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.

notes on desire, or 'there are no leaders on this dance floor, even for a ransom'

"Due to the eternal transmutation of forms, which are made of the elements, no single element ever gains predominance for long."

– Heraclitus

Al Jarry, or was it Doctor Faustrol who proposed a different way of thinking, suggests a law of rising vacuums to replace our falling bodies to describe all gravity, and that's not just the least or even half of it – you don't have to fall for it when a vacuum reaches up, it grabs you.

"All what?" you ask, I say "Whatever!", all was 'memory', all language, a song and dance – some call it theatre – all based on metaphor in fiction or in fact it does not matter, or molecular vibrations infecting 19th century Butler, or the principle of conservation of energy or stuff explained by Bergson in his conversations: just another state, not nations but a sort of memory all the same aestheticists insist it's just an impressive expression so what's the difference twixt a swallow and a metabolic penetration? and the elemental theory of ancient Grecians on the eyes themselves producing light which reaches out to kindred spirits like the sun or incandescent light bulbs and the grease-painted reflections all around you; and when two 'rays' meet the mutual vibing sets up – consciousness complete – a synergy of vibes which even Freud and Darwin so related, we back off, retreat or disengage when oversaturated; or that some aspect within the ear or lower, always barely trembling (or set and ready to go), finds a resonating wave and climbs onboard and rides it; infants who make every sound until those others in its rooms reiterate to such extent forgoes those oth'r articulations altogether; we can derive a make-shift basis for understandings of aesthetics as well as pleasure in experience (except when pain is just too much or have to rest before we lunch), and put forth definitions of desire just like this:

a cosmic vibe is looking for a dancing partner.

That is to say in all there's receptivity and spreading out or thin, a wiggle, not two halves of an exchange, an artificial and quite unneeded maiming cutting making only other fighting words and much confusion or dismemberment, not to mention faith and burning at the stake just to preserve a slice of life excluding all the others; not that all things "contain" receptors and emitters, that's just a way of talking (see Ibn al-Haytham/Hacen/Alhazen, medieval optician and inventor of the camera and expert on the lens) as superficial articulations, but perhaps tangentially so when there comes a bouncing ball or other perturbation we prepare to catch or tap it back, so they say desire's reactionary, muggy cruel and so should be suspended, but sometimes it's not anxiety, it's an embracive, no abrasion ever was intended.

If we consider the modern theory of the cell born as a stem, these so-called receptors do not come with a specialty, a special ality (morality's more special than any alter or an ego, and it says so), a leaf or innate dance or rhythm's sin, but learn their songs as old expressions (you might say a leaf is only wood's persistent way to catch some sun and spread it) seated only by and large and after their position (or coming 'round to it) in the environmental milieu or melange-like interweb's communication, they would learn from it, spider-like to associate a dance with songs or flies, like hum a few bars and I'll recall the lyric (and it's also vice to versa, sometimes virtuous but then they're often seen not versatile but coming with a greatly crass, cross purpose, lie because they've got no density behind their fat disguises); but it's not the cell which receives and dances well that generates our consciousness (that is, beyond its own – "we" cannot know this) but the resonating everything "connected", in the modern sense neuronical, hormonal (endocriminal) or mineral ducts and "channels", like Lamarke's originary blood creating its own tubules as they're creating it and then the seam's remembered (it's been rehearsed but only once the corpse flew out the window); or like endocrine corpuscles re-appropriating veins to turn them red to yellow (but really it's just sharing space – they're rooming) just like oceans making their own tubes of waves all folding over, which sets the entire town to dance, this community we call a "discrete organism", a "self" who only feels at home when on the beach, a home in saturation with everything in Heraclitan flux – not just because it's salty, there's also some crustaceans.

