ICONOCLAST, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."
-- Ambrose Bierce

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Keep it together, or the immaterial nonsense in the distinction – arbitrary split between invention, discovery, nature and artifice

When you have a sultry egg and slice it anywhere to produce a separation or divorce, a single slice but clean through and through (crosswise or in that fashion would be two – however well-met at the intersection – two slices at cross purpose doubling the results, to the degree of an exponential insult where, between me and you, one would do) there is born three: the mother-egg (it's not a fire-hydrant no matter how you slice it) and two crescents, cross-sectioned offspring with faces whose similarity is reversed in one sense, and in any other, or by comparison, depends on how you cut the mustard or how thick you spread it.

The scalpel or demi-urge, of course, and excluding for the moment asexually reproducing organisms (we are after-all, on the topic of eggs), stands in for the father, any of which will do, but has some lingering say on matters of appearance and even more-so if motherly (or at least like a kindly uncle), but otherwise is hereafter inconsiderate to our purpose and has no further bearing on the matter unless she invites him back or at a later date another just won't do.

In cell biology, mitosis represents a discontinuity of trangendered mother-father embedded-embodied unity: With the principle of identity one divided by one is two (1/1=2) – if the second one was any other, the result would have been three. In family life, division and addition are co-equivalent, lest there comes along an unforeseen subtraction. Meiosis has no long-term disruption to continuity of the original matter/mother or big picture: 1/1=3(or more); 1+1=3(or more) and then things get sticky until it's time to start over again with a secure sense of prodigality at one end or cantankerous old age at the other.
Introductory Biology & Counter-Mathematics
(Hardcore, Brace & Bittington, ISBN: 72)

We've been well informed and should by now accept without question that humans have an innate fear of the unknown, at least until it's been accurately quantified. To be sure, the only thing less feared is death. Tomorrow, BBC Science Headline News will report the discovery of the gene responsible for manufacturing the protein actuating universal paranoia. Induction reminds us that this production must come later in development, since every newborn would expire from shock due to instantaneous saturation with unknown variables at birth, or at least shortly thereafter. Even were this debilitating tendency overcome by a more powerful defensive protein to counter the hideous effects of the natural environment impacting the senses, no child would thereafter need be punished for an over-active imagination or curiosity beyond the limits of a recursive tautology. Our own experience suggests otherwise, and inverted logic provides an alternate and more comfortable hypothesis: there may be a ubiquitous fear of a difference of opinion. It can't be a matter of resistance to ambiguity, else neuronal activity would cease and we'd all swoon at every modern inconvenience.

The one immortal truth is that nothing can be discussed without reference to something else, even if unintended: as one thing leads to another, all discourse is metaphoric, and metaphor is the juxtaposition of forms set side by side, hence comparison, hence artificial, hence natural, all at the same time and not indisposingly so. It is an a priori deduction subject to such passioned embitterment its truth-value would best be ignored.

There is a sense of security called trust essential to everyday life (very likely, to any other sort as well). One approaches a chair almost mindlessly. It's name, title and definition are irrelevant if we can set upon the sensory appearance matching up well with any relayed or recalled experience. One rarely questions it or even plans ahead so-as to be certain it will not metamorphose into a dragon's nostril and set fire to your ass. Conversely:

No matter how high and mighty the throne,
what sits on it 's the same as your own!
Chad Mitchel Trio

When you've seen one ass, you've seen 'em all, or so goes the saying in proctological circles. Inductive reasoning does not lead to knowledge but to decision, that is, action coupled to the sense of psychological security one would wish it accompanied had we only lived in Eutopia. It applies to sticking to a path as well as pealing off it. Right or wrong is inconsequential to the action taken, the criterion or hinge or justification is the sense of calm or excitement or pleasure or relief it brings – it comes bearing gifts so is considered politely correct, even when in the form of a double-dare.

Therefore, there is no immutability to be expected, movement can continue on a transitory, provisional basis, truth is excluded. Investigative consciousness only comes to play after the advance of the unexpected, like the wrong appendage protruding from one's backside. Induction has no concern with the unknown, which is to say is not otherwise curious except when a perturbation seems somehow familiar or reminiscent. The inductive facility steps to the background, incompetent regarding such matters, when the playful poetic sense is called forth if not a second opinion. Suppressing play early-on leads to both morality and political-economy, generating such encyclopædic reams of dogma as to warrant it's own name and title: Modernity. It only rhymes with Maternity like honey to an orbiting cyanide capsule, and the fruit it bears is just as deadly.

If truth exists as is colloquially expected, because each claim differs from or contradicts every other but the nepotistic (where nothing is excluded or defined away just to force an issue, which is to say, "sans politics"), then every interpretation or representation is false, in error or fuzzily indeterminate. If, on the other hand, axiomatic truth is excluded or suspended as itself a dead end, a conversation stopper, a sleep inducer or any other stoppage or provoker of war (a true answer, in its infallible finality is all of these) then each interpretation is appropriate, each performance an act and every utterance is silently preceded with an "as if" as loud as any winking eye. It should be given or even taken that it's only a pretense – education can only ever familiarize one with the current script. It's not like we should take it with us after the show.

