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

Monday, July 22, 2013

Trace, Race & Ambiguity

"From the Indin's point of view, 'white man' is not a race, it's a psycho-social disorder."
– Sequoia Chesterfield

"It is said a black white man once became a human being, but mostly they are strange creatures. Not as ugly as the white, true, but just as crazy."
– Thomas Berger/Dan George

"For it is not merely that a race of men bleached white with the failure of courage would do well with a prelaid scheme of action: they refuse to move on without one."
Dora Marsden

"What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature."
DH Lawrence

It seems we're not talking about race at all in the twentieth century fashion. Recall that DNA wasn't "discovered" 'till 1956 and that was only a molecular chain synthesizing proteins from a vat of acid called the cellular nucleus somewhat resembling a chamber pot of variegated minestrone. Up to that time, Darwin's blood-born trace-as-blueprint passed from generation to generation as a mere theory subject to much discontent, compared to today – it's more passport than a postulatum – but discontent seems coming 'round again, despite the proofs of religious science and secular religion.

Prior to the twentieth, the argument over per- or preconceived types did not concern itself with the variability of humanity, but it's defined existence: one was either human or not human, that is, man or beast, and for the yet unconvinced, "more or less" demanded some kind of ranking. Variability applied to the animal kingdom alone – the distinction hinged upon the easily recognisable absence of a soul or for liberals, one that's charred with sin (as seen in all our children) and blackened by an unexpected (that is, immoral) action. Purity is the dentist class well washed with fluoride (or in former times, the puritans who washed their souls with spirits of turpentine or hydrogenated chloride). One could deny and in fact, change one's race by moving on to Croatan, that would entail a loss of face (and more should the patriots up and catch you – with bit and brace they'd run you through. In more enlightened times or nations the drills are used for carpentry and education).

The more embracive liberals spoke of race, not as a function of spiritual biology so much as inferring types of nation, culture or language or in distinguishing (it works both ways) the civilised and savage. The most embracive spoke of the human race, and were on sounder footing, considering no polly ever mated with a cracker, no human-chimp nor any catwoman babies were forthcoming but there were swells blossoming from every possible experimental reconnoiter amongst bipedal locomotives. All these senses revolve around a moral criteria concerning marriage or who gets the goods which others make while shackled to even yet another's acreage. And we learn from Romeo and Juliet, in olden times such sentiments were not of common folk but came direct from factions of the ruling regiments.

Elsewise, one might see a clustering of sensual aesthetics. It's oft been said a dog and its pet eventually come to resemble each other. Science gives the most ambiguous of definitions or states outright the whole affair is indeterminate or illusory. Grace value (in paid gratuities) is just the cost for saving face, sometimes in installments. A genome or a clade is just an average like the 33rd and one third state west of Wyoming. It sounds just like that language never spoken, the infamous proto-indo-european. Epigenes just posit an out-of-sex influence and genes would only express some inertia in a kind of relay. For some it might be tea leaves or a random recitation, dna analysis should work no less well than any other sort of divination (like placebo still works better than experimental medicine).

Of course today a race is just a cover-term for everything beyond the gates, illustrating a return to the sense existing twixt Rome and the ancient city states: it's just a word-like axiom referring to barbarians – from inside what is different describes everything that's scary. If you can't see or hear the difference, it's still there – we call it "class", just like in higher education. It's in the nature of a city or any other walled or gated community. What's unnormal to your senses, but mostly sight and hearing provides a likely subject for any proof of any pudding, most likely to be charged with any judgement such as antipatriotic or out of fashion clothing. It's the only thing that gives the normies a positive turn from their self loathing – it's a classic form of self-fulfilling prophesy learned early in the form of scientific reductivity right alongside reprisals toward one's own experimental inquiry.

Selection is deduced from the survival of survivors who are said to have an advantage over the dead or dying – it suggests that evolution is improved upon by escalated killing so the leap to warring states is considered native proof of a progressive evolution. But the punctuated equilibrium inferred in some biologies describes a jump or leap from one to other species, like a werewolf it concerns a transformation with the exception that there's no going back despite the moon or mushrooms in the rainy season. It may only mean that all the normies dropped dead from some catastrophe, leaving all the freaks or "meek" to carry on somewhat more congenially. Such has long been prophesied by more than one mythology. If genes are selfish, only concerned with their perpetuation, in evolutionary terms the best bet against extinction would be to mate with every freak (or the exceptional) which frequented their establishment. That, of course, presumes the gene's endowed with human ego. Colored white it thinks exclusivity's a sign of some distinction, thinking only of the nasty rebels, the course it's taken only leads to natural de-selection, given the existence of catastrophes beyond the reach of even capitalist recouperation.

