Scribbles and Horrors

The Endless Birthday Party of Kazzoo the Wise is a grotesque monument to the insanity of absolute power. The corpses of great philosophers from disparate eras (Kazzoo the Wise, Martin Trench, Oli Foops, and Karl Sloop) have been exhumed from their resting places, brought to a cramped room, positioned stiffly around a table, and re-animated to engage in a philosophical dialogue steeped in the stench of immutable rot. The dialogue has been in progress for many centuries already, endless questioning and speculating in the dark, without interruption.

The interlocutors will not notice anyone who comes into the room, and will not talk with anyone but themselves. They are reanimated corpses–in no way alive, yet academically active. Attempts to attack or remove them will meet no resistance. The conversation will continue until all of them are reduced to dust.

Included here is a snippet of that conversation (perhaps the bit of conversation which the party of adventurers happen to walk in on right at that moment!) It should be read very slowly, in a zombified drone.

Other snippets can be added, naturally.

The conversation generally rotates every few months between Kazzoo-Trench and Kazzoo-Foops. Martin Trench of course mainly has questions about ontology, ecology, and epistemology. Oli Foops is concerned with aesthetics, politics, and his watered-down theology. (Oli is always asking about the Demiurge.) Kazzoo is characteristically circumspect, poking holes in others’ arguments without making many himself. Karl Sloop’s chair rotted out from under him one or two hundred years ago, so he remains on the floor, occasionally groaning. (One might joke that Karl Sloop’s philosophy was never much more than the occasional groan anyway.)

Why in God’s name Thackeracky the Terrible set up such a display is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it is simply because he could — surely not out of a real love of wisdom. Thackeracky is now long gone, and so the Endless Birthday of Kazzoo the Wise endures as a harmless, if unsettling, landmark.

Young philosophers have on occasion ventured to audit the dialogue for long periods, hoping to gain some wisdom in the exercise. A transcript of the partial dialogue was even published by Kendra Matchsticky as part of her Ph.D. Thesis, “Ways of Knowing: New Epistemologies from Old Voices.”
In general, though, the dialogue is obscure and abstruse, of no great interest even to those who know that it is taking place. Philosophers are mainly concerned with getting their own work published and regard it as irrelevant. Historians of philosophy consider the dialogue to be pure anachronism, unworthy of serious study.