Kidney or Kind, eh?

3 Inductions:

1. Spirit in artwork is always posited from outside.
2. Spirits are never constrained by objectivity
3. The interminable structure is the fetish, everything else is real.

– Hypernonimous Botch

So from another perspective, spirit is that aspect of being which, when found entangled with other beings, generates new and unique beings. Dada may be the pollen of all meaning, but is completely impotent without the egg and its mother or a dandelion and its nurturing pollinators. Such is chicken logic for birds and bees.

If we approach the juxtaposition 'kind kidney' etymologically but wish to initially avoid an entendre such as "Just kiddin', eh?" (we'll come back to that later, eh), presenting a literal definition of the word "Kidney" as some kind of bean to eat, quite beyond the structural-functional organ all pissed-off people are familiar with, then we find "kidney" is kind of like an egg (< kiden 'womb' + ey 'egg') and that's a fact of shape and function, no doubt, especially for chickens from whose single orifice, in a single direction, emerges both generative and nephritic or excremental exudate (only the generative principle flows both ways, whereas nutritive input digs a different hole altogether). So much for biology.

We are also taught a kid is a baby goat which big humans derogatorily applied to their own (not euphemistically, the word should rather be "malephemist" – after Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), Italian physician and anatomist who discovered his corpuscles in other folks' kidneys. However the history (that is, philology) presents a different picture. Kid was originally the generic 'offspring', the literal generation of a kind or resemblance, as well as the thing, kith or kin that it came from.

To derogate is to refuse or abolish a standing law or decree of imposed order, which is also to say 'with impudent impunity' (all puns are intended, and rarely for punishment). The impish idea is still in the noodle or edge of a sword, to cleave, fold, spindle or mutilate, something of which even goat progeny are adepts – they call it play. A kid's natural inclination toward mayhem regarding your own regimentation, like clothes were once wind-dried on a line prior to folding, providing a trouble-spot should kids and goats be playing in the back yard, should be treated with kindness of redirection (should you want life wrinkle-free) another way to say "with kid-gloves" instead of the boxing sort and a reason Patience has traditionally been a name for aspiring mothers rather than kings. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two since no child cries out of turn, and never subjectively unmolested. Referring to compassion, Old English gecynde means "innate, natural" after joining the earth (ge) to a kind (cynde), a type that is formed when what's in it is shared.

Consider the following as a source of dada'ic generation (where truth be damned, every entendre is a necessary condition before any selection can be made for an unproductive habituation) and then tell me at least up through the middle ages all language was not poetic, to say the least, potentially comedic, and not always accidentally so, it was with some intension. a motive like kindling is to fire:

kidney
early 14c., of unknown origin, originally kidenere, perhaps a compound of O.E. cwið "womb" (see bowel) + ey "egg" (see egg (n.)) in reference to the shape of the organ. Figurative sense of "temperament" is from 1550s. Kidney bean is from 1540s, so called for its shape.

bowl
O.E. bolla "pot, cup, bowl," from P.Gmc. *bul- "a round vessel" (cf. O.N. bolle, O.H.G. bolla), from PIE *bhel- "to inflate, swell"

bowel
c.1300, from O.Fr. boele "intestines, bowels, innards" (12c., Mod.Fr. boyau), from M.L. botellus "small intestine," originally "sausage," dim. of botulus "sausage," a word borrowed from Oscan-Umbrian, from PIE *gwet-/*geut- "intestine" ...Greek poets, from Aeschylus down, regarded the bowels as the seat of the more violent passions such as anger and love, but by the Hebrews they were seen as the seat of tender affections, especially kindness, benevolence, and compassion.

bald
1297, ballede, probably from Celt. bal "white patch, blaze" especially on the head of a horse or other animal (from PIE base *bhel- "gleaming, white") + M.E. -ede adjectival suffix. The PIE base is also the source of Skt. bhalam "brightness, forehead," Gk. phalos "white," L. fulcia "coot" (so called for the white patch on its head), Alb. bale "forehead," O.C.S. belu "white," Lith. balnas "pale." The proper name Ballard probably means "bald head," cf. Wyclif "Stye up, ballard," where Coverdale translates "Come vp here thou balde heade" [2 Kg.2:23-24, where God kills 42 children for making fun of Elijah's lack of hair.]