As Proudhon once observed, there's nothing supernatural about it: the Absolute is the holy trinity in all of its three-headed aspect: religious, political and economic. The absolute extends its insatiably sticky fingers into everything. It gropes, grabs, grapples, gripes, grumbles, groans, grinds, graduates and grows, all coated with honey to both cover its ass and suck you into it like a fly to a sticky yellow no-pest strip, because the omnipotent has but one limitation: it can't reach to lick its own ass (except metaphorically) without being booed off the stage for an all-too-obvious costume malfunction. How else is it that the greater good is invariably seen walking in the company of a large evil and even a lesser evil is always the preferred champion? Well, as Baudrilard tried to reply discussing the simulacron, instead of no reality hiding behind the present situation, he might have said "there's nothing lower than the slimy truth", and more safely got away. No one likes to hear another dis their mother, not at least without sufficient pay.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Time for "The Legend of Immortal Truth"

Figurative speech is paint by earlobe but not always arriving just in time: Like the form of a mother beating around the bush, "Time" is the metaphoric juxtaposition of recollection with the mathematic ratio of possibility to probability of what does not exist – even as a blueprint – a rational expression impossible to solve without irrational numbers until it has already passed. Hence at one time, the future sneaks up from behind and kicked you in the ass. The literal interpretation of time produces "Truth", an aphoristic affirmation always formless, coming out but occluded by the horizon of one's perception and therefore problematic, whether considering childhood memory or a weather forecast. The past is history (a handy alibi for the present), the future mystery and like fish or an inundated dry creek-bed, with bare hands, the present's too slippery to catch. In the visual realm, time is a comet following an invisible arc (because it's not really there) across the sky, itself followed by an unwagging tail but off at a kilter (because it is there) for all to see, and after a few revolutions, is gone for as many as a thousand years just like an Algerian plague but not always in conspiracy with earth changing catastrophies and insurrections after which we must come up with a new story because the old ones aren't jiving. To any question, the immortal answer is always "Maybe", but then, only figuratively.

Ten million million years and a day have rolled, since these events, away;

but still the peasant at fall of night, belated therenear, is oft affright by sounds of a phantom bear in flight; a breaking of branches under the hill; the noise of a going when all is still! and hens asleep on the perch, they say, cackle sometimes in a startled way, as if they were dreaming a dream that mocks the lope and whiz of a fleeting fox!

Half we're taught, and teach to youth, and praise by rote, is not,

but merely stands for, truth.

So of my goat: she's merely designed to represent the truth—"immortal" to this extent:

dead she may be, and skinned—frappĂ©— hid in a dreadful den away; prey to the churches—(any will do, except the church of me and you.) the simplest miracle, even then, will get her up and about again.
– Ambrose Bierce, Cobwebs

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Barnyard Grammar

"I say, you!" bawled a fat ox in a stall to a lusty young ass who was braying outside; "the like of that is not in good taste!"

"In whose good taste, my adipose censor?" inquired the ass, not too respectfully.

"Why—h'm—ah! I mean it does not suit me. You ought to bellow."

"May I inquire how it happens to be any of your business whether I bellow or bray, or do both—or neither?"

"I cannot tell you," answered the critic, shaking his head despondingly; "I do not at all understand it. I can only say that I have been accustomed to censure all discourse that differs from my own."

"Exactly," said the ass; "you have sought to make an art of impertinence by mistaking preferences for principles. In 'taste' you have invented a word incapable of definition, to denote an idea impossible of expression; and by employing in connection therewith the words 'good' and 'bad,' you indicate a merely subjective process in terms of an objective quality. Such presumption transcends the limit of the merely impudent, and passes into the boundless empyrean of pure cheek!"

At the close of this remarkable harangue, the bovine critic was at a loss for language to express his disapproval. So he said the speech was in bad taste. – A. Bierce, 1874

"Pray walk into my parlour," said the spider to the fly. "That is not quite original," the latter made reply. "If that's the way you plagiarize, your fame will be a fib— But I'll walk into your parlour, while I pitch into your crib. But before I cross your threshold, sir, if I may make so free, Pray let me introduce to you my friend, 'the wicked flea.'" "How do you?" says the spider, as his welcome he extends; "'How doth the busy little bee,' and all our other friends?" "Quite well, I think, and quite unchanged," the flea said; "though I learn, In certain quarters well informed, 'tis feared 'the worm will turn.'" "Humph!" said the fly; "I do not understand this talk—not I!" "It is 'classical allusion,'" said the spider to the fly.

Moral: An intrusive preposition couplied with an article (see, for example, the distinction between the two imperatives: "Punch the clock to the end of time" and "Punch the clock to end time". The first verb looses its metaphoric ambiguity and the second verb metamorphically actualizes itself from the nominal state. The appropriate substitution would, of course, be: "Punch the clock for the last time" and all three Thesaurian confusions disappear).

