Awake is for working? You must be dreaming! The informal oppositon to enforced sleep and termination

There may be emerging another world than the world of work and it's binary opposition, which is said to be sleep like death and dreamed fiction. Neither wakeful nor sleeping, as indicated by their common prefix of negation, 'a-' (or 'an-' before a vowel) in the stative tense or season. Prefixed to verbs it suggests the continuation or enduring, as in "I'm a'walking", meaning of course, undergoing a transformation, a'way from a static norm toward which direction or end is not essential unless we have in mind a state of ambiguity. In Japanese, the suffix 'ne' only negates affirmation. It's not a positive response like yes or no, it just turns the preceding prima facie statement into an invitation like the canadian "eh?".

The really (negative) answer we would translate "no" is spelled "Ie", and pronounced like we would emotively say "yeah". You can see the difference: in other words the former question is merely an offering, tender, unlike the negative pronouncement which must always be down deep a positive affirmation. Rendered in Japanese, to "really" ask a question like que? is to suffix the former seemly affirmation with -ka, okay? For example, where we might say "It is!" (or 'tis – in niponese 'desu' – and the 'u' is mostly silent), instead of switching front to back like english speakers might have said ("Is it?" – when some athabascan speakers say "innit?", what they really mean is "ne?") in niponese one merely juxtaposes -ka (des(u)ka). In words like kaboom, the ka means getting from here to there without transcending the intervening space, as if a catalyzing cataplism going from ice to steam without experiencing intervening water. It may be a leap or merely an unexpected arrival. Capitalism gets someone else to do it for you, on the same basis of slaves providing for an archaic greek democracy coming soon to a theatre near you. That's what we are afraid of!

On this analogy, to be awake is no all-night party over a corpse. Or is it? You're supposed to be alert and attentive to detail, the proverbial opposite of being in a coffin and no laughing matter though it may take volumes of caffeine and not a little subdued coughing just to clear your throat or attract another's attention as if it was Tinkerbell's mirror in your eye or way too much mascara. Too easy we mistake the hidden plan with a coming massacre. Perhaps it should have been expressed or answered with a cackle – isn't that what's intended when there's a twinkle in the aye? In and out of any interrogation it may just be a slap in the face or figuratively, a whackin' on the too inquisitive behind.

asleep (adj.)
c.1200, aslepe, o slæpe, from Old English on slæpe (see sleep). The parallel form on sleep continued until c.1550. Of limbs, from late 14c. Meaning "inattentive, off guard" is from mid-14c.

awake (adj.)
"not asleep," c.1300, shortened from awaken, past participle of Old English awæcnan (see awaken).

– etymonline

If not for an original word play, what is criticized today as colloquial, anomalous or mere and childly, of insufficient analysis to resurrect some teleology, I would say "how else" can the waking world of work be justified by functionalists as "how the world works", established by the WORD which in olden times 'twas said "god given'? Unwilling to time-travel that far back, science is still satisfied with the law as wholly representative, that is they've only added a great big 'W' to what was formerly called "holy". Both forgot the more ancient central tree which in europe during solstice-time simply was a holly. You can look it up in hist'ry books, it's not my word, the language told me!

But still, what of that other world I said might be emerging? The language only says it might have been before us. Psychiatrists have a pill and will call it simply madness. Punch the clock or let it fly and you've transcended space and time. You could say the men with electric prods and butterfly nets are only there for your assistance if you're stuck or cataplexic in a hole, despite their own obsessive stand against a counter movement, especially clockworks running out from their control.

Sometimes it's just for show, like when chased by charioteers throwing sticks and stones behind their errant spears at comrade-leader moses, it was the plain-speakers demanding clarity who interpreted the flowery metaphor of boating 'cross the deep red sea, who thereafter shouting "It's a miracle!" or on any other hand is "scientifically infeasible!". Perhaps concentrating on precision and clarity in effort to diagram reality or pinpoint any holes in speech will either miss the boat entirely or puncture the hull and sink it. More than one ambitious nimrod has been swamped by others wakes.

A wake is just the water's ripples traveling long behind you. It is the water's memory as if to say only the present can induce or reveal the past or be possessed by it. The wake behind cannot occur until you part the water – it's harmonic. If there's a goal or destination, the future's had to happen before you can find it. Not fate or destiny which is totally euclidean, we're talking mimicry, like when the parrot says what goes around comes around, unaware that in all this commonality nothing is the same, or some old greeks who thought the future sneaks up and kicks you in the ass, sometimes from quite a ways behind.

Discovered irony is just a clue the world is funny that way. A no brainer is that magnets are attracted most to iron. Lacking that floating in water or upon Spring they head north. Without regard to jeans or things genetic, it's in your blood until you're out of it and in this way pathetic. So when loved ones died, the irish threw a party but everybody cries for dears departed. It just proves the spectacle's the same, independent of emotion – one can take it or leave it. Like underlying meatly meets and mealy meals and malignant malls, one really lasting question concerns what's to eat for energy to do what's next and that's what Bergson called transgenerationally maintaining life's duration. But heed your taste, they'll call you hedonistic. Old mariners have dreams of mountains and never want a burial at sea, and not for want of freedom from oppression – it's just nice to get a change of scenery. Our native fondness for water should be a clue that for such as us and killer whales, sustained immersion must be interspersed with leaps for air and room for breathing. For some it seems, however, there's never any pleasing.

It may be once upon a time a trance was never needed for some dreaming. But that's when all the critters on the earth communicated and we were not excluded. Now we sleep, ingest barbiturates or 'poison' mushrooms to gain barbarian experiences and when we try to relate, it's called fiction, but only if we're lucky. It means they really lied, appearing tolerant, and our discourse never really was invited. But there's just so much word play can be had, how could any disregard it as irrelevant or bad? Really? I would think it evidence that play is what is primary, and that's a process you can't take to any bank for future spending. As some mended alcoholic once was heard to say, "if you ever want to keep it, you've got to give it away".

reciprocitY

A collision of gifts is no exchange no matter how symmetrical or repetitiously trodden its route, which is also to say a habitat enframed by habits. A bullet may absorb or fortuitously bounce away: there will be mushrooms in any case only depending upon the mutual fluidity of the impact. Or it's not the law of gravity, nor grammar, makes a basketball bounce – try it sometime without air and you'll come up flat – with or without reverse english or a clever spin by your eulogist!

As good as a reflection, or for the hearing-enabled, an echo, another word for the principle of reversibility is "reciprocity" – the reference is to kinship (or aesthetics) and only tangentially to naming – it's not politically economic whatsoever which is a cause-effecting mathematical thing, that is the barratrous flight of fanciful exclusions. The name is an address or reference, like when a mountainous landmark IS the destination, not merely a signpost or its mealy-mouthed representation. Without impersonation like the exchange of tits and tats, there are neither lines nor continua – all it really takes to float is buoyancy and only where you're looking does a bobbling bouy mark a spot, hence the serenic screams of sirens and flashing lights of titans.

The concern is more with harmony (or non-abrasive sensibility or resonance) than reproduction (see the phonological association of "artful" and "heart-felt"). Consequently, endurance is merely a word for continuity and when we do get to reproduction, a sort of ex post facto mimicry through immersion, we're really talking transformation like weighing anchors or cutting strings of attachment. Without the lines of linearity, there is nothing to exchange so no direction which can't run both ways and nothing is the same even though the only sense made is through a lens of commonality. This is why for Alice, the looking-glass world is not just backward but well-twisted (and vice-versa). Reversibility is not confined by mathematics, its just that jailers are often in-the-closet mathematicians so prisoners themselves – of logic.

The language of "a", the language of "an", the article and it's negation just like anarchy, the contraction's apostrophe or excuse for ownership only looks like a non-sequitur or artificially sequestered juxtaposition. Compare "the man's a dog" and "the man's dog" – "a dog" as "not-dog", "is" as "has". We should laugh at such language-cops or other varieties who'd make formidable attempts to distinguish themselves – they ARE the joke of irreversibility. Substantial literally means good footing (as in "under stand"). To be merely under foot does not indicate a favourable stance: one could trip. Like the trickster, substance is just as happy being a nuisance as getting you off. Water-walkers are rare outside of the insect world so flying may be the safest option, and not in the direction of a moth toward a light-bulb or camp fire. There is also the less apparent quicksand to consider. The law is hyper-reason, which is also to say it bends: deep down it's just an insubstantial system of substandard excuses flexing in direct ratio with it's holder's muscularity.

With the nature of mawing and clamping and states of voluptuous emotion, vice and Vice are never really far apart. A vise is an american tool for squeezing immorality. From the start, law creates the space or zone for an all too-apparent hypocrisy. It is the tool of choice for non-believers – where there is no belief, not just a suspension of judgement, there is no real hypocrisy, just exclusion put off. The exceptional state and state of exception are joined at the hip. The law merely provides an expediency. The pope can annihilate pagan villages while adorning his church with pagan and even, according to the laws of propriety, unvirtuous imagery of saints and goddesses flaunting the dress code, and still be proclaimed patron of the arts as well as of polyamorous kings named henry:

on island nations like Japan, eight is always the lucky number. For the seventh son of seven sons, the eighth's not always father. For some it's baby jesus if not an aristotle; the more poetically inclined still call her mother and are less inclined to throttle.