edge (n.)
O.E. ecg "corner, edge, point," also "sword" (cf. ecgplega, lit. "edge play," ecghete, lit. "edge hate," both used poetically for "battle"), from P.Gmc. *agjo (cf. O.Fris. egg "edge;" O.S. eggia "point, edge;" M.Du. egghe, Du. eg; O.N. egg, see egg (v.); O.H.G. ecka, Ger. Eck "corner"), from PIE root *ak- "sharp, pointed" (cf. Skt. asrih "edge," L. acies, Gk. akis "point;" see acrid). Spelling development of O.E. -cg to M.E. -gg to Modern English -dge represents a widespread shift in pronunciation. To get the edge on (someone) is U.S. colloquial, first recorded 1911 ...To have (one's) teeth on edge is from late 14c., though "It is not quite clear what is the precise notion originally expressed in this phrase" [OED].

edge (v.)
late 13c., "to give an edge to" (implied in pp. egged), from edge (n.). Meaning "to move edgeways (with the edge toward the spectator), advance slowly" is from 1620s, originally nautical. Meaning "to defeat by a narrow margin" is from 1953. The meaning "urge on, incite" (16c.) often must be a mistake for egg (v.). Related: Edged; edging...

In the nautical sense, a cleavage's swell
is a wake which a boat has passed through or will.
So parting the water 's no mystery at all,
if you're stuck in a tub and are skilled with a rudder
it's as easy as cutting an egg like it's butter
or sucking rum-spirits like from mudder's own udder.

– Popeye McGee

...egg (n.)
mid-14c., from northern England dialect, from O.N. egg, which vied with M.E. eye, eai (from O.E. æg) until finally displacing it after 1500; both are from P.Gmc. *ajja(m) (cf. O.S., M.Du., Du., O.H.G., Ger. ei, Goth. ada), probably from PIE *owyo-/*oyyo- "egg" (cf. O.C.S. aja, Rus. jajco, Bret. ui, Welsh wy, Gk. oon, L. ovum); possibly derived from root *awi- "bird." Caxton (15c.) writes of a merchant (probably a north-country man) in a public house on the Thames who asked for eggs:

And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not.

She did, however, recognize another customer's request for "eyren."...

egg (v.)
c.1200, from O.N. eggja "to goad on, incite," from egg "edge" (see edge). The unrelated verb meaning "to pelt with (rotten) eggs" is from 1857, from egg (n.).

ileum
lowest part of the small intestine, 1680s, medical Latin, from ileum, singular created from classical Latin plural ilia "groin, flank," in classical Latin, "belly, the abdomen below the ribs," poetically, "entrails, guts." Sense restriction and form apparently from confusion with Gk. eileos (see ileus). Earlier in English ylioun (late 14c.), from M.L. ileon. Related: Ileitis.

ileus
painful intestinal condition, 1706, from L. ileus "severe colic," from Gk. ileos “colic,’ from eilein "to turn, squeeze," from PIE *wel- "to turn, roll" (see vulva).

vulva
1540s, from L. vulva, earlier volva "womb, female sexual organ," lit. "wrapper," from volvere "to turn, twist, roll, revolve," also "turn over in the mind," from PIE root *wel- "to turn, revolve," with derivatives referring to curved, enclosing objects (cf. Skt. valate "turns round," ulvam "womb, vulva;" Lith. valtis "twine, net," apvalus "round;" O.C.S. valiti "roll, welter," vluna "wave;" Gk. eluo "wind, wrap," helix "spiral object," eilein "to turn, squeeze;" Goth. walwjan "to roll;" O.E. wealwian "roll," weoloc "whelk, spiral-shelled mollusk;" O.H.G. walzan "to roll, waltz;" O.Ir. fulumain "rolling;" Welsh olwyn "wheel").

