An essay concerning energy and conflict.

Two friends of mine sitting around the fire suggested, one of them that sugar is the cause of conflict, and the other that oil was. What follows are my thoughts concerning their perspectives.

On the face of it, both claims are obviously contingent, for conflict, human or otherwise, personal or on grand scale, quite clearly predates both the first refinements of sugar and the first institutional usage of oil. However it occurs to me that sugar and texas tea both have one obvious similarity, profound energy density, perhaps it is not the substance itself, but this property which they were reaching for through their respective examples?

One gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 calories (technically kilo-calories, but it is the american convention, from dietary precedent, to call these 'calories') the amount of chemical energy for a grown worker to labor for 10 days, or longer if lean. It is this very energy density that all modern life and convenience (for the first world) is built. Even the mighty hydro-electric projects of the last hundred years have been built on this initial energy investment. The fate of wars and people is tied to their positioning in the harvesting and processing of this life-blood of civilization; for this reason oil has been at the heart of many of the worlds recent conflicts, either in fighting for oil, or for resources made useful by the infrastructure powered by robbing the graves of the past life upon the earth. Empires rise and fall in the struggle for this great power source, and conflict between competing interests is necessary to determine the course of this flow of energy from the earths distant past into our present.

One pound of sugar contains 1733 calories, making it a powerful and quick to digest energy source which the human body is programed to seek as fuel, our entire sense of sweetness an intricate instrument for finding and consuming this precious fuel. Our desire for sugar is no surprising thing, but of course the sugar of today is not like the sweet berries that Socrates suggested we have as our dessert (The Republic). In nature sugar is only rarely encountered in even a relatively condensed form. Syrup is, as a rule, boiled down from great quantities of more watery natural sources. Honey (1376 calories per pound) is only stored in density by the work of bees, themselves powered by the rich feed of flower nectar, a gift of sugar richer and more precious then almost any other in nature. Sweet fruits, even very sweet ones, are still largely water and still rich in fiber and other substances. Put simply, the human body, until a century ago, had never a reason to adjust itself for digesting the density of sugar that is in the modern diet, and as all chemicals do change behavior it should not be surprising that sugar be connected to depression and interpersonal conflict around that fine fire nights ago.

Though are the reasons the same? In the case of oil civilization has transformed itself into a machine for the rapid consumption and destruction of our planets one vast carbon energy reserves, though this intricate machine, complete with an order of intelligence of its own, does not turn the energy of oil to the betterment of man kind, but to using man as a means to its own end, the satisfaction of its own energy addiction. But in the case of sugar, human conflict and depression are not means to the acqusition of more sugar (addiction though there may be) but are results of the havoc wrecked upon our body by sugar itself. For many other animals live peacefully (to a degree) on diets as sweet as Man's has become, many fruit eating beasts, as example; and Fat, which is denser in energy still, does not seem to be as destructive to human health as his cloying kin, fat can cause many health problems, but not with the acuteness of sugar. Civilization is a beast that is hyper adapted to consume oil and fossil energy, and Man a creature still struggling to maintain the insulin levels needed to save himself from his diet.

How long can any engine run on fuel which burns too hot for it?

Apollo: the Stoic.

The Greeks said that Apollo, lord of reason, aesthetic and form, drove the sun in his chariot. But who's to say who pulled whom, and whether he was not just a dog on the leash. Life is a dream sent by the sun--conveyed in excited photons--dreamed by the round rock of earth and thin swirl of sky; and reason happens in the course of life.

Written Language and Set Theory

Our written language has a sorted past, one of determining what counts and what doesn't. Historians suggest that writing evolved from receipts. What a perfect start for the language of the positivists, the language that is which is equivalent to set theory, or as I name it: the significant (though 'token' or 'marked' 'class' would do).

Language is so much richer then the Significant. What can be said, found, or made in language goes well beyond what can be brought under the auspicious of the significant.

Significant (point out) language is just that which is done on receipts. We can mark (boundary) things (gatherings) as belonging to certain (sieved) classes (called) . And count (cutoff together) the thinks (gatherings) in each class (called). "There are five apples owed this man" count (cutoff together) to five from the class (called) of apples, being certain (sieved) to avoid the not apples, which are not to be counted (cutoff together) with the apples, if the man comes to take them.

It is about knowing what belongs in which categories, and only works in so far as we have a way of determining what belongs and what doesn't. You can only count apples if you can tell what is and apple and what is not an apple.

I postulate, that because of written languages history with receipts it tends to be connected with the veery specific part of language that is the Significant. I don't name this aspect 'Significant' with any kindness, but mockingly. It is the language if the discerning mind, the mind that splits things in to categories, that sifts.

Sifting is at very most half of language. And certainly not the greater half. But it is the obsession of our sciences and even some aspects of philosophy. It isn't bad, but mindlessly over used.

Look at text, how it is sifted into well ordered sets of symbols. Each clerly identifiable as one word, and not another. In order to say anything interesting poets have to use tricky language to maintain ambiguity and scope to words, rather then just having a orderly set of symbols. We shouldn't order ! The world orders the world, not man! Receipts and the tools of people keeping everything operating mechanically, according to rules that are in order to order before they begin. 

Machines can be good. But to order everything like a machine is to become ordered like a machine, and to make machines of all that we order. I beg you not to order those around you. Neither man nor beast nor plant nor mote of dirt. Not river not forest not even fire ordered. When that which isn't machine, material, in them shows its nature... your orders will become cries, cries unanswered. With dams we order rivers, and with silt and calamity and unpredictability does the river torment us for our hubris.

Do I tell you to never order? No. You may even order me, if I am our of order. But not all things have a proper place. Be humble in ordering the world around you, be humble in ordering nature. Be humble in ordering man. Remember that the power of an order does not come from the top, but from the bottom. Remember that when we order, we are either ourselves just maintaining an order, or beginning an order without an order.

Am I ordering the Significant?

On Daemonology

Much like a demon, a daemon is an entity of possession. Just as demons are not natural, but supernatural, Daemons exist not in the reality of nature but in the symbolic realm, they are ideal not real. Yet there is an interface between the ideal and the real, for an ideal has to be simulated in a material substratum, just as a computer physically acts out, with transistors and electric currents, the non physical pattern of its program for the program to be meaningful. The Daemon, to have power, must possess a body.

Power is the action of the ideal upon the real through an interface of some kind. In nature there aren't creatures that have power over their environments, as Carse observed in the context of the sciences "If to command nature we must obey nature, then our commanding is only an obeying." Put another way, we cannot say what is in power in nature. Only when there is an ideal aspect can power be considered.

There can be identical copies of an idea, daemons like all ideas can multiply. Nature isn't divided, and can't be said to have copies, though there may be resemblances. Daemons have their own form, but not substance. DNA is ambigious, the code itself is ideal, but its expression in organisms, especially complex organisms, tends to be real, even 'identical twins' aren't identical. The true ideal tends to run in a substrate that has the potential to hold any of a number of ideals.

Daemons are cybernetic systems that reduce the ineffability of natural drives to a symbolic instruction, and then issue instructions that can unleash powerful drives. Daemons are therefor, when embodied, very powerful.

What distinguishes Daemons from other ideal assemblages is that a daemon is capable of possession, that is to say being confused with the host. The Daemon is a changeling, like the supernatural beings that replace the baby stolen from the crib, it becomes tied to the ego identity of its host. The host thinks the daemon is it, and insofar as the thoughts of the host are the thoughts of the daemon, this is correct. The daemon possesses the beast. The assemblage of symbols, of limits: thresholds, over determines the assemblage of drives, of will.