– Atka Mip

While the law expresses consistency (by definition) its application has never (nor can it) – for most of its duration, unless perturbed it's flaccid. The nature of power is ever and only whimsy, while protocol is attended so no one else will notice. Consistency is a fetish when not disingenuity. The default position concerning laws is their breaking asunder (read as well "us under"), like a ball that's never really happy to settle down, even and especially after a slam dunk. Punishment of such faults is thereby among the most futile of absurdities, like beating an earthquake for its transgression. Punishment's nonviolent emulation is the mark of hypocrisy which is also to say, "meaningless", like asserting one is deader after clubbing than would be the case from excessive choking from the office of the governor.

Like the reversibility of applied immolation for heresy and barbarians burning down the city, all that's really happened is closing a circle to prevent spiraling about and fluttering away. It's the moving nature of a coven, not the crispied critters' steadfast stance within the cooking oven. And while for run-aways or not, "spaced out" is an acceptable amnesia, as a likely destination, the only real gibberish may be "outer space". As a wishful manifestation, watching star trek may be fun, but funner still is when you see it watching back.

Fetish is a spoiled cabbage

Lintel (as 'threshold' < L. limin-): "To suggest rather than to state, to make a crossroads of each word in the street of sentences. Something new will always come to light if texts are dissected ad infinitum, and in this all written works - and not just those of genius, as some have claimed in error - resemble the works of nature."

- Alfred Jarry

Of course, we are all well aware that the young cabbage is a child, snipped off and snapped up before maturation 's even formed a concept. It takes a different sort of cabbage farm to produce the seeds for tomorrow's soup pot, one on which the young are tended and nurtured so they can vegetate and mature. Brother Dupont suggests maturation is the cumulative limitation of possibilities. This is the civil take on the servant-subject. Adorno & Horkheimer might have said (with no sense of disagreement) that maturation is the accumulation of injuries and both Kropotkin and Mark Twain spoke of the accumulation of contradictions moving toward a complete embrace with hypocrisy. The least active bullshit detector should begin to smell rotten fish in Denmark, but, unfortunately, the sense of smell is fleeting and so, most prone to habituation. Plant botany and horticulture are, therefore, the only source of data which are able to put to question the myth of the spoiled child. The one thing young cabbages need, that is, if they're not expected to go into the soup or shit can, is just about everything they want: smotherings of motherings and one day, if not young'ns of their own, at least the grounds from which they sprout (and not as our examples in abundance show – de-force). It is the one thing outlawed by the proverbial saint, Paul, who first said "spare the rod and spoil the child". Unless there is another entendre for a rod which has only a freudian connection to fly-fishing, but that would be more the tangled line of Wilhelm Reich and not Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, it has always been easier to hold the nose and cook up the cabbage than to tend it to the tall, proud stalk it aspires to become. For any plant, love comes in the form (and not in the way) of sunlight, good earth and as much refreshment as can be drunk without tottering. For everyone else, there's the college of education or the space behind the shed for the lessons in propriety, that sacred fealty given toward all but your own property.

Turnip, n.

Fresh garbage. . .
Fresh garbage. . .

Well, look beneath your lid some morning,
See those things you didn't quite consume
The world's a can for your fresh garbage. . .

Fresh garbage. . .
Fresh garbage. . .

– Spirit, '68

Turnip, n.
1. botany: an unbleadable fodder or growth subsisting between a rock and a hard-on, of late spreading to northerly latitudes;
2. cybernetics: the penultimate object of the course of progressive consumption prefatory to a desert of cannibalic pellagroid.

– Epistle to a turnip

It is becomining obvious to all that a sequestor has etymological affinity with the verb, 'to squeeze'. Even so, as exageration is not always a reaction-formation, nonsense needn't be a defense mechanism; purposelessness is no mere substitute for drive – it's just more fun – in the same fashion that "CAPITAL" is just a giant Martian "BANTH" [a "cat-like" carnivorous scavenger] with material implications. Like digital dollars, virtual reality is without nutritive substance no matter one's sense of taste. As the laws of thermal dynamics clearly illustrate, even god is impotent without his pressure cooker and cadres of deathless archers. Besides a profitable expenditure, cops & armies are the necessary bet-hedgers 'til the debate is concluded in mutual insolvency, hence TS's prophetic whimper and not a bang:

– see The Hollow Men

[On that note, just like a Tenessee boy named "Sherman" or even honest "Abe" at home or over sea, what self-respecting theo-sophist joker would give a son the name of a fourteenth-century tyrant who in bloody wars procured himself, for all posterity, a bigger dick than even allah? Goodness me! There may just be an inverse ratio of imaginary senses to official intelligences. So who now's being most reactionary?]

THE ETHERIALIST & REALIST DEBATE:

"Come!" he whispered. "Or he will have the bowmen upon you, and this time there will be no escape. Did you not see how futile is your steel against thin air!"

Carthoris turned unwillingly to follow. As the two left the room he turned to his companion.

"If I may not kill thin air," he asked, "how, then, shall I fear that thin air may kill me?"

"You saw the Torquasians fall before the bowmen?" asked Jav.

Carthoris nodded.

"So would you fall before them, and without one single chance for self-defence or revenge."

As they talked Jav led Carthoris to a small room in one of the numerous towers of the palace. Here were couches, and Jav bid the Heliumite be seated.

For several minutes the Lotharian eyed his prisoner, for such Carthoris now realized himself to be.

"I am half convinced that you are real," he said at last.

Carthoris laughed.

"Of course I am real," he said. "What caused you to doubt it? Can you not see me, feel me?"

"So may I see and feel the bowmen," replied Jav, "and yet we all know that they, at least, are not real."

Carthoris showed by the expression of his face his puzzlement at each new reference to the mysterious bowmen—the vanishing soldiery of Lothar.

"What, then, may they be?" he asked.

"You really do not know?" asked Jav.

Carthoris shook his head negatively.

"I can almost believe that you have told us the truth and that you are really from another part of Barsoom, or from another world. But tell me, in your own country have you no bowmen to strike terror to the hearts of the green hordesmen as they slay in company with the fierce banths of war?"

"We have soldiers," replied Carthoris. "We of the red race are all soldiers, but we have no bowmen to defend us, such as yours. We defend ourselves."

"You go out and get killed by your enemies!" cried Jav incredulously.

"Certainly," replied Carthoris. "How do the Lotharians?"

"You have seen," replied the other. "We send out our deathless archers—deathless because they are lifeless, existing only in the imaginations of our enemies. It is really our giant minds that defend us, sending out legions of imaginary warriors to materialize before the mind's eye of the foe.

"They see them—they see their bows drawn back—they see their slender arrows speed with unerring precision toward their hearts. And they die—killed by the power of suggestion."

"But the archers that are slain?" exclaimed Carthoris. "You call them deathless, and yet I saw their dead bodies piled high upon the battlefield. How may that be?"

"It is but to lend reality to the scene," replied Jav. "We picture many of our own defenders killed that the Torquasians may not guess that there are really no flesh and blood creatures opposing them.

"Once that truth became implanted in their minds, it is the theory of many of us, no longer would they fall prey to the suggestion of the deadly arrows, for greater would be the suggestion of the truth, and the more powerful suggestion would prevail—it is law."

"And the banths?" questioned Carthoris. "They, too, were but creatures of suggestion?"

"Some of them were real," replied Jav. "Those that accompanied the archers in pursuit of the Torquasians were unreal. Like the archers, they never returned, but, having served their purpose, vanished with the bowmen when the rout of the enemy was assured.

"Those that remained about the field were real. Those we loosed as scavengers to devour the bodies of the dead of Torquas. This thing is demanded by the realists among us. I am a realist. Tario is an etherealist.

"The etherealists maintain that there is no such thing as matter—that all is mind. They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.

"According to Tario, it is but necessary that we all unite in imagining that there are no dead Torquasians beneath our walls, and there will be none, nor any need of scavenging banths."

"You, then, do not hold Tario's beliefs?" asked Carthoris.

"In part only," replied the Lotharian. "I believe, in fact I know, that there are some truly ethereal creatures. Tario is one, I am convinced. He has no existence except in the imaginations of his people.

"Of course, it is the contention of all us realists that all etherealists are but figments of the imagination. They contend that no food is necessary, nor do they eat; but any one of the most rudimentary intelligence must realize that food is a necessity to creatures having actual existence."

"Yes," agreed Carthoris, "not having eaten to-day I can readily agree with you."

"Ah, pardon me," exclaimed Jav. "Pray be seated and satisfy your hunger," and with a wave of his hand he indicated a bountifully laden table that had not been there an instant before he spoke. Of that Carthoris was positive, for he had searched the room diligently with his eyes several times.

