Free Speech or just another virus theory?

Parrhesia & Rhetoric: "The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse....Whereas rhetoric provides the speaker with technical devices to help him prevail upon the minds of his audience (regardless of the rhetorician's own opinion concerning what he says), in parrhesia, the parrhesiastes acts on other people's mind by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes." – Michel Foucault

Actual parrhesia is probably impossible. A benign tumor from psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavior theory suggests an internal running dialogue and commentary as a river, often lacking any sense of systemetized coherence until we are asleep or otherwise deranged, as Messieurs Poe, Artaud and Burroughs discovered. It is in this "stream of consciousness" or rather at times, raging river which swims the imp of the perverse which might equally invite us to jump in for a refreshing swim with questions like "why not?", or ponder stepping off the cliff and falling into the abyss to our certain doom. No prior psychic motivation need be posited – confusing what's inside for out, only a well-trained slave or one without a rudder would explain "the voices made me do it".

One might notice that outside of euclidean space-time, the inside and out are never confused. It's not even an issue in the figurative or poetic interpretation of verses unless as expressing a hyphenated existence. Perhaps this explains why the literalists enjoin so much conflict, if not massacres. Everything's a fight or equivocation between white-water rafting and bouts of smooth sailing, always for the win or nothing's worth playing.

But never mind the barge hauling garbage that's intruding on the view. The bullshit detector also swims this river. A home to many internal voices, they are both the river and Trickster-transformer canoeing like a hyphenated habitat-inhabitant relation or a bobbling and shifting criteria, with or without a hook, line and sinker. The background noise underneath a barely perceptual tinnitus is the cacophony of aquatic bugs endlessly repeating everything, even the unnoticeable, from within and without the environment – the obsessive repetition of "sense data", thought by some to be accessed hypnotically. Though sometimes we become caught in a knotted line and cannot disentangle, it is usually a silent noise of vortexes in the stream. Their elucidation (or perturbation) can produce poetry, psychoanalytic revelation and straight-jackets, if not an urge to adorn some paisley, if only to present the appearance of an inside-out consistency.

Militant regimentation (or should I say education?) dams this river just to generate power. Not to suggest a necessarily malicious intent, teaching language rather than allowing it to blossom makes it so, and in the same fashion that forced hydroponics reduces nutritive content and chemical fertilizer exchanges nutrient for toxin. Either way, questions do not pass unregulated. The free-ranging salmon must now learn to climb ladders; the others live out their lives in a net. Commentary is restricted to habitual categories, running through flow-pipes (the proper channels) activated by power turbines. Language is seen by the militant politician and social scientist only as mutual dam busting and bubble bursting, slinging shit from the towers of opposing fortresses – an interesting metaphor considering that they're standing hip-deep in shit, calling those who do not take such a "political" stand mindless, brain-dead, zombie or sheep which is to say, unhip. Undemocratic radicals "go against the flow". Revolutionaries think with a big enough dam, the river will reverse direction, but mostly it only shifts its progressive course with even more pent up momentum – a self-fulfilling prophet. Progress is only a euphemism for "no change is tolerated".

Without a snorkel or other means of oxygenation together with a flint for sparking some metabolism, the river becomes a violent water-fall killing all the little fishes on the rocks below. Witness: Neitzshe's "corpses in their mouths" and Orwell's "dead metaphors", chants of the plain speakers in the cult of death demanding (with no uncertain terms) one truth (theirs) or nothing at all. Brain-dead may be a misnomer:

Unless the water's vaporised with laser surgery or the like, with priestly vigil, canals are diverted from cerebral flows to what might have been vocal, down the drain which channels all that's excremental. What's left are gargoyles pissing forth the bloody sacramental. The only sacred face that's left is stone-faced sacrificial, but why choose suicide when you can delegate a proxy with a proclamation sounding not like "offal" but "official"? Now it's agreeable to all, the necessity of strife – if not just economical, frantic means that everything's reduced to matters of death and life, and only a dentist can brighten your smile.

– Teo Castraphoni, dds.

But when you get down to it, isn't the 'word' both an anchor at rest and a fish-hook on the move? Who knows what you'll have snagged when you reel it back into the boat? If you're a frog, you might catch a log, or then again maybe a sea snake. Rather than have it pull you away, the hook and the leader's designed to be expendable.

***

How often do we not know what's on our mind and do not necessarily want to appropriate what's in (or be converted to) another's? If not a motive for reclusion, this might approximate the process of becoming co-mindful, of thoughts (in the sense of ripples or blooms we like to call "names" for "things" as an alternative to what others consider a "stake through the heart" of the matter) unfolding and merging in common dialogue (rather than competitive – aka "economic" – discourse or "political" one-upmanship). Two senses of politeness appear: 1) the trickster-as-optimiser deceives us with honey, disguising the intention to appropriate or proselytise. We may call this "the propagandist art" and is perceived as either parrhesical or rhetorical; 2) The sense of communising/sharing – retaining an openness to make adjustments and coherences, or not as we may see fit – the radical fitness of a well-told story which may live on to be a twice-told tale giving the impression of an improvisational dance against a background of melodic or instrumental harmony and with the proper positioning of fingers and toes, feels somewhat akin to a Vulcan mind meld.

On the other hand, much of reality exists in word only. For example, adorned with the amulet or fetish of christian doves, one might never come to witness the layers of pigeon-shit covering the stack of hay in the barn that is said to amass food for sheep. And for every barn-cat who eats a bird, three are overcome with toxoplasmosis. Christian birds indeed!

Like Mel Brooks' "Standup Philosopher", the secondary trickster is the poet or carrier whose infection eats away at a set of categories (forms) without necessarily systemically infecting with new content, like necroforus (an organism in 'healthy' digestive tracts) on an open wound. It only bores a hole, leaving the newly injured the opportunity to close it or rethink without being put too much on the defensive. "To pick or not to pick it?" is the ultimate question concerning scabs. Bataille might call this an inner war, I'd portray it as finding oneself suddenly naked on a windy day and searching or improvising or being given something with which to cover up, to become comfortable again. The embare-assed politician might say "If that's not a call for carpetbombing the third world, I don't know what is", but not 'til registering in the medical log under Type of Injury: "Denise hurt my feelings". Stoicism or asceticism rarely leads to enlightenment, except to the fact that one finds oneself hungry! As soon as coherence and rigidity set in, bleeding and communication must stop, we've established a picket line, invented the scab and religion! But it's still just a cover-up.

It could be argued that this boring and scabbing is kingly (in the sense of an uninvited "burst bubble"). But come on! Taken literally, where is the authoritarianism with two youngsters sharing a bath and popping bubbles as they emerge from the depths? Did someone mention becoming like unto a child, or is it sufficient to merely like them? If categories are confining or limiting like a pair of shoes two sizes too small, it would lead to mutual (both/and/or) self-liberation (if, that is, one is equipped with a pair of scissors carefully directed away from one's 'I') – with the right question, one bursts one's own bubble but the questioner gets splashed as well. Without another perspective to observe, those bubbles can become ever more rigid, like an iron ball & chain. Try wearing that in novel rivers!

***

The accumulation (mining, optimization), justice, truth, exchange and (social) war paradigms are examples of such rigidity, where, with diminishing breathing room or ever-staling air, a gift is only envisioned in terms of a loss and sharing`a compromise – again, a sacrifice of one's "total" (if commercially procured) desire. For a loosening and relaxing, I'm tempted to use Deleuze' term, "deterritorialize". Another would be "extasis" which busts dams between the self and other like wire-cutters to a barbed-wire fence (one might take care it's not electrified as well).

Such is the brain damage witnessed in the extreme amongst patriot wankers who aspire to see some action as smokey-bear mounties, mercenaries or marines whilst the less successful, though still adequately trained oportunistic vultures scavenge what remains. Then there's the privileged money out protecting woods from riding hoods or any sightings of you know who – those kind of people doctors without borders must prevent from access to their gated neighborhoods.

God's boy, Saint Augustine had issued the memo, "we must have or be monsters to deliver us from evil" and then said the prophet, in keping with fashion, "only from Allah might we seek compassion".

– Atka Mip

What else should we expect when the ability to posit associations or try on other's shoes, from day one's been blocked at inception by churches and schools so the best in their classes (though sometimes there's exceptions) become killers or fools and incompetent asses?

Like any good insult, iconoclasty puts holes in our reifications or pulls up the stake and plants it elsewhere – certainly an ungrammatical impropriety. A word for a field of familiarity or resemblances (and not platonic essences), a leaky form allows ingress and egress of free, mobile content, transforming old into new forms or shrinking them altogether like a bladder out of practice in its holding patterns some would call "incontinence", others "freedom of expression".

All commentaries and questions posed have this destructive/creative potential. We might ask "are rigid bubbles owned, property to be defended?" If so, then linguistics suggests that resistance to infection produces ill-health to language. We would all be brain-dead, infantile (in the way no infant is), incapable of conversation in the first place. It is said a parrot has such a language, lacking entirely in a semantic component (fortunately the parrot is not mono-lingual – the mindless mimic is just a pretense when engaged with polite or civil company). Rhetoric would have no categories with which to impose and criteria would only point to where you've jammed the stick, that is, the datum and that's contingent or provisional to the poker – always a game of chance.

