No Work, No Food.

Forgive my writing today, for in my soul burns a great fire right now. It both fills me with vigor and it makes my words and thoughts over flow. You hear at mindingwith know the sensation of having too many thoughts come at once, and struggling to give each a fair share before the next thought over whelms you, and rips your hope at clear articulation away. But I will try very hard to contain my fire, and finish each thought before I yield to the next.

This fire inside of me is venom, a venom that I am more susceptible to then most people methinks. That fire-venom of the AnitChristian, Nietzsche. I suspect that this fire-venom is a contagion, for his own writing shows every sign that my writing shows of infection. If only I had the skills as a word smith that Nietzsche had. Though in this moment there is no doubt to me that his skills developed as a response to this fire-venom, out of necessity for controlling it. What more can I say about this fire, how shall I convey the sensation? A storm of thoughts. Each thought arises, a thought that I have had before a thought that I would say is 'mine'. (be it mine by my creation, or be it mine by my acquiring it from else where matters not.) Then it starts to interact with other thoughts that are freshly arisen, and they start reacting with others in creating thoughts that are new to me. (and demanding thoughts they are: “express me! express me!” they scream.) Which thoughts, why, by what force are these thoughts collided with one another for combustion? My desire, but now I am forced to derail if I have any hope of being understood.

Last night was a symposium where, amongst other topics, arose a discussion of the future and what we each of us mindingwith, will be doing in the future. Leaving the details aside, I felt weak. I saw that I was not up to the task that is my life. I have so much idle ambition, so much an idea of my own greatness, which stands in contrast to my actual conditions. To be specific to the thoughts of the night, there is the ideal of the farm, and the ideal of the so called 'mandala project'. These are two projects to which I would dedicate my life, for I do think that between them I have found a superior way for human beings to be, I think I have found 'the good life'. Yet what point is there in finding a good life if one isn't going to live it? And that is the problem, in recent days I have become quite autistic and turned from the world. There was nothing I could do to achieve either of my projects, so I imagined fulfilling my projects. So destructive is this behavior, in small doses necessary, but in large doses it is a turning away from the world; instead of living life, it is living a fantasy (other worldly) life. Some times fantasy is a part of life, and that is well and good, a setting of goals to be achieved. But in my self I have always (since childhood at least) noticed a tendency to live in the fantasy INPLACE of actually achieving any of my aspirations. Last night I saw this in myself, and I was beside myself. This morning I read some Nietzsche, and the old dragon (Hold me to this promise: by the next week I will complete a mindingwith post “Nietzsche the Dragon”) sank his fangs into me, filling me with fire-venom.

Going back a paragraph, I left you hanging a bit. Desire? Ha! More like my fear (I admit, now that my self honesty has grown in courage a bit). Fear that I would “settle down with a nagging bad conscience, remain an ascetic and mortify myself” (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce homo, page 12, Kaufmann's introduction paragraph 3) because I was too weak to become the lion,and thereby, the creator [of the farm, affirmer of the tablet of values in the mandala project.] So what is this fire? Well, the fuel of the fire is my own dissatisfaction with myself. The spark is a voice in my soul that cries out for me to not fall off the way of life, that cries “Wake up” lest I fall asleep and fail to take action for my ideals. The heat is a drive to make myself have the self-control and self-discipline needed to attain my ideals, my self-mastery. The storm of thoughts, my mind repositioning itself, waking up parts gone dormant, entering a stage of higher energy and activity. Now, will I succeed in awaking, and entering my first transformation (the lion, for those of you who know Zarathustra), or will lethargy overtake me again?

In philosophy I have always had a few good instincts, a good nose for one thing. The ability to smell the health or sickness of a writer right off the bat. And a good ear, the ability (when I am willing to exercise it) to really listen to a philosopher, and truly hear what a writer has in mind. But for those great boons, I have failed to (through lack of need) sharpen my eyes enough. I can discern one thing from another, my thinking needs glasses, it is fuzzy, and quick to gloss over details for a good “gist”. To be able to ignore the details is a good thing, a safety from being entranced by elaborate, sophisticated works of reason. But to ignore details by choice, and by habit are very different things, and it makes my thinking sloppy that I have become so habituated. So how will I ensure my transformation? I will make myself strong by a routine of daily reading and writing.