Preparing for the exoteric

The Initiate
of green circle

The Member
of blue circle
of red circle
of black circle
of white circle

The Teacher
of life ring
of world ring
of strength intersect
of grace intersect
of flight intersect
of care intersect.

The Master
of flowing water
of burning fire
of open sky
of loving earth

The Grand Master
of Four Ways.

To learn a word...

not just a new word for a concept you already had, but to learn a new concept opens up a hallway of doors. Entire classes of thoughts you have had suddenly open up for reconsideration by virtue of this solitary new concept. And though there is likely no systematic way to search for all the doors this new word is a key for, contemplation will lead you to stumble, mostly stumble, over many of them.

And that old tired thought by virtue of this new word the thought takes on a new and entirely different glamor, countless possibilities for reconfigurations open; possibilities for new combinations open, possibilities for unending new meanings and interpretations.

Suddenly behind every door that this solitary key opens you find not just uncountable new door ways, not just uncountable new vistas and worlds and thoughtscapes, not just countless new halls and avenues and possibilities and connections, but unknowably many new keys. And only one way to explore the potential of each of these new keys.

This run away reaction, this finding of old limits always ready to fall away, is what makes thinking so addictive. But be warned, sometimes the way back to where you started is a labyrinth, and not all new hall ways open up to good places, or places you are ready for. Thinking can really wreck your day/week/year/life if you don't have the grace.

So it's good to have a "place" you can call "home", that way if you get lost you can just call.

Bateson.

Level 0 - The Key and Lock. One.
Level 1 - Association. Tally.
Level 2 - Symbolic. Rational.
Level 3 - Holosymbolic. Irrational.

Our Google

Our Google who art online
Searchable be thy name
Thy results come,thy pages load
Client side as they do Server side
Give us this log in, and our new messages
Find not results from our embarrassing past
As we search not for the embarrassing past of our friends
Link us not unto 4-chan
but deliver us from trolls
I'm Feeling Lucky.

Responce to Clark and Greer.

Any sufficiently defined magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Reply to a Friend:

I don't know much about philosophy, but I do know a thing or two about boxes. Boxes have an inside and they have an outside. In order to be a box, the inside must have an opening to the outside but also must have sides and a bottom to keep objects placed within from sliding out or falling through. It may also have a top, and of course a'' this implies a general understanding of use that includes a right-wise orientation. It is also important to note that these sides and bottom aren't inside or outside the box, though they have inside and outside faces.

You mentioned something about the reality of the external world [independent of the internal] and, I would think, things hold quite the same in this case. I suppose using this metaphor would mean that the body constitutes the sides of the box, with there being an inside face to the body and an outside face. To grossly simplify, the body (or, really, the brain) is a kind of box of electrical waves that are both generated spontaneously within, but also through the senses where wave patterns in external media converted to concomitant waves in the brain. For example, sound waves are converted to electrical waves through the ear, which within itself creates a kind of artificial lake for our still very amphibian hardware to translate the patterns within. However, one can say that these brain waves, too, are externalized in that they are physical processes theoretically observable to humans--even to the human itself who is under view.

It would seem, then, that it is physical reality that is external, and the sensory that is internal. The sides of the box that are external would be the sensing body, and the internal face would be the sensed body. Except that we can hardly locate that sensory experience within a particular physical space; and, indeed, under this dualism we would have to say that it is non-physical, and hence non-localizable, and hence not a spatial thing that we could understand as inside or outside or possessed of faces. It will be protested that this is just a metaphor, but I'd like to hear just what the problem is if we try to talk about this matter (whatever the matter is) without resorting to the metaphor. Yet this seems precisely what we do: we apply the logic of space to the non-spatial.

In light of this, I would humbly forward a recommendation for general consideration: perhaps if we can fold the mind into a box, we could also perform a kind of mental origami and, with skill, do other shapes as well. If we can fold our minds into a box, perhaps we can fold them into a crane as well, or a ship upon the sea. Such is one of shaman's arts: mind-space origami. To fold these shapes so that he is not a passive hole into which the world flows, all flow, into the something I know not what; but to relate to sense as a flying-aloft, moving by its currents, moving amongst its currents. Not as a jet engine but with graceful wings. Maybe, even, we could be unfurled as a sail, to be folded and unfolded, waving in the current.

The only hard shape to get out of is the fold of infinite regress. The worst thing you can try to do is create a box that internalizes the external, or externalizes the internal--the box that eats itself and everything else; the box that would have but one face, facing the abyss (what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the system of the white wall and black hole.) This is the very definition of black magic, and is the cause of the systematic error that is appearance/reality. Sensation never lies, and it never trades in wholes or parts. It is only when that sense is cut off from the sensed by the schematic of an infinitely regressing frame that it can be isolated as an image, doubled over, compared to its unknowable reality (which can never be the thing but only ever be the empty regressing frame)--and come up short.

A story from a people in a distant future.

Once a horrible Tree grew upon the Earth. Its roots crushed and strangled the life that was there before it; they extracted all that was good and clean from the Earth; they excreted poison that killed everything else that grew. Its bows shaded out all other life; obscured the night sky, and the minds of man and beast until nothing could be seen except the tree. Its fruit was sweet but poisonous and all who ate of it became ill; all continued to eat of its sweet fruit was bound to die. Only the one trunk was permitted to reach for great heights, at the cost of all else. But eventually the tree made the Earth too poor and arid to support it. The Tree, which could only grow became sick itself. And the Great Mycelium began to tear into its roots; tear into its bows; tear into its trunk. The Tree fought The Great Mycelium, tried to drive it out, tried to poison its spores, but the Tree's might was failing for it had become sick, and The Great Mycelium grew deeper and deeper into the Tree. But the Tree would shed whole branches and limbs and bows and tap roots to purge itself of the Great Mycelium's growth; all in vain, for The Great Mycelium would always start again in another place from spores. And The Great Mycelium decayed The Tree; made The Tree's roots soft and crumbly; Released back into the Earth the nurtents that had been locked up in the Tree; made clean the poisons the Tree excreted ; defoliated the sky blocking branches, and opened the skys; shriveled its fruit; Fell its trunk. And when the trunk landed on the Earth The Great Mycelium did bloom with life and prosperity. When the Tree was at its might it gathered up all that was good on the Earth for itself; when The Great Mycelium was at its might, living on the destruction of the Tree, it returned to the Earth the boon from the Tree. Now we live in The Garden, its soil rich from the compost of the Tree and The Great Mycelium.

Blind: part 3

Dr. Strings Etching of the occasion the Lightstruck told him of their superstitions.

I studied to learn the language of the Lightstruck for 21 tides before I even came to live with the Lightstruck. I had listened to their language many times, and found that it lacked many of the concepts that we take for granted as the Blind. Their language is a relic from our past, a less evolved version of our own. For the day to day matters of survival it is quite utilitarian, but the rich harmonies of our grammar are lacking. The language doesn't include even contain the capacity of many speech acts we consider basic; they can't distinguish between possibility and actuality; they can't draw logical inferences; lack a concept of the past or the future; no concept of truth, or distinction of ends and means; they lack even the words to speak about their own language, hell they don't have a word for 'word'; They have no music theory or for that mater logic of harmonics. And yet, for all its simplicity, the Lightstruck are able to interact with one another in ways that I can't understand from their language.