Like sharing a catch from the local fishing hole, meaningful communication guides clostridial visitors (literally, a clue like a tiny star but figuratively, a tiny bug which can lock jaws) to intestinal tracts where they are welcomed, where they are fit, where they can simultaneously self-actualize, thrive and help us process our mostly digested food prior to a free expulsion of excess. In a wound, they can produce a deadly tetanic seizure somewhat resembling the mountain range in Wyoming and as dangerous as a Welsh Druid's cursed poetry. Nurture may be optimizing, but optimization is not always, in fact, in our world, rarely ever nurturing beyond the lowest levels of significance in a statistical distribution (reliable between .01 and .05). Fortunately or not, many clostridial visitors go by completely unnoticed. Like stocking a stream with gmo salmon, rhetoric, debate and propaganda mimic the colonial behavior of systemic tuberculosis (once called "consumption") – slowly, the fishes will consummate you. But recall this infective invective or brain occupation is always called "nurture" by somebody else.

Unless you can produce an appearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder only without magnificence. – Edmund Burke

Time & love's genetic parody

A number is just same-space traversed between points of interest or piles of rubbish, or how many verses you can recite between labour pains, measuring the progressive elimination of space consequenting an explosion or birth or total inversion and after which point pushy dna becomes retrogressively a vestigial tag-along to inertia as encouragement begins to pull.

– Algebra & poetry

If time and space are said, without exception, to covary, and they must, by definition since each is measured, in fact can only be measured by measuring the other (this is the essence of the circular argument which in any other context outside of gravity and mass is discredited), then what do we do with the contradicting stances (or is it "stanzas") that there is a one-way road from a daughter to a mother to a grandmother which cannot be altered or reversed in the generative sense (it is unilinear) and the grandmother (of the future) who was conceived by the infant daughter (of the present) without invoking a property relation in a causal chain where the titles or the names we give to our terms have to undergo a change lest we're caught comparing apples and oranges?

Historical discourse extends the present or compresses time with no effect on space every time it speaks of epochs. By extending the present to include the past and future (up to any limit inclusive of each of the three terms, daughter, mother, grandmother – 'dmg', the acronym of demigods for a basic matrilineal "family"), we can note the "truth" value of both verses (or is it "versions"). In the same way, genes are used to compress time to illustrate a family tree with no regard to intervening spaces. In other words, by compressing reality (or its criteria) and with some extraction, the dmg with its extensions is a single (solid) unit identified by parts or its internal constituents. In this case the compression takes some stretching.

Both expressions are a priori truths (by definition) yet extract and compress all personal experience to construct a reality which from any other view is not only unreal but contradictory, especially when there's marriages connected to an orphan or adoptee, not to mention sampling error and sometimes just mistakes. For certainty, the only thing less fallible than science is religious faith – just ask them! Wait, was that what's known as a complete redundancy? This is why science doesn't like the food upon his plate to touch before he turns it to shit in the mass consumption. Scientific utopias must follow rules of exclusion: "no orphans (flukes and/or mutations) are allowed...we shall erase them". Like medicine and politics, experimental control is incarceration, killing off or otherwise preventing consortation between the subject and any intervening variables. It's what demonstrates the power (or the unconscious wisdom) of a theory. We therefore come to expect the experts to exhibit priestly qualities and therefore need unqualified (susceptible) judges and juries to make the final decisions in lieu of an executive with orders. What's not to trust in this?

What is really said by genetic discourse, and it's easier to follow, is that it's certain genes who reproduce and have families whose descendants travel over time through big bodies which can only travel across space. It's no cluster fuck, it's just a relay race by little bits of property. For identification purposes, these genes have to be theoretically extracted from all their cousins who might happen to, as well, have siblings not just in chimp bodies but mice and shrew-like creatures living back when dinosaurs were around. Like cholesterol, genes are indicted: certain proof is always guilt by association. It's not like proof of spirits established directly (that is, without arguing to judges or a consensus by committee) by lighting matches or in internal mediation by personally imbibing. The miracle is that the magic works at all, but that's the nature of a mystery, especially when it calls itself an exact science because it's learned to weld to anything a probability (as long as the electrodes are attached with the proper polarity). Who would dare to say they're hiding behind a cop-out blowing air?

In psychoanalytic terms, the infatuation for genetics and dna is a fetish or wish manifestation for a return to the womb, and not unlike the historic contemplation of a golden age, the last or future paradisic situation. Few will consider it but the disgruntled or disenfranchised (or those with no encouragement) whose only opinion of the present age is nasty, brutish and short (or alternatively, all too frigging long) is necessary to such backward thinking or imaginary futuristic fantasy.

Fathers are said to love their sons only because they're fathers as if it's a priori or stands to reason: "Of course I love you; I'm your father!". It means that love is tied to the title which accompanies the name so doesn't need a proof extracted from some feelings and behaviour. It means the definition of consanguineal love is just linguistic duty. The legal duty is established through genetic analysis (or a timely fucking) and is only satisfied with home and hearth or money. In the same way, since without the constraints of morality, affinal love can only be ensured not by sex as most assume (it wouldn't be timely), but with a legal contract such that the law can make it binding. Hence the common aphorism of desire: "Ah, to be young and in love" which indicates an epoch in which one didn't give a shit about political economics or the religious when contemplating relationships and then the dreamy go on to complain that the kids are innately just too young to get it or too lazy to get with it. But who but bigots would make the call for a genetical democracy? Well, there always seems to be a Bill Gates married to Monsanto.

What might Max and Dora say? Compartmentalised for whatever reason, when one becomes bonded with an idea, in need of protection or care or even display, it is a child or lover. Eyes are averted at every delinquency. It is free to move out of its compartment to explore or mingle, and there is always a room with a warm bed awaiting its return. Every transgression, if even noticed, is forgiven. Even a contrary fit disturbing its room-mates. Unconditionally, this is a no-string theory. This is maternal love fathers share, stronger than even that toward material children. "Real" children must fit, more so than even their ideal counterpart. Children won't sit still, but the ideal sets in stone, on display. Yet only well groomed and bonded ideas are truly free spirits, thoughts fully independent of the thinker. But the thinker's bond is stronger than any expression of love or hate. With love, there is absolute truth. Less, there are degrees of concern or even ambivalence. As well might be felt a true spirit possession, a prodigal idea impossible to expel. One must nurture or protect the idea even more so with each escalating demand. This is the chief risk of too firm a grasp of reality and firmly planted feet. It has a tendency to solidify one. Or the spirit achieves more rock-hardness and the person becomes a noxious vapor. It could be dangerous for bystanders.

Could it be that without an organ sensitive to time and private property, there'd be no susceptibility to sophistry? Until you drop it a handheld implement is easy to see, but where the hell's the bio-clock in Gray's Anatomy? Even a chicken who falls asleep just after sunset will repeat the act at noon when time is an illusion made by covering its head before the ice-pick's shoved right through it. In such cases, time is not just a contradiction, it's the light and dark of enlightened dis-illumination and some might say, like love, it's grounds for a retrogressive auto-contraception. But then recall, a gene is just an old expression in a world of possibility and time is just a bloated, immaterial incorporeality and before you know it, taken out from under your entirety.

Silence - A Fable by Edgar Allan Poe, (1837)

'Eudosin d'orheon korhuphai te kai pharhagges'
'Prhones te kai charhadrhai.'

The mountain pinnacles slumber; valleys, crags and caves are silent.

– Alcman, (60 (10),646.)

"LISTEN to me," said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. "The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence.

"The waters of the river have a saffron and sickly hue; and they flow not onwards to the sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh one unto the other.

"But there is a boundary to their realm – the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty forest. There, like the waves about the Hebrides, the low underwood is agitated continually. But there is no wind throughout the heaven. And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling and loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon. But there is no wind throughout the heaven. And by the shores of the river Zaire there is neither quiet nor silence.

"It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall and the rain fell upon my head – and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.

"And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and ghastly, and tall, – and the rock was gray. Upon its front were characters engraven in the stone; and I walked through the morass of water-lilies, until I came close unto the shore, that I might read the characters upon the stone. But I could not decypher them. And I was going back into the morass, when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rock, and upon the characters; – and the characters were DESOLATION.

"And I looked upwards, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. And the man was tall and stately in form, and was wrapped up from his shoulders to his feet in the toga of old Rome. And the outlines of his figure were indistinct – but his features were the features of a deity; for the mantle of the night, and of the mist, and of the moon, and of the dew, had left uncovered the features of his face. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.

"And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. He looked down into the low unquiet shrubbery, and up into the tall primeval trees, and up higher at the rustling heaven, and into the crimson moon. And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; – but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock.