Now, if you have access to 'Zen Flesh, Zen Bones' look to page 92, this will be my technique for strengthening my will. No work, no food. If I do not write 1000 words a day and read 100 pages, then I shall have nothing to eat. Soon I will add physical exercise to this project. These goals are modest, all things considered. I invite you, my friends, to help me stay focused as I begin the camel transformation.

A Short Dialog on Faith:

The student: "Faith is not a belief, it is more like a performative; a promise received from God and in turn a promise given to him."

The teacher: "Ahhh--but part of this performative includes the act of belief. Both what is promised by God, and promised to him."

From Karma to Continuum (updated:)

Shinran suggests that action proceeds out of our experience (we do things because of what we feel, and feeling is not something in our control.) Our experience is determined by what we suffer, from the whole world, so that karma determines the experience that determines our actions. But karma is defined as the result of individual actions, insofar as we receive evil for evil we have done in past lives, or vice versa for good. This is impossible, however, because the basis in action is not of an individual will, but of feeling. Thus, there is simply no room left for the individual actor, and it becomes just another aspect of karma--some feeling we suffer from based on our past lives. Then our past lives also lose their causal aspect.

What we have left over after all of this reduction are flows of feeling over time. But what, then, is karma except this feeling, and how does it act as a causal principle connecting actions to experiences? Action, too, is rolled up into feeling; it can do no other, once we give up a notion of the world as a physical mediation between different selves who act and inflict upon each other certain experiences.

The physical world might also fold away insofar as it is a plane in which matter shows up, to cause feelings for subjects and to serve as bodies, instruments, and scenes in the acts of others. But not so fast. Natural events--events that are not motivated out of an experience at all, but happen by impersonal process-- have a karmic upshot too. This is not abrogated, surely, because it does not proceed out of an individual cause. In fact, it is extended. All action falls out of control and becomes physical; and yet, the individual soul as the bearer of karmic evil or good can no longer serve as the connector between these physical events and events in feeling. There must, instead, be a direct connection--one of karma, which inflicts upon itself as both cause and reception, according to the physicality. We are left with a continuum of matter/feeling, with feeling inseparable at any point from the physicality.

This continuum has no external landmark; it has no fixed point outside itself, by which the continuum could be absolutized. A continuum where every value is the beginning, and none is the end. But somewhere something happens. An event wholly contingent, whose precise workings we may not describe here. Though we can say that this event serves as a direction for all feeling/matter. The twins of nirvana and entropy. All excitation of matter and feeling--intense as it is in brains, in suns, in a living planet--give way to cold, converging at the spiritual/physical point of absolute zero. Mind is contained in its end, nirvana. The world in its end, the cold. Nirvana is not a feeling, absolute zero is not a temperature (ie: not a movement.) They are both still. Both are points--are the self-same point, only repeated--in which all things tend.

Together they serve to create a direction for all directions; all movement tends towards absolute zero, no matter what direction it is traveling. All feeling tends towards nirvana, regardless of whether it is good or bad or whichever passion it may be. How does this happen, though? How does the world and the mind have an end? The end is a fixture of a phenomenological, spatial view. And, as we have suggested, the mind is organized spatially, and is the product of a repetition of spatial resources, to serve other purposes.. And we see, fully, what this spatial processing system, in a monkeys, amounts to: the creation of a stillness that contrasts itself to any moving, vibrant scene. An invisible star in the sky that never deviates in our sight no matter where we turn. There is always an object just outside of the screen that serves as a frame of reference. no--there is always a screen itself, to frame the action in.