Disturbingly, sometimes when I am preparing to speak (before I have said anything!) they will seem to gather around me and grow quiet. I am fairly confident that it is coincidence, but the effect is disturbing.

~~~

I had a disturbing experience quite recently, and I feel I should put it down now that the memory is fresh, as if I don't I am sure to distort it. An older lightstruck for the last half tide has been listening to me etch these journal entries. And after listening to my previous entry he purred [smiled] and a moment later began speaking to me in the language of the Blind! Included is a transcription:

It's so obvious to you that when we talk there are things important to your people that never come up, and you note that we lack the * possibility* of understanding them. You would say we are of a lower nature. Of course you are the one not using logic. You would then infer, that if your people could talk of things my people don't have words for, then my people might be talking in ways that your people couldn't recognize. Granted, that I never would speak of the 'past' or 'future' an that even those words I only know through borrowing, if I hadn't listened to your concepts I would have never learned of these new types of words that I had never use for. But, maybe if you actually listed to us you would realized that there are things my people do with language that you can't even recognize. Those sounds you dismiss as nonsense are our words for light types [color]. The world is alive with lifelight [bioluminescent] language, and we too emit lifelight, and converse with the other creatures. You know how we know when you will talk? Your words glow on your skin before you speak. Out of kindness we pretend not to understand what you are thinking, and some of it is shameful and sometimes you embarrass yourself, it is fair because of your disability. We speak with each other of things your people could never grasp through out skin, and also with sounds, for even though you hear the sounds you could never understand that with you assume to be nonsense.

At that point he walked away, and turned his face toward the forest again. I admit this is an exciting insight into their mythology, but I am still shaken that a lightstruck was able to emulate our language so well.

Blind: part 2

The Blind became the dominant culture on Euterpe, for they were the only civilized culture. Others they called Lightstruck. For hundreds of years the Blind controlled the resources of the world, except for the untamed equatorial regions, too rampant with plant life to be civilized, those areas were still controlled by various feuding groups of Lightstruck.

By this time the Blind have, as a culture, forgotten about the sensation of vision. Children who, through some grievous error, grow up without having their eyes removed universally become quite insane, and even if their eyes are removed at a later point rarely recover to being fully functional members of society. Yet some among The Blind do find it interesting how the Lightstruck are able to survive, in such brutal environments, with their debilitating vision intact.

Let's call him Dr. Strings, a figurative translation of his native name with we would find quite unpronounceable; if you want an idea of it though it sounds not completely different from the sound you would get if you compressed to a fraction of a second a yodeler covering the opening 24 notes of 'War Pigs' where each note has an internal substructure of the guitar riff from 'Bohemian Rhapsody' played backwards over either 'Moonlight Sonata' or 'Smoke on the Water'; depending on the declension. Though if we created such an abomination is a sound lab in an attempt to communicate, it's even odds whether he would be able to figure out that you were addressing him or would think that you were inviting an ivy plant to a funeral for your goldsmith's second favorite pet, conditional on the acceptance of an earlier made wedding proposal by your twin cousin. Needless to say there are elements his native language's grammar that we don't yet fully grasp.

Dr. Strings studied the Lightstruck and their superstitions, they for example claimed they could know when Thunder would sound several seconds before it did, a claim that Dr. Strings was surprised to find verified on several occasions. Though the statistical majority of their 'predictions' could be discounted as good guesses, based on hearing, through sounds distortions, an incoming low pressure system. The Lightstruck though claimed they could, use their eyes to see an aura that predicted the thunder. Even if this were true, it could hardly be of use, Dr. Strings etched in his record.

Most of the day the Light struck slept, and most of the night the Lightstruck sat around facing out from their settlement into the tall thick plants, only at dawn did they go out and gather food, and then at dusk, when they awake, they set the settlement in order before they began their night of forest facing. The temperature swings between night and day were mild because of the thick atmosphere, but most life was nocturnal, and cooler temperatures are better suited for activity. Dr. Strings knew enough about eyes to know that they respond to energy from the daysky, he postulated that for the Lightstruck living strickly nocturnally was a way of protecting themselves from the dangers of eyes.

Blind.

On the other side of the Galaxy there is a planet, Euterpe, not all too different from the Earth. Similar temperature, similar age, water on its surface, and life of comparable diversity. But its mass is greater by three fold, and its surface gravity is twice the Earths. This holds down a very heavy atmosphere, which makes life on its surface quite different from the Earth. First, the stars light is dim and often often obscured by clouds, and second sound travels with superb clarity. It should be of no shock that creatures fit for comparison to human came to live on the planet. There shape I do not know, but I envision them as stocky men with beady eyes, large bat like ears, and stony flesh. Their eyes are only developed enough to see fields of colored light, but not shape specifically. But their ears are amazing, nothing on Earth, save maybe MAYBE the great whales have hearing that approaches theirs. They hear the shapes of their surroundings and they live in a world of pure sound.


When they emerged as a species on this planet they were a quick success, they were clever like humans. It a short few myriads of years they came to cover the land mass of the planet. One group small group sought to understand the world. So they blinded themselves. At birth a child's eyes would be cut out. To us this sounds drastic, but it was perfectly rational. You see their eyes weren't useful, they were only good for watching the bioluminescent displays of lower lifeforms; and this was a diversion that the youth would easily lose themselves in for days at a time if not cut. Their eyes were their weakness it seems, they were vulnerable to hypnosis by flashes of light that other creatures could produce. By blinding themselves they were free from this ancestral vulnerability, free to listen to things to learn their structure and their properties. And this group did learn, and did become powerful from their knowledge. And they spread over Euterpe teaching their ways to the 'lightstruck' those still afflicted with sight.

Timeship

The earth is a time machine; a machine that converts motion into space into recurrence by bringing it back around on itself as in an ellipse. It returns to its past place; it beholds it in its future. Back around to its future it goes, and the heavens do watch and wonder with eyes of faraway suns. It is a machine that makes days, seasons, and years, and just because we have discovered other time machines that we use to keep our time, hidden deep inside the smallness of things, does not mean that it, too, is not a time machine and one with whom human have sojourned in light of for much longer than the atoms in our clocks.

The earth is a time machine, not a spaceship. This spaceship earth would be a crummy spaceship--it only goes back to where its already been around the sun; and it might as well not go at all if there is some destination planned, because all we're going to meet again out there, other than empty space, is some disastrous asteroid--and if that all that awaits our spaceship we might not want to go at all. The earth, rather, crafts times out of this same space, and who would know time without this?

But like any time traveler, we of the earth, together, change ourselves and all things in our travels; going back from winter to summer again yields changes in the summer before us, and events are always metaphorically "killing their own grandfather." The earth, our native home from which we embark on the adventure of time, is now constantly betrayed in its origin by its loops, and time is always as going back to the causes of one essence and changing them. The present moment always erases what was needed for it to born, and what survives in essence is what finds in the future that same place from which it came; but which changes its birth into something different fitting it into new surrounds and, in becoming, to become as that same something else.

We come to spring, but not the same spring. Summer, but not to the same summer. The sun, an engine of this time machine,sends us around in motion and stirs the skies with heat and pull. Weather itself has been wound up over thousands of years with scant heat, but held close. Life lives in this time, being excited to motion with change and season, finding power from the sun to multiply our times. Making time frames that interpenetrate.

In stories, a time machine is that which changes at a rate out of step with its surroundings. The time traveler reaches down to light his pipe, and empires crumble. He travels in a way that is impervious to this stream of phenomena in which humans live and see--but there are many other speeds, and if we do not own all feeling for ourselves, these speeds can watch us at their own pace, and with a seeing their own, coming out of their own time. Dwelling in empires lasting days and within the size of a petri dish; or the fungal networks with a rhythm of ice ages. Or the time of genes, of neuron networks.