Distributivity simultaneously precedes and follows receptivity, generating poetry as a feast, not fastened, and there must be some bonfires, so gravity is never even constant, it's a variable distance between bodies and whose potent devastation's only countered by a motion, as Mr. Adams so well he noted, "Flying is the art and science of falling to the earth, and missing" and that is clearly a transmission, sometimes we want to land but everything else that's in the world of words can prove just all too much distraction; to chase 'one's' desire too resolutely is an invitation to be knocked clean out of orbit, we can only practice altered states of consciousness or to become devout, it's just another word for saying "shut in" – in a paper house, a burning match is only looking for a dance, to agitate infection, seducing paper with its spectral plays, it's just a fan dance to amaze, but proof of love at first sight or a touch, you might say the pantomime of eco mimicry; or bang of schizmophrenogenic scatter, loud like shotgun blasts unheard to any ear – so which came first, the sound or its engraved impression? – since up-close is all that matters as far enough away it all just fades or bounces (unless it's really really big) like every wave on every beach in flux or agitation only reaching for the moon, the eternal return in myth language and the sun's enduring orbit round a spot of gravity or fake and temporary center (in ellipses, there's never less than two but only when on paper as nothing else could ever stand so still or for that matter), which the other planets ellipse like an epileptic dancer round – it only looks smooth 'cause we're on it, it's a wobble, never any circle but a spiral, therefore every known return's as well an all eternal freaky but familiar transmutation, so is everyone a monster in this nation?

And so I look around with eyes, ever looking for surprise and when it comes my way I cannot notice 'cause it might resist or laugh or cause my brain to drip along the wall and me without a head to how's my eyeballs now that you have seen them? but should I shrink away 'cause I'm no matter I'll just wave and gravitate toward my own image in a mirror of water – it just seems safe 'cause you might think that I just want to harm you; at least you can be sure of this, that you're not just a background or some vomit in a toilet bowel or piss, but otherwise a vase that's holding roses so you know that anyone who's not afraid is only holding noses or is led by them or poses and don't know that there's a senic route around 'cause it is quite beyond them thinking difference makes a difference but we all know that some other differences don't mean shit at all, that is unless you've got a taste for it, it says it likes you after everything is said and done, the last it seems is sometimes number one and sometimes it is just imagination.

goddess poetry & matricide

Kind of old fashioned or used, Robert Graves once thought poetry should refer to a goddess in payment for her service as muse. True authoress, sure, but she sounds like a sellout. I'd side more with Emily Dickenson, who thought it was free (that is, poetry). Poems are about opening orifices, our faces, oroboreas's, (not sure how to spell them, I'll just expel it) putting holes in our head, let some world come in or find us a hole, so with Emily, escape it. The word for this feat's receptivity and that takes place with poetry (or mushrooms, lysurgics, in haled or in tea). Hunters with secret secretions should stay well clear, lest Seductress could smell, or Morgaine La Fey induce amnesia and lead them astray. And that only takes a look or a twinkle in eyes auspiciously cast your way.

It is sometimes important to be able to close your own holes, under cover, so to say (though not digging your grave). Hence the need for practice in altered states of conscious (some say mind but that is a headset) is not to sustain, but to stay ahead of the game, exercise all, not just the brain so if it should happen by, something more pleasing to the eye, you might catch it (I hope not a cold). Old poetry's on about eating and sex, or it's just a matter of consumption, then rest (for the weary or old). It's easy to see most goddess mythology was authored by men. Perhaps it is penance? More like wishful thinking – who wouldn't want an authentic mother – someone to trust in, relieve you or nurture? It may be the stories of gods adolescent, "they could do no wrong, 'twas an accident" were spoken by she, who, as if worshipping them, was just self-defensive as they came from her womb.

Not their fault? Then who took her babies and made them all men, and mistook the lion, a lady, for King? How is it then she lives without a lament, 'neath asphalt, bridges, corn-rows, cement? Maybe Graves was on to something or other, because there's hardly a mention or bother in all myth-time of offing the mother unless Junior's an asshole and she's in his way,

or she is just acting as proxy for dad.
A fascist in any gender or sex
is equal, fraternal, obnoxious, bad,
particularly when it's ordered by Rx.

– see Amber Jacobs, on Why Matricide?
on how boys got wronged psychoanalitic'ly
and girls still drown in The Sea of Anxiety
and mothers are rendered to objects of feed.
 

And we should know better, they've only been hid,
they live in the middle, "you're it", it's been said.
Aristotle excluded you, Apollo denuded you,
and each child proceeds as an orphan or blue.

Language or Politics?