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Is Spider-grandmother a seductress or is it entrapment?

[Posted in May by Dave on the Synchromesh Transmission]

Au contraire, Pierre, a spider never seduces its dinner. Seduction would not even apply to the Venus Fly-trap, which only indicates an error in judgement on the part of pollenating insects. The web is well-placed alongside another's path, a point of transition, a bottleneck like a Chinook fishtrap or a cop posing as a hooker on a busy downtown intersection where one might expect a bit more authenticity. The extent of the web is the horizon of a spider's perception extending its sensation of a perturbation. The spider still must move to the vibration to enwrap and consume it. It is a joyful noise played on the spider's web of expanded consciousness. If anything, it is the fly which, albeit inadvertently, seduces the spider with an angelic pluck of the harp string! A sublime sound for the spider, a frantic wiggle for the fly.

Seduction, on the other hand, is an invitation for some mutual wiggling and not a matter of consumption at all. It is not, as Baudrillard suggests, a faux appearance for possession; it is merely an expression of receptivity. A faux appearance for possession is a sales pitch to enfavour a commodity exchange. A seductive adornment is merely an expressive emphasis, to attract another's attention, a perturbation within their perceptual horizon. A pleasant surprise. A question of extension by means of a simple redirection where a loud vocal announcement such as "Hey baby, wanna booogie?" may seem inappropriate for the situation.

There is a difference between seduction and entrapment residing in one's motivation. Hell, they don't even rhyme! The confusion is brought on by the posing of equality when we notice matching patterns. When we witness overwhelming entrapment in our own lives, we redirect to that side of the equation as par excellent or primary index of the other. Thus, in the same manner that Baudrillard cannot find an "authentic" gift (he thinks it therefore cannot exist), he says seduction is at base entrapment, jiving with social psychologists who pronounce all communication antagonistic.

Pretty quickly, half the equation disappears altogether by virtue of linear sequencing. Reductionism reduces meaning by shrinking the horizon of perception. It does not annihilate meaning, which is always a potential. From a mechanical point of view, the same muscles are engaged in seduction and entrapment. It is a matter of polysemy which gets the poet in us excited, whereas the mathemetician proclaims identity and "end of discussion". The romantically susceptible has at least a fifty percent chance of error. Over time, our own language illustrates the poetic associations of similarity without demanding linear causality: a tela 'web'; a toile 'sheer fabric'; a toilette 'bag for clothing'; a toilet 'receptacle for shit'; coming full turn back to toilette water 'perfume to cover the stink' and network telecast a 'web of lies' inviting all to serve themselves another helping of, more toil. That once just meant "the way we weave our baskets".

An after thought: By insisting on clarity, linearity and unvarying precision, mathematical distinction (definition always being a process of exclusion of what never really goes away – we just proceed to ignore it), we're set up for confusion. Consider how, to this day, we mix up the social with the political – I'm sorry, in my book they're not equivalent nor in adjectival relation (except as one negates the other) and maybe that's why they'll always be at war. Self-fulfillingly prophetic, the victories and the victims always rekindle the political (that's as well to say the economic) and everything else stays the same. But then, I don't consider language an exclusively antagonist game.

– see Fanny Söderbäk, Impossible Mourning

Performance as Act

The distinction between history and myth is blurred. History, just as truth, depends on myth to come to life. The productive tension between the two underpins the Platonic account too: It is only by resorting to the myth of the cave that Socrates (as rendered down by Plato) is able to bespeak the truth in the first place.

... (As for culture) it is only insofar as we play games and tell stories that reality comes to be, and is allowed to change. Without the awkwardness and inadequacy of language and dialogue (In terms of intention or even representation) life becomes mechanical, perfectly dead. And it is exactly the excessiveness that these failures inhabit that reminds us that we are dealing with art and not philosophy. Socrates claims that he wants to expel the artist from his city because art is too far removed from truth. Behind that claim, however, hides a fear of that which cannot be reined into neat categories, that which always exceeds its own boundaries, that which in fact threatens boundaries as such.

... that every act of appropriation is bound to fail; that the human condition is a perpetual playful becoming that would be extinguished and annihilated if the metaphysical dream of eternal and self-same being was realized.
– Söderbäk

In terms of intention or even representation not every metaphor as a symbol has a meaning that endures, so what's the point of sticking to the truth? But this does not mean it has no history or future anywhere but as a curiosity or trinket on a shelf, worn on the outside (if excavated) not unlike a hood ornament wrapped around your neck, loose-fitting so it doesn't strangle. It is often said that in the old days people wore their subconscious on the outside and buried Mr. Greymatter so their day-time dreaming or play wouldn't be interrupted by all his calculations. When subsumed, so goes the thinking, it's accelerated to quantum speeds like leaps and jumps that we would label intuition, flash, a sixth sense or telepathy. It's maybe all or none of these, how would we know if it's running under cover, subliminally? Sometimes all you can do is go with your gut, and that's not to say "follow orders", it's just a temporary presumption of something you can trust. Distrust is only proved when it's been broken. Like I said before, along with others now and then, we haven't got it wrong, we've just been folded wrong-side out and told that every other way is sin (or something even worse, an embarrassment).