– from etymonline interweb home of the Muse (see 'spider').

SEX

Like a one-armed stick figure-named consonant Dick, 'K' is the male principle when entwined phonetically within two sybiline 'S's, enwrapped round a flowing or liquidy 'E'; and whether done standing or horizontally, it sometimes makes one plus one equal three. 'X' juxtaposes a 'K' and an 'S' to show the entanglement that's utmost necessity before any developing synergy takes place.

–

Sexes and Genders

"Observation: People (and many other species) used to come in two sexes, male and female, or so I understood. Now it seems that these two are genders in many, most, or even all cases

The question is: When are they genders and when sexes? The answer seems to keep changing: at least my idea of what the preferred usage is has passed through several stages over time. If I attempt to review my own successive understandings, I come up with something like the following:

1. At the beginning, as far as I knew, they were called sexes. When I first became aware of the use of gender in this sense, the explanation I heard was that it was begun by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that she did it to avoid the word sex because it made her uncomfortable [1]. Anyway, I haven’t heard any more about her role in this, so maybe this explanation had no basis in fact.
   
   
2. Subsequently this use of gender seemed to grow, and at some point I got the understanding that it was being actively promoted by advocates of the idea that the differences in human male and female behavior are in large part due to socialization. The explanation I got was that to emphasize their point, they advocated using sex for the biological distinction and gender for the culturally-assigned roles and to behavioral differences between those males and females socialized into them.
   
   
3. From some later point, it seemed that some kind of discomfort had become attached to the word sex so that people felt easier avoiding the word entirely and just saying gender for all (at least human) instances of the male-female distinction. At any rate, one now regularly hears talk of the gender even in the earliest stages of pregnancy.
   
   
4. But maybe some distinction is still being promoted here. Might this, for example, be intended to make some point about the extent of influence from the external environment on the intra-uterine development of the fetus? Or is it simply that gender just gathered a momentum that has carried it beyond its goal?
   
   
5. What then is to be the fate of the pariah word, sex? It does seem to have re-emerged as the way to refer to the act of sexual intercourse so that people who copulate are now said to have sex. (Does the expression have sex fill some previous semantic gap? That explanation hardly sounds convincing since English-speakers had previously seemed to experience little difficulty in finding ways to refer to the act.)
   
   
6. But should the replacement of sex by gender in reference to male and female be regarded as now complete? There are still some loose ends as far as my understanding is concerned. First, I don’t know the rule for other species. Is the distinction between bulls and cows one of gender, or are they still sexes as of now? Is the answer the same for peafowl? Bees? Black widow spiders? Papaya trees?
   
   
7. And there’s the word sexist? One would expect it have been replaced by genderist. In fact, one might expect that someone who was sexist would be someone who likes having sex. (But that condition appears to be so common that one might have felt that it was its absence that was more in need of a name).

Any clarification would be welcome.

Note: [1.] Ginsburg would have been exploiting the facts (1) that the noun classes of certain languages, such as the Indo-European, have traditionally been called genders (from the Latin root genus meaning kind), and (2) that the individual two or three classes have traditionally been named after the sexes (or absence of sexual status in the case of neuter). Thus the word gender has become associated in people’s minds with sexual distinctions."

– George Grace

Clarification

One does sex; one has (or is) gender. A 'celibate' might superficially or categorically reject both, that is, with or without psychic or other mutilation, and since everybody doesn't always do it or even want to, but given the occasional need for seclusion or breathing room, everyone needs a social relation to avoid psychic or other mutilation. One neither has nor does gravity; it is experienced, and not in isolation from another body or according to a vote – two corollaries of authority. Disregarding consensus altogether (since that only invites questions of normality and opposition best left to political statisticians), could it be that sex has merely transformed into an adverb (occasionally an adjective) and gender a noun, and that the confusion is largely over an inability to distinguish between structure and function – really meaning that in constrained systems, it's always safer to appear like it than to do it?.