There is no one time here, but times that enter into and exit one another. The engine of life and its whole history must move with the smallest of parts, and it opens up all levels, including our phenomenal, by which it can even be moved. And life, breath of life, both lives and does not live in this current moment. The time of times on this earth, the earth itself, does not stretch out in many times which we could access if only in fiction; but it is at a moment, bearing all the time frames not as its own frame, but as the moment of the earth which gives to the enframing.

The divinities watch and know out of many times, humans keep watch for the traces, and all is given out of the light.

Another Definition of Man:

Man is a monkey who has been overclocked.

Dewey: Education and Ecology are one art.

That a man may grow in efficiency as a burglar, as a gangster, or as a corrupt politician, cannot be doubted. But from the standpoint of growth as education and education as growth the question is whether growth in this direction promotes or retards growth in general. Does this form of growth create conditions for further growth, or does it set up conditions that shut off the person who has grown in this particular direction from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing growth in new directions? What is the effect of growth in a special direction upon the attitudes and habits which alone open up avenues for development in other lines? (Ex & Ed 20)

Shamanpunk 2020 part two

S: Now we live hear, we spinners of yarns, forever beautifying the tapestry of our lives.

I: So you work to improve yourselves?

S: That is so, but not with any ideal or fixed goal, with out a standard. Each of us seeking our own fulfillment of the story, and collectively weaving those stories into a shared mutually supportive tapestry. Even the ducks and the goats and the olive trees have their own genius to contribute to the tapestry.

I: And what is your position in all of this, as a shaman?

S: On no two days would I respond the same way to such a question. Today I am 'The Weaver of the Yarns of the Indefinite Tapestry' yesterday I was 'The One Who Sings with Goats'. But on all days I am called the Blue Shaman here, because of the role I play as the spinner of blue yarns. In the name of clarity, I make explicit that these yarns are stories.

I: I think that much was clear enough, though everything else is quite hazy.

S: The Tapestry of this place is the stories told amongst the life here. But not all stories are instantly compatible. The Blue Yarns are the stories that look for harmony and agreement between the most dissonant of notes.

I: Like that mixed metaphor.

S: Yet it works. To mix the metaphor still further, I am a translator, but never going so far as to strip each thread of its own uniqueness (lest I tempt the anger of the red sage). Translating the stories of the many spinners of this land into a form that can be interwoven. This not not imply that all stories are one story, and more then to suggest that all ways of life are one way. To search for such universals would strip so much of the uniqueness from each that nothing of worth could be preserved.

Everything acts out its role in the quest of its life, but also serves as secondary characters in the yarn of another. Every yarn in the rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be.

I: Wait, so you tie all the yarns together?

S: No, they are all always already connected, I simply make storys out of how they are connected.

My guidance counselor said I could be anything I wanted to be. So I decided to become a god. - The Old Master.

Hitch Hiking.

It's good for the soul. Really cheaper then therapy and most of the time far more productive.

Have I been understood? Dionysius with the crucified.

For neither one is there such a thing as "against."

Drunken Ramblings:

I don't want to transcend the ego. My goals are quite a bit more modest. To dwell along side it; to walk into it, go through its corridor and emerge from the other side. To let it be, and be other things besides. Even: to draw from it as a well, and drink from hidden waters--even in lieu of refreshment. A well that is just drawing the stuff of the self-same world I am in today, but doubled over and made...liquid. A well that drinks in the waters of the world, pooling them for the draw.

Do I make myself clear?

Reply to Ray's reply to "Monism and Dualism:"

http://mindingwith.blogspot.com/2010/12/monism-andor-dualism-and-incipient.html#comments

I wrote out this reply and it ended up being quite long, so I thought it deserved its own post jst to increase the chances it will be read by anyone other than myself...

It is a dangerous thing to try to escape something in thought. This can change the thought into a thing that haunts; that drives one on a trajectory that arises out of the pursuit of what one flees, and is hence determined by something from behind. Or, the escape could be from not a monster but from a topos--the thought as a prison, and the thinker as the prison break. this is dangerous too, since the thought as prison is like a labyrinth that does not mark its entrance or exit. Even if you've gotten out of the hedges or the high stone walls, how do you not know that you haven't just another chamber in the labyrinth--the labyrinth as city, as field, as desert, as sky. The labyrinth even in love, family, friends. The labyrinth as all.

One could almost say: the labyrinth is as labyrinth does; and a labyrinth is perhaps defined precisely as walls built in such as way as to compel escape, for we can imagine a labyrinth that has all one needs in it, and has all one cares about in it. Can you imagine being in a labyrinth with one's friends and trying to find a way out? One tactic would be: lets all break apart and search separately for the exit. That way at least some of us might get out, and we would increase our chances many fold rather than staying in a single group. This, of course, assumes the labyrinth has an exit, or that it isn't infinite.

Yet, another tactic would be to search together for a clearing in the labyrinth and settle there. Build a place; dwell in the labyrinth. And one could imagine that this clearing, too, could even be infinite, or as long as we're speaking in terms of the mind just as big as one wants it to be. Then it wouldn't so much be in the labyrinth at all, but both would be in each other. It may even be that we are wandering the labyrinth searching for the exit out into the field, when we're already there: maybe the path between the walls of this labyrinth is infinitely wide to dwell in, or the enclosing walls infinitely far away. When we speak of labyrinths of the mind it makes sense to talk this way, assuming it makes sense to talk of labyrinths of the mind.

The final question is of the combination of an imperative to both types of flight at once: the labyrinth and minotaur. Here we can play with infinities again: for, as I think we noted together once, it is perhaps this notion of infinity that is more labyrinth than any labyrinth--while at the same time being the secret of man. What if the minotaur is infinite? If the minotaur is a dimension of psychic existence, he is to that degree quite infinite so far as we're concerned. Infinite bull-headed mouth-god driving into us as in chase, while also taking us in as a devouring? The minotaur as just the principle of motion that impels/compels us in its entrails. A most terrifying idea, that our cherished free will in moving about this labyrinth is actually the flexing push of the walls that press around us in our surroundings, in our organs, even in our cells.

But here is a further mind-bending: what if we, as finite, do not move at all? What if we are, as fixed points, what these innards push off to move,moving around our sight as do the clouds in the sky? Surely if things are infinite, as we've said, then there can be no linear progress in a certain direction towards the entrance or the exit. Hence the scenery of the halls changes around us, rather than us moving through the scenery. Or, at least, it makes the same amount of sense to speak in either way, and truth be told we both move and are moved by virtue of our finitude.

Then an awful truth dawns on us: we are the walls, the minotaur, the labyrinth and we seek an escape from ourselves. And the labyrinth endless captures/devours itself while fleeing into and out of itself. We are, in our flesh and blood, part of the labyrinth. Likewise (and this is an important reversal) the labyrinth is our self-same flesh and blood. I know that you are a connoisseur of our culture's high art, so I need not be embarrassed by introducing the idea of Gomtuu, or the Tin Man (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tin_Man_(episode) .) We are only in prison insofar as the walls are lifeless and held out against us. But what if they are full of life and mind scarcely such that we could even conceive of it? I tell you, if we could hear a tiny fraction of what these walls feel, we would have a starship. For, as it is written, "So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" and "if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." Yet it is also written: "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."

This lends a new meaning to the notion of a "spaceship earth." Though, truth be told, we stay only on a single circular path instead of having a warp drive to travel to distant star systems. Perhaps a better term would be "timeship" for we plunge into the warping of the future that is constantly changing the topos of earth, by us in us through us. and we see, on this analogy, just what we are in our own Gomtuu, earth: we are the warp drive through time. We are the bending of time together in order to accelerate the creation of new spaces. Creation is the stationary voyage. It is how we get to new places without leaving home. But the labyrinth is the prison of the earth, and is infinite only by means of a circumnavigation or looping unto itself. There is just such an order today, and it keeps us from the earth that is made to be only beneath our feet.