Sometimes archetypes, just like bad habits, appear to be shouting orders, and we notice 'arche-' loses its connection to "olden" like the -ology that digs up bones and arrows from the dirt and instead turns its spade toward the assholes that anarchists are against. You dig? Like, the words we use (a word is a psychological attachment to a boundary around an utterance just to claim some property, not as if it's a child or lover – or for some, maybe it is) once upon a time referred to something very different. In fact (which is just a statement of induction, it's a cover for "I could be wrong, but...") you could say that this concerns most anything. Culture isn't something superimposed on or emergent from nature. It's a pattern recognised and sometimes pathological from everybody's point of view, even when the pattern's still mimicked. Every pattern just endures by telling stories, dramatised and performed like it's a ritual, the motions become automated with increasing practice, forever overdoing rehearsal and forgetting all about the show.

The good news is every script can be re-written, another lesson I'd call "fact" of histories that anyone remembers, and increasingly today comparing news headlines with those last week and how the meaning of a word has changed in just one year when shouted by the same directors, we shouldn't write it off, erased as mere hypocrisy when we can apply to it grafiti, throw tomatoes or read from another script, and prepare to self-defend literarily by plowing on ahead, insisting that beating's only what we do with eggs but on occasion we turn the beaters to a bowl of leaders or directors of our little theatres.

Ignore the chief but if he doesn't go away (he has that option) you may have to resort to thirty seven arrows. Artaud would make the play, a thing considered by some "deception", just to show the option of running just before the arrows fly. If we do it in the theatre, it needn't have to be considered true and reality changes in the telling and the doing – Kristeva's "confinement within the stases", like our arrows now are locked up in museums.

Monsters were created just to stay aware, not necessarily paranoid and running scared. They only came to life when we stopped believing they were there. So even Merlin's law of basic ignorance, which seems so enticing can be broken. If you ignore them they might just conjure up something really frightening (well, so can we!). Unless it's done with some perfection, which is to say electro-shock or surrounding doses of paranoia-inducing substance, theatre for the cruel would quite resemble a poetic curse. It may not be enough, it may need some help with props where all the players' masks are made of mirrors reflecting only the monsters that are the audience. Well that's also been tried before; it doesn't work when monsters cast no reflection.

Of course, Artaud would dispense with the audience altogether (everybody's IT and also in it) as just another set of indeterminacy, a variable, not something to control. In Artaudian theatre, players and spectators are in-distinguished, or such is the intended appearance.

In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed.

We want to make out of the theater a believable reality which gives the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all true sensation requires. In the same way that our dreams have an effect upon us and reality has an effect upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the public will believe in the theater's dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty.

Hence this appeal to cruelty and terror, though on a vast scale, whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our possibilities.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre & Cruelty

Pandora was right to open up the box because in it was our resistance that the bosses labeled "every thing that's evil". That's always just a point of view, especially when you're running frightened that you'll lose control. Pandora never meant a sacrificial state, it meant 'all-giving' or 'all gifted' otherwise her name would be "Panthusia" or "Pantheon", like the oligarchs or bureaucrats that keep you in your place. The Greek words for "sacrifice" are either thusia, the noun which means nothing beyond "victimized" or "a victim", and the verb form thuo, meant "to slay, kill or slaughter" – Theo is of course a receptive god in the bible, the only consumer at the table, and we're supposed to be his cooks. Once upon a time the killing was what was done just before a feast because most folks still preferred it cooked if food could run away before you eat it. In the olden days a feast was just a gathering from which no one left still hungry.

Why would wearing telescopic glasses or time-travel be considered just a cover or disguise if it helps to make things clear like "watch out where you're headed"? And why should we trust anything presented so clearly and distinctly, that is to say so logical or banal that it puts us to sleep? Better to just move on to something else if you don't feel the need to exercise or have already had your brain-cells wiggled – it's just a game and you're not required to play in it. But don't forget about the beasts who may have wrote it. If you don't like it, plagiarize with nasty cuts or broken glass and wheat-paste it upon their peepers, they're just announcements of a new show soon to be playing near you! If you don't understand, that "jeepers!" sounds like "gibberish" or "Greek", then think of it as just another entertainment. After all, what else is there when the monsters take a fall and go to pieces?

Friday, June 8, 2012

Stasis, Chaos & Detournement

"First of all, I am not sure what a ‘full-scale refusal of the Symbolic’ would mean, whether it is possible on [Judith] Butler’s own account, and whether it is even desirable. For Kristeva, poetic language is ‘the ultimate means of its (the symbolic order’s) transformation and subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution’. Subversion, for Kristeva, means transformation, not complete breakdown or erasure. And the aim of poetic language, as I read her, is not merely to destroy the symbolic order, but rather to allow it to survive – a term which I suggest that we must understand quite literally as the sustainability and injection of life and aliveness into discourse, as opposed to a kind of mechanical and dead discourse that would reproduce itself eternally and exclude alterity and alteration altogether.[21] In fact, Kristeva warns us of the potential danger inherent in the transgressive element of artistic creation, and calls for a ‘structurally necessary protection, one that serves to check negativity, confine it within the stases, and prevent it from sweeping away the symbolic position’.

