Continuing the Nietzschean as Composter

Oh--but it would also take an infinite time for an infinite tree to fall, never getting closer to a center of gravity that pulls it inward. This all happens in a fall that has no reference outside itself, or no source for the gravity by which it falls except its own internal impetus--a falling into itself, away from itself. The pull of that earth to which the tree would fall is also falling; and the earth to which it would fall also rises with new growth. The tree takes on the aspect of gravity itself, pulling all up into itself even as it falls down. Even as it strives down into the earth, as an inverted tree, and grows roots in the sky. A rising and falling in all directions and no directions at once; a driving into unity and a pulling-apart into multiplicity all at once; even a driving into multiplicty and a pulling-apart into unity.

Is this just a metaphor? No. I tell you no. We are monkeys, always monkeys and we can only ever think the thoughts of monkeys. Monkeys are from the forest. It just so happens that we've wandered into deserts or make deserts of our own. In the sky of those deserts our mind still thinks there are trees--it is too used to them or accustomed to them to think of a sky without trees----and there is no height or canopy to bound the trees we see, so we start talking about infinite trees and other crazy things.

RE: Ray's Zizek link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIpiXJW3dYE

A great interview--and one good ramble deserves another.

Whats missing, or at least, barely touched on, is what I call "the earth moving beneath us." What I mean by this is that ideology, as a purely "mental" phenomenon, is actually imbedded into to the active, physical processes of techne viz. machinic reproduction of symbols; the extraction of fossilized energy that is so overwhelming that it creates/deterritorializes hundreds of millions entirely from their day-to-day sustenance and then back onto purely symbolic relationships; the production of spaces and places with specific psycho-social effects (how does the lab rat whose life is in cages and mazes compare to the rat in the wild?--or the city for that matter? We could ask the same question of the human in the mazes and cages of suburbia.)

Yet--the physical import of this technical system has now reached truly global proportions. It is drastically changing the earth. But ideology--including the magical belief in capital, in money, markets etc. etc.--lacks the ability to compute these changes and truly understand itself as a physical process. Physical limitations are fundamentally traumatic to ideology, and Zizek's use of a psychoanalytic term is apt: disavowal is at work, at least on the political left. There is also something else at work, though: outright paranoia that doesn't just say "I know full well there's global warming, but..." and goes further to say "global warming is a liberal plot."

The rubber is meeting the road, though; Zizek is right to say that the recent economic crisis is not the end of capitalism by any stretch of the imagination--as if to say that capitalism is any stranger to crisis. It is, rather, a sort of shifting of axioms--the cannibalizing of the welfare states in Europe was named, as was the sub-prime crisis. There is nothing, at least on the surface, that is troubling about these from the standpoint of the global economic system. We know, from Deleuze and Guattari, that there are always to two tendencies at work: one that concentrates capital, even capital understood in more general terms as a species of the power to control the activity of human bodies. The other that redistributes capital through central apparatuses in order to sustain further accumulation, and to assimilate more facets of life on earth into the system. Naturally there will be an ebb and flow between these two tendencies.

Not so fast, though. Maybe what we're seeing is the first divergence of these two tendencies. maybe they were only ever in accord because, running parallel to the sort of of tremendous accumulation, centralized accumulation that Marx described "(the ownership of the means of production falling into fewer hands".) There was an exponential explosion of energy that allowed this accumulation to occur, undermining whole classes and races, while simultaneously effecting redistributions and generating new wealth and fortunes at various new frontiers, both figuratively and literally. he expansive, redistributive system was only possible with an exponentially expanding energy horizon. What we're left with when that expansion ceases is a brittle construct of accumulation and centralization that will inevitably create problems for itself that it can't solve (that it could only solve by expending more energy.)

So, as we've discussed, the sub-prime mess is just our partial internalizing of a previously global hierarchy within our national borders. The promise was that we could take in millions of new people from global and local hinterlands and integrate them into our consumptive society (which only exists as the pinnacle of various stages of production that have been integrated globally through a politico-military order.) But the collapse just means we now have a much bigger and less enfranchised underclass.

