Infection

Curiously, the war on drugs, terror, poverty and the war on infection exhibit a 97% philosophical overlap. Even more curious, the members of the boards of directors of corporate medicine (an emerged cartel or syndicate of pharmaceutical, chemical and insurance companies) also sit on the boards of military contractors (although obviously in different seating arrangements, else how could we tell them apart?). They are exceedingly hard to spot, being syndicalists ("connected"), anarchist ("above the law") and internally socialist ("the bucks stop there ... all of them!"), hence the designation, "high society". Now if everyone or even "just anyone" were to so transcend law, the epidemic of viral contamination would so furiously spread, the high and low ends would outright disappear, leaving society exposed and without adjective.

– Speaking on behalf of madness...

A PROCESSION of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.

A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.

The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.

The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.

The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.

But they'll march.

The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries -- but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming. [7/8]

The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.

So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.

But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.

Or everything that is, won't be.

And everything that isn't, will be --

But, of course, will be that which won't be --

It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.

– Charles Hoy Fort, 1919

– see The Fortunate Wheel