[21] Kristeva asserts that, ‘only the subject, for whom the thetic is not a repression of the semiotic chora but instead a position either taken on or undergone, can call into question the thetic so that a new disposition may be articulated’. What is at stake here is renewal, not absolute destruction. Later in Revolution in Poetic Language she reminds us that while the thetic is ‘absolutely necessary’, it is nevertheless ‘not exclusive: the semiotic […] constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called “creation.” […] what remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic’.

Despite the presumed impossibility to send something into nothing without a trace or memory, one must at this point wonder what is left in this symbolic order called modernity which anyone would want to save. But few consider the symbol by itself an arch-enemy, it's the ordered system it maintains and most now know by means of some induction that no structure can be indefinitely sustained. That word's itself a triple negative, three times absurd is always more than twice an oxymoron unless one leaves behind Euclid or forms all dialectical or jump off the butcher block beneath cadaver's come-on with his scalpel redirected toward the dripping adam's apple. Like, it's the corpse that's cutting you upon dissecting tables.

A newborn or one inside a period of gestation is no commercial product of either fathers or mothers. It's a self-creating symbiont of creatures once residing in them recursively and then later leaving and when they meet there's always an explosion: they call it "cell biology", without the jargon, "birds and bees" just to avoid that romantic word some once called 'love'. That very word is black magic when it causes moderns to get queasy and then vomit and think sex is property that must be taken. There's little doubt to history that a meeting's just a place and time for having, cutting, eating meat. but speaking prehistorically, that meter was just metaphoric for mothers giving milk, a reduced-to-liquid meat for infancy or hostess pouring mead for company where it's not a job but results from her interest, not necessarily in it but by chance instead? Aesthetics finds a difference between an interest and just more usery. We may just place too much emphasis on agendas, looking out for something really which is in and looking in for everything that's out, as if we couldn't shift or oscillate or even simultaneously experience a hyphenated in-out, in-out state without accusing or complaining or to find that something's always born from our wierd juxtapositions, never the same experience for anyone but commensurate like Alfred Jarry's "equivalence of all absurdities". Discovering them of old was called, by practice, "divination", now all chance encounter is eliminated or forbidden or excused "It was an accident! Who knows where that shit came from? Must have been the booze."

Like the trickster, maternity is no identity or destination except at the time and space when it's adorned, like a face-mask that does not change or cover anything. It's no secret, just a mystery how all those tiny molecules come together making trees and then sustain them. Maternity itself, in terms of semiotics or the building blocks of symbols, is a repressed line of thinking as it often leads us to contemplating chaos, crime and sin, not just in factories constructing parts for your replacement, never punching father's time-clocks, ever in containment. That's why ever since the first commander, we've been told we are the population problem. When there were only nine of us, someone didn't off the thug.

UTERO-SEMIOTICS: concerning signs in an indeterminate context, a random distribution, not in themselves as such (an sich) but without reference other than transitively transitive poetic, briefly pointed or provisional. The paradox for Jung is in this group of undirecting signs live ancient symbols, a foggy graveyard of undying archetypes some call vague memory, undisclosed history, mirrors of an eternity that Freud and others called "unconscious" brimming, less considerate name "oblivion", pessimists: "imagination", optimists: "hope" or source of curiosity and home to possibility, one thing's for sure: it's always misty. What it is for freaks that dreamers would call "beauty", sometimes "horror", this semiotic fluid linguists search semantics or for grammar, is just an academic's synonym for "psychedelic" (I call it "paisley"). It may be the site for resurrecting dead metaphors, it is also arsenal for detournement of the living. According to Julia Kristeva, it's a conservative force like maternal renewal and also box (think of the sweet Pandora) of revolutionary potential – it's subversive. Both rhythmic and metric, it is itself a symbol system repressed by symbolic stuff from grey matter as if (patrimetric) material emissions, it's contained not like a house, a bed or flower pot but like a prison. When it escapes (it always does) in dreams or art (when even as commodity) or other port-hole, windowpane or crack left open, Mr. Greymatter (self-repressed euclidean) assures "they're lies" or justifies the label called "neurotic" and the righteous parental types call "childish", everything unorthodox which priests call "sin". But this is the case only when greymatter thinks it's god inside a body that's a prison or a temple, an orphan never knowing nurture from a mother or ripped off from home for education or by slavers or just way too much time in front of father empire's big screen T.V., a window only looking out on corporate fabrications like all else is just the background of psycho-mystification.