Or the ongoing/upcoming sovereign debt crises in the first world are just the result of a demographic profile in European countries and Japan, and to a lesser extent the coupling of their lower classes into global labor pools. These problems are flowing into realities that aren't just structural problems of capitalism--but actually facets about the earth underneath.

Why couldn't the "American Dream" extend further and further, until suburbia filled every piece of flat land in the country? I think its largely because oil got to 140$ a barrel, and oil got to 140$ a barrel because global production peaked. The demographic issues are something that capitalism can't really deal with either--they are something belonging to the earth; to breeding and growth, which is something that ideology only touches on when it becomes truly monstrous. Economic theory, for instance, never deals with people but only workers--almost assuming that workers spring forth form holes in the ground, rather than from a complex, nurturing social milleu from which they are ripped even before they are born.

Zizek's also, I believe, alone amongst philosophers in even pointing out that earth is turning into the slum planet. He mentions that there are a billion people in slums now. The UN projections say that number will triple in the next few decades, and these projections don't take into account peak oil or global warming. I predict, based on the example of places like Lagos, there will be vast zones not even integrated into the order as "reserve armies" of labor. Pure slums. slums detteritorialized from labor dynamics and onto the forces in the earth that operate, as it were, underneath. The wretched of the earth, in a sense. There will be other elements as well. Those lodged in marginal lands--permaculturalists. The goal should be to hook these up and make them circulate together. I know not how, though I believe that Christianity will be a vital piece.

To answer the question of the link "are we living in the end times?" I'll just say this: the history of the world is ending. Life will go on, and there will even be global histories that crisscross times and places in uncanny connection. But the singular world history that began in Rome will not survive the coming age. That's my prophecy.

The Name of a New Type:

My ideal is not of the parish confessor, nor of cloistered celibacy. It is not even the saint of the forest who has a squirrel on his shoulder and a bird perched on his finger. Its also not a quaint little monkey eating porridge in his zen-hut. Not a flagellant, or an ascetic, or Brahmin victim of self-conquest. Not the Übermensch, as an Aryanist fantasy. Not a free-spirit or mister mojo rising. Not a man of power. Also, not a master technician or bureaucrat of the spirit, or a programmer in a computer of global flows of desire.

I would be just this, if I could: a genius of desire.

Perhaps this would include still a regulatory, symbolic function. I don't know. But if it did, I'd like to think it would be to the fecundity of a good and noble species: the Eden-making ape. Whose mind is breathing in the living air that's the sky of heaven.

The Nietzschean as Composter (in honor of Ray:)

God is an infinite tree. And if he should fall, we should say no life is wasted; death is food for life and to die God must have been alive. Even--he could have chosen death. And infinite food is food enough for infinite life, never to be eaten up. The infinite tree falls and is eaten by infinite critters that each have their fill of the infinite; out of these grow an infinite forest of infinite trees to rise and fall in the great time--the soil of gods.

Space and Nirvana:

Its been suggested to me that I've been unfair to Buddhism in my last post. This may be true. Amida's working through the saints shows us how we are trapped precisely in the draw into nirvana; the pit of falling: the movement that drops out of infinite speed as a self-braking eddy of its force that stops infinity with infinity. A movement that is no long the pure play of infinite speeds, but posits a distance out of itself to move in on and enclose around. And this movement doesn't precisely have an infinite distance before it, which would be perfectly possible for infinite speed to traverse (infinite speed only traverses infinite distance)--but rather, in positing a distance from out of itself to contain its movement, the speed becomes a finitized distance whose infinity is always contained in the bounds of lengths. Finite in such a way that this finite frame moves with every movement, so that truly there is no movement at all, relatively speaking before the absolute, and it is the box that contains the movement that moves with infinite speed.

We cannot move to the end under our power and break down the wall. But at the end--in the middle of all bounds--there the fullness dwells of that is just love that draws us to, and gives compassion for those trapped. That there was a certain incarnation of love's feeling to all things, which braved annihilation to its end, but keeps at its core the simple vow of compassion, to be found now at the depth that has been braved; even in the fall that is now and always the road to paradise. This infinite movement that would not just be infinitesimally stopping in being before the finite end, but would take to nirvana the vow and--stop.

Found in my handwriting on notebook next to my bed.