Zerzan, in 1988 said “Only a politics that undoes language and time and is thus visionary to the point of voluptuousness has any meaning”. Shouldn't this read “Only a language that undoes politics and time and is thus visionary to the point of voluptuousness has any meaning”?

"Iconographically restored myths, incorporated as lived experience, abolish time because they are timeless, derived from the achronous condition of Dreamtime. And myths are embodied, not in referential language (in which words are taken as referring to some external reality), but iconic language (a term which denotes the notion of mythic language being its own reality, rather than merely symbolizing some external reality).

Zerzan complains that art, like all systems of symbolic representation (including language) “is always about ‘something hidden’. But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it” (Zerzan 1988, p.54). Symbols “stand for” a reality which can be apprehended only through their mediation, which inevitably produces alienation. But mythic thought does not function in this way. It operates in a metaphorical, not a literal, manner. And metaphors function, not by pointing to a reality which they symbolize and thus render inaccessible, but through a play of resemblances and differences. Mythic consciousness results from a “desire to apprehend in a total fashion the two aspects of reality... [the] continuous and discontinuous; from [a] refusal to choose between the two; and from... [an] effort to see them as complementary perspectives giving on to the same truth”. Rather than signifying a concealed reality, it perceives analogies through modes of associational thought: “it is this logic of oppositions and correlations, exclusions and inclusions, compatibilities and incompatibilities, which explains the laws of association, not the reverse” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, pp.98-9, 90). The resulting semiotic lattice, based on the principle of bricolage, remains entirely ludic. Mythic consciousness thus avoids the alienation inherent in all symbolization, yet retains the possibility of linguistic expressivity. It abolishes language, and yet facilitates unestranged intersubjective communication." – John Moore

Ambrose, again: Nine Theses

1. NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only by a process of reasoning – which is a phenomenon. Nevertheless, the discovery and exposition of noumena offer a rich field for what Lewes calls "the endless variety and excitement of philosophic thought." Hurrah (therefore) for the noumenon!


2. PROOF, n. Evidence having a shade more of plausibility than of unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that of only one.


3. LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion – thus:
   i. Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
   ii. Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds; therefore –
   iii. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.


4. GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain – the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.


5. NEWTONIAN, adj. Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when.


6. OUTCOME, n. A particular type of disappointment. By the kind of intelligence that sees in an exception a proof of the rule the wisdom of an act is judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal nonsense; the wisdom of an act is to be juded by the light that the doer had when he performed it.


7. ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.


8. PLAN, v.t. To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.


9. MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Insanitary Conditions or Conditional Sanity

• sanitarium 1851, lit. "place dedicated to health," as if from Mod.L. *sanitarius, from L. sanitas "health," from sanus "healthy, sane" (cf. sanatarium).
• sanatorium 1839, from Mod.L., prop. neut. of L.L. sanitorius "health-giving," from L. sanatus, pp. stem of sanare "to heal," from sanus "well, healthy, sane." Latin sanare is the source of It. sanare, Sp. sanar.
• -ium a suffix found on nouns borrowed from Latin, especially derivatives of verbs ( odium; tedium; colloquium; delirium ), deverbal compounds with the initial element denoting the object of the verb ( nasturtium ), other types of compounds ( equilibrium; millennium ), and derivatives of personal nouns, often denoting the associated status or office ( collegium; consortium; magisterium ); -ium also occurs in scientific coinages on a Latin model, as in names of metallic elements ( barium; titanium ) and as a Latinization of Gk -ion ( pericardium ). Used to form the names of metal elements, after the style of early-named elements, as well as the isotopes of hydrogen. By extension, appended to common words to create scientific-sounding or humorous-sounding fictional substance names. Used to indicate the setting where a given activity is carried out: gymnasium, auditorium, stadium, colloquium, planetarium, podium, sanatorium. Words so formed often take "-a" for the plural.
• sonnet fourteen-line rhyming poem with set structure: a short poem with 14 lines, usually ten-syllable rhyming lines, divided into two, three, or four sections. There are many rhyming patterns for sonnets, and they are usually written in iambic pentameter. [Mid-16th century. Directly or via French < Italian sonnetto < Old Provençal son "poem" < Latin sonus "sound", see Sanskrit Sama-Veda [sáamə váydə] n. ancient Hindu sacred text: [Late 18th century. < Sanskrit < sāman "chant" + vedaḥ "knowledge"]]
• sonata 1. classical composition for solo instrument: a piece of classical music for a solo instrument or a small ensemble. It consists of several movements, at least one of which is in sonata form. 2. one-movement baroque keyboard composition: a piece of baroque keyboard music in a single movement [Late 17th century. < Italian < feminine past participle of sonare "sound" < Latin sonare ]
• um representing hesitation in speech: a word used in writing to represent the kind of grunting sound that people make when they hesitate in speaking [Early 17th century. Representing an inarticulate sound]
  – from the dictionary

