Kuku steps out of his car, adjusts his leather elbowed "academic" blazer, and stands on a podium and begins to speak... 

FRIENDS, I have in my hands my original, leather-bound copy of Systematic Immolation of Thought

Written by the late WhereWasI, apparently in an attempt to dissuade a distant relative of mine from being active on the Streets, this tome is a classic.  Many scholars have tried, with varying degrees of success to interpret its meaning.

That is what we aim to do here.  I will select a passage from it and offer my own analysis, and then invite you to comment.

Perhaps, with a joint effort, we might be a step closer to understand just Where He Was.

What is curious to me is that the passage seems to suggest that for every word entering the authors brain, others are displaced. What words are these? What knowledge is he losing? Could that be why he must ask himself, Where Was I? 'Living room' may no longer be a part of his vocabulary; it may no longer be a concept to him. Every idea puts at risk the word 'tomato' becoming 'hamburger apple'. 

He takes an alien view of the English language, referring to words as things that 'looked familiar'. Does a man like this live in fear of new knowledge, knowing that what exists in his brain can disappear in an instant? I do not envy him. He is a silo of raw intellect at full capacity.

Zapata - could what you are describing actually be the systematic immolation of thought?  Let us imagine that he learns about a "summer house", a glass building for growing plants in.  Could these knowledge immolate, in a systematic way, thought he previously had about things that looked familiar, like living rooms, and tomatoes? 

CommissarKuku, it certainly seems to be the case. What is fascinating is that it seems to be a directly proportionate relationship; one thought comes in, another is destroyed, as if learning to fry an egg could immolate the knowledge of what a chicken is in itself. Heraclitus once said that a man can never step into the same river twice, and so we can ask ourselves whether the river of knowledge flowing through HeraWhereWasItus's mind leaves him not only in a permanent state of becoming, but possibly a completely different intellectual entity from one day to the next, the entire lexicon of his being possibly replaced by something brand new? 

You make a very valid point, Zapata.  One that I think WhereWasI himself demonstrates here:

"There used to be a belief that the world around you was flat. It is now believed to be round. How many of you know how to prove this without using the words of another or a picture produced by another? I will use the works of the men before me to show you the proper way to analyze this phenomenon."

The proper method of proof is using geometry, take a piece of paper and produce a right triangle on this and imagine one of the points, not the right angle, is the top of a mountain, and the other that isn't by the right angle is your perspective. Unless something is blocking your path, you should always be able to see the top of the mountain. If something is, and it's shorter than the mountain, you should be able to back up and eventually see the top of the mountain. That doesn't happen though, the farther you get from the mountain the lower the mountain appears. The only way that's possible is if you're changing the angle you're looking, but you're still looking straight ahead. Therefor, you must be standing on a surface that isn't flat."

Could it be that WhereWasI is actually demonstrating the knowledge immolation process here?  He starts off stating that the world is not flat and discussing the proof cited - but ends up talking about mountains and geometry.  Not a single mention of the earth being flat or not; like that particular alleged fact was immolated from his knowledge.

Here, today, in the Streets, it seems that the knowledge that my father committed fraud immolates the knowledge that he, alone, is not the only person to disgrace his bloodline.  A lesson Slash would do well to learn.

You asking if WhereWasI becomes "a completely different intellectual entity from one day to the next, the entire lexicon of his being possibly replaced by something brand new" is, perhaps, the most interesting question so far.

Because it means, if I am understanding you correctly, that perhaps WhereWasI is indeed still here, and rich streams of thought are around, if only we look for them?

Could Systematic Immolation of Thought be a method rather than a warning?  Or, indeed, a prophecy?

A more mundane and perhaps easily accessible speech regards the systematic immolation of thought may well be more engaging to the peons if it were to to parallel something we are all here familiar with.

Is the thought alive or dead or existing in some in between state as it morphs between the two?

We all understand that very basic concept so perhaps one of you paradigms of philosophy could try to water things down a little for and deliver your beardeus scratching in a way we can understand.

My suggestion would be to use an analogy of an unstable keg of gunpowder or even go crazy and describe such superpositioned thoughts using a cat, a vial of hydrochloric acid, a hammer and a radioactive particle.

Looking forward to at least an ensemble interpretation, I suspect the findings would lead us to discover that the beardeus scratching leaves us with the assumption that the answer is relatively trivial.

Yes, if WhereWasI appeared in front of you today, would you be able to recognize the man? Everything you knew him to be could be rendered to dust, replaced by all that he has learned since. Could Systematic Immolation of Thought be a purification process? Maybe there is no need for him to have known the name of a tomato. A 'hamburger apple' covers three concepts in one, the flat-packing of ideas, a way to cheat this immolation while streamlining his mind into a cognitive juggernaut. But if WhereWasI has become an idea in himself - a total immolation - perhaps this passage becomes more prescient:

"Now I'll apply the use of another man's thoughts to another topic, those who think I'm an idiot. Ask them which line or thought of mine is stupid. I have, and no one has presented a single piece they just keep using the word. Now I challenge any of you who've read this far and believe it to find a piece that makes me stupid in any of my comments produced anywhere. I stand by every comment I've made."

Not only was he prepared to stand by every comment he'd made - some of which, at the time of speaking, he had likely already lost in the immolation displacement process  - but the very essence of his philosophy may exist within each and every new thought generated by this community. We are all in the process of immolation and regeneration.

In the words of WhereWasI himself, "I am a man, not a beast, therefor I think."