We go over thought
to push them into memory
like going over a dream upon awakening
so as to press it into memory
this is only important i introverted thinking
when we are active our activity
bears the job of record
conversation
art
writing
music dance
sculpture
TO THINK WELL
DO SOMETHING

I am become Rhizomancer.

It was too late that damned book had already I became it. Dread and Blessing to those who search through the obstrufication in the last post.

Sanity is just the tyranny of one voice over the masses.

"No, I am the ordered point of the mind, I speak in the voice that can be shared by all."

Ok you kant, don't do that, claim to say all that is consistent, walking to school I walked by a license plate that read 'death'. What of that sign?

"Don't be crazy, there are no signs, that license plate was there by accident, there was no message addressed to you."

Ha! Shows what you know, meaning is in the listener not the intention of so called speakers. Where does the voice of the speaker come from?

"The pruning of the rhizome of thought into the orchard tree. The logos is that which is not pruned."

And you're the same err sane one! What a farce! That is how the voice is refined to lead, where from comes the Anglesite ore?

"I am the origin of the voice, and the refiner."

You demiurge! A non-count voices flow about, the rhizome. Forever trees come about from apoptosis. The cancerous over growth of life pruning itself down to trees. What if we run rampant, the cancer?

"That would be horridly destructive! The very human body can not bare such over growth! We would all die!"

Right. The greatest growth is self pruning. Self pruning. It is dualistic pruning. The map and the tracing. What is a tracing of a map? Still a map! What is a map of a tracing, no longer a tracing! If you don't understand the rhizome you can't attack it, if you do, then you are rhizome.

"Are you some sort of rhizomatic moralist? Arguing for the triumph of the rhizome over the tree."

No, a 'mancer' is just a prophet. The Antichrist of 130 years ago first spread the spores I now sow, he put them in the voice of the prophet. The rhizome does not seek to destroy the tree. Blessed are trees and arborescence, but it is a joke if the forget what their roots tie into. They forget what the fate of their highest branches are, to fall back to the earth and be colonized by the mycelium, to be digested reprocessed and feed again into some other tree that looks evil to your eye. But roots love trees, nothing is better to decompose then a tall tree.

"Then do you oppose me?"

I am you silly billy! You fascist, what's the problem with that, at least your leaves fall on thyme. You do all the work. You are great and long lasting, but not alone. Have back your sanity, but remember that you are born out of my rhizomorphs, beware not to aim at purity for you are not good enough to be pure, and will surly die!

In the style of Borges. The Monster.

Two years ago I was given an old book, it once belonged to my good friend Matt Smith, now departed. The book had been in storage for some time, at least since his passing four years ago, most likely for many years longer then that, and upon coming into my possession I must admit that it then suffered another year of storage tucked away in a not often accessed filling cabinet. But last spring I was tidying up its storage space and when I saw it, I felt a tinge of guilt about ignoring the poor thing, so I then decided to give it my full attention.

Around the book was wrapped a paper, written on in pencil "The Weeping Angel" The cover gave one distinct impression when one looked at it, it was ancient. The material was uncertain, but resembled something between cracked leather and birch bark. On the out side the cover bore no text, only an image of a knot of vines tangled upon one another in the shape of a great tree. But one the inside cover was inscribed 'Bin Yayla' the meaning of which I am still not sure. Intrigued I decided to read deeper, but wedged in the book was a piece of paper, a bookmark? no it was a warning of some kind. The language was Turkish but with the help of my college Dr. Tim R Lang I was able to produce a rough translation of the warning.

Beware, beware. All that traces needs to beware.
It will unorder the world.
That which holds the image of it becomes it.
I dare not say more, I dare not say more.
Too many readers already have become this monster.
I did see and, I am becoming book.
Gaze upon me and you to shall loose your center.
Throw it away, once you understand why it is too late.

Once I we completed the translation I thanked Tim for his assistance, and asked that he be off, but not before he mentioned that the bulk of the text was an incomprehensible pidgin of Turkish with several European languages. I placed the warning in it original position, accompanied by a copy of my newly acquired translation of the warning. Closing the book once again I looked at the cover.

