The Novelty Manifesto
call to action by the man-in-the-castle-about-which-the-world-rotates
Note from the editors: Our prestigious tentacled journalist, Eddie Octo, has been absent in the time since he earned his Surreal Engineering Masters degree. He has been busy investigating new research opportunities. However, he took some time away from his underwater desk in Chancellor Subaswami’s pool, in order to tell us about Theodore Munnelly, aka The-Man-In-The-Castle-About-Which-The-World-Rotates, who he has been allowing to stay in his pool house.
Dear surreal times newspaper + readers,
My chums, what a time we’re swimming in. I’ve been living the nicest pool in Amherst, adorned with a custom octo-friendly lining as well as side bubblers. I love it here. I am working on new research, while simultaneously hosting the most peculiar biped I have ever met in my pool house. This man has a lot to him. And so, I am making fascinating discoveries on two fronts — in my research, and in observations of my guest, Theodore. He is an exceptionally smart and focussed biped, but also childish. He spends much time building Lego models of pyramids, wooden sculptures of skyscrapers and spaceships, and drawing pictures of symmetrical crop circles. He's a true son of Rube Goldberg. He reads and writes endlessly, and continually sketches pyramids in his notebook. Whenever he is not doing this kind of thing, he is out and about on “scouting trips” which he seems uninterested in telling me about. He has moved out, however, as of last Tuesday, and I am out of touch with him. I find his behavior rather… fishy. When he moved his things out of the pool house, he did so unannounced and disappeared without a word, even though we had been friendly to one another during our stay. He cleaned the place well but left behind a typewritten document hanging from the ceiling fan. It is a manifesto of some kind which seemed sensible to share with the public.
Best wishes to The Surreal Times newspaper, its staff, and its readers. I am back to my work for now. Sincerely, Eddie Octo
Novelty: The Future
Theodore Munnely
1. “Modern”, sometimes called “scientific”, educational institutions say the universe is entropy. They claim it progresses inevitably towards a state of disorder, towards a point where everything is stagnant, homogenous, and dead. They define everything, even time itself, in terms of death.
2. However, life is not entropy. In fact, life is the opposite of entropy. Life is Novelty, and Novelty is Life.
3. All life and everything that is good, is novel. This claim extends from the fundamental molecules, to the most basic single-cell organisms, to the most complicated and unlikely beings of our world, and further into more abstract domains. Novelty is in the nature of what makes art. Novelty is in the nature of what makes a structure of any kind strong and aesthetically pleasing. Novelty is even in the nature of what makes community and inter-personal relationships strong, healthy, and fulfilling.
4. Everything that is bad, is entropic. Everything that is entropic, is bad. Decay… Rot… Cancer… And more, are examples of this.
5. Novelty does not arise from fear of death. Novelty arises from faith in the possibility of contact. Openness to chance, and faith in chance, is essential to novelty. Without such faith, novelty is stunted before it can grow.
6. Noveltiests aspire to live and die in novel ways. They aspire to attract things and beings of high novelty, to become more novel themselves, and to increase the general novelty of their surroundings.
7. Noveltiests aspire to catch the eye of the divine, because the divine is infinitely novel. Only through contact with the divine can we exponentiate our novelty. All other methods are incremental.
8. Noveltiests maintain three superior “Novelty Codes”: a) Fight Entropy b) Make Symmetry c) Be Sacred
9. Noveltiests do not claim to know what the divine is. Still, they maintain faith that there is something divine and that it is of otherworldly novelty.
10. Noveltiests embrace the unknown divine. They aspire to catch the eye of the Gods, or whoever looks down upon us and to convince them we are worthy of their attention.
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