"It is well," continued Jav, "that you did not fall into the hands of an etherealist. Then, indeed, would you have gone hungry."

"But," exclaimed Carthoris, "this is not real food—it was not here an instant since, and real food does not materialize out of thin air."

Jav looked hurt.

"There is no real food or water in Lothar," he said; "nor has there been for countless ages. Upon such as you now see before you have we existed since the dawn of history. Upon such, then, may you exist."

"But I thought you were a realist," exclaimed Carthoris.

"Indeed," cried Jav, "what more realistic than this bounteous feast? It is just here that we differ most from the etherealists. They claim that it is unnecessary to imagine food; but we have found that for the maintenance of life we must thrice daily sit down to hearty meals.

"The food that one eats is supposed to undergo certain chemical changes during the process of digestion and assimilation, the result, of course, being the rebuilding of wasted tissue.

"Now we all know that mind is all, though we may differ in the interpretation of its various manifestations. Tario maintains that there is no such thing as substance, all being created from the substanceless matter of the brain.

"We realists, however, know better. We know that mind has the power to maintain substance even though it may not be able to create substance—the latter is still an open question. And so we know that in order to maintain our physical bodies we must cause all our organs properly to function.

"This we accomplish by materializing food-thoughts, and by partaking of the food thus created. We chew, we swallow, we digest. All our organs function precisely as if we had partaken of material food. And what is the result? What must be the result? The chemical changes take place through both direct and indirect suggestion, and we live and thrive."

Carthoris eyed the food before him. It seemed real enough. He lifted a morsel to his lips. There was substance indeed. And flavour as well. Yes, even his palate was deceived.

Jav watched him, smiling, as he ate.

"Is it not entirely satisfying?" he asked.

"I must admit that it is," replied Carthoris. "But tell me, how does Tario live, and the other etherealists who maintain that food is unnecessary?"

Jav scratched his head.

"That is a question we often discuss," he replied. "It is the strongest evidence we have of the non-existence of the etherealists; but who may know other than Komal?"

"Who is Komal?" asked Carthoris. "I heard your jeddak speak of him."

Jav bent low toward the ear of the Heliumite, looking fearfully about before he spoke.

"Komal is the essence," he whispered. "Even the etherealists admit that mind itself must have substance in order to transmit to imaginings the appearance of substance. For if there really was no such thing as substance it could not be suggested—what never has been cannot be imagined. Do you follow me?"

"I am groping," replied Carthoris dryly.

"So the essence must be substance," continued Jav. "Komal is the essence of the All, as it were. He is maintained by substance. He eats. He eats the real. To be explicit, he eats the realists. That is Tario's work.

"He says that inasmuch as we maintain that we alone are real we should, to be consistent, admit that we alone are proper food for Komal. Sometimes, as to-day, we find other food for him. He is very fond of Torquasians."

"And Komal is a man?" asked Carthoris.

"He is All, I told you," replied Jav. "I know not how to explain him in words that you will understand. He is the beginning and the end. All life emanates from Komal, since the substance which feeds the brain with imaginings radiates from the body of Komal.

"Should Komal cease to eat, all life upon Barsoom would cease to be. He cannot die, but he might cease to eat, and, thus, to radiate."

"And he feeds upon the men and women of your belief?" cried Carthoris.

"Women!" exclaimed Jav. "There are no women in Lothar. The last of the Lotharian females perished ages since, upon that cruel and terrible journey across the muddy plains that fringed the half-dried seas, when the green hordes scourged us across the world to this our last hiding-place—our impregnable fortress of Lothar.

"Scarce twenty thousand men of all the countless millions of our race lived to reach Lothar. Among us were no women and no children. All these had perished by the way.

"As time went on, we, too, were dying and the race fast approaching extinction, when the Great Truth was revealed to us, that mind is all. Many more died before we perfected our powers, but at last we were able to defy death when we fully understood that death was merely a state of mind.

– E. R. Burroughs: The Marxian Series

The Poetic Principle, The Poetical Effect

Time and Space... It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.

Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility.

It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.

– Henri Poincaré

So whose reality is it? In dream or an induced halucination, the figurative frame of experience is taken as if it were literal, like it was mana for sympathetic magic or how some petrol can relate reality to napalm, the lit fuse or imaginative figment is required to even notice another's torment. Unless it's pulled a trigger, the literary idea of it is absurd: words never do justice. At best they uncover a sewer-hole or open a window-shade like a dropped jaw just prior to a bout with nausea or the wink and a grin reeking from a ghastly intruder. It's only the uncensored eyes and the nose who are first to take notice and it's read from a face, not a page. No act is believable if the ego's still visible. Otherwise the play is deceptive, an illusion.

Only an artist could pull off the scam to not only survive but get paid selling their own internal organs on the open market or with them playing tunes within a church. Though the effect is the same, opposed to expressions of pretentious fakery, at least authentic unfleshly possession does not well succumb to practice. A synonym for magical powers or imagination, empathy can never be sold or bought, it can't even be rhymed with commodity exchange without a major metamorphosis like a bash on the head from a fallen flowerpot. Flights of fantasy are not an enigma. It's the fear of a landing which calls into question a developing sense of paranoia. Otherwise, whose business is it anyway, however well-reduced to a materialist economy? Dissemblance of mentality is only that which interferes with work – otherwise the label would be "criminal" so you'd have to pass inspection by the county clerk.

And in regard to Truth, if, to be sure, through the attainment of a truth we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience at once the true poetical effect; but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth which merely served to render the harmony manifest.

We shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct conception of what the true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect.

He recognises the ambrosia which nourishes his soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven – in the volutes of the flower – in the clustering of low shrubberies – in the waving of the grain-fields – in the slanting of tall eastern trees – in the blue distance of mountains – in the grouping of clouds – in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks – in the gleaming of silver rivers – in the repose of sequestered lakes – in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds – in the harp of Aeolus – in the sighing of the night-wind – in the repining voice of the forest – in the surf that complains to the shore – in the fresh breath of the woods – in the scent of the violet – in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth – in the suggestive odour that comes to him at eventide from far-distant undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored.

While the epic mania, while the idea that to merit in poetry prolixity is indispensable, has for some years past been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresies of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: – but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man, I would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical and chasmal difference between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.

– E. A. Poe, The Poetic Principle

"At bottom Kropotkin conceived nature as a kind of Providence, thanks to which there had to be harmony in all things, including human societies. And this has led many anarchists to repeat that “Anarchy is Natural Order”, a phrase with an exquisite kropotkinean flavour. If it is true that the law of Nature is Harmony, I suggest one would be entitled to ask why Nature has waited for anarchists to be born, and goes on waiting for them to triumph, in order to destroy the terrible and destructive conflicts from which mankind has already suffered. Would one not be closer to the truth in saying that anarchy is the struggle, in human society, against the disharmonies of Nature?"

– Errico Malatesta

Anarchism is not Enough: An Anonymous Book

The most curiously integrated of the groups of stories which may be classified as a single dramatic (or philosophical) unit of the book is the queen-group. Indeed it is possible to discuss this group as if it were but one story, the episodic variations seeming no more than caprices of style—the same story told in different degrees of earnestness and so in different personalities, as it were. The one fixed personality of the group is the Queen herself; the others are all stylistic personalities. The Queen began as a photograph used by a newspaper at discreet intervals to represent the female bandit of the moment or the murder-victim or the fire-heroine or the missionary’s bride. By experience and variety she became a personality, and a fixed personality. It is quite remarkable in fact how under our very eyes this anonymous author should be able to transform a fiction into a fact: for the Queen is as true for always as the photograph is each time false. Indeed, the whole transformation is merely a matter of style. To illustrate: “As Maxine, the world’s sleeplessness champion, the photograph had great momentary importance but did not know it because it was part of a newspaper dynamic in which everything happened with equal fatalistic effect, everything was accident, in the moment succeeding accident it was always clear that nothing had happened. As photograph therefore the photograph saw all this; it was permanently unimportant but it knew this. And as it had a knowledge of its unimportance, it also had a knowledge of the importance of accident; and as the first knowledge made it insignificant so the second knowledge made it Queen. The Queen, the photograph without identity, this anonymous particularity, did in fact dwell in a world in which she was the only one and in which the world of many was only what she called ‘the chaotic conversation of events.’ So she resolved to put her queendom in order, not by interrupting the conversation, which would only have increased the chaos, but by having minutely recorded whatever ‘happened,’ whatever ‘was.’ Nothing then in her queendom contradicted anything else, neither the argument nor its answer, neither the burglar-proof lock nor the burglar against whom it was not proof: everything was so, everything was statistical, everything was falsification, everything was conversation, and she was an anonymous particularity conversing with herself about her own nothingness, so she was outside the chaotic conversation of events, she was Queen.”