"And the man turned his attention from the heaven, and looked out upon the dreary river Zaire, and upon the yellow ghastly waters, and upon the pale legions of the water-lilies. And the man listened to the sighs of the water-lilies, and to the murmur that came up from among them. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; – but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

"Then I went down into the recesses of the morass, and waded afar in among the wilderness of the lilies, and called unto the hippopotami which dwelt among the fens in the recesses of the morass. And the hippopotami heard my call, and came, with the behemoth, unto the foot of the rock, and roared loudly and fearfully beneath the moon. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; – but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

"Then I cursed the elements with the curse of tumult; and a frightful tempest gathered in the heaven where, before, there had been no wind. And the heaven became livid with the violence of the tempest – and the rain beat upon the head of the man – and the floods of the river came down – and the river was tormented into foam – and the water-lilies shrieked within their beds – and the forest crumbled before the wind – and the thunder rolled – and the lightning fell – and the rock rocked to its foundation. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; – but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

"Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies. And they became accursed, and were still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven – and the thunder died away – and the lightning did not flash – and the clouds hung motionless – and the waters sunk to their level and remained – and the trees ceased to rock – and the water-lilies sighed no more – and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed; – and the characters were SILENCE.

"And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more."

Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi – in the iron-bound, melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the Earth, and of the mighty sea – and of the Genii that over-ruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There was much lore too in the sayings which were said by the Sybils; and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona – but, as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all! And as the Demon made an end of his story, he fell back within the cavity of the tomb and laughed. And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh. And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face.

THE END

GRACE & CONTROL IN RITUAL PERFORMANCE"a gesture narrowly divides us from chaos"

In formal dance, that is, in observing it, since it is not a movement which I myself engage, grace only gives off a whiff of calculation and control. Control is an illusion cast forth like the reflection of a gleaming habit, something which is so well practiced, it is subliminal, unconscious, spontaneous, automatic. It's not unlike informal dance when such applies to music which, in this case, dances you. Sometimes a put-on like a priestly fabric, it may be that sublimity is more the experience of the observer than the performer, but that's beside the point. In the theatre of Artaud, the distinction between performer and audience is the starring absence, a magic disappearing act, the practice in extricating demons in broad daylight. Danced correctly, which is to say, "in fashion", there's no room left on the stage, even for a lonely hyphen.

Control that's not just trusting your own muscular and metabolic memories is never letting loose; all can see it's awkward, putting nothing down to chance or what's between the frames which gives two gestures continuity, the illusion that's reality – a movement rather than sequential stoppages – self-control prevents recovery and health – it makes for awkward blockages. The "C" words might be re-cured with "comfort", "expertise", "well-seasoned", since nothing has been sacrificed except perhaps our reason. Recalling the identity of myth and mirth or muthos as a speech which tastes like muther's milk (especially if you're starving), the indifference between order and disorder in magic time only represents a hyphenated state where duality is the grandest of illusions but most dangerous and tricky to perform. Order and chaos are both irreverent, impious, irrelevant.

As with guitar lessons, control lives in past tenses, in tension, attending to avoid practicing one's mistakes, that is, the repetition of the pre-mature or unintended. A mindfulness without intellectual interference, calculation only reflects the absence of speed which thereafter increases in acceleration such that both observer and performer miss the dance of fingers like it was a lost bead in a shell game. The difference between a bad actor and a good one is that the former merely uses tricks to persuade you something's real. On the other hand, we see a complete metamorphosis akin to any metempsychosis. One can judge the reality of a performance by randomly hitting the pause button – observe the freeze-framed expression on the face: Is it awkward looking or appropriate to the surrounding situation, to the stage? Imbueing life, the mask and costume may be essential to the transformation, assuming it's not just one's belief constructing reality if it's played with feeling.

There's the same sense of astonishment witnessed by the less than skeptical entranced at the magic show. There may be glandular secretions. Grace is the present awareness of everything going on subliminally such that one may at will change direction without stumbling, whether we're on the topic of fingers, feet or flapping tongues. That is adaptation, where freedom comes to bodies when the brain is left on hold, but not rendered unconscious. We've been told that that is also Zen, when things just seem to come together, and then they come again, when "hurling everything 'to chaos" feels like pleasure, not upchucking variegated, nauseated sin.

With all the words ending in -(t)ion like in commotion or rendition, the effect comes across as natural. Imagine two dancers meeting in chance encounter in the fashion of an Epicurean particle-collision. If an explosive bounce does not ensue, it's intentional repetition is called a choreography (in square-dancing, "the call") which makes it reproducible and therefore, stylized. Remember that in Dada, only from such epic, or should I say heroic collisions and heroine addictions emerge new forms. In ballet, we'd imagine a leap or bound from the stage, but that's just an after-thought confused with the allusion to offspring – that one leaps for joy is a natural interpretation, but broadly speaking means the sign has metamorphosed back into symbol, like it was any offering. This is merely an expropriation if it is understood or given that dogma and religion were first to take the symbols and make them into signs, that is attached an appropriated meaning; appropriate thus means that truth is only found in representation; it starts out as a bait-and-switch manipulation, like to live is merely not to die; that is, it was, put forth for someone else'e ends, a great big fat oversimplification, that is, a lie; not unresembling Alfred Jarry's puppet, Ubu Roy.

Without grammatical dissections or incision, Mr. Grey Matter is clearly capable of intuitive precision. Neither is dance and music much different from speech when one is aware of each utterance expressed almost spontaneously but perceiving semantic associations as if they were body movements, and then we see that they literally are from the reverberating vocal strings (a general strike and then again, a harp or xylophone) to the accompanying beat of one or more ear drums: "as if from an immense dripping forest, and in the equally sonorous interlacing of movements" we have the sighting of a symphony setting fire to the stage. Without hypocrisy are sounds like words and deeds with good intentions, divining distant other stages on which that tune's been heard. And sometimes it's a parody, for laughs or criticisms. I'm sure that Torquemada thought he was only helping Antonin Artaud with thirty seven electrocutions. Like all the roads to Dante's hell were paved with good intentions, only searching for some gold or justice' dispensation – some would rather call it "reason".

Think you not? The unconsciously expressed "thank you" is instantly answered with a well-practiced "you're welcome", but what is that? Awareness and unconscious (instant) word-play present the missing meaning as an action scenario: "you've come well" in answer to good thoughts put forth, as if we've all forgot the present since thanksgiving's not just eating but as well, for giveness. In many worlds "no thanks" as the refusal of a gift would be considered rude, that is, ungraceful. Faced with such unthinking might elicit a response or counter-move – "Them thar is fightin' words, dude!" Oh, such nihilistical ingratitude!

The climax of this spinning dance is vertigo, like dining on L-tryptophan or tripping at a fan dance. Reversability of the greeting, like a chicken and egg argument, sets up an equivalence between a visit and a gift. It's no exchange, they're dancing together – the host says "bienvenida, welcome, it's a mess", the visitor's "gracias, no es nada" is not confused with "asshole, thanks for nothing" but the rendering, "good thinking, gracious one but this is nothing" means a mess is in the eye of a beholder or just inconsequential.

Ain't it always something? Grace only ever works when gifts are both free and well intended. Forces of control are never, well, invited. Thanks is just the second person, past participle [from Latin particeps "a sharing" (see participate)] and durative sense of thinking, all from the PIE (as simple as archaic european) root *tong- "to think or feel." Thinking of a German Thing ('assembly'), it's not too hard to see a Chinese Tong a'coming into view. Or whatever grabs you like ice cubes or a hot potato. Coming is a synonym for entrancing, but really, who'd a' think-thank thunk it? We were on the topic of fish-bowl mutuality or some dancing on a stage while juggling dynamite – it's all the rage. That is, a theatre with no room for economic sentimentalisms like one-upmanship or give-and-take – a dance that's once and for all, done with judgments and with leaders.

Linguistics & Construction-Work

“The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”

– Edward Sapir, 1925

But let's not get too discouraged here, since in any single language

(if there even is such a thing, considering that languaging grows beyond the lifetimes of speakers, mixes or transforms until all the mouths are closed or there's a universal outbreak of aphasia or dysplasia or any massive cue progressing toward a collective graveyard. Are there artifacts, like is there print if no one reads it? If no one's left to hear, is there a-muse still talking? Like would a six foot rabbit hear some fuzzy voices or some wily critter howling at the moon?), an infinite number of utterances might be made, any reality might be postulated along any number of dimensions (that word has yet to be adequately defined, but in this case, it probably refers in some way to largeness in a number of shifty critters called criteria pacing along besides length and breadth and depth), their reversals, inversions, tensions and ruptures or any combination there-of without necessarily losing your place since, while invisible to the rational mind or gray matter, they're clear to shifting organs of sensation. In this sense the brain's a thing only as their meeting place. An event occurs in-between them.