The objective rational truth that gets hauled out in defense of racial types is just as much a component of one myth as is the muskrat who swims down to the bottom of the sea to bring up some earth to plant on turtle's back a component of another. Everyday life, even in postmodern societies, does not function according to a set of codes established upon objective facts; at least, not entirely. A lot of what one does when one negotiates the quotidian (e.g., in New York or Des Moines) is active myth-interpretation, for in the end, one has to forget much in order to get anything done. Myths are stories that are comparably much more practical for integrating experience than are the raw data of biology. Were people to really pause and consider the reasoned basis for their views on race they would be thrown into a conundrum. Inevitably they would become less productive employees, for they would be compelled of their own trajectory to contemplate the reasoned basis of their society, a reflective activity that has always threatened the status quo with its revelations and subsequent disrupture. The myth of objective truth is the myth of the culture that sought the conquest of nature. It functions like a good myth ought to: it sufficiently explains the contemporary society in a favorable way that encourages an ongoing compliance with its rules and constraints. And just like a good myth, it conceals its mythical nature in a veil of truth. How very magical.
Neal Keating, What is a Race?

For pragmatics we have a more practical solution: a race, when not a game or competition, is just a form around a rolling pin or bearing useful for a smooth transition – from what to where is not the prime consideration, unless the sun or moon or stars as data for to catch your bearing – in which case we're on the topic of provisional contingency and dancing with affinity. Considering the variables of living, in a bazillion years there'd never be a single blended unity. There's not a single standard which can articulate a "nature" without contradicting all the others – by it's own imagination even Western reason considers rigid categories something quite absurd, but that's how lawyers win their cases and governments make laws concerning im- and emmigration. Did someone say the civilised embraces contradiction?

When a groove enclamps a ball 'tis said it's bearing
but only when of age, a race for lube and proper caring.
Atka Mip

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

And then it gets complicated

Or does it? It's very likely there never was a time when "things" were simple. History is a compressor like the piston in a steam engine where much complexity goes up in smoke, and to suppose the people back when or now are sheep-like is a good assessment, but not perhaps in the same manner that a sheep herder would present it. In fact, there's little flocking among sheep without a herder and the dog (to emphasize the point) or a farmer's imposed fences or a desert all around oases. When sheep get pissed they split in all directions (even 'cross a desert) and by the time you find a one you notice they're in small groups scattered here and there. They're also practiced in deception: they might feign contented feeding just to bore the herder into sleeping, and then they're gone before you can proceed to blinking.

A clever one might see a call in all this splitting, for further ratcheting our alienation. Unless defined politically expedient, amongst friends that can't describe the situation; not by any stretch of even Webster's definition. But wait a minute! If there's no way out of any state or weird condition, since fate or invisible hands are pulling strings like we're just puppet things, and surely we never asked for our surroundings, how is it that some can get together in tanks or cloisteries or ivory towers and on a whim proceed to blow us all to smithereens? It's either magic power or as Dora Marsden said, it's never just the law that people find so dear or guns and knives or spears they fear. What's in fashion is obedience itself – it appeals to authors and performers. Doesn't everyone just want to be loved? Well, sometimes we hesitate throwing bushels of tomatoes at the stage, not just out of politeness but because we feel sorry for them, like we would an aging garbageman suffering a bout of on-the-job hernia. It's the author and director hiding in the wings who need the egging. On the other hand I've seen some sheep give chase to a biting dog clear into the next state, and then returned to gentle misbehaving with a glance up at the herder as if suggesting "Make me!" On occasions horns play hell with even coyote livers. In the end, of course, like everyone the miscreants were rounded up, then sorted out and put in cans of dog food. Fido finally had his way (proved in the eating), but at least the sheep had had a day of living.

"THE offending aspect of the pretensions of "democracy" is not that in the name of what the "majority" supposedly thinks: we are supposed to be pleased and happy to be "ruled" by a clique "for our good." Far from it, since, in truth, but few of us are "ruled" at all. It is merely our little foible to pretend we are. We give our "rulers" to understand they "rule" us because it pleases them so greatly to think they do: and then there is the consideration that a docile demeanour serves to divert their too too kind attention; probably the most servile-seeming member of a "state" the most bent upon fulfilling the role of step-grandmother fundamentally is untouched by "rule." The obedient attitude is a very convenient garb for the perverse to wear: and if the mere doing of it does not jar the temper too much, appearing to submit will define the line of least resistance to doing what, under the circumstances is what we please. Thus under the shelter of the servile demeanour there forms a residue of mulish waywardness, especially in those who appear to present their parts to receive the kicks which keep them going between gutter and cesspool: a waywardness which even more than temper succeeds in making them into a kind of clay unmeet to the hand which would govern. The great unwashed will accept the infliction of the bath which cuts a slice off the space of their limited premises with resignation and reflect that it will indeed have a use as a wardrobe and coal-place. Though they are cast down by such things they are not defeated. "Rule" slides from them, as water slides from a duck. "Rule" has effect only on those who are indoctrinated with the Dogma: those who are under the spell of the "Word." Even these – these intellectuals – are not placed in bondage by the rulers: theirs is a voluntary bondage – true freedom, according to the Word – and if they act as automata it is that they subscribe to the dogma that it is their duty to be as automata. They submit themselves to the law: because they approve not always indeed of the law, but of the attitude which submits to law.

