Introduction/Summary:    

Surrogate Panoptic Quantal Regality has two levels of meaning. The intitials of the four words form an acronym, SPQR, which has historical significance, being the same four letters that the ancient Romans used as the official seal of government. Senatus Populusque Romanus translates to "the Senate and the People of Rome". It is a vital development in world history because, by using it on legal documents, stone monuments, shields and all sorts of official writings, the Romans were making a revolutionary statement about the source of human power. Traditionally, the sigil of the king, his signet ring, would make words into law, but for the Roman Republic, the people themselves were the source of the authority, as expressed through the Senate. This is a powerful image to us because it places both the glory and the responsibility of mass civilization in the hands the masses themselves, not blaming or begging kings or gods to sort out the great unknowns in an ever-changing world. Human civilization does not need gods or kings to act creatively, to care for itself, to care for the earth, or to explore the cosmos. The four words infuse the acronym with a second level of meaning. A surrogate is someone who replaces someone else in their roll, and in this sense, it means forcfully, like an overthrow. Panoptic means "all-seeing" as opposed to the more traditional concept of the divine as being "all-knowing". Quantal refers, as an adjective, to being measurable and highly influential within an infinite network of real activity. Regality is the quality of being regal, kingly, or god-like. It is the privilage we and others achieve through pursuit of expanding vision and activity. It is our approach to our own lives. As rulers of our thoughts and our souls, we choose to act as judges and gods, with Regality. We create this album as a Surrogate idea for divinity. It is a Regality, described as an ever-emerging, Quantal responsibility, resulting from ever-widening, Panoptic perception. When Romans chiseled SPQR onto their monuments, we believe they had some of that same spirit, and are proof that such a culture is possible. 

 

There are two levels of meaning to the album title. The first is the poetic summation of the words themselves, as constituent parts and in consort. The second is the symbolic identification between their combined concept and the reference of the acronym. We will define them individually, then as they relate to one another, then as they relate to the ancient Roman seal of human self-governance.

    A surrogate is one who stands in for the original individual or prefigured roll. Surrogate mothers and surrogate rulers, like regents, have the same two essential qualities. Firstly, their acquisition of the role is a change from a previous state, a conscious adoption, whether willing or unwilling, a taking, or accepting. Secondly, because of its otherness, it is blessed and cursed with all the complexities of a step-parent relationship. The surrogate fufills either an absence, a total vacancy of roll, or a lack, an inadequacy resulting from neglect, incompetence, alterier motive or inability. Such is the case with men and women and their god. We utilize this term in a dual, reciprocal fashion, in which our interaction with the concept results in art(the album) which, in turn, results in both a broadening of the interaction through the seduction of new minds, and a deepening of the interaction, as we ourselves continue to plumb untold and untamed depths, resulting in more art. It refers not only to the experience of engaging with the surrogate archatype, the new god-face, but also, in spirit with the Nothing we have named Nihlotep, who threads the inner void to the outer void, leading the seeker into the bliss of the seeking itself, it refers to activity of the album as a surrogate thought, an unhinging and liberating of those minds shackled by the illusion of guilt, giving them a new thing, a thing so limitless and grand it can never be exhausted, nor can it ever be forgotten, nor must it ever be repaid, for its abundance is total. We wish to give a surrogate to those who suffer needlessly in the terrible grip of a deified abuser, a psychotic and utterly childish absentee father, who's ego exceeds even his own understanding, namely, the slave god, yahweh. May all his captives awaken and leave him to wallow in the apocalypse of his personal contradictions. 

    Panoptic, in the simplistic sense, means all-seeing. This is not the same as all-knowing, or omniscience, since such a state is not possible, given the fundamental instability of knowledge, and the emergent nature of all phenomenon, ribboning all things with chaos and potentiality, so that knowing requires knowing what is not expressed or what could be rather than what is, for what is has already passed away. Panoptic, as an ideal, sees all potentiality, since knowing is an arrogance, and hence an ignorance. It is a rapturous exploration of what is becoming, and it carries with it an ever-widening responsibility, since vision affects the trajectory of change, and change is the only norm. The more we see, the more we become art perpetrated by the myriad painters of the universe, and the more we become artists ourselves. The divinity we seek in ourselves and in others is not a static posture, a nirvana or sainthood that once achieved, ends the struggle of life and remains stoically unmoved. That which does not move does not exist at the basic physical level. This is why, try as they might, no one can achieve a temperature of absolute zero. To do so would be to disapear utterly, which is not possible, given the obligation of energy to never be created or destroyed. True divinity is dynamic in its essence. It, like the structures of physicality, be they galactic superclusters or subatomic particles, becomes more elegant and more beautiful and more complex and more and more and more and more. We endeavor to add our vision to the emerging phenomenon, to continue the evolutionary journey towards a universe that is universally self-aware. 