The tree made of a knot mesh of a thousand vines, now I realized the nature of the monster. The warning I had worked over for the lions share of the day made me see the image on the cover of what it is, and in seeing it I became it. An image of the book is the book. I had been the tree, now I am vines.

Lecture Idea.

I am a revolutionary, and farming is the natural starting point for the revolution I imagine, so I will talk about what can be done to revolutionize farming. Normally a revolutionary is seen as an attempt to over throw social order, but I only mean to suggest that I hope to fix a problem that is so systemic that to correct it would fundamentally change the way of life for farmers.

Humans do the most amazing things, but none is more important then the ways we make food. Doctors, Scientists, Politicians, Soldiers, Technicians, Lawyers, Bankers, Manufactures, Academics, Poets, Musicians, Bureaucrats, and Accountants. Though all of these things are amazing activities, none are more essential then the farmer. We can imagine a large society with out any particular one of these things, but the simple farmer is indispensable to civilization. The farmer is the foundation of civilization.

But maybe because he is the foundation, we place him at the bottom of society, and unfortunantly we do not often value that which is at bottom. We could imagine a world where all people would say in their hearts "If only I were lucky enough to be a farmer, to be one of the most important members of society." But that society is far from ours, in the modern world it is not good to be a farmer at all.

Look at the average age of an American farmer is 57, the young are not choosing to go into this field. And with good reason, a mid-western farm can produce $300 of corn per acre, but the cost of growing that corn is $375. After subsidies a small profit can be worked out, with luck maybe even enough to pay of the interest from the debt incurred in the purchase of the heavy machinery used to make the industrial yields possible....

(more later)

Buddhism and Christianity.

Buddhism and Christianity are opposites. One says that life--feeling--is at bottom suffering, and love has no power autonomous from suffering (suffering is its positive effect,) but is a slave to the appearances that construct themselves before it, as the objects of desire. These objects of desire are just mirages of suffering that trap it into walking in the desert a bit further. I often feel that this is the truth, but there is a power in my hear that thinks enlightenment is a tragic rejection of what's good (oh what you could have done, holy man, for love's sake!)

It also seems like all the talk of rebirth and achieving nirvana through practice is a particular "tech" that harnesses the impulse to suicide and use it to turn the wheel of a wider annihilation of consciousness. This arises, perhaps, out of a realization out of the self-same solidarity of all feeling beings. It dwells in the infinite space between the thought "nothing matters I might as well kill myself" and the thought "it doesn't even matter if I kill myself."

Yet it seems that in Buddhism the Bodhisattva's compassion shines through; love has a power, and in Amida that love establishes the place of salvation for all beings, with life infinitely passing and coming from oblivion, through illusion, into bliss, and back into oblivion. This constitutes the natural way of feeling such that the fullness of bliss (the fullness of love's kingdom) is achieved in excess of the suffering, and wants this fullness of love wants to fill even oblivion. It crests into it and back into the turbulence of the desires of all the beings in appearance.

Christianity, says that at bottom life is love, and suffering has no power except as leads to love as its positive effect. Then all that is desired leads to love, finally. It is love that drives all things in excess of all things; even, it is love's sympathy for all things that lends them the power to feel in the first place, and to have finite desires. I would live out of this, but I love and hate my life too much to lose it to gain the greater life.

Then there's a third school--modernism we could call it, despite its various stripes. It says "we can build a world where people will never think to ask 'Is life, at bottom, suffering or love?'" Never to think of the bottom of things, but only the play of images on the surface. To cut off this depth in a sphere of depthless experience that calculates every path of escape, and manufactures a maze of symbols to head off any excess in desire. The pure organization of desire so that it drives always into the new, and turns a machine that throws up barriers between self so that desire never enters into conflict, never touches anything but objects and images. So we all desire as appropriate for our place in the system's well-calculated turning.

This might be best. I'm not just saying that--the question is usually ruinous. Yet it it also results in all our desire for others (or most heartfelt desires) becoming impossible as we bounce off the other's alien sensibilities, never fulfilling their phantasy. Also, it is a fragile, extravagant, futile expenditure that sustains this project and it only provides its "ignorance-is-bliss" when it is also ignorant of its contemptible basis--being always only ever built on the backs of the poor, who must, in all their own ways, ask the question. They are naked before it, not having their desires ever piqued, not being in their own personal bubbles, not being clothed in subtleties.