It is not therefore for its supposed prowess in the line of government that democracy's claims are obnoxious. It earns its odium through the commodity which the "rulers" offer in exchange for their investiture with authority to govern. "Rulers" appear contemptible not for what they take but what they give. That they lay hold of authority and all the ready cash which their positions render available is, if regrettable, yet tolerable: the machine will go until it breaks; the vexatious thing is that in order to become installed in their position of advantage they must needs undermine and bemuse by flattery the intelligence of those whose lack of it is sufficiently evidenced by their willingness to have truck with them...

Every new creed is ninety-nine parts rechauffe of all the creeds which by virtue of its hundredth part it is supposed to supersede: the fact that the ingredients are incongruous proving no bar to such rehashing. To mince the whole to a uniform state of non-recognition where possible, and to accept whole what resists the process according to its external merits, is the method of treatment. Naturally therefore in the cult of equality-cum-democracy it is not surprising to be met with the spirit of "Noblesse oblige," notwithstanding the fact that democracy knows no "Noblesse."...

A civilisation is the attempted working out of a Scheme of Salvation: a plan of escape. It is the imperfect form built up from the perfected plan which the religious philosophies of the "great" "constructive" "thinkers" of its age have projected. For it is not merely that a race of men bleached white with the failure of courage would do well with a prelaid scheme of action: they refuse to move on without one. They bleat for a Deliverer – great constructive thinker-as sheep for a shepherd. Being without prescience, without inner compelling desire, they wait to be told. The great world of audiences puts out its distracted agitated tentacles, swaying about aimlessly, dumb appeals to be told how to expend themselves, and where. Culture, training in the art of spending oneself, is the imperious necessity of the bleached race, whether lettered or simple. Life without the courage for it, is so bad a business that they must needs approach it with caution. Earth is so little to their taste that they demand the construction of a heaven. To construct the "New Jerusalem," work to the plan of the Deliverer, and make a heaven on earth is a task they can put their hands to. But to live for themselves – to lose "faith"? They would as soon not live at all...

To understand why killing at times is, and at other times is not murder, one must turn not to law, but to the theory of "order." "Order" is that arrangement of things – including people – which fits in with the whim of an individual, or an individualised group. If the "order" of those who are maintained in their position of governors demands the killing of certain people, as it does in a war, in overworking to make profits, or any of the thousand ways in which the lives of the common people are jeopardised and "taken " – then "killing is no murder." It is instead, " patriotism" or "bold statesmanship." But if the common people begin to think that the ways of the governing parties are incompatible with their ideas of "order" and they take to killing: then killing is murder: double-dyed, heinous: a hideous, heart-shuddering blasphemous affront to God and man: to the universe, to "morality," to the heavenly host and all the troops of angels, and must be avenged. So, Call out the entire army and navy and see that God and the Church are bustled up!!!!! Killing then is murder and no doubt about it...

"Culture" is the outcome of Gadding Minds – minds, that is, which are dull "at home," and which have fallen in gladly with the notion that there is a "Truth" which can be come at by assiduous and ingenious manipulation of phrases. They are very willing to attempt short cuts to understanding especially if they can in that way travel with a crowd of gadders like themselves. The culture-epoch of the last two thousand years will have to pass before the Searchers for Truth begin to inquire "at home ": to understand that the only things which are "true" for them are the few things which their own individual power to perceive makes them aware of through the channels of their senses. Their present habit of Hunting for Truth with thimbles and forks, anchors and care, clappers, tracts and a wild whirling sound will help them as far towards awareness as – to use an analogy we have used before – the presentation of bound volumes of the works of Darwin will help the jelly-fish up the ascent of being. The clutter of cultural concepts – mere words – are choking the frail fine tentacles of perception: preconceived notions hang as a film over the eyeballs and until they can slip the entire burden their way in life will be mad and melancholy...