Most importantly, without the ambiguity of metaphor and other language tricks, there'd be nothing to say, at least nothing of interest except perhaps to obsessed mathematicians, as long as possibility is preferred over the prevailing disappointment of failing prediction beyond counting fingers on a hand but before the angels start dancing on a pin. Lest we forget, Sapir & Whorf were talking about linguistified reality as mimicked sets of habits whose place is called by geographers "the habitat". That habit, if you have it, means style, vogue or what's in fashion, not just vapors shooting up from under your foot or others up your nose. Sometimes it's just a dangerous addiction. But who correctly posits any universal style hiding somewhere underneath your clothes except the fashion-police running in the shadow of Mr. Jones? Should your reality be any different? Not just guests or ghosts, our own errors may be the worst which come to haunt us. Back in Myth-time anything was possible and most importantly, folks can communicate with other others just the same as they seem to do with each other. It's not quite a Dr. Do little thing, but that may be a good start, never the less, it may involve some chewing and regurgitation, another word for shape-shifting.

"There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands. We have another life. It shadows the life we actually lead. We occasionally become aware of it, particularly in those moments where we step outside of what it is that we are, and reflect upon, for better or worse, how it might have been. We are presented with, in that moment where we have become exactly whatever it is that we are, another who is not us, but who also is. This other us is a type of intimate personage, a subset of our self. The life we have not lived is always, at the very least, conceivable and therefore, remains subject to us. Or anyway, we are attached to it somehow – it seems to haunt significant crossroads and drags us back there. To shake ourselves free from the melancholy hold of this shadow, we consider the innumerable variables of existence, and multiply all the other others we also might have been. By means of conjuring up the possibility of other lives we also did not live, we relativise the significance of the life we actually failed to bring into the world. But these other others are categorically distinct from our intimate stranger – they are merely the lives that we have not not lived. We are never presented, in moments of regret or celebration, with the roads that are not not taken. These possible computations of existence have no substance for us, they are like the fantasies of others, wholly uncompelling; their improbable coilings and writhings permanently accompany our every moment without our ever giving them the least attention. They do not ever achieve the compelling and haunting form of our other self, that spectre who fixes us to who we actually are."

– thetheologicalturn

Just like the difference between "public opinion" and "the rise of neo-nazi sentiment reflected at the poles" as well as in quasi-journalistic peanut galleries or reality tv, the after-image may reflect that only Wilhelm Reich's fascists are left to do the voting, deprived as they are of love but never sex and gender. Quantification is meaningless outside of any surveilled sample. What is not observed might just as well have been excluded, and this is no argument for universal suffrage unless one over-wishes to extend the suffering. Nazis have always been big fans of democracy, as long as they remain the fittest, and not in any numerical sense, another misconfusion of quantity and quality inheritant in all darwinian analyses, should only flukes survive which more accurately reflects that survival of survivors is in dialectical opposition only to the worms of decomposition.

Through the lens of extended environmental conspiracies, we see from a height (a sort of superstition) the worms are us as well (or as well-connected to the ground a' wiggling), and fascist pigs are only "living" inside the telescopic spyglass but have no vision of their own, hence no imagination, hence are most alone without a doppleganger or even shadow and if well-deserved of pity, they couldn't accept that gift as there's nothing in them to be resonated like a guitar string by a flat pick or shovel to the head – perhaps the only creatures in the verse born dead or shortly there-after sung in post-pleistocenic time scales. Only worms and earthly microbes are for giving, which is why when pigs are pumped with formaldehyde and wearing their protection, they keep on coming even after we inter them. No good can come preserving mummies except to fuel steam-powered ships or future loco motives. Such is the problem of historical interpretation: it must proceed backwards, to a point disqualifying as inadmissible the possibility of other others. Mythic discourse is not weighed down by relegated absences of monsters or material effects (like glandular secretions) from ethereal forces (like remorse or anticipation).

Exclusion, that is, disqualification only ensures that language remains one-sided and therefore, in stasis, that is to say, stagnant but without the entendre of living organisms superflurishing in a swamp. We're talking frozen solid like an iceberg or rock. Otherwise the invalid can only limp along with a persuasive crutch. The only discourse is its own, a monologue when even floppy ears are not included. Extracted from their context like a corn-cob from Illinois, even they are not immortal. Like lies, Pharaohs burn hot when subjected to a flame which shares the essences of fire. The transparent substance of a truth is likely leaky, but everyone has seen a liar.

Besides the confusion of criteria with "class" in the construction of categories (most of which, like brackets, are not but artificial or political means for boxing within boxes) there's the same amnesiatic condition antagonistically prevailing. To wit: for human sorts at least not swimming in the sea in schools of parrots, there's no social anything without a bit of languaging. If one can't see its own reflection, could we ever even sense there is another in the world, even as a possibility? What chance then have other words or worlds existing, without coinciting a reality or kindle its untwisting? It may not be the language after all producing cosmic order, but it's arrogant rules of grammar which insist that, despiting eyes and nose and ears and toes, meaning or semantic system is more synonymous with the thing which makes most sense than any tongue or organ.

– the myth-time and the timely myth

Ambiguity and arbitrarity and their present confusion

"Language is an error of humanity. Words do not express the depth of feeling between two beings who love each other. A word is a worn pebble applied to thirty-six shades of affectivity. Language is convenient for simplifying, but I detest it as a means of locomotion."

– Duchamp

PHALANSTEROPIC MUTUALITY

you may be a magnet o'r
a bowl of iron filings,
but one way or t'other,
unless you've had encounter
with a sucking vacuum cleaner,
only thinking you're a scorer
you will always die a virgin,
without stirring & inmixing –
in your thinking what is missing's
some voluptuous immersion.

– Chuk Furier, Paraphrased    

ambiguous (adj.)
    1520s, from L. ambiguus "having double meaning, shifting, changeable, doubtful," adjective derived from ambigere "to dispute about," lit. "to wander," from ambi- "about" (see ambi-) + agere "drive, lead, act" (see act). Sir Thomas More (1528) seems to have first used it in English, but ambiguity dates back to c.1400.

arbitrary (adj.)
    early 15c., "deciding by one's own discretion," from O.Fr. arbitraire (14c.) or directly from L. arbitrarius "depending on the will, uncertain," from arbiter (see arbiter). The original meaning gradually descended to "capricious" and "despotic" (1640s).

– online etymology

The problem of a desiring id (thought like a boiling kettle or of the Tutel Age when Mr. Tootles lost his marbles, a desire in an age of tunnel vision like the long tube of a telescopic tv) is the cracked lens, a sort of manufactured glass revealing the ego on the other side as mere interpreter. Only the ego, seated upon the couch of reason (or like indica, a poor excuse – why Mister Salvatore Buddha liked sativa) ... I say again, only the ego can desire rationally as well as irrationally: logic and counter logic juxtaposed result in hegelian friction, otherwise known as antagonistic debate (see Antigone) or the autoeroticism of split-framed brains commonly thought of as schizoidal (but see trapezoidal geometry, necessary for the linear construction of manufactured lenses irregardless of a later state of fracture or refracture – see Pete and repeat across a functional amygdala or copper-mesh electrified gondola) a two-step which can and must lead to excessive blood loss given enough enlightened time to view it in.

The id, as Dr. F. well should have known, is a-rational, so could never encounter a personal intention – it is relaxed that way, just like Duchamp's fallen strings, an experiment on stoppage demonstrating much shorter lengths between two points than any straight line (or erect one), which would necessarily overshoot the mark every time – that's why at a distance one should aim high in all seriousness as well as foreplay.

It may be that the id is in contact with the excluded middle, those sepequish guts meandering like intestinal worms through a sea of chance, and discovers the scribblings of Fourier spelling Voluptuous Attraction like a vacuum cleaner sucking a milk-shake full of magnetised iron shavings without indigestion, but not before jumping in, if only to avoid cramps.

The french curve was always considered a thing of beauty next to any mere phallic representative (a mere use value). Straight by some means twisted thinking since to twist and untwist, in the same fashion as reason and madness, use the same movements but only in an inverted direction. Hence, the multilinear project is only unilinear squared n times or multi-plied.

Chance excluded from betwixt and between any two points is, beyond the definition of a prior utopian impossibility, the elimination of choice at the time and place one would be most comfortable making a healthy deposit for well-being beyond the intent to do so – it's a no-return bottle, not a matter for accumulation unless you're a lily or bank vault at the local fertilizer plant for odorless hospitality brought to you by the medical sanitation facility with their fertility aids hailing from orderly hospitals just prior to the poisonous injection.

So a straw (like a pipette) is also used to swirl liquids like a fan stirring air from your exhaust pipe for breathing room. All dialectic thinking points to nutrition and poison like there's an ether or proposition, but taste can only come from trying everything. Apathosis is only a venal disease caused by over-repetition and is generally self-mending if surrounding a particular bent or leaning between sabbaticals, no matter which day of the weak surrounding your absynthian absence. What's the difference if it makes synthetic sense? Sometimes they change the letters just to confuse us, sometimes it's a case of bottled amnesiatic fluid that gums up the transmission.

By definition, every disposition is a fall like Atlas dropping the ball and breaking. When evicted, it's more literal than dispossession. No dimension can alter that fact without vertigo to the consciousness – except maybe through unquantified consensus which is none of my business, that is, an esteamed sensus communis. There may be babies, but what's it to you? For like apples and oranges, a particle is by definition discrete whereas, a wave is the epitome of indiscretion. There's just no comparison between identities without a criterion through the heart of matter, and unlike the literal impaler of figurative vampires, a criterion is insubstantial, immaterial and quite unwavy-like.