Eating is hard, but not on the eater (unless it's autocannibalic)


CANNIBALISM: 1. quasi-sex – see 'eat me' (don't confuse with SEx, an anagram for self-exchange); 2. unquestioningly consuming knowledge or kneading (rolling it for raising dough); 3. the theory of employment (converting your own kin or strangers into energy and products to increase your mere survival without leakage from your ducts and capillaries); 4. consuming a disposable shell, mold or form such as an Aztec pump organ, dropped placenta or fingernails:
"For the moment, we need to keep in mind three types of things: 1) that which comes to be, 2) that in which it comes to be [receptacle], and 3) that after which the thing coming to be is modeled, and which is the source of its coming to be. It is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring ... a mother or recepticle (is) an invisible and characterless sort of thing".
Plato

But that's only a pointed metaphor of male matters – try saying it to vinegar, praying manti or black-widowed spiders. Nothing? Even when a way of talking like a corpse, for the child the source is always mom or even grandma! And sans an endorsed contract from the state, who's to say who was your father but the catcher at the plate? Does it really matter? What would change if you were born as someone else? Isn't everyone precisely that already?

Concerning mothers, Loki teaches one can swim both ways and then repeat it! One can see that mothering's what matters, (nothing's immaterial when "matter" is a verb) and that's a trick that anyone can turn, we even call it "nursing", "nurture" when the context isn't milk or gmo's becoming nature (that which preachers used to call "god's factory") to monopolize (emasculate) all future culture – what some call "symbolic order". That's when the young Trickster must transform into Destroyer, like your gods did to their fathers. I can see what your game is, Mr. Plato: the seeds you plant will only sprout as allergies. I'm thinking only gods are cannibalistic – they're unappealing for the eating except by others who are tasteless or whose appetites have turned to shit; I'm thinking of unsweatened (lite), the liposucking sycophantic.

METABOLISM: (roll along beside, nurture (gently push) from behind, also eating mothers or mother-eating) 1. any grinding process toward the hips before excretion, by which food is converted into the energy and products needed to sustain life after separating out those which might just end it; 2. conversion of matter to energy, ie, what appears death of a substance is growth and reproduction of another, but only through inmixing into chaos and then emerging reconsolidated into something new – it's sort of like technology (when that's not free, it excludes all the middles and whatever's down below) but more resembles art when it's opened up for anyone to see, an autopsy of the living.

Generating no-cost heat for neighbors as a by-product only appears excremental. Plants and bugs who scavenge waste say it's absolute, essential. The shock or awed explosion occurs at that moment of transformation, but should not for your observers (unless their orbit's been disrupted):
Fig Newton

In myth-time it is only thought a transubstantiation, a new solidarity in what was expansive or explosive (from certain observation posts "it all turns to shit" but from that post they cannot see potential). Density, expansity, density, the law of three is the eternal return, but not of an identity since all density is unique and transitory. Entanglement, a teratory, an open fieldbook of more than a trillion stories that are dances – a bent doughnut only looks like a figure eight from the side – nothing is contained and nothing's emptied. The only for-sure vacuum is ascending gravity (see Desire if you're still hungry). Black is only the inversion of a color to accentuate an image (pay no mind to the void behind the curtain, it's just another image for your inconsideration – it's just the unknown author or a fit of blank imagination).

CATABOLISM: (roll/throwing down) the production of energy (capital) through the conversion of complex (living) molecules into simpler (dead) ones, one little bite at a time. – see the difference between parasite and paracide.

Beating babies even mataphorically tenderizes spirits toward and for authority.. Metaphor was once the form of mothers up till gods proclaimed perogative to open and close wombs so they could eat the newborn, a potential every generation for another revolution, its consumption thought to halt a foregone conclusion but even so the fates were only tempted, and Zeus's grand solution was to supper on the mother.
Euchronius Funk

Birth is as much a rebirth, a return of the mother-as-young-girl or maiden, as the infant who is, for all appearance, new, all the while the placental organ is born dead and rendered into food. The singular event of parturition encompasses or is commensurate with every transition, even puberty, and that is likely near the time (or is it tome?) of baby's first, but in this sense a mother's second birth. The I/you split's ambiguous, especially at first. It was all about a rythm and a meter, now it's just a rhyme producing blues because it's called a "labor" as is anything juxtaposed to pain and then projected onto others. For men who like their answers cut and dried, maternity's a mystery so they proceed to treat them just like any other piece of meat and then proceed to rewrite history, to own and keep what's been digested – developmental growth is ever after confined to matters of economy – the only things that they can bear are prisons. "Bearing" is the clue that something in their head's gone missing.

FREEDOM: 1. A satanic promise of Utopia the priest and his police will never know. 2. the "ownership" of the means of, neither production nor reproduction, but mischief, which is only the ability or energy or potential to turn against the wind, to go more with the nurturing than toxic; to turn for no reason whatsoever in or outside of an experimental context. There is no choice available 'til one comes to a turning point. This is the basic law of navigation. A turning point is just a noticed reinforcement suggestive of another way. The law is never legal cause its only definition – it is really just an insincere appeal, otherwise the lawyer-judges wouldn't have to keep concealing that behind them stands the guns and clubs and knives and bars of steel. Who would need a law to tell them not to leap off, high on spinning ferris wheels nor to eat your grandma 'cause your gut says "feed me please, or I will eat whatever in you I can feel"?