Insanitarium: The prefix in- can refer to absense or negation ('not') as well as inclusion ('within'), which generally means 'clot-forming', but may (rarely) also indicate the quite opposite 'scattering' ('incoherent' or 'not clot-forming', 'unglued at the hinges'), which we must as well accept as colloqially more accurate with the common phrases, "scatter-brained" and "blown mind" when referring to the insane and "clod-hopper" for the rural variety on the twin analogy of leaping (a symptom of madness) and breaking soil (a known source of unsanity or perversion) rather than wind.

The leakage, fault or deep crack is clearly seen on the part of the diagnosticians (crackpots) and not in their clientelle. This is because of the inherent split still open within all acadaemic circles as to the nature of ill-health as ultimately derived from within or without. Medievil doctors who thought all sickness was due to insanitary conditions, producing infection like a ford factory, pit themselves against the churchmen who insisted on internal construction error (sin as birth defect) or the more Platonic attitude of a "station" one was born into and from which one should never attempt to stray (still the standard definition of 'crime'). The churchmen had to back off a bit when it was pointed out the contagion factor in sin much resembled succombing to temptation. After much bloodletting, there was a resolution of conflict when the external microbe was found hobnobbing with intracellular materials. Artaud, diagnosed with scatterbrain disorder since art is supposed to be constructive and destruction best left in the capable hands of governments, was electrocuted 37 times for suggesting the microbe was a particle of grace (god) dissected to form atoms usefull for evaporative affects when they themselves were split.

Lastly, um, we should not discount the phonological resemblence of the root morphemes /san-/ (> 'health', 'cleanliness') and /son-/ (> 'sound', 'pronouncement') as mere chance linguistic anomoly. There is always, by definition, a culprit or sin hiding behind each pronoun. The only evidence a quack (which is a digital crackpot tuned in to disharmonic soundings) can go on is aural or literary: disorganized speech must, in theory, follow disorganized thinking just as infection is known to derive from living in slovenly habitats or through lack of rigidly sanitary habits. Interesting that a soiled or dirty mind (and they're pretty solid on this matter) is still considered a moral rather than purely psychological condition, but literally, a sanitarium is 'a place of brain-washing with a technical or scientific ring' (hence the final and unhesitant articulation of "hum" even when accompanyied with much beard-rubbing with one hand between puffs on a pipe with the other to stimulate clarity in thought – in smoke-free environments, beard rubbing alone is sufficient when attached to a distinguished or patronizing "um"). Most often, a negative health diagnosis is warranted solely on the basis of others' reportage in the form of accusation or hearsay – one is invariably reminded of heresy. A consonance is always achievable with a consensus of the proper pronouncement of consonants. Don't let those tricky vowels fool you.

Not another Word

Take one word. Take any, but for the sake of experiment, or what someone else might say, "humour me", just this once, just one if you please. You can proceed to write an infinite book or speak a never-ending discourse, a rant to be more precise, utilizing, or scripting or uttering every other word in the existence of former future noises and sightings in any language, even those never before heard or seen, and you can make sense to more than just someone. Might be anyone. Nothing said will displease everyone; how could you know such a thing? Are they even real or is there only a need for deafening applause and then who cares how it comes about? That could be your execution! Recognition and encouragement are quite other words altogether.

