Visceral reality, Hot Milk & the Spark of Life

All Bleeding Eventually Stops

– Dave Brown

The prospect of motion was one thing the translator of Stirner's classic, old Steven Byington aptly got through to me, albeit to help the book-seller and pacifier of anarchists, Benjamin ('P.R.') Tucker build up a damaging case of madness, and ironically, in his moral deference to interest charged on borrowed time, or money. But then, he was only trying to invoke a Bergsonism to bring Max Stirner into the loving embrace of the worshipers of property (their own) and cast out more intelligent interpretations (or at least cover them up in a mental ward or with the application of several plagues in Mexico during its insurrection – see James L. Walker & the Self-management of Medicine, ISBN: 42). We can catch a glipmse of the hypocracy of democracy when Shakespeare demands "Physician, heal thyself!" ... and he did, so they gave him another dose.

Foremost in mind, however, may have been to negate the possible fruition of the prophesy by the Manchester, England school teacher, Miss Dora Marsden, which fortells thus: "When one becomes filled with thoughts, there will be no room left for thinking...'It is the kind of thing that overpowers our mental digestion'." Of course, the Spoonerist, 'P.R.' somewhat redeems himself when he says "To say that a rebel is bound in honour to take the consequences is to declare the victim the tyrant's debtor, and is superstition pure and simple! A rebel against the State is contemptible if he complains of the consequences of his rebellion, but certainly he is entitled to avoid them if he can, and, in doing so, he shows not lack of fibre, but possession of wit" (possibly referring to his own behaviour and advice following Most's flammable insurance scams and the haymarket executions).

The diffuse confusion not only in placing Tucker but successfully marketing "liberty" while still escaping the purges with bank-account in tact, is the persistence that the fixed idea of government can be dissected off from the "economic organism", but its "useful and non-invasive (functions) would be taken over by voluntary associations of workers" (Understandably, a certain Italian in 1924 favourably confused this with "fascism" – not yet a bad word in main-stream Amerika till the '40's – so much for clear and distinct language!). To this is conflated "voluntary co-operation" with adherence to a "contract fixing the limits of such co-operation, as a possibility of the future", a clear misreading of Stirner, but not, perhaps, Proudhon. The difference between a contract and agreement is the expected strength of their binding surviving (in tact) any degree of digestion. But enough of this talk of anarchic duty; back to the reverend, good doctor Byington:

I cannot but welcome [Henri] Bergson into the field against me: for if he is an opponent he is one of the most obliging ones I ever met. Being on the topic of Greek philosophy, he takes up the well-known Greek arguments to prove the impossibility of motion* [see note], and identifies this defiance of common sense with their disposition to worship ideas. The idea [image], the particular state of existence conceived as stationary, corresponds to any one of the various places in which the moving body is conceived to stand successively; but just as the moving body never stands in any of these places, so man, or any other progressive being, never is in any of the states represented by our ideas – he is only passing through them. So Bergson; let us accept the analogy, and instead of considering merely the metaphysical question of the possibility of motion let us consider its application to practical life. Suppose the moving body to be a man; and suppose that he intends to make his motion more or less satisfactory to himself. He has nothing more urgent to consider than these places to which or through which he is to pass. Ordinarily his only rational purpose is to pass to or through these places; the choosing of his route so that the process of movement itself shall be satisfactory is of some consequence indeed, yet of minor consequence. Even if he is not aiming at any place – if he is walking through unknown country for pleasure or exploration – he must still from time to time have an eye to places that he does not wish to pass through, or he will come to grief. Does Bergson's analogy hold in all these respects? Decidedly it does. In the conduct of human life, intelligent planning is possible only by having an eye to these states represented by the "ideas" which form the landmarks of our course, choosing which of them we wish to reach, and, as a very urgent matter, noting the ones to be avoided. Whether we stop at the ideas or not, we must steer by aiming at them if we are to live sensibly. That is what the page of Bergson comes to.