Regarding the question of everything and nothing, i reply with a bit of dialog from the Japanese interlocutor in Heidegger's A Dialog on Language: "We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the nothingness of which you speak in that lecture. To us, emptiness is the loftiest name for what you mean to say with the word 'being.'" This isn't to say that we have represented the "European" perspective, or I am "turning Japanese." Obviously we are all Americans here, though I would stress this in a positive sense as the people who are out of reach of the priests: "The priest did not turn west. He knew in the west there lay a plane of consistency, but he thought it was blocked by the column of Hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. but that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions rediscovered or deterritorialized. It was not for nothing that permaculture started in the place where the British empire met, and attempted to swallow, the land of the dream time, and started dreaming dreams of the earth;nor that in those green islands in the expanse of deserts and mountains in the American est it has taken root.

No doubt that in working with the two-fold room must be made for the freedom of the things from the everything, and from nothing, and from love; and they must have a place that gives itself over to this meeting, where things come into their own together. Love gives us this; for love is the word in which to be in love is to be in love with. And, indeed, this love is consummated in the with, without which it would not be there. "for where there are two or three gathered together -- to my name, there am I in the midst of them.'" Love is what you can be in, without being determined by the thing you are in. It gives the things a place to be together as they are, without one consuming or encompassing the other.

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end."

So far as the twofold, the things circulate from love that gives a place to be as they are--both with as against each other and for themselves, and with as in with each other--and into the totalizing everything-and-nothing. This circulating is the arising and the abeyance, where things come into their own, from out of nothing, and pass back into nothing by the totalizing claim of the all. and love goes into the nothing and finds the things, but it is never fully claimed by the all. even as the all fully encloses it, it comes into its own as the giving site, which the all is drawn into to be--just another thing among things.

This is what gives us confidence that as we travel in the timeship, we hang together as one earth despite the divisions in feeling, where we can even be in the same room with other humans and not know anything of the truth of their feeling. suffering and joy and whole worlds can be together unknowingly in the same place. we are divided but guided by the way; and when we pass through deserts or cold mountains we are not abandoned to them. These divisions clear to a place where they are always meeting;and this victory, though always won out over the death of individuals, will become as a force and a "new sun" for us to travel by.

Nevertheless, I have matured since writing the short post that prompted this matter, and I would not be so hasty to declare "love!"

these are some pertinent videos to think about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfR_HWMzgyc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfDlY1WuXUQ

A Revision:

"If you build it they will come" becomes: "If you start building it they will come and help you build it."

The Anarchist Conspiracy:

They control everything--they even control themselves. Therefore, everyone is controlled; therefore: no one is in in control. That is why everything is out of control.

Reply to "The End of History."

You've tapped into a few important veins here. First, the conflicts of the twentieth century arose out of totalizing ideologies that can be understood in a broad sense as setting up, for the globe, a unified world history that proceeds through dialectic. This unification of previously disparate, or at least multiple, histories through dialectic was something constructed in discourse, and then returned upon the world as tremendous machines crossing the lines of economics, politics, and ideology and organized according to one of a few of a finite number of vantages or interpretations of this new logic of history.

The central idea was, indeed, that history was ending and the victor would determine future existence for the entire globe, against an opposing force aligned perfectly opposite to it in terms of values. I would maintain that this was not in any sense prescribed by philosophers in the 19th century but at best palpitated by them, or extrapolated from trends. Far from directing the trends as kings, the philosophers were perhaps directed by the trends to fulfill a budding requirement of a history yet to be, but making itself--while in the process remaking all historical self-understanding to be an understanding of this particular history's rise.

Marxism first sets up the history of the world as the history of mechanical production, organized along certain dialectical oppositions whose latest, ending stage is industrial class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. And, in a sense, National Socialism reacts against two features in particular in this account: the notion of history as that of means of production, and the leveling of all differences to amount to just class; however, it is precisely this reaction against the totalizing character of Marxism and the leveling feature of capitalism that Marxism that for granted that makes national socialism also a totalizing ideology. Meanwhile, liberal democracy reacts against both along the axis of collectivism and individualism.

Now, there are two ways we can understand the outcome of this human construction of a dialectical history; either it fizzled--there was no final synthesis, and the victor was just drawn from either side of the conflict without proceeding through the stage of the negation of the negation of the other. IE: capitalism just wins in a dualistic conflict with collectivism and doesn't take its nature into itself. Meanwhile, we could read national socialism perhaps as a failed attempt at synthesis,in that it combined the perpetual mass mobilization of socialism and a corporatist dividing up of industry with a money and profit structure. This would surely be controversial, with certain left wingers today--even Zizek--preferring to call Nazism a "pseudo-event" that doesn't fit into their dialectical picture at all, rather than representing a failure of that picture itself. On this view it is not Nazism that is the pseudo event but dialectic historical narrative that is.

We can also describe this fizzling of dialectic in terms of thermonuclear war: the great global conflagration between the capitalist and communist states, which i have described many times and am confident in as the inevitable historical narrative in a non-nuclear twentieth century, was thwarted by the possibility of total annihilation. This conflagration would have transformed the victor into that "negation of the negation" of its other--whether capitalism in the case of communism or vice versa--because of the intensity of a mass mobilization that, perhaps, only a hybrid of the two systems could have absolutely perfected.

But its possible for another reason: that the dialectical process did complete itself in the triumph of this post-cold war order, and that dialectic now faces its opposite: the resumption of multiple histories that arose or were transformed out of the triumph of of the totalizing historical narrative--but splinter off from it and feed back against it in a new and fundamentally non-dialectical conflict (with the terrorists being a false dialecticization of a multiple enemy.) this is the reading i prefer--but the question arises, when is the historical site of completed dialecticization? is it the fall of the Berlin wall, or does it develop before?

Have we not, rather, pinpointed the site through an engagement with Curtis's works? Ernest Dichter, the founder of modern advertising, considered himself more than just a money maker but a patriot in that he found ways of effectively continuing the mass-mobilization of American society after the war. Without consumerism, he said, millions of men previously employed as soldiers would return home--and with no demand for war goods, factories would close, unemployment would skyrocket and socialism might succeed. Yet the only way to gainfully employ so many people in an industrial economy would be to drastically ramp up production--and to do this meant ramping up demand, which meant ramping up desire. At the same time, the techniques of game theory were busy creating an internalized, mathematical representation of our enemy--only to become the basis of economic organization for the world.

Thermonuclear war sublimated the vast, apocalyptic confrontation and the true world war; the same mass mobilization that started in World War Two and would have continued and become totalized in an age of global violence was thwarted. And dare I go out on a limb and say that the communist powers would have won? I will say it; the soviet military machine in 1945 endured vastly more hardship, fighting, victories and defeats than the United states military. Despite many millions dead, the Soviets still fielded four times the divisions as the United States and Britain along with similar numbers of air craft and tanks--and their models were greatly superior to ours. The Soviets had basically defeated the Germans before we entered the war against on a combat front on d-day (the Italian campaign involved but a small fraction of German strength,) and even after the landing the bulk of German forces were concentrated on the eastern front.