But how did the repetition occur, whereby there became inner and outer space? It needed a pivot, and found it precisely in that stillness. The stillness provided the repetition, the fictional territory of the beyond. As no-space, it was precisely the only space possible for the repetition of space. Mind is stillness; but desire, excitation. Desire is movement, and in the act--the bodily act, as in dancing (would that I could dance...)--tears down the wall between the two. There is no inner space and outer, for instance, in the sexual act. But often our actions are chained in projection; desire against movement, a death instinct. the desire that desires alienation. repression. The Aristotelian desire, that desires the sphere outside all things. The desire that dwells in fantasies; even acts not of reality, but only of fantasy. Fantasy populates the inner space, and is always fantasy except when it moves, in love. To nourish, protect, build.

From Karma to Continuum:

Shinran suggests that action proceeds out of our experience (we do things because of what we feel, and feeling is not something in our control.) Our experience is determined by what we suffer, from the whole world, so that karma determines the experience that determines our actions. But karma is defined as the result of individual actions, insofar as we receive evil for evil we have done in past lives, or vice versa for good. This is impossible, however, because the basis in action is not of an individual will, but of feeling. Thus, there is simply no room left for the individual actor, and it becomes just another aspect of karma--some feeling we suffer from based on our past lives. Then our past lives also lose their causal aspect.

What we have left over after all of this reduction are flows of feeling over time. But what, then, is karma except this feeling, and how does it act as a causal principle connecting actions to experiences? Action, too, is rolled up into feeling; it can do no other, once we give up a notion of the world as a physical mediation between different selves who act and inflict upon each other certain experiences.

The physical world might also fold away insofar as it is a plane in which matter shows up, to cause feelings for subjects and to serve as bodies, instruments, and scenes in the acts of others. But not so fast. Natural events--events that are not motivated out of an experience at all, but happen by impersonal process-- have a karmic upshot too. This is not abrogated, surely, because it does not proceed out of an individual cause. In fact, it is extended. All action falls out of control and becomes physical; and yet, the individual soul as the bearer of karmic evil or good can no longer serve as the connector between these physical events and events in feeling. There must, instead, be a direct connection--one of karma, which inflicts upon itself as both cause and reception, according to the physicality. We are left with a continuum of matter/feeling, with feeling inseparable at any point from the physicality.

On Prophecy toward the Burning of the Tribes.

Most religions have a story of the coming of the end times, and we are always in error when we think of this as a prediction, belief, or theory about the future. Prophecy of the coming fire is always a wish, a hope, and a begging for a future that is alive. When a people comes in to existence, it is co-temporal with the writing of their myths; with a sharp eye you will find that to every people corresponds a myth, though it is invisible as a myth to the people who live in the world of the myth. (Such was the case with Joseph Campbell, who thought his people had lost their myths, not knowing that the natural sciences were a myth too.)

Why beg for the end of the world? Because the founding of a people is the end of a world, and one turn deserves another. A people, a myth, a world these three things go together, the three arise, and the three depart. The highest moment for man is the creating of a myth, an opening of a new world, which is filled with the people of that myth. This creation is also the destruction of the three that it replaces. As one myth is dismissed as a fiction the world of the myth becomes fiction and the people wed to it are made into savages (which are no longer persons in the fullest sense since they no longer can speak), a new myth/truth is substituted and it is revealed/created for those wed to the new myth/truth the new people occupying a new world. Yet how can the firey lion that writes the new myth, discovers the truth, makes the world, and founds the people not wish for the fire of creation to keep burning? It is a joy to burn a new world into being, who would wish that the new world live forever as the end of history? Hegel and other charlatans. This fire makes the ash that nurtures the soil of the earth on which the people dwell. Wisdom dictates though that this soil/earth will deplete and that the people will grow weak and that the myths will die and change from books into kindling. So even in writing a myth for a world and founding a people, there is the unspeakable knowledge that it too will someday burn, lest it be preserved and protected to the point of its own decay, which is really just a slow burning fire.