Your word. Every other word has something to say about it. And then you notice there is no word. There are no words. Alphabets grow on no tree in any combination but much reference to trees and reverent trees at that. There are war nodes, but these are imaginary. Iterations and re-iterations of sightings and soundings plucked from a string and immortalized in fret-work. If all the frets are in the wrong place, like around your neck instead of across it, there is still some play which makes music. The brain is just an organ, simulating horns like a rhinocerus mask and strings making you as well as a puppet. Don't fret. Bow. That is to say, fiddle.

In Japanese, the sensei is the one making sense, especially when it is not common. The sensei has a bag filled with arousals. Some druids had letters in their bags. Each letter is a word. There is nothing else like it in the world except a string of them. Robert Graves, the grave robber that is, he may well have been but noticed the secrecy of cranes forming cuneiform on the sky and some ancient one collected them and discovered the post office weighting for the right brothers to hear news of flying human thought impossible before writing. And so there is much precedence to wronging, setting both phones and ears to ringing.

Dialectics was always the crossing of lines and there was always the confusion between lines and words, immortalized by the latin word, 'lect' which sounds so much like a leg someone somewhere must have seen a utilitarian connection with running and then there was a flying off of the handle for the hard of hearing and their hand signals. The most efficient way to pull a leg is with the mouth. Taking care not to bite lest there be insult or fright. Without language, there is no magic. Ecology proves it in no certain words – it's poetic. There is no representation. There is no exchange. There are no terms. Senseless? There is more and less of it, depending on your firms or variable density. Gibberish, or the double reductive jibber-jabber is perfectly reasonable in the language of rogues and gypsies, which, in fact, is any cant or cryptolect but your own, and that is the final word on that. Take it or leave it.

The Scientific Alternative, from Rabbit-hole to Nutshell

For the big bangers, faith in the black hole is a certainty derived from the imutably unknown. It represents an encapsulated zone of nothingness, sans shell, into which all passing bystanders are sucked. The closer the flyby, the stronger the pull, the faster the fall. The zone is not a hole but the most dense condition of substance imaginable, sucking even itself into its own nothingness. The greater its material increase, the smaller it becomes, which is also to say, it takes up less space and time itself flies by the wayside. Time becomes nothing, and space itself disapears in a fit of logic. It is the end of criteria, the end of points of reference, the end of data. What is left is half a metaphor, a self-referencing dada-esque language game, a lonely ego not at the center of the universe, but the universe itself, in and of itself, consisting of nothing, the Great Oblivion Dude (god).

Since this end of everything cancels its own beginning, it cancels the first law of physics (as an ultimate transgression against the logic and reason operating in former fabrics of timed space), this law being none other than "from nothing something can never come" and its inversion, "from something nothing can ever be". Materialism's first axiom? "It's always something!" This is the premise supporting every calculation positing a material object of local uncertainty leaving no evidence of itself but the reactionary display by others within its regional influence (which is to say, seduced by its gravity), and the entire scaffold of material history which supported the idea falls away.

Essentially, something becomes nothing, and even loses its cabability to transform into pure potential – it is the end of possibility, the problem of peak energy bringing on the end of everything as we know it. Refusing to accept its own demise, Great Oblivion Dude explodes in a tantrum of cosmic scale, like the ejaculation from a glimmering erection sending seminal sparks helter-skelter throughout the great black nothingness, like an autoerotic resurrection of the dead coming to find order in general assemblies to legislate an astropolitical, transactional dance of the eternal return of the economy, but ever in fear of the insurrection of the coming disharmony, afterwhich everyone is lined up against the wall and shot.

Reverse Engineering the Fall or Emergencies from a Rabbit Hole

If we are accustomed to burying our dead in honour of grieve or gravity or even by unconscious habit through millennial repetition, shouldn't archaeologists and others digging holes presume, because of the axiom, "what goes up must come down" (unless one gets too high, in which case to be out of sight is truly out of mind – or off one's rock – except for the hauntings by phantoms some call memory, others fantasy), that in a logical transposition, creatures must come into being from holes in the ground, as if it's their mother, or from mothers as if they're the earth? If one is embracive of orphans, isn't one mother as good as another? Should you wish to speed up the process, expect some resistance – the bigger the tuber, the harder the pull. Should you wish to halt it, expect to be buried by yourself, otherwise, there is some encouragement, even if a placebo, which is Russian for 'thank you' or in Latin, 'to please'.