It is clear that the one emotion which the moralists cannot afford to permit to weaken is: Fear. (They would call it reverence, but no matter.) Whatever strengthens human fear is to them the basis of "good": because "Fear" is disintegrating, and throws its owner in submission on to the breast of any and every concept which is thrust forward and called "salvation." The moralists exploit and play upon the feeling of smallness and loneliness which is the first outcome of that sense of isolation and separateness which is called self-consciousness. It is because men are in the first place lonely and afraid, that the feebler sort move in herds and act alike: hence the growth of "customary" action: moral action. The outcry against the "immoral," i.e. the unusual, is the expression of distress of the timid in the presence of the innovation. It is the instinct which feels there is safety with the crowd and danger as well as loneliness in adventuring individually which puts the poignant note into the epithet "immoral." To be "immoral" is to be on precisely the same level as the unconventional and the unfashionable: that and no more...

The commandment "Love one another" is an advance in subtlety as compared with the injunctions it was intended to supersede. It is an attempt to establish an intra-conscious police in the shape of Conscience. It is what the Webbs for instance would call a move in the direction of "efficiency in administration," as the spy-system is more "efficient" than an ordinary police-system. More efficient because more intimate, and more effective because it is easy to control actions once feeling has been surrendered under control. The favour with which the command to "Love one another" was received is evidence of the strength of the desire for neighbourly espionage and democratic control of "each by all" of which all modern legislation is but the grotesque parody in action. (Now with democracy merely an infant, "loving one another" only mildly, we control each other in the realms of marrying, being born, housed, clothed, educated, fed and similar minor matters only. When all "Love one another" with zeal our inter-neighbourly control will begin to show something of what it can be.)

It is therefore quite clear what motives of economy would operate in the point of view of "Authority" in substituting "compulsory love" for "compulsory circumspect behaviour" such as the decalogue enjoins. If only universal "loving" could be made the fashionable habit, the supreme "moral," how easy the work of "leaders" would be. When individuals love one another how easily they work together: how they appear successful in overcoming the otherwise unmanageable ego. Then why not make love among the herd compulsory: and hey presto: the New Dispensation: the Christian era...

The irony of the efforts of the advocates of the new dispensation to press "love" into the service of the "moral concepts" is not immediately apparent. It is customary to regard "love" as the outcome of "culture" and therefore in some special way amenable to the service of culture. It has become too much a habit of speech with the "civilised" world, i.e. the moralised idea-ised world, to look on "love" as in some sort a means of "salvation," to expect it to analyse why it does so. If it did men would realise that the explanation is the reverse of the current one, i.e. that love is the consummation of moralisation. It is in fact an effort to escape from it. The heavy incrustation of habitualised actions, i.e. morals, increases in tenacity as life goes on, forming a sort of hutch which is half shelter and half tomb. The taking on of its earlier incrustations is called "growing-up": as they grow more obviously oppressive it is called "growing old." To be "morally-minded" is to have lost the instinct which revolts against this walling-up of the changing spirit: revolt that is against either growing up or growing old. As most people are morally-minded the world is left with a tiny remnant of individuals of whom if we spoke of them in terms of time-measurement we should say ranged in age from two years to five: the people of genius and charm. The age of maturity, if we may put it like that, when all that we mean is the age at which the soul has made itself familiar with its new dwelling-place and is at its best, brightest, most inquiring and "true," is from two years to five: not twenty-five or fifty-five as the moralist would like to pretend. From five onwards the browbeating process which is called moral education begins, and as we have said only spirits which are bigger and more resistant than their would-be instructors resist it and stand firm at their height of growth. The rest are slowly driven back by "culture" to the state of automatic living which was their pre-natal existence...To introduce an attitude into a relation whose very existence is a revolt against attitudes is to snatch from the conventional what is literally his one means of salvation, and that none too certain...

The characteristic of the "rebel" position is a feeling of angry temper against – something: i.e. conditions, presumably static. Now as a matter of fact "conditions" of a relative degree – precisely in that relative degree under which the agitator conceives them, are an illusion. There are conditions which men would find absolute, as for instance an explorer without food in Arctic territory: but in a "land of plenty" such as these in which the "rebel movement" is trying to make headway: conditions – static – hard and fast – are illusory, and impermanent as the blocking out of light from a room by a night's frost is impermanent. Heat the room and the window-panes clear and the light streams in. Now seemingly-harsh conditions of wealth acquiring in fertile lands with instruments of production such as we possess are as formidable as an army of snow warriors exposed in the glare of warm sun light. Conditions dissolve under the thawing influence of human initiative, energy, and temper. What is amiss, in the worst (of these relative) conditions human eye has rested upon, is not the condition: but the conditioning human quantity which has enabled it to take shape. The condition was not there first: it followed in the trail of the human beings who allowed it to settle round them as an aura; and altering the condition is not the first concern: the seat of the agitator's offending lies in his trying to persuade the "poor" that it is: the folly of the rebels is that they believe it so to be...