The Christian Myth is a case in point. The natives were born again into the Christian people but light of a new truth of the new world, the kingdom of god. It was a good fire, but its ashes were spread too thin across Europe (and now the planet) such the the Christian people quickly (most of them at least) degenerated into weaker and weaker peoples (though from a genealogical point of view still Christian) first Catholics were born when the ashes were first spread to thin (by fault of the Romans) then the contemptible Westerners were born when those ashes (plus, somewhat, the ashes from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but still only a by product of the Christian ashes) were spread even thiner (by fault of capitalism, which is still to say the Romans) over all the planet. Yet in those too few days before its ashes were spread, when it still had its strength Christianity, in Revelations, foresaw that this world too must burn when its day comes.

So when one does this creative/destructive action, it is no surprise that in the stories of this deed there is commonly a part prophesying that the world shall end. Because for the people wed to the myth, the day when their myth will falter in strength and be consumed by the coming fire is the day when all creation is brought to an end.

Why does the strength of a people falter, and tend back toward nihilism? I suppose from a certain perspective the reason can be related to the faltering of the person from old age or the failing of soil from over use, though this is no answer. It seems that the strength at the birth of a people is its love of live and existing, this including its love of pleasure and pain together, and its acceptance of the hard realities about the nature of death as a part of life. Yet for as long as the people live within the world that was created for it, they will weaken. An act of revolution against this original myth is the source of new strength, yet the revolution doesn't so much reinvigorate the original people as it destroys them in creating another. Put simply, life is change, and this is creation and destruction. The people that doesn't change isn't alive, and as it petrifies it weakens and tends toward nihilism, unwillingness to let the weak die is a common cause. The weak is the part of life which must change for life be be creative, blessed are the weak, for their destruction is the change that is life and the birth of the strong. A society that composts it by products, and burns its trash, and culls its weak will prosper and stay strong the longest. But it too shall one day come to its reckoning where strength beyond what can be expressed within its confines will demand to be expressed, and will shatter its wall and burn it down.

The overmen who are the arsonists of history, lighting fires when the fuel is ready, know that the world/myth/people forged in the fire will one day fail, so they tell of the end days. This is a sign of good instincts. That what ever we bring into the world is mortal, and that is must one day die.

Live in this world, as it is, and do as one in this world does, remember that the fire that burns the world is part of the world too.

The Nietzschean as Taoist

*I apologize in advance for dealing with generic human types such as "the peasant" or "the scribe." This is normally sloppy thinking, but I assure you that I am going somewhere with it.*

Nietzsche was not a commentator or culture critic, but a scientist of energy flows. Its with this in mind that we must inquire into the meaning of decadence. The territory of decadence is excess. And excess, when thought of by the earth, is anything outside the equilibrium of geo/solar radiation over a given time. This is not just meant as fossil fuels, as per my earlier discussion, but can also include even purely natural processes that, as it were, eat their sowing seeds. That serve to undermine their preservation-enhancement conditions.

This is why the nomad is so admired by Nietzsche: he has no excess. Human beings can just barely survive on the steppe. they can, and do, but only by reaching a highly attuned existence with everything being economized and packed with multiple purposes. Where even art installs itself at the margins of the functional: jewelry, weapons, clothes. Where nothing is wasted.

Conversely, the peasant is ignored if not reviled--despite a similar economy--because he is the first basis of decadence. He produces excess, and this excess is not something that he enjoys but rather comes to bear down on him as an added burden. Funny how life works. When left to his own devices he usually realizes his lot: his labor sustains the source of his enslavement. Oppression always arises out of excess--folks who have nothing to do in life but control other people. Beureucrats, the aristocracy, priests, monks, emperors, scribes, merchants. And then their various servants.