Her three chief statisticians (we learn) were publishers. They were all pleasant fellows, each with a touch of the universal in him, and came and went without suspicion everywhere in the queendom because of their peoplishness: they too, like all the rest, were statistical, so statistical indeed that they were statisticians. They went about preaching the gospel of the communal ownership of events. They said: “Primitive man believed in things as events. As civilized man it is your duty to believe in events as things.” And the people did. And they permitted the statisticians (or publishers) to know what happened to them and what they did with what happened to them as faithfully as they reported their possessions each year in the great Common Book. In this queendom there was no loss and no mystery and no suffering, because everything was reported as conversation and nothing therefore thought about. All was automatic spontaneity, even their love for their Queen. As for the Queen, she would walk (we are told) through the dark rooms of her palace at night, having each room lit only upon her leaving it, until she reached her own small chamber, which remained unlit all night while the others shone; until morning, when in her own small chamber the curtains were drawn, the lamps lit, while in all the other rooms of the palace there was daylight. The meaning of this is plain: that in the anonymousness of the Queen lay her non-statistical, her non-falsificatory individuality. She is the author, the Queendom is her book. She is darkness and mystery, the plain, banal though chaotic daylight is her unravelling. By making the unravelling more methodic and so more plainly banal she separates in people the statistical from the non-statistical part, the known from the anonymous. She shows herself to be a dualist of the most dangerous kind.

For a long time the authorities from the internal evidence of the queen-stories suspected the anonymous author of being a woman. They said that it was not improbable that the book was the Bible of an underground sect devoted to educating female children to be statistical queens. But this view had to be abandoned as unscholarly, even ungentlemanly, because in nothing that the Queen said or did was there any accent of disorder or ambition: she merely, with miraculous patience and tact, saw to it that records were kept of everything. The authorities eventually concluded that she was a Character of Fiction, and so stainless, and could not help them. For some time their suspicion was fixed on a character in one of the stories with whom the Queen fell in love. But as he was Minister of Pastimes to the Queen it was thought that it might prove generally disrespectful to State officials to pursue the matter further (as when, in the story Understanding, suspicion was fixed on the character who bribed the magistrates to convict him, the inquiry was stopped by the authorities—the detectives even put on the wrong scent—as too metaphysical and cynical).

It must now be clear that the strain of my task is beginning to tell on me. I have become very nervous. In the beginning my emotions were all scholarly, my task was a pleasure, I had the manner of calmness with an antiquity. Towards the end fear has crept upon me. I must speak, and after that go on till I can go on no longer: till I am prevented. I say prevented. For I am haunted by the obsession that the authorities are still watching. They do not suspect the Queen. She was or is a fixed personality, so anonymous as to be irreproachably a Character of Fiction. The others vary in earnestness; in anonymity; they are, as I have suggested, personalities of style; they point to the probability that the author was not or is not a Character of Fiction. I dare go no further. I have become very nervous. I shall nevertheless attempt to continue my task until—I am prevented.

One of the three publishers was a Jew. He was tall, his ears oustanding, his grin long, his voice loose in his mouth. He had been financial adviser to a charitable organization and had had much general statistical though humane experience. He was gross but kind and therefore in charge of all sentimental records: his grossness assured accuracy, his kindness, delicacy.

He had the historical genius, and several specimens of his work are given—though with a touch of dryness in the author himself which makes it impossible to enjoy them as we might have were the book without an author. Indeed, they were not meant to be read at all, but merely written to satisfy the political instincts of the Queen, who never read them herself. I find it difficult to pass over them myself, for aside from their part in the book they are very interesting. There are several small extracts that might be used here with complete propriety and even in a scholarly way. And after all, the author wrote them down himself, did he not? But he was writing and not reading. But am I not writing and not reading? My position becomes more and more uncertain. I shall hurry on.

I shall give one of the Queen’s monologues, to tide us over this difficult period. The monologue does not appear in the book itself: it would have been a piece of naturalism contrary to the theory on which the book was built. Therefore I give it here, as reading. No questions must be asked of me, for as a scholar I should feel obliged to answer them; and the passage would then become writing; and I should have produced a piece of naturalism. Here then is, shall I say, a variety: which is not the anonymous author’s writing but we might almost say his reading, and after that my writing but of his reading, which remains reading for all my writing. My conscience is in your hands: the burden of curiosity and falsification falls upon you. With you rest also the rights of anonymity, the reputation of style, the fortunes of publication, the future of philosophy and scholarship and the little children, for whom these contrive sense. Sense, I say, not satire.

And now for the Queen’s monologue, which the anonymous author did not write and which for this very reason requires, as the reader’s part, sense, I say, not satire, even more immediately than what he did write. Furthermore, you will have to discover for yourself where it begins and where it ends: were I to mark it off it would become writing and so a piece of naturalism and so belie sense and give encouragement to satire. I mean: restraint, statistics, falsification, are more accurate than courage, reality, truth, and so truer. For the Queen’s monologue, since the anonymous author did not write it down, is true; had he not statistically, falsificatorily, restrained himself from writing it down it would have become a piece of naturalism and so a subject of satire. To tide us over a difficult period I set myself the difficult task of writing down the Queen’s monologue without turning it into writing, and so defying satire (if I succeed, which depends on you). The important thing is to defy satire. Satire is lying: falsity as opposed to truth and falsity as opposed to falsification. It is betwixt and between; against sense, which, whatever it is, is one thing or the other-—generally the other, it being for practical purposes impossible for it to be perpetually one thing. By practical purposes I mean of course the question of boredom, as truth finding truth is monotonous. Therefore things happen. Sense, I say, not satire. Imagine a woman has her heart broken and imagine a man breaking it, then her heart heals and he ceases to be a villain, and then they meet again and her heart is whole and he is not a villain. Does she weep because her heart was once broken and does he blush because he once broke it? This would be satire. No, they both smile, and she gives him her heart to break again, and he breaks it. This is sense. Or they both smile and turn away from each other, and this, too, is sense, but sense too academic to survive the strain of academically enforcing itself. The One Thing must be saved from itself, it must not be allowed to overwork itself or to go stale. That is why sense is one thing or the other and generally the other: falsification to relieve truth, broken hearts to protect whole hearts, weakness to spare strength. Fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is puff! puff! everything that satisfies it and which must be carefully recorded in spite of contradictions and lengthiness. Desire is the other things, in great number. And what is satisfaction? Not the other things, which satisfy, but the one thing, that cannot satisfy or be satisfied, and so, though but one thing, equal to desire, and so to all the other things. Fact is it not me; fact is fancy and fancy is desire and desire is the other things. Satisfaction is me, which it calls Queen. It is a lot of him’s, it is a queendom, it is desire speaking the language of satisfaction, it is a great looseness and restlessness of fact and confusion of eyesight and costume, into which the Queen brings sense through order. And what is order? Order is observation. Her first publisher (or statistician) is a gross, kind Jew. Her second is a subtle, cruel Turk, who brutally forced events: he has the political genius. But the people do not mind, since the events happen anyhow: they shrug their shoulders good-naturedly and say “Old Hassan Bey smiling with Turkish teeth,” and call on the first publisher to take notice how smilingly they wince back. Her third is a Christian, and he does nothing: he has the philosophical genius. His idleness and talkativeness exasperate the other two into efficiency. His favourite harangue is: “Let the people create their own order.”

“But how, their own order?”

“Let them think.”

“But if they think, they will all think differently, and not only differently—some will think more powerfully than others.”

“Exactly: those who think more powerfully than others will create order.”

“But this would not be real order, rather the disorder of a false order created by the most powerfully thinking individual or individuals of the moment. This would be anarchism, and anarchism is not enough!”

“I have heard that said before, but how is the order created by the Queen not anarchism?”

“The Queen does not create order, she observes methodically, she creates her order. That is why it is her queendom.”

“But is this not merely a refined form of anarchism?”

“No, it is more than anarchism. The Queen is not the chief individual of her queendom; she is the me of the it; she is the one thing, her queendom is the other things; she is satisfaction, her queendom is desire, a lot of him’s. The more me she is, the more it it is, and the more anonymous she is, and the more she and her queendom are diplomatically indistinguishable. The domestic situation is of course another affair. But to carry the distinction beyond the boundaries of the book is to fall betwixt and between, into satire.”

– by Laura Riding, 1928

The Thing about Sunlight:

In Dante's inferno or Blake's deranged pit,
in a cosmical egg or à plomb chaotique,
whether one world or many doesn't mean shit.

Should you fall to the bottom, your ass gets a kick,
not slightly transformed, (did you think I meant lick?).
Not sure of your hist'ry, thrown back through the mirror,

if you trust it's a myst'ry, you needn't keep score.
If this wasn't as true as you lick off your thumb,
then where do you s'pose all that sunlight came from?

– Pyrrho's Technique

By its own definition, "thing" is either and both an unnamed and indeterminate autonomosity, so therefore, is only presumed to be materially existent, unless as a stand-in or proxy for some relation or process, in which case matter is immaterial and existence incorporeal. In any language it translates to "garble". And applying to anything, once named or observed, it loses its thingness, and hence, its material objectivity – now it's glaringly subjective – for

1. consideration on the one hand, or
2. 'exploitation' on an other, and
3. ignorance by any other criterion than luminosity (like stars in your eyes) or feeling (like a headache)

an affinity perchance or adventure which may lose its thing for animosity or paranoia: by association in the first which makes it relative to something else so is no longer independent; destruction in the second by virtue of its consumption or corruption (something we can't be directly assured of when even repressed skeletons emerge from dark closets); and outright disappears in the third like a closing wound or zipper – in any case it may just be a phantom, so we can with confidence proclaim "no thing exists" in dream or awake but for that we have just named or witnessed.