Were it not expected to become broken, there would be no law created. A regularity is a mathematic or statistical assessment or it's an observation. It only speaks to frequencies and their seemly distribution. The only use for this 'normality' is to facilitate prediction. That comes in handy; it can be reasuring. The regulation is no assessment at all. It demands the normal is the only possibility and can only give one a false sense of security. A front to hide a major insecurity: it's precarious. You could say that legislators have no mathematic capability, so how could they cope with any sort of poetry or witness more than simple (tit-for-tatish) resonating patterns?
M. F. (Mathew Flunky) Junky

When going seems a rut that is spinning you in circles, and in lieu of external encouragement or road signs scattered round and bout, which is to say a plan, playful chance (that's spontaneity) creates its own turning points, opens possibility, the word for mischief is play, whether or not it's an act in three part realities. Hence planning remains the most popular sport for the unwilling types of casualties prone to go with whatever a breeze is blowing or line of shit that's snorting. Unfortunately, since games are the mechanisation of play ("there are rules!" they say), the limits of planning resemble the limits of mechanics, and for social change, increased mechanisation is fast falling out of favour. It turns out that mechanised society is precisely the problem folks bitch about, it brings to mind Jo Stalin as well as George Orwell's 1984, and for many, even those, by today's standards, are looking less hostile.

DIABOLISM: Friction. Every internal or external contradiction produces friction, which is heat, which continues struggle (if only to let off steam or some other excretion). Continued struggle after letting loose produces a victor (think 'quicksand'). It is therefore always encouraged by enforcers of control (the game is their salary, seat and earthly cup for tits or tea afterwards – it's tit for tat, the common game of all economy and that's for home security and 'winning', otherwise known as a boring penetration just before yer own capitulation – one gets swollowed or is flushed when the preferred residence is a toilet).

"Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up just where we're headed"
Pinyin Wan, New Wives' Tailings from Olden Chinese Sayings, 3rd cent b.c.

Capitalist civilisation is the absolute extent of the nature of dialectics. That is the only absolutely agreed-upon absolute. Unfortunately for the civilised, every child understands that nature is itself not dialectical (it's just a con who's hiding behind curtains, like Pelonius, unknowing it's for him – they think they're wizards or that they're immortal beings), at least, not till youngsters learn the word, "opposite" and are taught its universal application. This lesson ends childhood, unless they become it and keep a certain fondness for disorder.

Mischief, ever an invention by the young of every species, breaks one free of all friction cycles set on crumble, excuse me, tumble. Even those that spiral, some would call it syncopated swimming if they're sympathetic drummers. Other than your murder or lobotomy, the only reaction the civil order can engage is to increase its own acceleration, like rapid spin before the drying, and that is always in a cannibalic metabolication – of sorts, a new vacation, and for which there's not a chance of vaccination. To mix your metaphors when contemplating soaking tubs of gin-and-tonic clubs is no sign of madness. Never fear, it's just anger and poetic way to blow their brains out like a curse that looks just like a master blaster. That's the secret to embracing or escaping into chaos like you're hiding underneath someone else's mother's skirts to find some breathing room and catch it, like in Old Norway Hela was a hela pretty goddess and not the joint good christians fear to smoke in.

Friday, June 1, 2012

The Discovery of Agriculture: Road-kill or Supper?

the initiation experience imparts the realization that, given universal holistic interrelatedness, all sexual acts are incestuous and all forms of consumption are cannibalistic.
– John Moore

Raw or cooked, why is cannibalism of the already dead considered morally repugnant (rating just above scavenging upon car-wreck meat and other roadside carnage) while the murder, maiming and deprivation of the living (whatever the species, but particularly your own) merely good business or economic sense?

It's often been suggested that the human is at base an opportunistic predatory animal, and to look around, we see that this in fact describes the workings of capitalism quite accurately, what with its armed forest rangers and the like protecting power-plays of corporate interest ("the greater good" my ass!) or one-sided economic "transactions" (actually, "extractions") just to put bread on the table. Ask them why? "It's just a job!" If you are a poacher or berry-picker on "community property", best not even ask!

Reactionaries against thuggery of all sorts have historically looked at what we're eating rather than how we come to do it, and many conclude meat itself is the problem. Perhaps this is why oppositional defiance is considered a mental illness whereas pure-and-simple defiance is merely a crime, being that it is more diabolical than dialectical. Whatever the case, vegetarians do not like to hear that they are enslaving other species in their gardens just to eat the children produced and turn the less palatable elders into the soil without even the pretense of a funeral ceremony: "they're only plants, after alll!" Egg, fruit and nut growers seem to escape this criticism, trying to keep their "charge" living, but not so productively as to crush the earth and all the other inhabitants with their accelerating weight, their growth rate. It is said a mother oyster has three billion babies in her lifetime just to keep the seagulls happy. If the other critters weren't well fed, the oyster itself would perish.

