say "Aaaaaaa! What are you doing????" (Indeed, the House is always around us, what are we doing?) Instead he rushed satorically downstairs to seek comfort from John Deal, a co-Philolexian at the time (and, John, still). Rob explained the situation with the gingerbread house. John replied, "That's impossible. There is no way a three-foot tall gingerbread house, ornately decorated, is sitting in the Hartley study lounge. In fact, if there is, I will scream." Rob accepted this offer, and took John up, where he too beheld the Pauline Housist epiphany. He saw the house, he screamed, and housism was born.
The point of housism is to awaken the epiphany everywhere. We live in dangerously absurd times. Mounted police, divided societies, Elvis cults, dead art, evangelical evil. Yet inured as we are to the world's insanity, we have our wonder crushed by the machine of practicality, as Schleiermacher observed. Humankind are not lemmings, but they are, voluntarily, sheep. We will have none of that. Because the radical amazement Heschel spoke of can no longer be reached by the Cloud's piercing dart of longing love. It can be accessed for us, in our time and in our place, through punching that fucking cloud-shaped pinata until the little candies rain down with the soft fruit in the middle of a hard Kabbalistic candy shell. Bam! Bam! Bam!
It's hard to say. Ask Ionesco. We are like the Interpreter in "The Chairs." We can only gesture and say things like MuVDFDH HMMHA VQFBS, but that sort of aping antilogism seems beside the point. Like John Cage, all a housist bodhisattva ought to need to do is point out the world, rather like the sculpture 'Space that Sees,' which frames the sky and submits it for our aestheticization. Housism ought not be purely aesthetic-- although it can be purely surface--but only because to be aesthetic implies that one can be otherwise. Signs! Signs! Signs! Aaaaaa! More flava.
Sorta like tripping, but worse. Imagine the world frozen into a beautiful tableau-ice-sculpture, but the sculpture was as natural and as true as the spikes inside an ordinary ice cube, clear silver blades of grass in rigid, cold crystals. If there were a worm coming out of it, that would basically be an approximation of Housist epistemontology. Thing is, you get over it. Housism grips you for a moment, then you start analyzing it (beginning with "Egads, I've had a housist moment.") and it's over. The thing is, it's replaced with another, and another, and another, and so on and so on and so on. Eventually, this may seem like (or become) a nervous breakdown, so you back off a little and forget what you're seeing and go about your work ethic as you ought. You may even find a way to contextualize your housism in a pre-existing religious or philosophical system. But you'll be back. Like the secret ingredient in McDonalds french fries, the tathagata of the universe keeps you coming back for more. You can be a post-housist, but someday, a housist revelation will again happen to you, upping the ante, knocking you out, blowing your new brain to bits higher scattered than the old one's were. Onward and upward. Like the secret ingredient in McDonalds french fries, the tathagata of the universe keeps you coming back for more.
Writ large all over. Thing is, humans can't normally write housist scriptures, especially if they try. Their brains always get in the way of the absurdity. Trying to make it something. One exception to this is the housist allegory, related by Sidney Smith at Columbia in 1992: There's this fish, see, that lived at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Everyone thought the fish had been extinct for millions of years, but it was living there all along, and scientists just found this fish, which they thought was extinct.
Drugs are cool, but it's more frightening when housism really just jumps out at you, like the man with the big face, or the barbershop quartet on your fingers. These things can be seen with drugs, but it's when you see them without drugs that you realize the farcical nature of our seminole-like house built on stilts over the raging eddies of the infinite.
Metaphysics: Hooey. Crazy up there. Ontology: The world is like jello, baby, lime fuckin jello. Epistemology: Your head is not a frying egg. Ethics: If you can't even know if you're existing, how can you know it's right to interfere with another person's autonomy? Teleology: Hopefully, everyone'll see what insanity and beauty constitutes the universe without walls.--What's housist, what isn't? Everything is housist, some things more so than others. E.g.:
Pretty damn housist Not that housist, usually Mel Torme Frank Sinatra St John's Cathedral Riverside Church Gray with gray dots Black Gingerbread houses Brownstones Accident Cleverness Mark Leyner Stephen King A man with a big face A man trying to be clever The Clown Prince The mystery queen The thing itself Ideas about the thing CheezWhiz Jarlsberg Supermarianatio Anime Strange human heads Sex organs Cracks in granite Cast iron
Housism really does consider itself the rightful heir to the morass of theories and strategems that constitute postmodernism. If modernism questioned the world in the name of the self and reason, and postmodernism questioned the self and reason in the name of difference and contingency, housism questions. What's nice too is that East and West have already copulated (Beats) -- we think housism is their freckle-faced black haired offspring. It's easy to be a housist in New York, where nothing pretends to be real but the fake, so wake the fuck up! What are you seeing? Where are you going? Are you being served? Don't seize the day or seize the moment. Seize! Aaaaaaa!
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