In fact, the conclusion to which one is pressed is that we – that is the people who talk and write – take all theories, politics and propagandas too seriously: far more so than ever was intended by those who amuse themselves by such species of Sport. The permanent role of propagandists and politicians is that of public entertainer; and they stand or fall by the answer to the question, "Do they entertain?""

In simpler terms: Utterly, in lieu of an existing thematic social organisation, the well-fit (euphoric, meaning 'good form') juxtaposition of novel (dialogic) utterances and pantomime (dramatic performances) of a cultural mythos, a narrative pantomime of one's ethos some call "theatre", others "culture" and others yet "delusion", the novel (or themes and theses) uttered (or performed as drama) reveals a contemporaneous alternative cosmos (from Greek kosmos: 'order', 'universe', 'ornament' from Fr. 'objet') whose enduring livability is yet to be determined, but is discarded before the experiment or comparative analysis can proceed, "acting as if" one verse were a unified reality split into fact and disposable fiction, the really real and the fantastic. All argument is a fight for the superiority of one's own goods (or gods – see "spook", "phantasm") or the equivalent subsumption (appropriation) of those of others, of the others themselves. But this one mostly concerns their stylistic form over their practical, hands-on content, thus the split between science and philosophy (or physics and metaphysics) overlaps factitious documentary and fictitious narrative, cutting off the history wherein factic and fictic were once alternative expressions (exgesia) of an oral cavity on a single face regarding the same ingestive content (ingesta). In such a struggle, all possibility (potential) steps to the background until a fist (or vomitus) flies, in the end trading off possibility for a secure moral sense at no rate of interest in the sociological (also known as democratic) construction of a novel religious order.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Procrustean Epoch:
Conspiracies in applied singularity

Saith Sir Thomas Brewbold, "for whereas, there is but one way to do nothing and divers way to do something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of going astray as he who pusheth forwards".
A. Bierce, on indecision.

Largely due to the inability to appreciate a sound flogging put forth by the skeptics but only after the institution of smarmy lawyers to discredit the even sounder linguistic intuitions of the sophists, the stoics prevailed behind the heels of the up-and-coming media personality, Plato. Rather than acknowledge independent thinking which might just put an end to voluntary sacrifice, stoics organized as the nouveau class of philosophers modern cynics might call sycophantic wankers, christian atheists or merely, ministers of unnatural science – that is to say, well-schooled dogmatics.

So the stage was set, not unhindered by the trials against impiety, for the more conservative of thinkers to fill the think-tanks with the smells of fish-like swells of the theologic systematizers who put together the first bible (still largely oral) for the growing Aegean state or region and called it Orphic Mysteries, named for the chairman of that illustrious committee, Signor Orpheus who said even bigger than that contemptuous Zeus and his afterthought, Apollo was the world creator Phanes (the name means lighthouse: "brings to light", the dude who laid the cosmic egg, that is controlled the monopoly of appearances, but in Latin it means mere image, unreality, a specter or apparition), named for a former Egyptian general who was prior, pissed off at the administration so led the Persians into alliance with the Arabs, as guides across the desert as if protecting just another caravan from unruly pirates, and entailed a hostile take-over of the Egyptian state. Some say for blasphemy Orpheus died of thunder-bolt, but the consensus said 'twas a gang of angry ladies cut his throat.

But back to Phanes, such seems the fate of alliances and empires who would share power. Bureaucrats must get a regular ass-licking – it's what they give so is their due – no matter how untasty or one's assured superiority. That's the lesson chairman Mao found out but all too late. The alternative is to reduce the levels of bureaucratic hierarchy to nil (impossible 'cause who would tend the til?) or avail the profitability of shill, the Public Relations Industry. JP Morgan was not just a banker, but treated information and research as if it was monopoly money – little even made it to the patent office censors without his signature. More a king or feudal duke than any smart-ass corporate puke – the rabble that he sired are the suits we all too often see today. But Phanes was more like the disgruntled bureaucrat or general-mover prone to temper tantrum, J. Edgar Hoover. The other Hoover was presidential, but like all things executive – increasingly – in name only. More properly, his only claim to fame was in his title – a little dick or nix, unsuited to J. Edgar's spittle.

But such things are small potatoes to the grand scheme of things, which is too far-fetched to entitle a conspiracy. The push was always hegemony of internal dependence, that is to say obedience itself, the fuel of state efficiency regardless of who's in power and what he's got to say. Empires can only reach out effectively to others by systematizing global entanglements – the trend in entropy is chaos. Such is where lawyers and other priests come in handy. The only alternative is always posed as a total global disaster,and still spun in terms of famine, pestilence or a great big solar flare. It's never mattered which ideology is in vogue, what's always concerned statesmen is that everyone is on the same page – of the hymnal, that is harmony – or playing on the same board – that would be monopoly. The field of economics is created when the currency which Milton Bradley provided in the box runs short so there's a frantic running after other currents. Exchange rates must be regulated just like irrigation water, and who better for the stand than the high priests (if certifiable) of the Order of the Invisible Hand? Oih!