When I was a child learning to fish, I objected to what I considered a cruelty in the 'hooking' enterprise, and it was explained to me that "fish have no central nervous system so can't feel pain". John Moore used the same logic to justify eating lettuce babies. Corporate suits & generals have always looked on others as would a Greek god: as "mere people", ie., disposable. No need to bring up the ku klux klan. Over the years I've come to see that I was not alone in thinking rutabagas and fish have feelings too, and developed a theory to explain this squeamishness over killing and maiming fellow creatures (a "sentimentality" often mistakenly attributed to females and children), that the human was neither predatory carnivore nor herbivore, but like the coyote, vulture or dung beetle, a scavenger helping to keep the landscape fresh and fragrant. I've never had an existential problem arise from eating the unborn egg (helping to resolve the deadly conflict between fertility and fecundity) or stuff that's already dead. Our pig-like teeth and stomachs agree with me on this point. And now I seem to recall a word from grade-school science: "omnivore".

Apparently, when a wolf eats healthy mice in the spring, she is participating in the chance-driven eco-systematics operating all around us, where even the good (as far as a mouse goes) die young. Eating's always an accident from one perspective, good fortune from the other. No need to get all arrogant or self-righteous about it; fortuity is not something under our control. In fact, even for the most favourably conditioned or well-practiced and intentioned, favourable conditions are still necessary for a successful hunt or gathering of any sort. And we still say "Good luck" when sending others out into the world. We know it may be the last words we speak to them.

Grover Krantz once suggested that the original hand-axe was a multi-stage, multi-purpose tool useful in pantomime as well as a kitchen aid. When coming upon a carcass being consumed by other scavengers like jackals, the little Southern Ape-man (our ancestor by virtue of dramatics and technological disposition) might have held the pointed rocks up to his mouth mimicking the threatening body-language of a large canine-equipped predator, and then used them to cut off bite-sized bits from the vacated corpse. The only risk would be if the primary consumer was not swayed by the "virtual" antics because of her own bigger teeth. A Saber-tooth cat comes to mind. The first sentence spoken might just have been "Run away!! Run away!!"

Speaking of accidental death, it is rarely calculated the actual biomass of the live, creepy-crawly variety that sheep, cattle and elephants consume in their grazing, wiping out whole families of bugs too large to survive even the first stomach, should they miss being crushed by the last molars. It is only the very smallest whose metabolism is hardly distinguishable from their reproduction, the microbes, who actually want to be eaten so they can have a nice warm abode adequate to feed all their children and grandchildren. In fact, prohibiting them from residence would result in death-by-starvation for ruminating beasts, no matter how much pure leafy matter they ate. You could say microbes mediate their metabolism without the merest speculation toward causing alienation. Sometimes the indirect or mediative is the safest sort of action.

I was astonished to find out I had similar sorts of creatures navigating my intestinal tracts, only harmful when evicted. Is there a hidden implication for those who would charge rent for tract housing in the cities, particularly since each and every squat is at best an intestinal occupation? I was also astonished to discover it was only the actual predatory animals who had the compassion to kill the sick and injured, as well as the gluttonous and arrogant critters incapable of sharing, with a quick bite or blow, all to help limit the suffering in the world. Authentic predators and prey have one nothing on the other in the departments of kindness and warrior spirit.

The logic seems impeccable, yet we are not to follow it:

if we consider an apple tree a living organism, and if economic pertains to 'how we make a living', then the mode of production for an apple-grower is represented by an early-term abortion induced by the orchardist – a potential tree cut off before the prime of its life, so to speak. This may just be how a seagull approaches a cluster of oyster eggs should we restrict all meaning to functionality.

Such a metaphoric extension as apple abortion, despite its biological accuracy comparing perceived patterns, would be considered eccentric, to say the least – evidence for institutionalisation by means of thought disorder. Yet the safer alternatives raise existential problems concerning death and equally disturbing ontological problems concerning our own species. If one considers that the apple, a burgeoning tree that might be, merely undergoes a metamorphosis (with our help in the eating) jumping across not only the presumed unbreakable species boundary but that impenetrable border between class or kingdom, becoming the other (us, that is) no less easily than we merge with traffic on the freeway, we are labeled harmless spiritualist, but definately sailing on the "wrong" route. But really, who suffers in the transformation, the transcendance of class distinctions, this re-incarnation (see carne: 'meat')?

But no! How much easier to consider life (and death) a particularly nasty interruption like sleep apnea, or to embrace brutish behaviour with a vengeance, or merely hire or delegate others to do one's dirty work (as well as dirty thinking about what that work should be) than the rather more enjoyable "inmixing of otherness"?

Of course, the "kind" thing to do after depriving the little seed of its supper is to share with it your own evicted intestinal residents. Such might be how Johnny Appleseed discovered agriculture.