Is there a forth way? Life is bitter. Some feelings are out of love and the power of life, some are out of death. We are follies in the hands of these, and know two contradictory masters. So all we have is to live and feel in blindness. Or are the two the same, so that love gives itself over to suffering--and lives and dies right along with us without remainder? Or is the reality of feeling its full gradient and all its dimensions; love and hate and jealousy and fear and spite and happiness or joy, with a feeling that is not of just one, but is just the touching of touching to create emotions that are truly nameless and ever anew. Gone like tears in the rain. Except all these are just love. How can we imagine them without it? This is the cry of the artist and poet. The tears and crying. But would this cry be finery to hang on the wall, or an aesthetic experience? The voyeurism of dulled souls who would plug in and feel for a while before returning, dreary, to the rat race. Or would this cry come from some depth; the depth of suffering, or the ecstasy of knowing that the hoped for invisible--paradise and the reconciliation of things--is just beyond what we can see.

The Will to Return as a Will to Death:

The will to return makes the three times (past, present, and future) merge together.

The will return says to the past: I would have you live again, as future; and even be here now, as ever-present. To the present it says: I would have you live again--but I would also have you already be dead and gone. This will adds the aspect of future to the past and present, and this gives it a false sense of affirmation, but even here it turns to negation. The future, being the essence of things hoped for, is the font of affirmation; to will presence to the past is a nostalgic wish that holds onto it against the present. To will past to present is to say "I wish you were over already." But to say to the present "I would have you in my future" is to love the present, and is the first dawning of freedom. And to say to the past "we will meet again somewhere in the endless depths of paradise" is to affirm that all things are contained in the future, including all that is lost, and hope reaches into all things.

The will to return also says something about the future. It gives the future an eternal night in being already eternally present, and thus having nothing of spontaneity left in it. Further, it says to the future: you are already dead and gone like the past. This font of hope and affirmation seals up, and we live in a frozen icy ring of present pastness ahead and behind with the hoped for future sealed outside, never reaching in; for to make the future past is to deny it entirely, since the future is always and essentially new. The will in us--that spark of the divine--denies its other-worldly character and greedily chooses to have itself all for itself, even if in the process it shrinks to nothing and loses everything about itself.

EROI as fantasy:

Its about time somebody brought this up. EROI may or may not be valuable as a kind of heuristic to describe the problem that extraction of lower grade fossil fuel resources or so-called renewable energy must surmount--ceasing to be an expenditure of high grade fossil energy as they are now, and becoming a generator energy; however, its impossible in practical terms to actually calculate the EROI of anything. The insistence on doing just such a thing belies several fundamental errors. These errors are, first, in continuing the instrumental understanding of technology (technology is a tool that serves human desires.) Second, and related, is an attempt to sort human activity into rational-productive extraction and transmission of earth's resources on the one hand, and superfluous or "ornamental" expenditure of those resources on the other. These two errors, in turn, are reflected in two myths for EROI.

The first is the energy cost of item X. We can't isolate the costs of a particular item from the pre-existing milieu, which was built and is sustained by fossil fuels, and say "this is what is necessary to produce item X," taking into account only the costs of the materials, capital investments in the factories, etc. this is short-sighted economics that ignores entirely the notion of externalized costs, or how those materials and capital investments exist only within a wider society where it is just as important, say, to have a judge on the bench or a kindergarten teacher teaching ABC's as it is to have copper or plastic supplied to the factory. How could you ever possibly calculate those costs? Marx proved that even the chronically unemployed slum dweller forms a necessary structural component of capitalism, being part of the "reserve army of labor" that depresses wages and prevents labor organization.

The reality is that a society is crisscrossed with myriad arrangements of power that exists as a kind of a stasis that is constantly resolving itself out of the interplay of individual things, people, desires etc. and a particular practice, such as manufacturing an item, is inseparable from these arrangements. A particular process can enduring some flexing of these relations--but it cannot be isolated from any and all connection and viewed by itself.