But Hegemony is an unrealistic ideal even in the tightest system. In every dialectic, there are the bleeding heart but smarmy running opposition to the conservative but slightly stupid, well trained in aristotelean sentiments (or Babylonian religion), yet straight forward and foolhardy, they'd rather destroy the world on principle than be caught with their pants down jamming their torpedoes with the throttle set to full. It's why unitarian dictators rarely last more than a season, the two party system has since become indispensable. Plato's Republic slightly tempered with a little Aristotle. It's based on ancient marriages which ran on one or four or eight year cycles. By the time it comes around again, no one remembers, well-hid are all the little infidelities: "Thank the gods for rehab; this time will be different...he's our man!"

Like the greek patriarchs before had imposed a patrilineal genealogy onto diverse myth-time figures from different regions and changed the way that time is reckoned from a moon-year lasting 13 months (with one day off recovering from the party) which effectively took the meat out of stories useful to calculating diverse topographies as well as changes in the seasons, when and where the deer are there for all the meat eaters or some peppercorns, wine and taters for the veegers, Orpheus systematized a single rendering and came up with a greek religion not unlike christianity, specifically the catholic church from Constantine to Augustine, that saint named for the emporor, so in the end, based less on pastoral Greek than the Roman tax collector. Yet they were still working on the Classic Greek detournement in the fifth century ad., then after sixteen more centuries perfected by Hollywood and DC comics, should the neopagans ever take the revolution. Either way, as has been, will again be said "let them eat cake" which is a euphemism for old weevil-infested bread and the circus is just what is circular in any revolution – that is to say many casualties. What's changed in all this time is we've got not so many horses in our cart, plastic coin and everywhere a wall-mart.

The Byzantine think-tanks were more suited to restoring, not a greek democracy but imperial Rome which, contrary to public opinion, incurred some setbacks but never underwent a collapse. What's racist in the faux victories of the Gothic over Latin is that Bismark's heir or even an emir couldn't make an appearance as a distinguished roman citizen. What's common to the modern view in Agean, Judeo-christian and Islamic is the utopean platonic synthesis of republic mixed with a dash of Aristotle (the Islamic prophet and father of all atheistic science) together with Apollo (carried forth by christians in the figure of Roman Paul, no longer manly god but, like Orpheus, his smooth-talking – the word in French is where we get english parliaments – the gods' publicist and apostle).

Having successfully demised everything mysteriously pythic in Delphi before Apollo (like St Patrick) slew the snakes, by Mohamed's time everyone worth noting (that is, the patriotic) was already patriarchic. Of course today we don't speak of empires, and global village has had its day, and world-democracy is gasping for its final breath, the word that sounds so hip and intellectual is "singularity". But it's just another metaphor meant to draw our heads to hyper-sucking black holes or Borgs who look really scary.

If the verse was all so simple and straightforward and not multiply diverse or hectic in principle, there'd be no sense in science, philosophy and religion except as diversions into absurdity from all the endless monotony – but then we're led right back into it. And even if it's true there's not much anything that one can do to make everything better, there's just too much pressure, no imagination or wonder, we learn from Emerson that one can at least choose their own influences. This must be obvious given so many conflicting stories or perspectives as to fuel each version in explosive argument. There're still stories afloat unconcerned with any antagonistic polity or concrete (if "green") integument.

As to the claim that capital, or whatever current avant garde of civilisation, encompasses the earth so without deflector shields and warp drive, "out" is rendered meaningless, it's plain the claimant's head's already liberated but its body is stuck in the mud that's called the general economy. They might as well stick with Marx or Adam Smith for company. We heard that science is criticised as too reductionistic and justice and religion were just purveyors applicating blame but only slaves were blameless in their supplication. Isn't a conspiracy just sticking to whatever is in fashion? If only one avenue leads to truth or too much dam(ned determi)nation, every other way is radical, the root (one might say "route") to safety or salvation. Only the righteous call a field of possibility disorder and/or chaos. They only hold their nose because it smells like teen spirit, and that's not bad, it's just embarassing – every one knows deep down they had ejected prematurely. It may be the ever-rousing truth is what needs routed, and for the nihilistic bent the alternative is nothing: how can one get lost if there's no rigid plan for where we're headed? Procrustes' path gets everybody busted.

Friday, July 5, 2013

The rule of consistency and free association are confused

Radicals as well as mental health 'workers' and social reformers have long efforted to expose the hypocrisy or contradictions (both collectively and individually) which modern society holds. Such is the long drive toward reason or rationality: "Headway". Unfortunately, this completely ignores the compartmentalization which rationalism requires lest it burst out with waves of absurdity. A brief look around will show most folks are not rational creatures except as pertains to the particular box they reside in. An historical look will return the impression that, of any form of enlightenment (and not just in the manner of a universal), the projects have all ended in failure. As B. Laska concluded, "we cannot be enlightened".