By any reasonable extension, nothing is unknown and all that's left is reality, a world where there's naught left to know. When all questions are obsolete the thing as such and any other self is dogma or what's read in any dictionary once one erasses all contra-dictions. Ignoring any sophistry annihilates all poetry, the chief`linguistic substance which so upset Plato, the nature of language games of which entendres or polysemy, anomolies are the`necessary conditions for any comparison, definition and assessment concerning any context, predictive predilection, and without any of which witness wanton predicates or you're placed under predation, sometimes called "into perdition".

Without some kindred for comparison, to name an unwitnessed thing eliminates all chance for consideration, use or antipathy, a thing which only authorities can offer (it's often all they have) so is taken as such, like a ding an sich as if one missed the garage door entirely, and with no ambivalence, call for property damage or a speedy ambulance. Dogma's truth is given, no questions asked, but it's no gift when every thing else is taken, most of which is room for curiosity and exploration. Doubt and fallibility or each judgment fast suspended returns the gift as an offering or suggestion and nothing gets expended. In lieu of inquests for an answer or tit-for-tat exchange, nothing can be shared except erotic poems and carnage, in either case transformed, it means it'll never be the same and even when if noticed, nothing will be missed, except perhaps the sunshine or more light on the subject though not directly in your eye.

Skepticism, ranging from a simple suspension of judgement to the outright denial of truth (although Pyrrho suggested "we neither deny nor affirm anything"), need not lead to passivity (that is literally impassive or "impressively impassable") and indifference nor to morality and the formulation of an ethics (as has been traditionally demanded by seekers of the right and true – but not the beautiful), nor to an impossible impasse, (just to double emphasize the point) although there may be no shortage of dilemma for decision-makers, meddlers and other fast-talkers equiped with intellectual ammunition in thirty round clips. A proper dialectic is just a pair of shoelaces or a set of reins: right and left make no difference to keeping your boots on while holding your horses.

ANTISYNTHESIS:

"The mode, power, might or technique of the Sceptical School is to place the phenomenal in opposition to the intellectual "in any way whatever," and thus through the equilibrium of the reasons and things opposed to each other, to reach, first the state of suspension of judgment, and afterwards that of imperturbability. We do not use the word power in any unusual sense, but simply, meaning the force of the system. By the phenomenal, we understand the sensible, hence we place the intellectual in opposition to it. The phrase "in any way whatever," may refer to the word power in order that we may understand that word in a simple sense as we said, or it may refer to the placing the phenomenal and intellectual in opposition. For we place these in opposition to each other in a variety of ways, the phenomenal to the phenomenal, and the intellectual to the intellectual, or reciprocally, and we say "in any way whatever," in order that all methods of opposition may be included. Or "in any way whatever" may refer to the phenomenal and the intellectual, so that we need not ask how does the phenomenal appear, or how are the thoughts conceived, but that we may understand these things in a simple sense. By "reasons opposed to each other," we do not by any means understand that they deny or affirm anything, but simply that they offset each other. By equilibrium, we mean equality in regard to trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, so that of the reasons that are placed in opposition to each other, one should not excel another in trustworthiness.

... The fundamental principle of the Sceptical system is especially this, namely, to oppose every argument by one of equal weight, for it seems to us that in this way we finally reach the position where we have no dogmas."

– Sextus Empiricus

AGRIPPA'S OR MÜNCHHAUSEN TRILEMMA

1. All justifications in pursuit of certain knowledge have also to justify the means of their justification and doing so they have to justify anew the means of their justification. Therefore there can be no end. We are faced with the hopeless situation of an infinite regression.
2. One can stop at self-evidence or common sense or fundamental principles or speaking 'ex cathedra' or at any other evidence, but in doing so the intention to install certain justification is abandoned.
3. The third horn of the trilemma is the application of a circular argument.

The agreement of slaves or antagonists, consensus leads more to dogma if not politically, democratic submission, a sacrifice or compromise. Like the Zapitistas the German assembly was a thing, but only birthed after being held up against the wall by Latin broadswords or their equivalent. Before confederation for defense from French and English conquistadors, the Iroquoian council called up nothing and stood nowhere. They were called up to help with someone facing some impending uncertainty (or so the story goes).

Before any administrative council, the thing was a festival or what happens within a circle of interest. A meet, moot or meat, the sense of which is the same, a stretch or an affair, the place for a fair. Prior to the middle ages, which is to say, in myth-time and truth was just what's trusting, the thing of aesthetic mutuality 'twas neither an economic fare nor politically fair, that certain place where justice must always proceed both from and with some jousting and never just in jest. In lieu of divinity, recipe or chance supposition, a thing is just another choice or means for a movement when confronting uncertainty. As they used to say, "bad company often makes strange bed-fellows" just prior to prescribing a strong laxative.

"We say that the Sceptic does not dogmatise. We do not say this, meaning by the word dogma the popular assent to certain things rather than others (for the Sceptic does assent to feelings that are a necessary result of sensation, as for example, when he is warm or cold, he cannot say that he thinks he is not warm or cold), but we say this, meaning by dogma the acceptance of any opinion in regard to the unknown things investigated by science. For the Pyrrhonean assents to nothing that is unknown. Furthermore, he does not dogmatise even when he utters the Sceptical formulae in regard to things that are unknown, such as "Nothing more," or "I decide nothing," or any of the others about which we shall speak later. For the one who dogmatises regards the thing about which he is said to dogmatise, as existing in itself; the Sceptic does not however regard these formulae as having an absolute existence, for he assumes that the saying "All is false," includes itself with other things as false, and likewise the saying "Nothing is true"; in the same way "Nothing more," states that together with other things it itself is nothing more, and cancels itself therefore, as well as other things. We say the same also in regard to the other Sceptical expressions. In short, if he who dogmatises, assumes as existing in itself that about which he dogmatises, the Sceptic, on the contrary, expresses his sayings in such a way that they are understood to be themselves included, and it cannot be said that he dogmatises in saying these things. The principal thing in uttering these formulae is that he says what appears to him, and communicates his own feelings in an unprejudiced way, without asserting anything in regard to external objects...

It is evident that we pay careful attention to phenomena from what we say about the criterion of the Sceptical School. The word criterion is used in two ways. First, it is understood as a proof of existence or non-existence, in regard to which we shall speak in the opposing argument. Secondly, when it refers to action, meaning the criterion to which we give heed in life, in doing some things and refraining from doing others, and it is about this that we shall now speak. We say, consequently, that the criterion of the Sceptical School is the phenomenon, and in calling it so, we mean the idea of it. It cannot be doubted, as it is based upon susceptibility and involuntary feeling. Hence no one doubts, perhaps, that an object appears so and so, but one questions if it is as it appears. Therefore, as we cannot be entirely inactive as regards the observances of daily life, we live by giving heed to phenomena, and in an unprejudiced way. But this observance of what pertains to the daily life, appears to be of four different kinds. Sometimes it is directed by the guidance of nature, sometimes by the necessity of the feelings, sometimes by the tradition of laws and of customs, and sometimes by the teaching of the arts. It is directed by the guidance of nature, for by nature we are capable of sensation and thought; by the necessity of the feelings, for hunger leads us to food, and thirst to drink; by the traditions of laws and customs, for according to them we consider piety a good in daily life, and impiety an evil; by the teaching of the arts, for we are not inactive in the arts we undertake. We say all these things, however, without expressing a decided opinion." (ibid)

But a virtue itself, particularly one of submission (piety) or aloofness (disinterest), is incompatible with every-day life taken together with any other pro- or im-posed value: there is an impiousness lurking 'neath the lines of every skeptic wishing a voice without being cast into the pit undone or too early. Virtue is only true of and in itself or when in the isolation of solitary confinement, which is to say out of space or context, emulated or enframed, in-flamed and therefore false or dying, but without the insinuation of lying and that is sometimes called hypocrisy or else delusion. It may just be outside of myth-time, everything's absurd or cast with self-allusion – a thing witnessed shining on every regime may be as certain as any sunburn on a cloudless day or gamma rays when shady so to wish to further cloud things up would be by all a thing of virtuous desire often, traveling underneath the name of mayhem.

"One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive."

– Žižek

What is thought to be a dilemma concerning reality is no such thing should you follow Einstein's advice and enlarge your circle of interest or compassion to let things fall where they may but not refrain from taking action or speaking things relatedly. Such as was in myth-time is now mislabeled ancestor worship, the same folks who say "If it was good enough for grandpa then it's good enough for me.

To wit: Consider a child is in the street and comes along a bus. Either may be your own but the juxtaposition presents three alternatives.