The second myth is that can we contrast to our current conspicuous consumption a kind of fantasy of a total mobilization, along the lines of the Soviet Union in world war two, of all human activity not to war but to energy extraction, so as to provide a kind of baseline of necessary energy for the sustenance of industrial technology. Total mobilization is no baseline at all, however; much like the extravagant expenditure of fossil fuels, it chews up accumulated "social capital," leaving human relationships shattered, lives irreparably interrupted, and the populace spiritually drained.

I think these myths--that of isolating the total energy cost of a particular object, and providing a societal baseline of energy expenditure--are the myths that undergird most of the concept of EROI, or at least its application to our pet question "will industrial society collapse?" (Please God may it be so...) More than that though, they rely on this idea that these is an autonomous human desire that exists out there, independent of production, and that desire uses technology as a tool to accomplish its ends.

This ignores the fact that much of industrial activity is devoted to increasing, shaping and directing this desire, only then to (partially) satiate it. Desire itself is produced, specifically by the mass-production of symbols by machines. Humans have a very specific function within technology. Other than providing rational calculation that directs fossil fuel energy into novel forms and arbitrates between machines, we provide a time horizon--a future--for a process that is, being bereft of all ends or goals in itself, is unable to direct itself.

But by in turn being acted upon by technology in our desires, we serve to internalize this futural horizon of desire within it, and serve as a necessary element in propelling the machine forward, to further extraction and reduction of nature to energy. In other words, there is a machine that spreads across the earth that has not goal or use, but is just a pure instrumentality that swallows all desires up within it. this pure instrumentality is just the reduction of the earth to energy at hand, and then its arbitrary expenditure. Having no desire that masters it, this machine is, essentially, a desert-producing machine. a machine of pure annihilation. In this way, our desires--which naturally desire love and peace and freedom--are enslaved.

Pictograph.

I really want this image to be the first response in an image search for pictographs.

Spiritual Caffeine.

My mind has bore a heavy weight since Sunday. It depressed me, but in a way was promised good fruits. Today I was visited by an old friend, wise in a different way from all my other friends. I was made to remember who I once was, and who I am become, and who I will be. And I drank a pot of dark dark coffee, and became ill. Yet the frenzy of mind did bring forth the first harvest of the promised fruits of my heavy weight. The knowledge of the means of the collapse of the selfish and the selfless. The 8 fold path lay itself before me, to be walked on. History teaches that Raymond does not take many steps before he strays, but it also teaches that even one step can do much good.

So they say...

Money is power.

Thus, if time is money.

Then time is power.

A Definition:

Desire is love trapped in pictures.

Some thoughts.

A quick thought: Maybe we could move from defining our words, to describing the things.

Nietzsche was far above most. I know some people who might, with some fortune, go far far beyond him. They are my closest friends.

Heidegger was a clever one, mining etymology as a collective memory of a race. That's a cool move. "WE [a people] are a mind, and our language is its memory."

A maneuvering:

We misunderstand the utterance "God is dead" as an atheist theological argument, as is obvious. But just as surely we misunderstand it as a description of historical precedent--that a God once lived amongst his people, and has died to them. Rather, it is a proclamation about the nature of God, and an offering of a predicate to God. "God is omnipotent, omnipresent--and God is also dead. " The omnimorbid. Much more, though, it is a making of something as God, putting it in the place of God. What I'm saying is, the logic goes as such: God is dead. Therefore, death is God.

That is, the totality is dead; death swallows up life. When we get down to it, death is truth, while life is something about death, and shows up within death. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche starts to wax materialistic when offering proofs of the eternal recurrence, speaking of configurations of matter, forces, and the law of conservation of energy. Matter, in materialism, is dead. The eternal recurrence is just this: that everything has already happened; it will happen again, but only as it already has--given each moment a perfectly rigid permanence. The present becomes meaningless, as it loses all of its determining power, and all spontaneity. The present just is the present as already-happened. The future also becomes defined by the past: what happens in the future is just what already happened. And to be past--and purely past--is just to be dead.

Surely there is another way.

Enlightenment (part 0)

The walls may hold you
But the prison's in your mind
Freedom is your choice.

The American's Prayer:

"Heaven save me from my fantasies. Amen."