Steven T. Byington, 1913

But then, that would make ideas mere provisional reference points or navigational aids and not suitable fodder for stone tablets or grave markers in a field of well-fed lillies, which, as we understand, toil not – on both counts. Otherwise, there is the reverse invisibility cloak surrounding the center of the universe (a narcissistic solipsism or house of mirrors) which renders the blindness of a blank slate on any subject position, like an empty gut in an abandoned macdonalds burger joint smelling of moldy reefer. Bergson used more, the word "image" than "idea". Feats of imagination are rarely, these days, taken as absolutes, and thinking truths does not make them so. Duh! But throwing bricks through mirrors (or seeing them where they are not – a bit of reflection or identification with the world outside) may make fiction the more revealing process than the generally-preferred doxa and dogma.

The one gnostic idea survives, however, despite eons of dissection and quibbling elaboration, that life is generated not in organic motion itself (the question of Lamarck, with or without ulterior motive), but in the application of a spark to a potential (or former, as regards Mary Shelley's muses) corpse, as the lit fuse is to a cannonball in flight. It may be that literary fusion will never supply a sustainable energy source like an enzyme is to digestion and bowel movements. To wit:

The spark of life for a block of cheese is the stomach's inert content (rennet sans milk) of a dead, baby sheep, who's gender is irrelevant and any extraneous milk will do in the amalgamation, as long as it's from a mother and not a thistle or prickly lettuce. However, thistle milk (which is really a white, acidic blood of the plant's circulatory system) is a suitable substitute for dead babies when added to hot milk, aiding in separation but the cheese will be mushy before it crumbles. (Mold sold separately). Should your taste move more in the direction of live music, the same baby (or its mother's) intestines make an excellent addition to the string section: Livelier than steel (though not as loud), it will not cause sparks (but may inspire your own). The sappy blood from a pine tree or its needles may prevent babies altogether, in which case musicians will need rely on their own steel, whose production also requires much heat, rubbing and stretching. A nice hot cup of milk might help you sleep after any such moving ordeal, but does not affect the conscience – that calls for a strong dose of religion or its alternate: reductive caballic materialist philosophy (RCMP). For any other liver toxicity, try a bowl of milk thistle and eggs (hen not included). More adventurous souls bleed poppies like leeches to sooth excessive animation – then they drop off. A not unsuitable substitute for petroleum distilates, vast pine forests were cleared, as at the time, they were considered a sustainable solution (which always means "a temporary fix") to the accelerating need to plant growing soldiers' corpses.

– google add

– The Discovery Channel

– A. Runnion Polisson

After the first big war (falsely accused, advertised as "the last"), Dora Marsden gave us her own impressions of the relation between "selfs" and "souls", the separation of which would most certainly bring death (or at least bad tasting music – a priori), just like lopping off the government from the presumed "economic organism" (the French Public Safety Committee saw on two occasions how well that had worked! It was exhumed and elect-trickly revived), but her manuscripts were destroyed and she confined to an institution for the insane for the last three-or-so decades of her life, fulfilling Tucker's initial prophecy: "a person who pursues that ideal [repelled by Proudhon's solutions in accordance with Rousseau's 'social contract'] will find his proper environment within the confines of a madhouse. Until such is forthcoming, the discussion cannot proceed." But such is the sentiment of the civil-tongued, where there are no prisoners but political prisoners, all heretics to the ideas of democracy (or mutual constraint) and binding contracts. Is that not the state already? Well, of matrimony anyway!

[*note – it was not so much motion which Xeno disproved, but getting from here to there in accordance with the calculation of pre-scribed steps along a consensual criterion, the sophists' [or Mel Brookes' "Stand-up Philosophers"] notion of 'fixed idea' to which they generally ran opposition like every child's "why?" and "yeah but!" after-which they must run for their very lives. Not to be confused with ritual, which is merely a repeat performance and typically entertaining. In the same fashion that Bergson questioned "stages" as corpuscles which images are thought to "represent" (minutes and snap-shots), Buckminster-Fuller did not disprove continuity when he discredited a "continuum" along "lines in space". These beings were less progressive than multidimensional, and that means "life-like".]