Social movements proceed much like Kuhnian paradigms, whose transformations merely result in the construction of new compartments after the old-timers are dead. The "What's the alternative?" question is loudest in the midst of the transformation or period of instability. Any truly radical change is therefore, and from almost any rational stand, deemed impossible. Then I'd like to ask, "why stick with reason?" This shaky status is only the ground for a grand systemic recuperation.

The "reason" is always given in a most circular fashion, "it's the only game in town!" The theory of inertia is no help at all. A game is just the rationalization of play, and one might think it just an excuse. The game is not even in the same compartment as play, and when I affix the adjective, "free-", one might consider there is a point made, but surely not a "win" even when it has to be admitted that everyone else seems to be cheating. It's a moral complaint like red meat in some circles or too much salt or deep-fat fried potatoes. The field of free-play is chaos, and that is the zone of free association where despite one's intention, up comes a surprise – sometimes it's pleasant.

Another way to put it, as Huizinga suggested when he said that play annihilates logic or reason, what really comes about is a de-compartmentalization – nothing's been broken but boundaries and some questionable connections which were beforehand well hidden. Intuitions are released from categorical constraints so, in distinction to gaming, the field of play is as infinite as the number of tunes to be played on a piano. Traditions or habits may follow you like the wind in a dust storm, but not like bullets unless no one else is playing, and then, watch out!

The poetic and mythic equally admit no discourse but the metaphoric (in it's most broad or non-technical sense) or contextual (rather than comportedly departmental). Dada suggested that only the juxtaposition of the habitually unsuitable will trigger the imp of perversion or bullshit detector. It's much less damaging than the shock required which might just come to instantly marry them. Like the young boy patriot who hates the government for its persistent treading (and so much he has heard) does not see the problem with joining up to fight its other enemies until he's been basically trained, and he's likely transformed, but into what we'd have to consider. If not in the gutter, a cop or good husband and wife-beating father? Whatever, they promised good jobs or an education, should he survive his commitment. The heightened chance of losing the gamble brings on the reply, "I'm a man so I'm not afraid to die so stop fucking with my decision to try!" And in this he'd be right and we've completely lost the topic. Percy Shelly's rhymes in Anarchy could probably provide better argument or at least a more child-friendly playfield with other sorts of portal to adventures.

From some point of view, logic is never logical. Make it tighter? Would this boy see the "logical error" of his ways when presented with a mathematical formula? Likely not. When under attack, even a mathematician will defend a position, no questions asked. This is why they invented irrational and imaginary numbers. It's less ego defensive than against all that's chaotic or absurd and the rest will appeal to authority, celebrity or otherwise the WORD as "revealed". A random montage might be better than Shelly since chaos has no orders to persuade, so observing it may actually be thought safe, at least from a distance or until you've been made.

More likely, there's already occurred, through a "proper" upbringing, a linguistic death of the "private reflection" where "everything's disconnected anyway". Well, that's not quite what we mean by chaos today. Like Tim Burton, the one-time rebel director (you can tell by the gothic and unruly hair), had the balls to attach his name to a view of the Yanks as protecting their station from evil Rebs who were fighting to up-bring a vampire nation. It's likely no Tenessee boy who died young had ever raised a colonial pillar. Or Alice returning from Underland to bring in free trade and industrialize China. Any descendant of Jim Bridger or Ghengis Kahn should really resent every 'foregone conclusion and all the implications they raise! Like every Ozark granny who lived in a shanty could wisely advise, "don't count yer hens a'fore hatch'n".

Haven't they already proved themselves bloodsucking nightmare creations? The same one's who say that anarchy is ever the plague of society! With all the payments of commitment and duties, they can't even guarantee you'll not be drained with your needle on "empty". Or like ol' honest Abe, whose pre-fabled station was prosecuting slaves to be returned to plantations and only reluctantly went abolition and thought up the final solution: invade Nicaragua and send them all there, or maybe Liberia as dummy farm workers just like off-shore corporations, oh what a wonder – full commutation of every sentence which might be uttered. Four score before was Grandfather Jefferson, who, praising the 'Injuns' said "unfortunately, every last one of em's in our way". Just who are they calling an Indian giver? It's fucking unreal, that's all I can say!

As to the potential for system collapse, the embrace of hypocrisy which Mark Twain suggested is the foundation of every civilization should guarantee a survival. But without the truths to be juxtaposed, and all the prophets to be made, just where in hell might that be? There may be no alternative to what we've been given, that is, except actually living (and we're not just referring to making it).