The peasant realizes that there is no way to prevent this excess, and patiently acquiesces to these types. Yet he binds them to a condition: that they will not reinvest this excess, but will rather hold to various ways of ritually destroying it. The Egyptians, for instance, created a figure called "Pharaoh" who would serve as a focal point for all of the types who lodged themselves in the excess of the Nile peasant. Simultaneously, Pharaoh would be infested with a peculiar fantasy world that was symbolically projected as a kind of extension of various parts of his total being after the end of bodily animation. And his concern would be so focused on this dead world that the excess at his command would become utterly spent in building tombs.

Why was this done? Because there was something infinitely more terrifying than these rudimentary forms of oppression that might torture or maim a person for stepping out of line; something that destroyed not just the body but the self. that made not just the body but desire a slave. Capitalism. where excess becomes the standard. where excess--capital--rules every single minute facet of our lives, and is so interwined with them that need and excess cnanot be disentangled. the conditions are ripe for this when a nomadic people install themselves at the head of such an order, applying thier economy to excess, reinvesting it just like a primative who hunts dressed in animal skins and with a bone spear from his former quarry. Using an extracted surplus to build weapons to extract a further surplus, and a further surplus--and employing all the former types and their peculiar powers as part of this merciless extraction. This is why Genghis Khan, for instance, was an advocate of religious tolerance--because religion to him was a tool. "Its true if it works."

Along the way there are many advances in technology, but these only marginally effect the peasants lot: his existence is maintained at a minimum, and any increase and surplus is absorbed in ever more extravagant forms of excess. The only speed bump in this story, which was set to continue for literally millions upon millions of years,was the exponential release of fossil fuels.

But I'm confident that this will eventually work itself out, and we'll be left with basically the same story--only, with the sort of type I talked about earlier: the technician as peasant,and the ruin of all the types territorialized in excess. forever transformed by knowledge. And given enough time he will develop a reinvestment of excess in the natural, peaceful expansion of his type until they have reached all of the nuances of the earth, fully integrating with it in a "path of least resistance" (the Tao.) what I mean by this is that eventually population might increase to its naturally sustainable limit and stay there, so that there would be no excess to invest in oppression because, at its maximum limit, human activity couldn't be invested in useless things, but would all have to be directed towards just sustaining itself at its present level. We would all just be peasants.

Decadence in human affairs, then, is anything in addition to this baseline.

A reply to a friend who was puzzled about what existentialism meant, despite reading a book about it.

...As for existentialism, my teacher said that its simply a name for the various dissenting opinions to Hegel, minus England and America. I would explain it further: it is the reaction, amongst thinkers in continental Europe (or at least a certain bourgeois element,) against Hegelianism--understood in the banal sense of the end of history. Or, the reaction of thinkers in touch with the radical contingency of existence, in the face of the totalizing temporal narrative that, as it were, "internalized" or "historicized" the totalizing spatial narrative of Aristotelianism (that the universe is a closed and finite system contained by a firmament.) Essentially, this describes its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who lodged themselves in the contingent, and in Kierkegaard's case, out of the infinite.

But it was the experience of the world wars in particular that developed existentialism's morbidity and, ultimately, its stance from the isolated individual. Continent wide there was an experience with death that can scarcely be described. And this death led not unto life, either the eternal in Kierkegaard or the cyclic becoming of Nietzsche, but was "the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." It was, in Heidegger's words, the "own-most possibility of impossibility" and something that one faced entirely alone.

Everything else was inauthentic, because it could be given over to someone else. other people can live for me--supply the word is think and say, and provide the template for the actions that I do. But no one can die my death for me, so the story goes. At the same time, however, this death formed the definition or limits of life, such that life became defined by the contours of this possibility of impossibility, and specifically its character as utterly individual in character.

These later developments to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche serve, in fact, to merely repeat the Hegelian narrative of the ending of existence in a way that is "always already in each case mine"--that is, repeated as a kind of fractal in each individual life, and each individual moment. It is a view from within finite existence, and hence possesses none of the joy of the infinite, and none of its ability to merge the tragic and comic at infinity. Instead, existentialism tries to self-create this joy in the figure of Sisyphus, deriving the comic out of the tragic by some impossible logic.