I believe that the communist system was capable of a mass mobilization, and a mass sacrifice of all human values, for victory in a way that our system simply wasn't. Americans lost a few hundred thousand men and gave up much of our cherished discretionary goods; we donated tin cans and went without new car tires. but in Russia every fiber of the being of the people was either directed to the front or in arms production. it is true that this sacrifice, along with successive waves of mass tragedy for decades before, eventually eat away all the positive social ties of the Russians and their empire crumbled away as much by a deep malaise and depression as anything else; however, as long as the war machine kept turning they would have continued against us, mobilizing new nations as they went under the self-fulfilling prophecy of the people's revolution.

And who knows? Maybe this phase and the aftermath would have looked something like the provisional dictatorship of the proletariat that leads to a communist utopia. We''ll never know any of these things for sure.; however, we do know that the advent of nuclear weapons thwarted history from a very different course that had been building for centuries; and it was put on a new course that invented, from marxism, a new and hidden dialectic not between the bourgeoise and proletariat, but between capitalism and communism as systems themselves. The synsthesis would com, as it always does, as the negation of the negation; that is, the negation of communism as the negation of capitalism, which produced a capitalism of mass mobilization responding to the mobilization of an insatiable desire.

There is a sense in which we did learn game theory from the Soviets. In them there was an irrational and all encompassing will to survive/win that would stop at nothing, and which utterly dispensed with all humanity in pursuit of victory. specifically in Stalin. We learn from World War Two, as the culmination of many wars, that rationality could break the most indissoluble bonds between human beings, and transform them into killers.

Now, anyway, what we see here is the reality of the end of history resolving the last contradiction. For what is the end of history except, not utopia which is just a projection, but--thermonuclear war? The accomplishment of it in fact creates a virtuality in our historic understanding that affects the last dialectical move. But the earth moves underneath, and it is the earth that furnishes the uranium. The earth has furnished the means for the immediate, terrible realization of the repressed wish of the civilized: to make it all end (which just is ressentiment.)

We ought to ask: why has the earth furnished us with this power? With its own native power? and why did being send us the understanding, yield itself as intelligible in such a way that the construction of bombs is even possible? With Heidegger we say "language speaks." "Language speaks us" but why did language speak out the plans for a hydrogen bomb? These are insolent questions; god withdrew from the world to leave it to its own devices. prayers no longer reached him, and people were not gathered. And in this rebellion there was just death, the drive to which was furnished by our will against the world; the means in which was furnished by the world, to give this curious monkey enough rope to hang himself with.

What are we being told by the existence of this choice? Zizek wrote somewhere that if we truly have the power, through the technological, to close off the horizon of being's sending--then it was illusory all along, being subject as it is to human caprice. But what if we are precisely given this choice, as is set up carefully by the affairs of history. Yet--this means that the choice is not an illusion but a real choice. We will either annihilate ourselves with our machines, or we will dwell on the new earth. And the hand of God has guided all history to this point with the utmost poiesis. In this we can be assured a good victory.

The laws of the universe are not of iron but putty. They are not carved in stone, but written on an etch-a-sketch. And "Aion is a child at play, playing draughts; the Kingship is a child's. " God spoke, as in a song, and brought the world together in its stars and galaxies. And these, by his singing, he can make unmade.

The End of History came like a theif in the night.

I am starting to think that in a sense 1990 was the end of history, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Hegelian dialectic was completed in modern Capitalism.
So you hear: Communism is dead, Capitalism and democracy are the victors.
now all that remains to do is consolidate the strangler countries into global capitalism and democracy. The Neo-Conservative narrative. But what is interesting is that it is also the Neo-Liberal narrative too. So the political dialectic we see in the world today is one where with in the entire political body all opposition is with in the victor.
Marxism and Capitalism did not synthesize. One was defeated thereby breaking the waltz. (thesis, antithesis, synthesis.)
So now all opposition (that exists on a level of meaningful political power) is within the context of Capitalist Democracy.
And islamo-fascism and such are projected as opponents, but only in an insincere way. No one can look at any of those movements as anything but an out growth of Capitalism.
So when the Marxist speaks to day you always hear the same reply: "Capitalism won, its over."
But what is it that is over? What was it that Capitalism and Communism were fighting over?
They were fighting to be the end of history in the Hegelian sense.
And now the next move in history is by necessity a non Hegelian move. So of course the story isn't over... but the part of it that is refereed to as 'history' with in the Hegelian system is over.

Reply to Non on Subjectivity:

There's no problem about the subject except a lot of hooey. It is a simple, imaginary spatial feature--a dot--that is always about three or four inches behind the eyes, moving with them as we move. It exists in our awareness precisely the same way as any other object thing that happens to be behind us--in tension over its possibilities of action that we cannot see, updated by sounds (and, God forbid, smells) that corroborate to various doings--crashes, bangs, rustlings, footsteps, etc; except, of course, for the fact that the subject is silent, odorless, and tasteless.

And since we have never seen the subject, we don't know what it is; if you know that there's a baby behind you, for instance--and you are busying yourself with the dishes, then you know what to be on the alert for; what sounds coming from her and the other objects behind that would be a sign of danger, distress, or something being broken. Likewise you know how to be on the alert if your waiting for the bus and there's some bum behind you who's thinking...God knows what he's thinking but its sure that have to do with your wallet--or worse! But the subject is something we've never encountered, and hence don't know what to do with.

Its like a sign pinned on our back that we can't see or reach to pull off. Like a dog chasing his tail we can't ever seem to catch it in front of us. It just sits there behind us, seeing what we see and do something we known not what behind us. Possessed of all of our feelings, thoughts, awarenesses--but also something more, what one might charitably call "the truth." The subject does stuff, though. Before we're even done with our thoughts it encircles them like an anaconda whose skin is all one big mouth that immediately sinks around what it encircles. If one didn't think of anything, the snake would just sink into itself--which is what it does all the time anyway, as it encircles other things. You want to know what the subject is? Its a Greco-Roman wrestler, that's who that little guy is. And he will fuck. you. up. He'll get you with the suplex so fast you won't even know what hit you.

By all means, if you want to be a mapmaker and get out your measuring tape and try to get the dimensions of this snake--be my guest. I can tell you already that you won't be able to see it to measure, and the only shape you'll get and the only analysis be able to perform is on the shape of the measuring tape itself, as the snake wraps around it. He can wriggle out of any topological description too, and eat it. The black snake of nihilism, as Nietzsche puts it. The Oroboros, the snake that eats itself. But Descartes's intuition was right: the pineal gland is situated right about where the subject should be, and the fact that it actually produces serotonin is not proof that the subject is a mystical object that connects to the body by a voodoo that needs no site of connexion; it proves that it is imaginary.

As a corollary: the imaginary is only viewed by the image of the viewer, which as we said cannot be viewed (unless it is--and then the viewer of that viewer isn't viewed. ha ha.) Thus, the imaginary itself cannot thus be viewed in its entirety, and thus--what we're really dealing with is the unintrepretability of dreams. The inability to transform the imaginary into an image with borders, or a source. The imaginary only has borders within itself; the borders are images of borders. Incipient dream-time. But when does this whole business arise, historically speaking? Again--it is absolutely with the destruction of the firmament. As we've already established: this guy is a tricky one and can wriggle out of most anything; and robbed of a universal home over everything, he shattered into each and every lacuna of our vision, filling it with the old celestial machinery.

So with that being said,there remains a certain discussion of strategies, a discussion of the business of topology, and how the subject is constructed. Plato already described the space that constructs the subject, and did a most admirable topology. The subject is in the cave,and is defined by a certain place in that cave. There are many places that resemble the cave: a classroom resembles it, especially insofar as the teacher is a pat functionary of centrally planned lessons confirmed by tests, and a theater is even more. But the modern American den with its television and computer screens, or better yet the motion picture show, resembles it the most. These places only constitute together 90% of typical waking life during childhood? Where else do you need to look?