Sans winds or strong wings, the uprising or flight, as a gravitational transgression (without which the game would end in sudden death; in fact, given time, they all do anyway), is only achieved by foot or by mouth, lest our collective umbilicus break. Anti-gravity is a loss of density, easily sustained by scattering brains or setting fire to your remains. In case of regret, there may be other holes from which to emerge. When Vine Deloria said his people emerged from holes in the earth, it was a case of adopting a new mother, and staying near her as a matter of choice – the previous home was Amnesia (or, like selective service, was never registered in the first place). The medicine wheel or omphallus is a poetic reminder of nurturing mothers and the sun providing galactic inspiration. Such is a poem in the form of a chiasma like optic nerves and chromosomes. The transcendental portal through transdimensional space is the joke by, of and for the people who do not explore their own utterances but chastise mythic poetry as superstition or worse, magical or childish thinking.

But no shit! God made the earth before the starlit heavens it sits in and the only reality is measured with irrational numbers and cities came before the country and you will be smart if you can raise the dough to become institutionally certifiable. For everyone else, there is a tending to machinery toward a material singularity producing such density that the universe has no option but to collapse into itself to the central point of nothing at an ever-increasing rate. Either way, the poets win due to the failure to enact legislation requiring the literal interpretation of anything! Such is the way of natural selection – the survival of survivors, now residing underground, due to fluctuating variability – it's a big pool to draw from.

Prosaic Prose

Like poetry, "anthropology is comparison or know nothing"...
Comparison is a meandering bent and that is a temptation
to psychosis or to sin, a drop off or out from a straight and narrow line.

But on further exploration, an adventure of a kind, one should surely find
the barbaric is the final evolution or stage of termination for each and every line
of prosaic interpretation, not to mention a big bang blasting every civil hyphenation.

What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that 'music' and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it... And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

The joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares to set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind...

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilization alive. The scholar is a quarry-man, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet's insurance against factual error. It is easy enough for the poet in this hopelessly muddled and inaccurate modern world to be misled into false etymology, anachronism and mathematical absurdity by trying to be what he is not. His function is truth, whereas the scholar's is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

– Robert Graves, 1946

Fiction & Taboo

Fort's principle: "People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

– Colin Wilson, on Charles Fort

"Of course high among virtues are the honorable lies of Governments. Whether virtuously said, or accurately reported, I don't know:

... if anybody could ever distinguish between righteousness and exploitation and tyranny.

One of the engaging paradoxes of our existence – which strip mathematics of meaning – is that a million times a crime is patriotism. ...If we could have new abominations, so unmistakably abominable as to hush the lubricators, who plan murder to stop slaughter – but that is only dreamery, here in our existence of the hyphen, which is the symbol of hypocrisy...

And almost all liars are conventionalists.

The one quality that the lower animals have not in common with human beings is creative imagination. Neither a man, nor a dog, nor an oyster ever has had any. Of course there is another view, by which is seen that there is in everything a touch of creativeness. I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Though I have classed myself with some noted fictionists, I have to accept that the absolute fictionist never has existed. There is fictional coloration to everybody's account of an "actual occurrence," and there is at least the lurk somewhere of what is called the "actual" in everybody's yarn. There is the hyphenated state of truth-fiction. Out of dozens of reported pearls in stews, most likely there have been instances; most likely once upon a time an old fiddle did turn out to be a Stradivarius; and it could be that once upon a time somebody did get a ring back fishwise.

But when I come upon the unconventional repeating, in times and places far apart, I feel – even though I have no absolute standards to judge by – that I am outside the field of ordinary liars...

"GOOD MORNING!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.

I have this record, upon newspaper authority.

It can't be said – and therefore will be said – that I have a marvellous credulity for newspaper yarns.

But I am so obviously offering everything in this book, as fiction. That is, if there is fiction. But this book is fiction in the sense that Pickwick Papers, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species, Genesis, Gulliver's Travels, and mathematical theorems, and every history of the United States, and all other histories, are fictions. A library-myth that irritates me most is the classification of books under "fiction" and "non-fiction."