So to answer the question of M. Duchamp, is there more or less art in a private toilet in a public museum? It is both calculated and grammatically correct, so there is little room for a charge of arbitrarity except in its more archaic sense. Ambiguity, on the other hand, is embraced, but what of it you may find is only that which you've brought along, and that is found art. No thing's ever been created unless it's meat (hence-from a critter); meaning's always found betwixt and between, that is, in the interregnal middle, curious as the anticipation of an impending birth but may last longer than a watched kettle. The disordered id lives outside culture, not ironically containing it (the deepest generative structure may have always been chaos); for the ego only, is much to be desired.

– see Tout Fait on Marcel Duchamp

Revolution is no mere excuse for poetry

"the one who has abolished himself thereby produces the relinquished space where he could have been."

– insipidities

If sacrifice is the decision not to follow an interest, to relinquish pleasure from any single situation, to reject a possibility, then it is necessarily the murder of one traveling an alternate time-line like firing a trans-dimensional proton torpedo and no mere lay-off or resignation. And that one is a doppleganger of you and goes by the name of possibility, aka fiction. Sacrifice is a time machine with deathly intent expressing, minimally, a function no different than suicide in the present. The ecstasis of a gift, consideration of the other, love is the only movement which puts an end to sacrifice in the same way that a gift annihilates exchange as well as theft, canceling democracy with no forced extraction, and sending morality to oblivion with no loss to the substance of the verse.

The word itself lives but only as a rotting corpse in a deep waterhole, at least until it finds another like "well-doing" or "well-being" (see 'Utopia'), producing a baby resembling twin ancestors called mos – "one's disposition" (in plural, mores, "customs") and mut. the reciprocal gifting of courage or heart in nurturing a nature which our grandmothers initiated. In this sense, the only place morality can reside or be sustained is in the social instinct. And since that is its natural habitat, the natural habitat, no sense of duty or debt is felt except in the archaic form as a debut or first appearance of every new child – the eternal return of difference.

Vico suggested a cyclic revolution of language traveling from poetic (symbolizing or connotative-to-obscure) to technic (denotative) to ironic (paradoxical) and coming full circle back to the poetic. It makes sense until one examines languages recently extinguished and those few remaining "survivors' about to become extinct which never traveled into the technique, into the realm where the thing is always confused with the innuendo, where it is (or seems to be) unrecognized that every denotation would at base be a dead metaphor in a dying language (or a language of death). In any subjective or poetic sense, there are no denotative signs, and therefore, by Barthe's own definition, no signs at all (except perhaps, "occupied" or "temporarily out of order"). The par excellent is a matter of provision, agreement or law – nothing is arbitrary but the arbitrated.

In keeping with the myth that predicate language (without the nominal category) is undeveloped (primitive) or corrupted, there are as well the unmedicated adult "sufferers" of thought disorder, once thought potential producers of marketable poetry for commodified literary entertainment. With the death of god or the secularization of education, and in a full ironic twist, the bible remains in the curriculum, studied as "mere" literature. It was the source of all modern, occidental law or a growth askew but nevertheless derivative of the infamous oriental Hamurabi code, still worshiped by legislators the world over.

But who would consider the reading of modern legislation (or any, for that matter), from referendum to legalize (or commodify and regulate) marijuana to the patriot act, as bodies of literature subject to poetic interpretation? In historical point of fact, that is precisely the job of your professional lawyer – the art critic-slash-actor who dramatically persuades in matters of guilt or transgression by selling an agreeable interpretation to the forces of control, be they congressman, judge, jury or hangman. I'd not be the first to insist on the relation between the tragi-comedic theatre and the court of law. When I was three, I noted the phonetic homology, the source of suggestive semantic ambiguity covering up an underlying structural isomorphism between 'lawyer' and 'liar' later explained as "one of those chance anomalies of language" or pronounced error.

Since well before Saussure, it was considered the sign, and by inappropriate extension, the symbol was arbitrary, right along with its relation with the signified – the thing being everything – "reality". It is ironic that the so-called language of science treats the relation as primary and generalizable and the symbol replaceable, where the sign never stands in for a thing but expresses a relation, where the metaphor or analogy (the word problem) serves to clarify the expression. In this sense only can algebra be considered a natural language, and modern English, not.

From the toddler's point of view first learning names for things, "baba" never transliterates to blanket and "mulch" to milk. They, masquerading as signs, are symbolic or a short-hand index to a whole-body, emotionally immersive experience. "Aacch!" is the grand revolt later educated into a silent scream. Experience is everything. Semiotics is first and foremost the rudder by which one recognizes and hence maneuvers it loudly – when a random association becomes a preferential attachment or memorable disgust, error be damned. Teaching language is child abuse. The sign is an imposition defined by cutting away all alternate innuendo until free association disappears altogether.

The difference between the modern myth and the archaic is the vacant space once occupied by meaning, the interpretive play of languaging in which every toddler is already fluent, the modern closing of what was archaically (and developmentally) open. Modern myth is a transaction of things for dead words & pictures and its language becomes the construction of a democratic institution subject to the exclusion of any and all subjects, replaced by objects not ironically held in subjugation, where sacrifice is necessary and approved, up to the point of the loss of one's commodity value (or labour power) or useful leverage, which is simultaneously murder and suicide – the end of a use-object is simultaneously the end of its exchange value – the accursed share justifies all collateral damage. If capitalism is the exploitation of surplus labour, then it is no simple stage or phase like puberty, but as old as civilization itself and without which there is no moral transgression like teen acne in need of a rupture or experience a loss of face.

There may be no irony where the denotation is absent and significance is a measure of interest and not a transaction of signs. Certainly there is no truth to it. For the child, truth reflects its medieval sense of trust – "troth" – which is an attachment irrespective of the attached. It is an acceptance without literary interpretation. It is the understanding of the theory and security of mutual aid without analysis or instruction. Therein lies safety, but not by virtue of an absence of danger. With no sense of moral ideology, the most profound support when facing the unknown is neither structural (the gambrel) nor material (the bullet) but moral – it's a grunge thing.

"Consistency is a vice of the square and out-of-date. It can’t be reconciled with the 'contradictions of reality', nor with the imperative to 'do one’s own thing'. Consistency is an old bore. The voice of the bore is doomed in the end to tail off into silence."

– E.P. Thompson, Open Letter to Kolakowski,

– The Assumption that Languages like English are "Natural" Languages
– The Assumption that Language Consists of Languages

Word: Area

An a-circular tautology which leads everywhere BUT back to itself as a knot or entanglement becoming increasingly complexified in its unraveling expansion, exponentially so, like the significant other once called aether, or not that either but all of the below:

• A-rhea: not ground, no earth, motherless bird or other orphan like a lonely word, two in common runs across rather than falls to the ground like a loose pair of critics adjusting the sound or cross-section of a panamanian panorama, full manic but undepressed pit raised like a bun in the oven.
• Arroyo: a he-gendered area like a horizontal latin mineshaft inundated by rain under wet sheets falling but not dropping, later exposing shiny elements when full of hot air like men's work, otherwise see gully washer for unclean topics.
• Airy: any wisp of a wasp with butterfly wings or an empty nest like vacant lots or absence of lines to connect the dots.
• Eirie: An egg in a nest, bird in the hand or distance twixt an eagle and land which lilts like a brogue from a friendly rogue.
• Air: or what it flies threw as a medium of change so invisible to the eye but not to the skin if a burning wind;
  1. elemental like a hand-made bent or mind bending twist like a tornado when it's upset expropriating the parts it contains, at least 'til it rains.
  2. unparticled matter because waves are just cooler than a shotgun blast of lead particles following lead particles or a blast furnace amidst the territory.
  3. hyper-diluted liquid which does not drip.
• Are: the collectiveness of being without a collector of beings.

AS A RECURSIVELY LOCAL COMMUNITY OF ORGANS OF ORGANISED CELLS OR AFFINITY GROUPS SHARING ENERGY DRINKS, "I ARE" IS PREFERABLE TO "I IS", WHICH WORD IS GENERALLY AN ACCOMPLICE OF THEY ("THEY IS" – GRAMMARIANS ARE HERE WRONGLY REGARDED). RECURSION DISAPPEARS WITH THE AB-SENSE OR EXCURSION OF AN OBJECTIVE OBJECT OR UNPAID BILL.

– see space: an invisible paisley formerly found in the tapestry of a mango tree.

Beyond the mere syntactic devise, any noun is the spectacle (as in lens and image as well) of articulation in process like the empty space of distinction between an organism and a rock once called "criticism", later plate glass window (as in "see but don't touch") when miners found trace minerals in organs but no diamonds except as a virtue of Mrs. Gotrocks.