Often confused with the world of the dead, what's really real is everything else, or what's left outside the (compartmentalized) "known" or better yet, guesses and labels – inconsiderate of letters, its literary symbol is ...

-- see Time & Genetics

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Mythic Discourse

In mythic discourse, one could say everything, in its broadest sense, which is also to say each ambiguity comes in threes. Charles Peirce, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Asger Jorn are three moderns who re-claimed the excluded middle. Perhaps unaware of Baudelaire and Jarry, Charles Fort down-right expropriated it. Charles Fourier had to re-invent it, lassoing a gift from an honest giraffe and casting it into the future. In binary systems, the third is always attached to that which is ignored or excluded, as in the modern assessment, 'there's no way out'. Where acknowledged, the middle is average, derivative or unoriginal and mundane, undecided or wishy-washy. and in this sense, still excluded, even though it may be only a position of disinterest, it's often given a negative moral attachment such as "tasteless". It seems there are no unitary systems. Even democracy includes the good, true and beautiful and then there's everyone else, that is, "those kind of people". But in all eliptical thinking such as mythic discourse, there are three important points: two shifting centers and a recursive periphery. Avant garde thinking considers the periphery an obstacle or resource.

Myth-time proposes a space or an epoch from which we emerged, at least wherein times must have been better. In myth-time the mythic is grander than false. Without it, (and without a doubt), the justice delivered between the good and the evil is placed on any innocent bystander who happens your way. Excluding the middle or trimming it off (the dialectic of science, whether reductive or not) in the interest of the synthetic (which almost everyone deep down understands is artificial and overly complex) ensures a world we call "reality" of perpetual opposition (we call that progress). There are three ways to approach any mythic discourse: 1. literally; 2. the reversal or mirror, and 3. the leap or stretch which might lead anywhere.

For example, from the film "White Men Can't Jump", there is 1. the literal basketball reference; 2. the inversion represented by reverse racism; and 3. the actual leap, or idea that moderns, with their plodding feet ever on the ground in search of reality, can't make the leap to the third option which is sort of transcendental and certainly intuitive. Even when accepting the tripartite situation, we, like Freud dealing with Shakespearian choices, tried to pick the right choice, that is, the real meaning of the story, it's "truth" like an art critic who thinks the original intention of an artist can be revealed by dissection. Forgetting that the discourse comes from a "golden" age or Fourian reality and therefore unhinged from temporal inclinations (the point of triangulation actually circles around declinations) and it comes in the form of poetry, every interpretation is simultaneously and equally correct, it's just not euclidean so there's no contradiction, and even when there is, there's no either-or about it. As well, authorship is inconsequential except in its hollywood-esque revisions. Even so, and assuming they're just stupid or lying, something mythically grand and thematic survives and the periphery or audience or onlooker is revealed as the real art critic.

Every option or choice can be a mirror or telescope and Ravena may just have been Snowhite's sister or mother or grandmother assisting a ritual initiation becoming a maiden from childhood, including the coma or a ritual death. There's always an ambiguity in drawing the line between nursing and chemical assassination, with words or with looks. In the sequel, of course, Snowhite will become Ravena for somebody else. Woody Allen might have called it "In Love and Death" and we'd have a completely other rendition. The point is there are so many themes (Themis was goddess of social organisation) the fun in anthropology is not just observing but comparing them. Stories, on the other hand, invite one to jump in and if only for a moment, feel like you're in them – in the process, you've transformed, or become an other.

Freud's three "caskets" of course, all lead to the truth, which for the modern position is invariably death. But the first door is closed, the truth can't be known in the modern or biblical sense, that sense when considering, for example, marriage, in which the door would allude to the post menopausal grandmothers. The middle door slams behind you, your fate is sealed by total immersion, like suicide or foolhardiness. On the other hand the postpartum mother has delivered the future already, so your part is already inconsequential. The first door is for the morally righteous or curious but persistent. The second is for those without a backup plan, who may well come to know the proverb which advises "be careful what you wish for". The third door is taken as it will stay open, but mostly brings forth post menses maidens and that makes the suitor part of the future. Behind that door lies all manner of possibility, and that is authentic wealth. Still, one must beware of the past which surely will follow. Though Freud was right that death waits behind every door, so where's the choice? Mythic discourse is never straight forward. The choice is not between boxes, it only lives beyond the third door or out of that box. The third way the allusion is to the eternal return which lives amongst endless possibility. There is birth there as well, and that is the lesson myth-time will tell. Fate didn't used to mean doom and gloom, but sometimes alluded to good fortune. The other allusion is laid out as plain as can be in the Kalevala (the story, not what was on tv) and that was "At one time in the interest of grandkids, we didn't sell off our children, no matter the highest bids!"