1. The first, if you're a human and you don't drop dead in shock, is your heart clogs up your throat and your gut falls down an elevator shaft and you're there (the "mother panic maneuver"), and just in time at that.
2. On the other hand your grasp comes up empty – the child was just an optical illusion – and pausing in momentary dismay, the bus grinds your new haircut out from the pothole and into the asphalt.
3. The weighty analysis. Should you have prior stopped to consider more carefully the options and the situation and then proceed with more certainty or do nothing, walk without a care and guarantee your safety or prevent the accusation you've been once again in error?

The smart thing would be to have abstained from all demands that say that you should cut your hair and hope for the best because if it's not one thing, it'll always be t'other. Burying your feelings on any matter never meant, except by chance, you'll come out any other end unscathed or less demented like reversing the transmission back across the railroad tracks to re-align your front suspension. But just in case, so said Pascal, all lacking in a certainty, you give it a shot, and that's experimentalism, believe it or not. On clear days even juries cast the shadows of a doubt.

Titanomachy Comes Around to Reconstructing Carpetbags

Teleology's an anticipation of a pay-off. A free expression doesn't need ulterior motive, sometimes just a great big perturbation. There's nothing more abusive than a truth that's not elusive. Should you catch it take a rest and liquid else yer cursed so go to hell or somewhere even more insipid.

It's said the gods themselves were one-time titans, and then they got religion when mighty titan force was no longer sufficient to sustain the realty of kingly or more philistine estates from invasions or assassinations; when habit proved too fickle as the new invaders were oft' the miss-content of what was formerly an outward trickle, "good form or good riddance!" no longer suitable, the Truth was invented: what cropped up now and then was henceforth to be a universal. Of necessity were there priest-kings, then on Egypt's fine example, realigned into religion and after many corpses came the all infallible, The Reason, good for use in any season.

Good reasons always need a partner, so our Hegel once had said. Synthesis is fabrication, a structure placed upon the dead. Before offing old Goliath, young Prince Dave was prob'ly no more an itinerant goat-herder than the giant, Honest Abe had been a logger (he was a lawyer), but since the Yellow Emperor, history's written as an epitaph a'top some speechless heads, but only by the conqueror after vanquishing the Rebs.

As a means to classify (with the singular criterion) now by nature folks divided along lines of status, race and gender, impiety and treason or for any handy reason. Such was Greek democracy (and someone, always trickling upward, both works and pays and to this day, to prey and pray sound just the same – it's sequestration mixed up with well-timed negotiations). With new smarts and realizing the error of their old ways, it hadn't after all been war which needs defeated, but peace in any season – what stays inside is justified, without is bad, none could deny – enclosure laws and prison walls are for our own good, and that's always been the greater, inner peace now means "security", or what's in or done for, favour. Whatever's in the basket, it's the same – protection racket. There's always risk. Sometimes it is a bomb, sometimes you miss.

Railroad trains and freeways only interfaced equivalent absurdities, the illusion you can freely move to new and different prisons, I mean cities. Once the righteous good, now it's the baddies hiding 'neath a hood or up against a wall with red and blues a'flashing, crashing through them. It's all the same, and every time it comes around it's different. It was war that birthed the structures, made them all rigid and regal, kept them straight and narrow, lines a'crossing space as if a symbol forever thing eternal (but that's internal "aye's" as in "Because I said so"), and not to lose the point, the arrowhead's a reminder of our history and grammarists use it to control the meaning which is "generate": for every child the question's "Why?" – before a corpse of course it looks like this ––> and then the X, the spot of all degeneration.

As rows and columns preceded all accountants, suits and pigs, so now they've come around again back to the tried and true, the lethal, proving only that a straight line can come back on itself like a spiral made of squares. But it's all illusion: the space had bent at right angles so no one really lost their place (a swerve depends on curves), and pretty soon we all can live in the big outdoors of outer space, that is, when we can alter it, conform to our position which has always been the goal in any race for new material. There's no going back, all else has been forgotten – high or low, for all it was for bidding, like once upon a time they only meant "for having" and "for asking". The most important word 'twas lost was "smithereens": what happens to all multifarious union is corruption, that certain dissolution of controllers of the mean or what's in fashion.

Today's Mythic narrative was called The Idiocracy, and everyone believes it might just be the last to be. Controllers have departed 'cross the cryptic overseas (it may be near Miami) and Dunderheads, that race of con-patrols and the richest you will see, the one-time petty burgeoisie've been left no reins for which to hold or lead, they've gone quite raving and unstable, and all that will remain may soon be called The Uncontrollables. But there's still hope for rectal types to get up, wipe their ass, regain their youth, to dig out with a hook or ladder, perseverate along the lines of truth, which now we know is just construction work and for some others, letting loose your bladder.

Or not. It's probable at some point anything can rot except the truth, for that's impossible as there's no more points beyond this dot.

– Carreck Hoursabhorus

THE VOGOS, of TAU or DEATH

Myth-time is the shaky ground lurking under every truth or calculation. No realm, nor a union, nor reality, a timeless landscape stripped of corpuscles of distance and sequentiality, but occasionally brimming with history. And it comes in all shades of paisley 'cause it's birthed free of a boundary (or at least one it easily sheds like placentas or hard-boiled eggs). The Stewart Principle which proclaims "Every picture tells a story, don't it" (and like a coin or Etruscan mirror, always has another side) is modified by Bergson's durative simultaneity or Butler's reversability of the chicken-egg argument such that every "story is a picture, ain't it" and the quantification which came first is irrelevant to the polyvagus swimming with Mr. Graymatter, who had more in mind the spokesman, Polybius who forgot that betwixt and between every floater and sinker is no more ambiguous than all things amphibious – it's just indeterminate and risky.

– Rodney King

Might I go so far as to suggest that, though they are equivalent in sense, there is received a difference altogether when we hear that "myth-time is non-euclidean space" and its inversion, "when we hear the phrase, non-euclidean space-time, what is meant is myth-time" and that sort of myth is not the fiction that's the classical physics of Richard M. Nixon. As the old Tibetan saying goes, "A" is not "A", therefore we name it "A".

With such logic, and if what we call space were a multidimensionally woven fabric (so to speak), even a paisley tapestry in dark undulation like waves flowing beneath a stationary boat, such that the directional movement of either is an illusion, the measurement of motion a misunderstanding of the intensity of the wave inducing a bounce on all the water that touches it or inversely, is mimicked by them

– in rough seas there's no telling an original pebble perturbing the water just to make waves or rings of concentricity – there is no pebble so its search is what's known as contingent futility – unless there's a port-hole or index to elsewhere (all that which representation excludes) . . .and whose own undulation flows to the shore yet the water has not moved except in relation to the land beneath it as the tides from the moon, like a long, distant lover, which distracted and thereby displaced it, or if in a tub it goes down the drain whilst the floating scum doesn't, and if to this we suggested the no-thingness which is not paisley fabric is the ultimate, par excellent brightness, the infinite everything from which was spun the fibres that weaved the tapestry, "moving" its spirals in every direction whilst going nowhere, (the bisected yinyang is only a leaf on a mango tree), then the most obvious excuse for the stars would be holes in the fabric letting the light through.

We're talking about the inversion of perspective which makes the standard line or come-on, previously important, presently impotent. We're also talking Lewis Carroll's looking glass world with which the same "reason" can apply to both, even the same measuring implements for the spatially insecure, but no direct translation is possible. Each seems fit as a straight jacket for the other. The formula, "A is not A so we call it A" portrays a metaphoric relation, so there is no room for tit-for-tat representation (neither in 'art' nor 'marriage'); at most, conjugation's an orbit, not a property exchange where speed has no bearing on an incurred debt, unless there's a recurring pebble coming your way set on eating out your liver.

[Where I come from, the coin in the mouth or two on the eyes of any corpse but the ones you despise is no payment to an imaginary gondola operator, but has engraved a picture from popular stories depicting a portal or literally porthole out of this world and back in through another. Without such a navigational guide known to work for the living – better even than a lucky charm – it is thought the ferry'd get lost and then foundered. There's also the added advantage in the coin's weight and opacity which prevent distraction by rambling tongues and wandering eyes: It's both a blinder and pacifyer. It's the same logic which enables one sea-monster, swimming through interconnected underground streamlets to appear in any lake or wide spot in the river East of the Cascade Mountains known for bringing bad weather and make a local appearance at a moments notice, and likewise, the local ones do the same in inverted fashion.]