The ding in a snapshot illustrates the impossibility of things, particularly those seen traveling through space in the same way a map is no territory but folded along appropriate lines may fly over it and land unpredictably, depending on the air currents, but only so far, not an eagle nor as the crow flies, covering much ground in a hurry as if moronically increasing denseness goes slower since a brick is now found offensive even though it seems to fall faster with increasing distance but loose ideas like morality hang in the air.

Unreported Comments on the State of the Police Commentary:

(from Imbalance)

Despite the abundance of raisins and even edible dough in the position represented above from the peanut galleries, and recalling that exclusion itself is not the morally offensive thing (morality is) as so much bigotry probably should be excluded from the commentary on the comments, there is always a decision as to what feels toxic and what is nutritious, and bigotry (dripping down the nose at "those kind of people") is always shit and always unsuitable for digestion. There is as well some wiping to be done if only to remove an unsightly stain. No exclusive club is inclusive as members come and go, expelled on moral grounds – the outside and every thing around is what's excluded – a field or bank upon which to deposit vast sums of excrement.

The first bit of wiping I would do is "Western" off from "civilisation". In this day and age, even east is west, and concerning civilisation in general, and irregardless of topographic calenders, it may have been so from the beginning. The toxic shit is part of civilisation itself, and one would have to rub so intently and for so long, the entire bathtub would empty in the process with no babies forthcoming, being left standing only with a naked, cardboard toilet paper tube and not a fig leaf in site.

Which leads me to the second bit of off-tasting material stuck between my teeth. Belonging. There are many entendres of this word, but most point to the same plot of property. For them everything is a plot (especially cemeteries), not always because of any paranoia, but there is so much plotting one must do just to survive in the tub we call civilisation. Hell is the moment just prior to the collapse of life, the universe and everything, a moment extending into eternity. I would say we neither belong to the earth nor does it belong to us, except in the sense that ones hair is one's beloning and so are the fleas, in the same relationship as your head is to them. What is most often thought when "belong" comes to mind is possession and property, and must be held tight else confront a close shave. This calls for militancy and vigilance.

What is the ontological alternative? A natural articulation consisting of the space or pause between mutually associated absubjects. Metaphysically, there may be four or five basic elements, but objectively speaking, subjective spirits and other ideas may juxtapose anyway they want and for as long as they want without any necessary thought toward patriotism, and although not exclusive of materials, matter moves a bit more like a tortoise and is limited in the kinds of association it can form, like up and following a goose chasing the moon.

In lieu of imagination which has been cut off by education, sometimes linguistic thinking will paint a picture as a friendly mediation and not so much intended alienation. And who says critique has to conform to to the intention of the original performer? I should think that would be too strong an edict and a stickling for intellectual property. So on the topic of fig leaves, I am reminded of the philosopher of pragmatism, John Stuart Mill may have been his name.

I wouldn't think use value a good substitute for labour value. Any value divorced from interest or esteem pretty much still defines property and who is eligible, not to mention duty as material as well as moral imperative. Mill's philosophy (at least the more nutritious bits of it, if indeed it was his at all) makes no such suggestion. The pragmatic perspective has no necessary association with the moral in making excuses or other sorts of explanation. Hence, back to the fig leaf:

Why should that simple covering have any kinfolk by the name of Shame, when it may have crawled out of the same hole with the dog and boat and sea-loving mariners once thought restricted to the ground in the form of menstrual pad mimicked by the boys as it came in handy to both hide or exaggerate a natural peninsular appendage and its not-altogether under-controlled motivations? For jocks, the strap is said to keep the balls from bouncing on your leg. Is that of more or less import than preventing warm and sticky bloody ooze from running down it? I'm sure we're all familiar with that feeling. For the boys there may have been priorities like bringing down a hog without distraction! This may have occurred a score or two millennia before the species called Morality even considered it'd be nifty to evolve. Admittedly it's different than mere cover-up to exclude the cold, but we still call them clothes and why should one excuse have par excellent preeminence over all the others which may be here or there by them and those?

Before Nietzsche, Lamarck himself suggested something like from chaos as indeterminacy comes order and that stimulation causes and effectively responds as simultaneity: it's improper to say a thing but that they cause and effect each other. In all seriousness, it's all just a Pete and Repeat joke.

But I especially like the idea that strife is what is meddled with to produce a fleeting balance, but I wouldn't call it that – sounds too much like struggle. Who but a wobbly or a protestant would envision Eutopia as eternal, universal and foremost, voluntary toil? The preferential word for me is chaos, a life without triangles (not to mention squares) ever holding up a plank or unfolding one's bandanna for extracting some fig-leafs at the bank. It's the only resource we have for building beauty or nutritious art as landmarks or perturbations 'round which to commune or navigate.

How could no rule of law creating falling bodies underneath regimented pressure or not sleeping through a boring lecture be thought so gol durn awful bad? I think the law of balance only means we've all been had. Morality, economy and civil polity make a fulcrum that only balances flights of wingless corpses thinking high is mighty just above a living hell and unlike gravity everything that's needed down below (like health) trickles up, and lightening seems to thunder down but that's all just the illusion of the metaphor. The theory of games which establishes verticality for some, vertigo for others, is just a sort of misguided art criticism or literary interpretation coming from the location on a balance beam thinking it's where it's at while everyone in proud coherent fashion calls for more not less such harmony or re-arrangement. Balance by it's very nature can't be in an of itself, it's always just another eye of the beholder sort of thing.

It's all the same to criticize or desecrate a temple or the priests of church or state or the academy: police force only steps away from guarding stolen property (your life, it's just a living) when folks around begin to lose their faith and stop their giving – the ins and outs of heresy have always been the ends of lead or rubber bullets as a means when news or written histories, like ridicule are insufficient, especially when the upper space begins to be diminished (state and space are only words describing the conditions). Progress? Ha! We're all still living in the Spanish Inquisition.

The Painful Truth

A nihilist might say "There is no truth but everything is real" and not be jabbed for inconsistency. It sounds accepting of possibilities others call 'futility' and therefore kinder than we usually witness in pessimistic or romantic idealists (every thing's illusion or it was god's and My idea) and the experts who actually own reality (the priestly class, clerics of clarity, safely sipping claret from clerestories in ivory-tower sanctuaries) but have never seen it up close or personal (or if they did, escaped, having read their Hobbes & Plato). More objective than the rest, they admit to no ideas, only facts – they're often authors of our dictionaries or build machines to not only think for us (not unlike the old-time school teacher who invented the precursor to the electric drill: "Repeat after me!") but experience life so we can stay safe in our exclusion. That's the nature of democracy – it's always for the greater good and that entails a certain sacrifice from every neighborhood and no one ever hears words like slavery and the settled-in confuse the youthly 'angst' and boredom with the show for 'apathy' and need for tightened leash so they will go as slow.

There's no doubt everything is real (even a dumb idea or error – someone surely makes a wrong turn now and then somewhere) and even science, when not inclined to make machines to cover up the inconvenient, admit they're only out to disprove everything in pursuit of what is left and that must surely lead to truth. Unfortunately, all such roads go on for ever into outer space or circle back on the home-bound and kick you in the ass with a boot called déjà vu – weren't we here already? It's the nature of a wheel to spin in circles – everything else seems to wobbble and then peter out.

But there is a kind of truth which happens all about. It is always painful and so imp-active to our senses (it inaugurates ego defences), it must be excluded from any view. It's the sort of truth that makes us stupid and to cling to it would lead to actions most consider sanguinolently suicidal. To explore them without replacing the man-hole cover (it's invisibility cloak) or have a kindly accomplice hold you by the heel is to get a free ticket to the local facility for mental health or jail if you are young enough.

More than merely inconvenient, which suggests an eventual work-around or final solution, the painful truth is exposed whenever exploration steps off the map and gets immersed in the territory. They used to point out places on maps with the admonition: "There be dragons". We know they're true because they can't be known or tabulated – they're fenced off, they're excluded. To even find them requires an advanced degree in spontaneity. To mix a little Tao with dialectics, we find pleasure and pain as choices but more an excuse to go nowhere expecting one to come without the other – this way one could wait forever.

A really good adventure, literally "against the wind" or "through a rip or rupture", might just illustrate in Timbuktu there's way more fun than torture. To simultaneously stay on guard while getting carried away some used to say "all things in moderation" just to play it safe. But that excludes all peak experience. To have your cake and eat it too needs practice in altering states of consciousness. That is adaptation and avoids committees set about for your committal. All institutions, if not just shared patterns of habit in a circle of interests some call a habitat, require a commitment and that's the end of flexibility – it's the place of rigid truth, and that's more grave than dangerous morality.

Skeptical or spectacle?

Spectacle¹, Spectrum², sceptre³ and spectre⁴: Incorporeal materiality. A nonlinear continuum or the moth-holes in the fabric of euclidean reality from which emerges randomly associated reactionary tendencies transcending the subliminal chaotic matrix in a possibly scary adventure into ostensibly ordered superficial arrangements.