This leaves us with the matter of strategy. One immediately has the idea of pitting some kind of mongoose against the snake--but if such a thing were possible, which I cannot see, one would have the problem of the old lady who swallowed a fly. The mongoose would, by necessity, be an even tougher customer than the snake, and there's no way to anticipate its effects.

This leaves us with the strategy enunciated by Burl Ives character in "The Big Country:"

"The next time you come a busting and blazing into my place scaring the kids and the women folks, when you invade my home, like you was the law or God Almighty... then I say to you, I've seen every kind of critter God ever made, and I ain't never seen a more meaner, lower, pitiful, yellow, stinking hyprocrite than you! Now you can swallow up a lot of folks and make them like it, but you ain't swallowing me. I'm stuck in your craw, Major Terrill, and you can't spit me out! You hear me now! You've rode into my place and beat my men for the last time and I give ya warning, you step foot in Blanco Canyon once more and this country goin' to run red with blood until there ain't one of us left! Now I don't hold mine so precious, so if you want to start, here, start now!"

The strategy here is the strategy of "getting stuck in the craw" by developing a shape that the snake can't swallow. This can be in the form of an intellectual exercise in constructing a time bomb of infinite multiplicity that blows in the creatures throat. The problem is that this shape may be the same--or is easily confused--with the snake in itself, when it consumes itself. In this way it amounts to "letting the snake alone" like Schopenhauer's Castle of solipsism, and leaving it to consume itself behind a safe partition. As Ray notes,the idea of partitioning things in the brain is misguided. The brain is necessarily leaky. it will always forget its booby traps while wandering through the labyrinth that is the brain, and fall into the pit all over again. It can, also, as the quote suggests, come in the form of making resistance at the disenfranchised remnants of those communities that have not been assimilated to subjectivity at all. This is better: but the problem is that, in the current form, the disenfranchised either acquiesce or are driven to their one option in a disfiguring suicidal despair. the hope here is to find non-destructive social machines to couple into.

The final strategy, what we could call the Eucharistic or hallucinogenic--the transubstantiatory; things that, when consumed by the subject,have a qualitative effect. That metamorphosize the mouths into pores. That change the all-consuming into a vomitus of long-contained discontents. To change the direction from one of an enclosing shrinking-in, to an outer-directed explosion--with all the suppleness of the anaconda--with which feelings and ideas can attach to. These are all dangerous and messy, though ultimately necessary in many cases, as long as we proceed with due caution. and the goal in this is a subject that takes in and sets lose flows with an expanding and intensifying effect--at times skirting a zone of mutating irradiation--but which don't cycle endlessly, but take in one end and let out the other. Do this all in a way that resonates with the despairing, half-assimilated underclass, and uses both for a machine that does not demolishes, but ceases the near monopoly, of the various cave forms in the middle period of our maturation as children.

The point, however, is that the movement of the subject, its telos and the inward direction of its flow, are functions of a qualitative ideology (a logos in images) and on that level it can be hacked. Try it.

--I should add, by the way, that what all this tries to show that what is powerful in the subject is not its topology but its material, which is novel and amazing. The topological logic of subjectivity qua absolute inwardness is a logic found other places, and is really quite simple. And at any rate this is not mathematical but imaginary and must be dealt with as such.

On Linear Time

The cycle isn't a circle its a wave; the solstices and equinoxes mark zeniths and nadirs of a sine wave for the intensity of sunlight (this does not apply to equatorial peoples) that never ends, but is not a loop back on itself. However, the imposition of a circle on the wave is the first step in linear time. The year starts at the point between the zenith and nadirs of the wave--it cuts across them, and returns back on itself to form a circle. One year's cycle--and then two, three, four and five. I was worried about how to explain this particular point, but o my surprise, after writing out this post in rough form I discovered an animation on Wikipedia's entry for sine waves that exactly represented what I'm saying here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/ComplexSinInATimeAxe.gif

But what behaves like this or could supply a raw, natural example? Circles and spheres are rare on earth--but from earth we see stars in a sky that, except for the wandering planets and the sun, seems to rotate perfectly in a circle. And since they moved uniformly, the impression is irresistible that there is a sky that moves, and that the stars move with it, or are in lock-step with it; or that it, while immobile, moves space by its sheer curvature in a way as to give these stars their special nature against the fall of gravity towards the phenomenological center of the universe. It was not until Newton that this bifurcation of the universe into two types of movement was fully resolved into just two sorts of falling that are differentiated only by velocity.

Astronomical observation produced a consciousness of a circle; rather than peaks and troughs we had a circle that the sun went around for one year. Specifically, it is in calling the arbitrary point in which the stars pass over into a new cycle "the same" (as in "eternal return of the same") that creates a historical conscious; the consciousness of enclosure. We first create the celestial sphere, the rather than the extremity of a sine wave, but stitching together the two nearest waves into a circle, at their extremity. Then we do more and more and more stitching to get greater cycles until we get--the horror. The totality as cycle. The eternal return of the same. Linear temporality is the repression of the horror of circular cycles in time.

Let me recommend a thought experiment: is there anything horrible in saying "I am the high tide of a wave that ever washes over the beach of the world. this tide will go out into the ocean and then back in again. So it must be." there is no horror in that at all! but there is infinite horror in the circle, because it annihilates everything, as I've often discussed. So we say: there is no circle of circles--thus making the circle of circles a repressed unconscious the secret history of our religion and philosophy, according to Nietzsche. We constructed a fact about the world that was unbearable and had to be repressed. But the repression of this content marries it to bodily cycles. there is the firmament of air and the breath of air. This firmament is permeable to infinite beyond. But there is also the enclosed firmament; the infinite as firmament. The cycle of everything. The world brain.

The sky, being empty, becomes the world brain--but that's not all: the earth, too is bounded; and the living earth, as is well known, eats itself and this is life and this is death. But with the bounded under-firmament (and there is such a thing, as is represented for instance in the Greek Hades) we have the repressed circle assimilating itself to the concepts of consumption and digestion, in order to form the image of hell, or: the monster that eats its own shit. It is not unimaginable that these two most primitive functions in human experience--constituting much of our world in our first chaos of experience--would strive to become linked, and would find in the finding of a sublimated astronomical horror the proper logic in which to become one dreadful but powerful system.

The earth becomes dirt. Filth. Fount of hell. And all the mythic associations--earth-moon-snake-woman--become likewise tainted. The horror of the living sui generis is that it becomes "the business that doesn't cover its costs": with each generation of self-consumption some is lost--annihilated--and we have the endless, hellish cycle where death is the infinite reduction of life through self-consumption, that eats and eats but never eats itself up. Nietzsche identifies this repressed content in the black snake of nihilism, which gets lodged down our throat. Also, the Oroboros, which is perhaps the origin of Schopenhauer/Nietzscheanism. The Oroboros is a shit eater (think about it.) and hence a shit worm. What Jesus calls the worm that never dies, the fire that is never quenched.

Linear time is the repression of the eternal return, but like any repression, it is also the secret desire to accomplish the repressed. What this amounts to, is to make it so everything's already happened--annihilation. As I wrote to Ray, linear time says that the moment is any length of time other than the whole of time--that is, cyclic temporality, transformed under the auspices of the circle, is denied the totality through repression. How is the moment cyclical time bounded by repression? How is a moment a cycle as in a circle? it is self-contained and timeless, like a slide in a movie. is fractal--but discrete. it has a border that connects its beginning to its end, and this border cannot exist in time at all, but must just be the form of time. I've wrote and discussed this many times in connection with the eternal return.