In mythic discourse, there is no economic transaction nor a need for justification to discredit the other, so the question of a reality or truth lying beneath the metaphor or symbolism just doesn't need to come up, and if it did, it'd be like trying to squeeze your ass through one of those tiny holes in the sky to put more light on the subject. That could only result in death, a cosmic boil or a great constipation. Either way, should it fester, one might expect a big bang. Instead of the Logos some gray matter orbits, the paisley is vague but sensed through the vagus and its unfashionable polysemous name is The Vogos, where head-on collisions result not in death but some transformation or for the more dense or gnostic, knocking your lights out is like plugging a hole:

< vogue (n): 1570s, the vogue, "leading place in popularity, greatest success or acceptance," from Middle French vogue "fashion, success, drift, swaying motion (of a boat)" literally "a rowing," from Old French voguer "to row, sway, set sail," probably from Old Low German *wogon, variant of wagon "float, fluctuate," literally "to balance oneself" (see weigh). Apparently the notion is of being "borne along on the waves of fashion." Italian vogare also probably is borrowed from Germanic. Phrase in vogue "having a prominent place in popular fashion" first recorded 1643.

and from which we get Witch, (like Roma's to roam and rough is to rogues, a wand'ring relation before time was in fashion and Keruac's boat was a station wagon):

weigh (v.): Old English wegan "find the weight of, have weight, lift, carry," from Proto-Germanic *weganan (cf. Old Saxon wegan, Old Frisian wega, Dutch wegen "to weigh," Old Norse vega, Old High German wegan "to move, carry, weigh," German wiegen "to weigh"), from PIE *wegh- "to move" (cf. Sanskrit vahati "carries, conveys," vahitram "vessel, ship;" Avestan vazaiti "he leads, draws;" Greek okhos "carriage;" Latin vehere "to carry, convey;" Old Church Slavonic vesti "to carry, convey;" Lithuanian vezu "to carry, convey;" Old Irish fecht "campaign, journey"). The original sense was of motion, which led to that of lifting, then to that of "measure the weight of." The older sense of "lift, carry" survives in the nautical phrase weigh anchor. Figurative sense of "to consider, ponder" (in reference to words, etc.) is recorded from mid-14c.

– etymonline.com

– The full treatment

Understanding may be over(alter)ated:

Capitalism, if it is truly the condition of our existence, cannot be known. We may hope at best, if we are successful in hoping, that it may become wholly unknown...That is not to say that knowledge ought not take a scientific or objective turn, only that this serves no transformational purpose.

– Going to seed

Class consciousness is not the possessed truth of objects (or classes of them) by subjects (or vice versa). It's not even merely a perspective or variable of approach (ie., a 'theory'), but an extended perceptual horizon illustrating that wealthy leaders' very existence hangs upon the exclusion, misery, exploitation or extraction, in other words, the subjection of others. It's a matter of environmental awareness, even compassion should one be carried by experience or by the tales of those who are themselves so carried.

Subjectivity and objectivity are universally meaningless or they are interchangeable. For any detection, the object in hand is said to be data (circuitously defined as 'that which is subject to handling or sensory engagement and manipulation'). Like a bird, it may be the subject of inquiry or merely an obstacle to be tossed aside, in which case, the "real" data remains unknown or, like an undrilled oil well, is yet to be groped – it may be nothing. The object which is subjected to handling is the subject, whether the experiment or investigation is of things or set upon processes. Very often, like in psychological experimentation, a subject means "a live one", but then where does one place school subjects like history, math or grammar except as more real than students? It's all a matter of where you place your exponent.

Value as such, smooth or rough is the subjective experience of the handler of objects, and whose objective is manipulation (literally, 'fingering figures') or an intermediate stage in quite another purpose. This mediation is what we mean by exploitation – the ownership of the means:

"He who controls meaning controls the world"

– Old Man's Tale

Where there is damage to the subject, object or process by the processing of data, the subjective experience is misery from one perspective and pragmatics from the other. It is the basis of (or it lurks under) capitalism, and is justified as "natural" when compared to eating and "neutral" when compared to art. On the other hand, it clearly rhymes with cannibalism, a rarity in nature and typically frowned upon as it is the last stage of any class or species prior to extinction. The rhyme may be chance but the equivalence it portends is not lost on either "side": From the perspective of the leader-eaters (gods), the eaten has always been classed as overwhelmingly other – meat, receptacle or "natural resource". On the brunt of such semantic transformation, one is said to be "objectified", made the equivalent of an inanimate object.

"The Regnorak in Nordic myth-time is the last battle of each against all. Not a single god survived, but some folks did who'd left for the hills or rowed a boat back into mother, eons before or timely, when the shitaree had turned to fire."

– Old Woman's Tale

When there is death or destruction to the subject, object or process by the mining or processing of data, the subjective experience of onlookers from any one perspective (even when pragmatic or utilitarian from another) is war or rape so it, pragmatism, is clearly no universal justification for anything. In the same way, transgression is merely a cross-wise movement on the one hand but no mere "struggle" in the context of war. And like christianity, capitalism cannot thrive unless all of nature other than the immediate subject (the Cartesian ego) is considered a collection of obstacles or otherwise hostile. This is the basis of both Hobbesian and Cartesian (or narcissistic) philosophies and their infinitely recursive cogitations.

The ratios, misery to struggle and war to death, are equivalent. Such is mathematic or objective value in contradistinction to subjective experience. Money is merely it's medium of exchange creating the value-form or commodity. All such exchange cancels experiential value like an electrical shunt to ground, where justice becomes a euphemism for the inability to tell shit from shinola, leaving one always in need of expert opinion. When ensconced in the midst of hostility, value must always come from elsewhere.

One of the illustrations as well as problems with understanding is its method-as-destination, 'going to ground'. This is both the discovery and formation of the subject (thinking, therefore amming), and as integrity demands a line, position or a stand, one is now subject to all the vagaries of nature, be they kind or cruel. The subject position must therefore always come from the ground of slavery or other such stasis. Neither form of immobility has been uncovered by archaeologists digging for first principles. Going to ground with high expectations, one goes nowhere but under or atop a dungheap or other similarly constructed midden. It is home only to the excluded middle and lost art.

To de-fence requires wire-cutters; o'r-fence is a leap or a climb. Either destruction or transcendence demonstrates a will to distributivity, not the content stasis of being, even for more seedy types. Life is becoming and cannot be said to be mimicked by art, which coldly produces beings – still life – although at times, they may signal a favorable movement, just like a biohazard sign stuck in the ground can be a source of moving inspiration. Of course a sign in it's navigational sense and a gesture in any sense are rarely taken as representative. They invite or discourage.

It's not even the other way around, except when life and art are seen as synonyms – one theatre merely mimicking another with no sense of representation and only in this sense it can be said to be reproductive, but not of identities such as the cloning operations along any assembly line, be it academic or industrial. A better word would be "generative", since what is produced is always difference. It may merely be the play of otherness. Why then, asked Roger Caillois, wouldn't a moth disappear into the bark of a tree even when there is no wasp giving chase? Certainly not always the errors of paranoia! That itself may be the stand from the paranoia of eros, and quite unbecoming at that.

If the subject is the seed, the fragrance of tomorrow's lilac bush is irrelevant. Any modification of perspective transforms the subject into object. Any third position does the same regarding the other two. First, second and third are therefore equivalent and interchangeable, and even trialectics decomposes. The problem, of course, is the logo, lect or ligature misunderstood as the landscape or territory rather than the simulation, snapshot or map that they are.

One may merge with any traffic, but there are always off-ramps – a moth has wings (with or without cammo) – even if the exit is through the guard-rail, and without the security of a seat-belt, there's a chance one will be thrown from the vehicle before the fuel tank explodes on the rocks below. In either case, the lay-off may be no gentler than a certain resignation. To move or be moved is often the question, but what difference if the destination is the same?

Understanding's destination is truth, a stoppage or turning point. Nominalism only comes up with lists of names, jargon and talking points – the basis of applied journalism. Equipped therewith, one establishes leadership, only practical when there abound barbarians, unbelievers and heretics. The 'lazy' follower is part and parcel of that leadership, having the same intention, a delegation or relegation of "will" (or "perception", in the sense Aldous Huxley used it) in the interest of conservation ( – see 'blinders'), so presents no antagonistic distinction in the same way that the head and tail of an ass present no zoological contradiction so are never expected to transgress, much less revolt one over the other.

Without truth, morality disappears and without that hobgoblin, war and antagonism are meaningless outside the context of eating and being eaten, and whose result is still a mutual merger, a transformation on both counts. Like integrity and consistency, we should not confuse consciousness or awareness (even coupled to the memory of familiar sequences or patterns) with knowledge or truth. Only the former are provisional, and as Einstein warned, without an arrival and departure point, speed is irrelevant and time itself is always relative to one or another's standing still. Hegel gave us the dialectic, but Charles Fort corrected it with the hyphen. To wit, master-slave and slave-master are identical according to the principle of reversibility. This principle only states that if something appears uni-directionally linear like a geometrist's straight lines in empty space, there is somewhere an error in judgment or need for an optometrist. Even a crow doesn't fly as the crow flies; sometimes we just confuse one thing for the other when what it is – is no equivocation, it's just one-another, oui?.

Without the objectivity of the nominalists (or environmental vivisectionists), barbarians, unbelievers and heretics are just folks, unless, of course, they're also run-aways. But what's in a name? Clearly the manipulation of language is no justification, much less rationale for anything. Sometimes it's just fun. Altered states of consciousness are not achieved until one substance moves through the environment or its substance moves through you. Such is adaptation by any means you have selected. Just be careful what you wish for: hard enough, you'll likely get it.