Everything is different, that's academic. What piques our interest, when not in search of justification for war or grounds for disassociation, is the common something shared within a crew which seems to persist with the enduring association, whether speaking of atoms in ionic dance coalescing from a drying solution or affinity groups or traveling troupes who's members come and go but very often return like homing pigeons and salmon & mourning when they don't – waking from a bed that's empty – it's as if someone's dead so find a mirror or pinch your skin just to make sure it wasn't you. Did you only lose a life-long habit?

All culture is conceptual art once euclidean bindings are ruptured or aristotelean boxes are crushed by an incendiary boot on the top uppermost face forever (down but not out)! It's all about the vortex created in a pepper-mill and the coming solidarity of its bestrewed barley-corn excremental derangement like chicken scratch. There is no void as radiation bounces back into itself with the snap of a rubber-band or impact with a sudden field of density like three feet of black lead or just dissipates in all directions upon the mere encounter with a rain-drop, forgetting its first intentions 'cause there's just no more coherence or prodding prompt for any sort of reinforced remembrance. And vacuums are nonsensically gibberish without a simultaneous gravitational pull seducing their suck – when the pulling force is cast round the lower appendage, its vacuous proprietor will fall, but even that's uncertain and not always funny.

A monopoly of appearances may be as simple as a cloak of invisibility around everything outside the carpet-bag of medicinal elixirs smelling of snake oil. Answers are only implied by the absence of questions. Like, what else is there? Without the posited, sub-real and shifty "center of gravity" around which elliptically inclined objects fall for each other without an antagonistic collision [like binary star systems] are figuratively tethered in a judo-like oscillating dance or undulating wobble or the almost telepathic tip of an atom's electron responding to a tap from its dance partner on the other side of the galaxy, the missing third must be ethereally electric love or it's a universal accident disguised as nothing.

Like 'economics', quantum force is merely a meaningless word-game resembling corpse-like vomitus just to avoid the accusation of "romantic" when trying to explain the inexplicable attraction and mutual reciprocity (sans exchange medium as well as debt and insurance premium with moral currency to bind the transaction) seen emerging on the cosmic dance floor because gravity and motion account for only two-thirds of physicists' theoretical observations and the long distance attractive force between distant wall flowers. If a transaction can be voided by a mere club, it was probably missing from the start. Such is the nature of true fiction and false fact.

It may just be that Mr. Grey, that fatty tissue in the cranium called chief executive is only there to help us track, to read the signs so we can navigate when the target of interest is moving and lies beyond our perceptual horizon and we must follow cues or clues and then remember just in case of a distraction and we have to start all over again. Just because the limbic is nearby (we may need to hurry) is no excuse to say the head's the master or in control of anything but disaster when it's certainty that steers the boat instead of an experimental suggestion. There's no controlling chance no matter how preplanned the itinerary: one goes with the current flow, capsizes or navigates around it because in nature, there are no short cuts. A natural articulation is the zone of free association, any way you slice it.

see – The Psychopathology Of Work by Penelope Rosemont

The whole truth? It's overated.

No matter how enduring, "truth" comes only once, provisional.
Then it disappears – along comes something else unusual.
Strictly "absence of a proof", truth should be read "approval".

Sooth-saying's only a belief to soothe the over-pliable.
It may inflame aquatically diluted, but it's not indubitable
'less something else's excluded by the absence of a scruple.

Rigid truth arrives like a ship of fools at anchor when what has been agreed or denied docks with that which is approved or disapproved, two behaviors slightly more active or meddlesome than merely transitively cognitive or passive, and around which moralitics and polity are tightly wound, bound and thenceforth declared sound, insensitive insistences like Titanic's hull wrapped too tight with paper shoe-laces and that screeching noise is laughed off 'cause we're all immortal beings; we've done away with feelings or replaced them with velcro prosthetics – in other words, it's cheating. It's been said "a lie" we're even living.

Truth must be authorised, but being the singular abrasive friction like a bow to a fiddle string, between the lines of sharing and withholding or exclusion into steerage, this is bare economics and should no more come across as a riddle than the construction of reality by permit-granting institutions, the guarantors of which are engines of control like a potentiometer at the throttle (once called a governor) enjoying no higher power than mechanical tradition or a settling in or selling out their ways, their position, an automated cruise without a captain at the wheely – on vacation most days, from where he can digitize a signature should an iceberg appear too big to fit his gin martini.

Even cops & bureaucrats who do the real throttling are dispensable as nothing can persistently continue the maniacal and raise a family of anything but anarchic reactionaries – thus making any discourse on the state of exception (just to camouflage the contradiction) an absurdity with neither practical relevance nor theoretical currency. There's never been an end to capricious, fickle slavery – wars are fought to ensure an enduring state of perdition for anyone beneath your station. Wives and children come to mind when husband-fathers say "this family's no democracy". The only true authority's an ethos called religion or for atheists, some healthy economic competition. It may as well be just another ego defense mechanism as politics can never float without an airy draft of one-upmanship that's pushing forth the boat.

Exceptions prove it's only gods that rule...and then they die. Up comes the new and improved, in function never quite as good but otherwise the same old same old, by and by. There's never been a sheep who'd follow flocks of herders lying dead within the grave year after year, even as a habit 'less they're chased by phantom dogs or grizzly bears. With this in mind, there is no truth but the moral wrung from a concorded acquiescence in the service of peace (as no one looks under rugs for what's been sweeped) making any balance a bit heavier on the acquiescent or conceded side & euphemised "consensus" but we know better, it's an ancient sacrifice of the bloodless just like any tenacious coalition of the willing, not brave like when the fabled, cynic lemmings living at the edge and giving up, en masse abandon ship.

And as unanimity can never be achieved without disgruntlement on even such as proper seating placements, war can never really be avoided – pressed into service, militancy is the third leg of any claim to truth, the moral economy of a broken tooth or a look down the nose at "those kind of people" builds both academies and cathedrals armed with truth, for sooth, there's no escape from religious inquisition when someone has the balls to answer with a pointed question as if a spear into the side of the chief heir apparent – they'll come after you when their "feelings" hurt: they're christianly politic so can't tolerate a heretic or critic not to mention those appearing on the scene all out of fashion or demanding a commission without displaying a significant certificate.

If you or I behaved as they, we'd be called paranoid and living in a statuesque delusion. Some would say we're normal. Unbeknownst to either talking side, abolishing the truth (or statute) does not generate a lie (they're there already), it puts an end to the debate and not only that (as well it should) both ends and their means to appropriate. Safer to approximate – all already know there could be error and big mistakes. The truth is just another form of property and law is money for the corporate state. For all else there's the dictionary (look up "the joint" or "penitentiary")...unless, of course, it's self-defense and you can't pause to hide or hesitate and your attackers do not represent or have a bent toward colloquial establishments.

The equivalence of opposites prove nine times out of ten, and in retrospect that's how often they'll disagree although their story is the same. The one exception is they're unrelated as criterion, hinge or pivot has been fabricated like there's such a creature as a continuum with ends defining nations or other false-flag operations: it's no insincerity, the golden rule's been thought to capitalize the pig who wants to put a cap or two in you, and sometimes in the negative: don't fuck with folks the way they fuck with you right to the end. The closest thing to truth or any rule of thumb is "It all more-or-less depends". Just try controlling situations outside of science-lab conditions and you'll understand the paradoxic aphorism, "be careful what you wish, you might just get it".

Only in a gas tank, like hydrocephaly,
is water priced four bucks a gallon,
a flim-flam specialty, a pretext that's delusion:
the kind they use (it's from the tap) is free
but never from an atom bomb pollution
so they say tobacco leaf is at the root the evil seed
and since they're experts, nine out of ten
consistently agree.

– Atka Mip

Power is Bullshit

The only good to which logic can be put is the utter destruction of another claim to fame resulting not in a victory of truth over error but self & mutual-annihilation since logic being its own means brings on its own end when a simple accusation by the referee decrees that the equivalence of skill and weaponry must always result in a draw of ambiguity – any close race is judged by an arbitrary agenda like time and politic or space, never grace as that's just a trendy accessory – unbalanced skill proves nothing but the authority of dogma, carte blanche for exclusion of any inconvenient matter hanging 'round the pointed snake like a stake called "criterion" or "index", a "categorical constraint" and sometimes "principle" which is always an investment like a scuba diver in a wet-suit making the distinction between philosophy and sophistry and logic and rhetoric always subject to another debate – the exchange of weapons is but an expression, hypocritic, considering the assertion that "there are no absolutes" is itself an absolute claim but never-the-less rests on the assumption that bullshit is inversely proportioned to the reality of truth (as if anyone has a prior claim to that) for sooth only rhymes with a pointed tooth even when the words sound soothing and truth is only ever what is nurtured – otherwise dabbled, alluded, abstruse.

No matter the diction, best stick with fiction, to impress with a guess, to avoid a conviction.

Not unlike our senior Lewis Carrol, Charles Peirce said of reason's fame, it only represents the inner workings of an active brain. It may be that nothing else is due it – when it claims for naught but silly fun and games. Play explores the endless possibility. The end of play has thus been labeled ego's "victory", and always for the other, death at most, or less, eternal "shame". Without ambition or any ambi-valence, each and every utterance is only seen a rudder steering through a sea of chance and sometimes that's all there is to keep us going. To let go or insist with great authority will always suck us down into a whirling fetish, and that is what is called "a certainty" – it's only spreading thin a bun with elderly relish.