But where does the line come in, in the midst of this repressed extrapolation of astronomical cycles unto infinity? Well, a finite line is quite the same horror. But an infinite line means that events will not recur, and hence is not the always-already annihilated; however, it provokes a new terror in our self understanding: that we will disappear and be gone; the monster of nothing is the yawning mouth of the gone past. And this provokes the very greed for control that I've talked about, and which has its secret end in death or the accomplishing of nothing in the course of non-recurring time.

Dwelling masterfully.

Ecosophy. Despite the washing out of the morpheme 'eco' in English, this coinage still is dew some credit. Eco is from the Greek for a home, or a dwelling, casting Heidegger into the picture. 'Sophy' or course originates with the idea of mastery.

Dwelling on the Earth masterfully, under the Sky and the divinities.

Another Definition of Philosophy (continued:)

It seems that the Shamanic function is the reverse of the philosopher; like the philosopher he deals with "language on holiday" but he does so in a way that is intended not to disrupt the working of his people, but to maintain that work in the midst of the people's own constant deterritorializing of language. This is happening all the time, but it happens especially in primitive societies where conversation, dreaming and the interpreting of dreams, song, dance and art generally, and thinking are consistent occupations of all. The shaman, on the one hand, maintains this space but simultaneously regulates it from excesses that he has already experienced ahead of the society, and has seen as destructive in the sense of closing off the space and serving to inagurate to people the "Pandora's box" of alienation.

Yet, this is not to the discredit of the philosopher, since the people he is imbedded in, being already alienated, cry out for his kind of freedom, being "shut up" as they are in consistent and well-inscribed patterns not only of daily life, but of thought. The philosopher has made the conditions of civilization *almost* impossible. He has discovered constants that only work by being allied to a mega-machine fueled by massive, dead energies. And yet he has also founded the technology of thought necessary for that machine, and at any rate he never sees to free the people like he wants. This may be because, like the shaman, his own right working arises out of his people, whether they are alienated in the case of philosophy, or unalienated in the case of the shaman. The philosopher's impulse for freedom, in the midst of in an alienated form of life, can only reach the bare forms of alienation--but without working simultaneously on the form of life, he can offer no freedom but only a more perfect control. In short, even the philosopher is revolting against "the system"--but the system exists precisely as the force that converts revolution against it into the impetus for its continued expansion.

Another definition of philosophy:

Philosophy is breaking your brain.

I mean this in both the immediate sense, where one is rendered broken in terms of one's native understanding, and the smoothly functioning, naive participation in society it undergirds; Socrates was broken, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were definitely broken; Diogenes the cynic was broken (perhaps, the most broken of all...) Philosophers don't work like they're supposed to, and despite possessing a lot of brain power, will, and usually a privileged upbringing, they amount to little. And their own understanding of success and failure is radically different, so as to even preclude much resemblance to a worldly standard.

But they are also "broken" in a specialized sense that is found within the community of Magic: The Gathering players. Something is "broken" if it is so powerful that it distorts the flow of a game to such an extent that the game ceases to really resemble a game at all, and instead hinges entirely on luck--on who draws the most broken cards in the beginning, or even just who is lucky enough to go first and pulls off a combo that precludes their opponent even getting a turn! A card in magic can be broken on its own: for instance, Black Lotus is so powerful compared to its cost that it borders on being broken and almost any player with any remotely competitive deck who draws a lotus in his hand will possess an almost insurmountable advantage over his opponent who doesn't. But, more often, a card is broken in specific combinations. The archetypal example is the combination of "donate" and "Illusions of Grandeur," neither one of which is particularly powerful on their own, but which together make a deck that frequently can win on the first turn.

http://sales.starcitygames.com//cardsearch.php?singlesearch=Donate

http://sales.starcitygames.com//cardsearch.php?singlesearch=Illusions+of+Grandeur

The broken philosopher takes words and concepts from every day life, and then "makes them go on holiday;" that is, he deterritorializes them from their native milieu, and creates novel combinations that, within the certain "finite games" that characterize the various social discourses of his society, quickly annihilate all play, and make a mockery of the games that they were ripped from. And, just like with magic, these combinations are often banned or restricted--but not before they wreck havoc. Socratic questioning was broken in this sense--perhaps more broken than anything before or since. The Athenian had no defense against it, and it made a blatant mockery of his life. It must have seemed, when speaking with Socrates, that his broken game was opening them up to an abyss --and in that abyss Socrates had a vision of rules and powers over existence that might have evened seemed quite wicked to the Athenian, though by now they are commonsensical.

What is the purpose of this? It can be all kinds of things: the Sophists, for instance, found a way to make money doing nothing--which for many is a kind of holy grail. It could be that Socrates just liked fucking with people. But there is also the possibility of using philosophy to territorialize people into new forms of life, out an ethical or religious dimension. Out of this elusive concept "infinite play." this may also be the "creation of new values."

Touchstones:

or the need of the other for language.

One idea, sparks another. A new way of using a word starts to play out in your head. It suddenly makes new patterns apparent. This sparks a little cascade of ideas. Suddenly a few more words shift into a newly evolving schema. This shift in thought starts to pull other words out of orbit. Suddenly a whole bunch of mysteries open up and you have the power to see into them. You can now hear over-tones in the words that were never before suspected. The words that shifted a little in the beginning have started to take entirely distinct linkages, splitting into multiple words. And these new layered words have new meanings added to them each based on the previous layers of meaning. But as you build up these towers they begin to shift in the wind. A path through the abstractions only traveled once is not deeply etched, and is only remember vaguely, by virtue of re-deriving the path from the land marks. But who has time to retrod a path deep into memory, when on each trip down the path several more present themselves. Now, tying back to the base metaphors for a moment so that this path not become as lost and the one about which it is a story of, we are building up news layer of connections between words, ideas, images, and so on. Each new layer forming bridges and short cuts between distant places in the forest of the mind. But these bridges are put up quite wily nilly often not much more then lifting a word over the canopy, and tying it to another word pole far away with rope. Thin rope. Each time we cross the ropes the pull another rope with us, making the bridge more secure. But rope bridges are not solid, other forces move then around when we aren't paying attention. The forest of the mind isn't very stable you know! And of course ever since this damn story started, with the lifting of one word to a new layer of canopy we have been able to see dozens of new possible connections (what am I talking about, brains, neurons, forests, bridges, towers, paths?) and we have been in a rush to start linking them is this really playful way, drawing ropes from place to place that cats cradle in the mind. So many new connections that we go back down to the forest layer that we called home before this started and look up, seeing a HUGE new canopy. And some words even raised about the super canopy we imagine as starting points for a no doubt more abstract super duper canopy to come, like trees planted on and growing from the ropes that connect the underlying layer. The wind (those little thoughts that we never all the way hear, blowing through our minds) is making sway the rope bridges, and tangling some. Only the most used and reused bridges are staying stable(ish). We look down to the ground of life. The most grounded and tied to the world bits of our mind. We see that it is dizzyingly far beneath us. I look: This forest... I invented as a metaphor, quite by accident... for the loneliness of private language, my words running amok as I play with their meaning, inventing a new jungle... what was the ground, it is so far that I can hardly see... as yes I can see a bit of earth a touchstone... you, for all the confusion of my mental adventures and the dangers of being lost, and making a forest so thick that I can't escape it... there is you and your use of language not tangled up in the same way.

So I tell you the story of the forest, and you receive the best connections from the story. You say 'hey, that bridge there is quite nice, lets keep it, so we always have a short cut for that connection.' and in that the cacophony on other bridges fades. The forest rots back into the soil. But the finest new trees (truths) are left standing as glorious new canopy members. This is why we name trees, because they are connected in ways that let us see patterns in the world that we can't see from the ground. These named trees are the ones we both know, sharing a forest.