And yet there is something about the yarns that were told by Dickens that set them apart, as it were, from the yarns that were told by Euclid. There is much in Dickens' grotesqueries that has the correspondence with experience that is called "truth," whereas such Euclidean characters as "mathematical points" are the vacancies that might be expected from a mind that had had scarcely any experience. That dog-story is axiomatic. It must be taken on faith. And, even though with effects that sometimes are not much admired, I ask questions...

Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies...

It seems that my reasoning is that, under some circumstances, if something is highly unlikely, it is probable. John Stuart Mill missed that...

Said Dr. Hastings H. Hart, of the Russell Sage Foundation, as reported in the newspapers, May 10, 1931: "Morons for the most part can be the most useful citizens, and a great deal of the valuable work being done in the United States is being done by such mentally deficient persons."

Dr. Hart has given very good newspaper space for this opinion, which turned out to be popular. One can't offend anybody with any statement that is interpreted as applying to everybody else. Inasmuch as my own usefulness has not been very widely recognized, I am a little flattered, myself. To deny, ridicule, or reasonably explain away occurrences that are the data of this book, is what I call useful. A general acceptance that such things are would be unsettling. I am an evil one, quite as was anybody, in the past, who collected data that were contrary to the orthodoxy of his time. Some of the most useful work is being done in the support of Taboo. The break of Taboo in any savage tribe would bring on perhaps fatal disorders. As to the taboos of savages, my impressions are that it is their taboos that are keeping them from being civilized; that, consequently, one fetish is worth a hundred missionaries.

– Charles Hoy Fort, Wild Talents

The Fortunate Wheel

A golden rule's unneeded when one notices surroundings: "what goes around comes around, no worries". Augustine found so abhoring, a pain to privilocracy – mid-age peasants knew full-well from pagan stories told from old that chance is only half of it, the other's steared to make one's destiny.

Chance is fickle, so they say, though it can help decisions because faith believed in all the way presents but one direction. But as a starting point, we say "so what if it is?" When you come around again it's likely fallen quite a way.

This points to Lady Tyche or Fortuna's spinning wheel, casting out lines like spiders inviting vitals to grab on and calling crawling feet a rudder if in lieu of boat, to help one's fate along.

Or globe she's spinning with her fingers like a basketball or underfoot creating day and night. In middle ages, a game of ferris wheel or rolling heel for gypsy wagons with a compass for an orphan – it's compassion, never any kleptomania – to remind it's not just chaos makes a cornicopia and sometimes like the snail, chew with much less haste so's not to forgoe taste: there will be plenty but not if you'd stand still, waitng till you're more than twenty.

The tiller is as well a weaver's beam some call a transom but sometimes it's a club not made by joinery or ransom, and a transit views a steady rod or two or stadia and makes a road as if a star to steer by.

Where six hundred seven feet's a single stadium and the rod is sixteen and a half (or ten for shorter craft), the same for any cranium or tub we call a boat and the rod is the handle of a rudder and a perch or pole.

Pull the oar or turn the sail from transom, tiller shift and tell a tale concerning it in case your mind's adrift. Viewed from a perch a pole shift's just a turning of direction and if you're six feet high a league is to the sea's horizon.

The wheel is great if taken as a symbol, but as a tool for getting there from lake or stream or ocean, nothing's more impressive than a boat & oar or sail – now that's quite an invention – like a symbiosis with a whale, like to cross a scary stream land-lubbers grabbed the milk-cow's tail.

Divination presents a chance for wandering perusal; the oracle – it's like a koan – removes the rut beneath the wheel and in that spell enlarge your perch upon the universal. Blow your mind with this: sometimes beauty isn't just an ordered academia but sublime as any in- or outer spatial psychedelia.

And as for time there's none at all or ever not enough except in Math-time most would call real and that's when things get tough. Myth-time's simulteneity for sums and differences. Math-time's that old religion 'cause when infinitude is ever added to finality the sum is cross-eyed, absolutely certain death, and no one recognises but the dead who may know all or nothing to surprise us. Time goes nowhere yet still a question for the square and hip; going is for mariners by foot or truck or ship.