The Discovery of Writing & Democracy

A snake who had lain torpid all winter in his hole took advantage of the first warm day to limber up for the spring campaign. Having tied himself into an intricate knot, he was so overcome by the warmth of his own body that he fell asleep, and did not wake until nightfall. In the darkness he was unable to find his head or his tail, and so could not disentangle and slide into his hole. Per consequence, he froze to death.

Many a subtle philosopher has failed to solve himself, owing to his inability to discern his beginning and his end.

Two snakes were debating about the proper method of attacking prey.
"The best way," said one, "is to slide cautiously up, endwise, and seize it thus"—illustrating his method by laying hold of the other's tail.
"Not at all," was the reply; "a better plan is to approach by a circular side-sweep, thus"—turning upon his opponent and taking in his tail.
Although there was no disagreement as to the manner of disposing of what was once seized, each began to practise his system upon the other, and continued until both were swallowed.

The work begun by contention is frequently completed by habit.

Back in the day when all the animals could talk, in that most prehistoric of past pasts, there was such a superabundance of love and compassion throughout the realms, that the whole show collapsed into a global state of malnutrition. This was when Odin sent his only ill-begotten son to introduce deception, murder and theft and we entered into modernity: the survival of the fattest, and of course, the illiterate who had to resort to the analysis of imaginary imagery just to conceive of mutual representation, and so it is written, the only worthwhile reality is fiction.

Simultaneous Subspecifics of Nonrepresentative Symbolism:

1. Simulation: A mask disguising inability
2. Emulation: Mimicry without credential
         3. Parody: A mirror casting revolting reflection

Having been taught to turn his scraps of bad Persian into choice Latin, a parrot was puffed up with conceit.
"Observe," said he, "the superiority I may boast by virtue of my classical education: I can chatter flat nonsense in the language of Cicero."
"I would advise you," said his master, quietly, "to let it be of a different character from that chattered by some of Mr. Cicero's most admired compatriots, if you value the priviledge of hanging at that public window. 'Commit no mythology,' please."

The exquisite fancies of a remote age may not be imitated in this; not, perhaps, from a lack of talent, so much as from a fear of arrest.

A wolf was slaking his thirst at a stream, when a lamb left the side of his shepherd, came down the creek to the wolf, passed round him with considerable ostentation, and began drinking below.

"I beg you to observe," said the lamb, "that water does not commonly run uphill; and my sipping here cannot possibly defile the current where you are, even supposing my nose were no cleaner than yours, which it is. So you have not the flimsiest pretext for slaying me."

"I am not aware, sir," replied the wolf, "that I require a pretext for loving chops; it never occurred to me that one was necessary."

And he dined upon that lambkin with much apparent satisfaction.

This fable ought to convince any one that of two stories very similar one needs not necessarily be a plagiarism.

... and on the golden rule:

A man was plucking a living goose, when his victim addressed him thus:

"Suppose you were a goose; do you think you would relish this sort of thing?"

"Well, suppose I were," answered the man; "do you think you would like to pluck me?"

"Indeed I would!" was the emphatic, natural, but injudicious reply.

"Just so," concluded her tormentor; "that's the way I feel about the matter."

...

An ant laden with a grain of corn, which he had acquired with infinite toil, was breasting a current of his fellows, each of whom, as is their etiquette, insisted upon stopping him, feeling him all over, and shaking hands. It occurred to him that an excess of ceremony is an abuse of courtesy. So he laid down his burden, sat upon it, folded all his legs tight to his body, and smiled a smile of great grimness.

"Hullo! what's the matter with you?" exclaimed the first insect whose overtures were declined.

"Sick of the hollow conventionalities of a rotten civilization," was the rasping reply. "Relapsed into the honest simplicity of primitive observances. Go to grass!"

"Ah! then we must trouble you for that corn. In a condition of primitive simplicity there are no rights of property, you know. These are 'hollow conventionalities.'"

A light dawned upon the intellect of that pismire. He shook the reefs out of his legs; he scratched the reverse of his ear; he grappled that cereal, and trotted away like a giant refreshed. It was observed that he submitted with a wealth of patience to manipulation by his friends and neighbours, and went some distance out of his way to shake hands with strangers on competing lines of traffic.

Against Domestication

A wild horse meeting a domestic one, taunted him with his condition of servitude. The tamed animal claimed that he was as free as the wind.

"If that is so," said the other, "pray tell me the office of that bit in your mouth."

"That," was the answer, "is iron, one of the best tonics in the materia medica."

"But what," said the other, "is the meaning of the rein attached to it?"

"Keeps it from falling out of my mouth when I am too indolent to hold it," was the reply.

"How about the saddle?"

"Fool!" was the angry retort; "its purpose is to spare me fatigue: when I am tired, I get on and ride."

...

A wolf went into the cottage of a peasant while the family was absent in the fields, and falling foul of some beef, was quietly enjoying it, when he was observed by a domestic rat, who went directly to her master, informing him of what she had seen.

"I would myself have dispatched the robber," she added, "but feared you might wish to take him alive."

So the man secured a powerful club and went to the door of the house, while the rat looked in at the window. After taking a survey of the situation, the man said:

"I don't think I care to take this fellow alive. Judging from his present performance, I should say his keeping would entail no mean expense. You may go in and slay him if you like; I have quite changed my mind."

"If you really intended taking him prisoner," replied the rat, "the object of that bludgeon is to me a matter of mere conjecture. However, it is easy enough to see you have changed your mind; and it may be barely worth mentioning that I have changed mine."

"The interest you both take in me," said the wolf, without looking up, "touches me deeply. As you have considerately abstained from bothering me with the question of how I am to be disposed of, I will not embarrass your counsels by obtruding a preference. Whatever may be your decision, you may count on my acquiescence; my countenance alone ought to convince you of the meek docility of my character. I never lose my temper, and I never swear; but, by the stomach of the Prophet! if either one of you domestic animals is in sight when I have finished the conquest of these ribs, the question of my fate may be postponed for future debate, without detriment to any important interest."

This fable teaches that while you are considering the abatement of a nuisance, it is important to know which nuisance is the more likely to be abated.

The Meaning of Life

An ox meeting a man on the highway, asked him for a pinch of snuff, whereupon the man fled back along the road in extreme terror.

"Don't be alarmed," said a horse whom he met; "the ox won't bite you."

The man gave one stare and dashed across the meadows.

"Well," said a sheep, "I wouldn't be afraid of a horse; he won't kick."

The man shot like a comet into the forest.

"Look where you're going there, or I'll thrash the life out of you!" screamed a bird into whose nest he had blundered.

Frantic with fear, the man leapt into the sea.

"By Jove! how you frightened me," said a small shark.

The man was dejected, and felt a sense of injury. He seated himself moodily on the bottom, braced up his chin with his knees, and thought for an hour. Then he beckoned to the fish who had made the last remark.

"See here, I say," said he, "I wish you would just tell me what in thunder this all means."

"Ever read any fables?" asked the shark.

"No—yes—well, the catechism, the marriage service, and—"

"Oh, bother!" said the fish, playfully, smiling clean back to the pectoral fins; "get out of this and bolt your Æsop!"

The man did get out and bolted.

[This fable teaches that its worthy author was drunk as a loon.—TRANSLATOR.]

On Differànce & Deference

"The son of a jackass," shrieked a haughty mare to a mule who had offended her by expressing an opinion, "should cultivate the simple grace of intellectual humility."

"It is true," was the meek reply, "I cannot boast an illustrious ancestry; but at least I shall never be called upon to blush for my posterity. Yonder mule colt is as proper a son—"

"Yonder mule colt?" interrupted the mare, with a look of ineffable contempt for her auditor; "that is my colt!"

"The consort of a jackass and the mother of mules," retorted he, quietly, "should cultivate the simple thingamy of intellectual whatsitsname."

The mare muttered something about having some shopping to do, threw on her harness, and went out to call a cab.

– Ambrose Bierce, Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 1874

A rat, finding a file, smelt it all over, bit it gently, and observed that, as it did not seem to be rich enough to produce dyspepsia, he would venture to make a meal of it. So he gnawed it into smithareens [I confess my inability to translate this word: it may mean "flinders."—TRANSLATOR.] without the slightest injury to his teeth. With his morals the case was somewhat different. For the file was a file of newspapers, and his system became so saturated with the "spirit of the Press" that he went off and called his aged father a "lingering contemporary;" advised the correction of brief tails by amputation; lauded the skill of a quack rodentist for money; and, upon what would otherwise have been his death-bed, essayed a lie of such phenomenal magnitude that it stuck in his throat, and prevented him breathing his last. All this crime, and misery, and other nonsense, because he was too lazy to worry about and find a file of nutritious fables.

This tale shows the folly of eating everything you happen to fancy. Consider, moreover, the danger of such a course to your neighbour's wife.