"What exactly does this chorus mean? It means all that is possible to find in it. ...beyond the subject represented by the [word] "one," perhaps equally understood as being an outside observer (in this case, fully disapproving) and as being the subjective judgment of this youth (and, in this case, expressing a philosophically or cynically lucid satisfaction). All of this is true, one must not delete anything...

Each time – and this is quite frequent – that a word or a phrase has two possible meanings, one must recognize and maintain them both, because the phrase must be understood as entirely veracious in both senses. For the ensemble of the discourse, this also signifies: the totality of the possible meanings is its only truth.

...One must also sense that this is not a simple irony: must they ultimately be experienced as truly ironic? One must leave this doubt intact."

– Guy Debord

Some thi(ev)ery concerning signs and symbols, the former bearing the highest mysticism while the latter may be neither here nor there.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

– John Muir, 1869

'The human face is an empty power, a field of death ... after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken & breathed one still has the impression that it hasn't even begun to say what it is & what it knows.'

— Antonin Artaud, July 1947.

William Blake said it well in "Auguries of Innocence":

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."

– Apio Ludd

"When we see a person’s lips move and his tongue flap, we must decide whether what is coming out is ‘the universe expressing itself’, or some idiot rational plan that he has concocted."

– emile

Sometimes ambivalence is exchanged for indifference, as in "I don't give a hoot", and if said with sufficient snarl, demonstrates a moral (at base emotional) commitment against morality itself. Contradiction be damned – it proves nothing but the shackling of symbols to mathematical sign language or the prosaic death to symbolism masquerading as a technical journal or symbolic logic for the more spiritually minded. Each symbol must be kettled. Once identified, labeled or extracted from the symbolic milieu, a "symbol" is just another sign: each sign must point to the status quo, the material present. Anything else is called utopian fiction (although in some circles, "imagination" is not considered a defect)

Every epoch-defining revolution has simultaneously been a counter-revolution. Only the criterion (such as "iron" or "information") changes, making the epoch nothing but a value judgement wrapped around a talking point. What revolves has been the state ("the condition or state of affairs that currently exists") because at base, progress, consumerism and gentrification (here in the country, called "rural economic development") represent a single phenomenon – the suppression of symbolism is the death of community, itself a synonym of free association (in both material and linguistic senses).

In the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom (1878–1969), proposed that changes in the style of life, made feasible by the economics of the industrial age, had induced to the mass of society a “philosophy of futility” that would increase the consumption of goods and services as a social fashion; an activity done for its own sake. In that context, “conspicuous consumption” is discussed either as a behavioural addiction or as a narcissistic behaviour, or both, which are psychologic conditions induced by consumerism — the desire for the immediate gratification of hedonic expectations."

– wiki: conspicuous consumption

The potential for rupture (which is to say "metamorphosis") in mid twentieth century Euroamerika was only a repetition of that which a full century earlier occurred on the Russian steppe, a terrain which looks even more familiar today. In the end, there has only been a single epoch, and historians, like theologians or other dogmatists have been correct to portray it as the only reality, but in geological time, six thousand years of civilisation only amounts to a nanosecond. History as media must exclude it's own subject matter to re-present each present age as the "Modern" one, unique above all others, a set of constrained symbols wrapped in gagetry, patriotism and war-mongering, because, after all, it's just got to get better.

Hence the nostalgia (or durative fetish) for failed revolutions is at the same time a longing for community, the renewal of openings, free-flowing symbolism oozing outside of transaction or economic/structural adjustments, poetry as subversive of institutions of exclusion, the embrace of ambiguity as a renewed interest in novelty, bringing possibility back into the cosmos:

"The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, “dead” to humans only because of our neuro-muscular chauvinism … Look deeper. You’ll need a magnifying glass … On the atomic and sub-atomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles are spinning simultaneously forward and backward, sideways and forever at speeds so incalculable that expressions such as “arrival,” “departure,” and “have a nice day” become meaningless. It is on these levels that “magic” occurs.

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters."

– Tom Robins, 1984, 2008

It is above all the form of the media, not the specific content, which has an ideological effect. The media’s specific informational content is subordinate to the function of producing consensus by deterring thought. Knowledge of the event as an aspect of life is prevented, creating an atmosphere of stupidity. Consensus functions by the exclusion of more radical others, and the mobilisation of resources to destroy them. It is achieved by powerlessness. The personal response, and responsiveness, is not possible in mass media. Disasters past and present are neutralised in a simple emotional response. Events like Live Aid involve viewers enjoying the spectacle of their own compassion."

– Functions of the media

"The University has always been, in some form or another, an institution for producing the ideological justifications, and consequently their material realisation, for the forces of the state, its image of splendour and the “happiness” of the ruling society. It has been as fundamental an aspect of class society as has been the dominant media: a society in which the ruling class speaks to, and tries to convince, itself and society generally in order to ever-perfect its forms of social control. Whilst academia’s differing illusions of “objectivity” and “neutral” acquisition of knowledge have changed and developed, along with its intake, over the centuries, its fundamental prop for this miserable world has always remained. So it should be no surprise that academia has produced more modern and subtler versions of how to preserve hierarchical order in the 21st century

The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as a supreme principle that to make men moral one must have the unconditional resolve to act immorally. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact — that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie] — offered me the first insight into this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.

– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

...Let no-one say ideological work is the same as building work or working in a hospital or a call centre: the hierarchical division of labour has always meant that capitalism, even in its initial development, wasn’t just capital but was also an “ism”. It meant that, as well as an armed and economic force, it was also an ideology brutally materialised. Ideas for the ruling class, developed by professional intellectuals, were not merely ideas any more than religion, developed by the priesthood before the bourgeoisie, was merely religion.”

– Dialectical Delinquents

Religion (or philosophy, if that is your bent) and Science: non-overlapping magesteria? It's beginning to look like there was no separation in the first place! And they told us "Never the twain shall meet". One can never directly see one's own backside except through the eyes of another, and that's how we know it's there. Another word for majesty is despot. A dogmatist or expert is merely a know-it-all.

– more thi(ev)ery

The Smooth Transition & the Conservative Instinct

Just like the virtual ownership and distribution of a flailing appendage or a brief facial grimace at a wood-tick with his head buried in your scrotum, it may very well be that the authority of rampant property is a mere postcard confused with the landscape – it's often beside the point (or behind it).

– Old Wives' Tale

Kublai Khan liberated the Chinese from both their own tyrannic government AND from Big Daddy's barbarian horde intent on razing it to the ground. It's been the same story since well before Apollo the Apostle offed his own dad, Zeus (still hanging on a cross in oblivion) for the benefit of disgruntled Greeks everywhere (except, of course, the Dionysians). Mao wasn't the last to sign off the revolution in the interest of a smooth transition (humanitarian, I'm sure), paying off corporate bureaucrats 'til the time they're no longer needed. Every Union negotiator does the same, especially when handed a pitchfork and a train ticket to the nearest livery stable in the country-side for some brief R&R. It would seem that, while everyone is up for a radical change, no one wants to notice should it come along. This must be why even the most liberal progressives remain politically conservative once they take hold the reigns and kick their gueldings in the kidneys.

Since the Iron Age and aside from Ghengis and his crew, our era is among the first to witness rising numbers of people doing a work-around on that conservative instinct, calling for the rough over the smooth. The word gaining ground since the nineties is "rupture". They tried to revive the civil war sentiment in the interest of an us-against-them dialectic, but folks seem hip to the idea that even a fully automatic AK-47 with a thirty round clip would be no match for an F-16 or "drone" bomber, especially when the ensuing explosion is written off as another natural gas disaster negating any accrual of martyr value.

Revolution is definitely out, since we've come to notice it's always been just a polite way of saying "reform" like an electric blanket in the Alaskan Bush. The point is, when you're being drug to the bottom by a giant squid, the only things left in Captain Nemo's bag of tricks are the thrust ahead by rip and tear after an electro-shock to the hull. It's very hard to consider this an expression of any will to destruction or escalating death wish: in the midst of a real disaster, peace and violence are even meaningless as talking points. Anything which precludes your own mortality at the bottom of the proverbial drink is the most conservative expression one can make. Did you notice that "the will to live" has been all but erased from the dictionary?

"We can at least take one thing for granted about our era: it - the era - will not rot in peace.

...What's the point of their new, high-yield investment in doom-saying, as they paint their black canvases with images of hypothetical disaster, and hold their alarmist discussions on the subject of these problems that the atomized populace has no way of confronting by direct action? They intend to hide the real disaster, which one doesn't need to be a physician, climatologist or demographer to articulate. Everyone can see the constant impoverishment of the world of men by the modern economy, which develops only at the expense of Life: it destroys the biological bases of life with its devastating power; it submits all social space-time to the policing required for its proper functioning; substitutes for every once commonly accessible reality an ersatz reality whose residual authenticity content is proportional to its price"

– Encyclopedia of Nuisances