    Quantal is the adjective form of the more widely know quantum and refers to the interconnectedness of all material through an infinite and ever expanding set of relationships. It borrows the relation between consciousness, observation and phenomenon explored by Quantum mechanics. The most unassuming and rigidly bound subatomic particle intimately relates to and deeply influences other quanta across chasms of unthinkable time and space, as if such obstacles were just our fancies, limitations of our language, an inability to follow the conversation occurring between other individuals. Even our listening pollutes the privacy of the conversation, like a surgery, influencing the quanta, so that they take  our listening into account, modeling the position of electrons to suit our cultural expectations, such as singularity of position, with an accommodating translation. Things are only things because things are all we can handle. Quantal dovetails with Panoptic, multiplying the sensitivity of vision with the affect of influence in a spiraling exponentiality. Together, they are the recipe for godhood. All things are sentient and all are influential, though none hath authority, since all wrestle with the awesome task of inventing meaning where there is only the all-muse of the question, the tempter in the shadow, which we have named Nihlotep. 

    Regality is a noun form of the more common 'regal', or something which inspires admiration, reverence, fear, attraction and awe. It is something royal, something which inspires without the slightest demand, since its nature is to be appreciated. This appreciation transcends the paradigm of dichotomy, and its intensity is interpreted as negative or positive, as terror or romance, only by the limitations of the observer, as it is effortlessly beyond the question, being question itself. The idea that a singular, unified, limitless god of all things would give a binding, unchanging set of moral limitations on thought and activity when all the world is change and growth is both absurd and insulting. Accepting a fallen nature is merely shrinking back from the responsibility of idea, affect and consequence, a quitting the game, so to speak, a desperation for the security of the womb, the garden of ignorance, before knowledge and exploration made life difficult. Such a state has never existed. All creatures struggle. All creatures choose. This is the sublime state. The regality we espouse for ourselves and for others is the godhood to which we are all disposed, an artistic depiction of the greatness of the void, a pantomime of the infinite, expressed in the dance of expanding conciseness. Regality is first and foremost the awe we feel for dream-speaker, the infinite Nihlotep, ultimately benevolent in its endorsement of all paths, all creation, and majestically horrific in its destruction of any and all comfort or certainty, dragging us, kicking and screaming, out of our existing models, into what we would not see, white knuckled and breathless. Regality is ours as well, as we shine into the dark, in increasingly perfect solar thought, spherical and explosive, illuminating others and ourselves with the bittersweet futility, the serpent round the olive branch. Witness the lie that is truth.

    Together Surrogate Panoptic Quantal Regality is the name given to this piece of music and magic which we cast upon the peoples of the earth. It is our devotion to humanity, our love and our hate for them, that causes us to share this quicksand of cognition, this trap door. All of the songs are gateways, exits to pass out of the vain idol worship of permanence and into the ever widening contemplation of possibility. They are paths that we have traveled personally, and so they are intimately bound in up in the essence of our histories, and not the abstract mumblings of cowards who hide in the theoretical, begging others to live how they could not. They are not a prescription so much as an empathetic wave, immersing the listener in our journey while reciprocally reflecting back to us, the wisdom that we could never achieve without an audience. Take them where we could never take them. Create and destroy, love and hate, redefine reality, you are alive. 

The significance of the acronym provides a grounded application of these concepts, in the context of our current awareness. It binds the astral with the terrestrial, as we must demand from ourselves the sort of real engagement in context that we demand from others. Here the rubber meets the road, to use the vernacular. While lofty philosophies are intellectually stimulating, shaping the emergent reality is the consequence of our philosophy and so we are bound by our own chords to do what we can. SPQR was an abbreviation for the Senate and the People of Rome, and was used to represent the Roman people on official documents, banners, shields, etc, as the symbolic authority of the will of free individuals. Signing a law with the name of the people rather than the sigil of the king was a monumental development in political theory, and more importantly, in human self-awareness. It was a signpost. Never again, they were saying, would power be accepted as completely arbitrary. The microcosm of the human universe was becoming increasingly self-aware. The greatness of Rome, for us, is not in the short sighted rapist fascism of the emperors, but in the mental achievement of the idea of Rome, for all peoples live, learn, forget and die, but the truly great ideas they create evolve as living beings. We choose this metaphor for several reasons. It is the product of a society that was both proud and open minded, passionate and rational, cosmopolitan, exploratory and strong, and above all, consciously emergent, appropriating the best ideas it found rather than plugging its ears and eyes with the dogma of purity and xenophobia. And it existed without any invisible super dad to explain rigid rules of human behavior, or enforcing them with eternal punishment in an imaginary future. Human society is the best judge of human society. We endeavor to awaken the proud and adventurous nature of humanity, so that it may throw off the shackles of self-loathing and emerge into whatever future it deems fit. SPQR is not a model. It is not a standard. We look back upon SPQR as an inspiration, a muse, like the classics were for those lucky 16th century Italian scholars who dared to look beyond the paradigm of their time, beyond the strangulation of the church, and create Renaissance.