It may be that the argument over superiority between verbs and nouns (or doing it and being it) is only a feint to avoid the heavier topics of gravitation and the magnetic propulsion which keeps poles apart, and that to posit poles, one must presume a ponderous middle before it can be either excuded (a mere squeeze) or excluded (a disfiguring amblyopia like a poke in the eye). Or is it the difference between a nexus and omphalos or a fishing line and lake or consuming fish and consumating them or beaching an archepalego from a cove or a disagreeable taste for festivity as opposed to the serious work of maintaining an appearance? Because structure and function only create a pragmatic but opaque bubble enclosing one from the rest of the world not deemed useful, interesting or secure like an adventurous sperm seeking to nest but swallowed and digested by an hungry egg. It is said the opposite of consent is either refusal or an accident, and how often is that just a reference to one's dialect, or in musical notation, a note whose pitch does not correspond to the key signatory but not necessarily an unwanted intrusion by the party of the first part or the second?

If gender is merely a mistranslation of Latin genus (or 'kinder') being a literal interpretation of an indended metaphor, which might include or express any grammatical classification, then perhaps Hamlet's big dilemma would have been over whether or not to do it or at least make an effort. Well, that really was his problem, wasn't it? To stop being would have been a cop out – end of problem. It is, after all, a cop's job to keep others from doing it, a soldier or hangman's job to stop them from being. Still feel repressed? Get thee to a nunnery – let's not forget the importance of an adequate division of labour! Do we not tell the sheltered egghead to act more spermishly? Or just less squeamish about a little dirt under the nail? To promote receptivity or assertiveness, do we advise seeking a surgeon? Why then get so hung up when it's all just a matter of language games over the simultaneous but indeterminate in and out or up and down of it all?

It is the lack of mutual spontaneity which produces uncertainty, hesitation and compels respect on the part of the investigator or probe into any experimental or exploratory situation, regardless of appearance. With unsupervised youngsters at play, the problem rarely comes up. So in a reverse-flit back to the question of consensual linguistics, this "respect" is typically what is meant by "kindness", a thing much confused with genius because of its rarity. The traditional solution is an incurred or dog-like sense of duty or tit-for-tat exchange (that is, a dog whipped into place), but even in shakespeare's day, the nunnery was free and econimosity pretty much leaves out questions of more or less gravity and mobility and that makes sex work. As an adjective, sex can go either direction, but gender is supposed to be set in its ways, much like a cement block. For example, isn't there a difference between a sexy car (or coat) and a masculine (or feminine) one? When in doubt, there's always neutering or melting ice cream into or for oral cavities.

So from another perspective, gender is that aspect of being which, when found entangled with other beings, generates new and unique beings (as opposed to an entanglement in factories which concerns itself with the reproduction of identity). When it is not generative, we are referred to sexing, which exists in the same genre as playing (being an unproductive ex-spenditure or a-logical transaction of sensory organs in an imitation of the dance of motion with gravity), as opposed to, for example, work. The first is, in fact, often thought a cure for the second. One's gender is, therefore, not deducible except after the proper consideration of children, and that is an empirical claim and not a deductive generalisation (one either gets pregnant or doesn't and the exudate is not a diffuse knapweed or potato). Sex and gender stand in the same relationship as generation and productiion, two competing genres of discourse ongoing between naturalists and construction workers. These are not necessarily poles of activity except under external constraint, as little is actually shared between them. In Liberation Chemistry, the ionic bond presents the new molecule as an identity, but it is not left unsaid (though often taken for granted) that this bond is only possible with the sharing of electrons, or whatever it is the two (or more) participants find so attractive. Even if it is a hot potatoe, the bond is secure. The key term is of course, "sharing", otherwise there'd be a chemical explosion or a big bounce and then we split.

– see Gaia is a tough Bitch! by Lynn Margulis

Metis as Trickster: Cunning Intervention

Transformer may be the most salient aspect of the Trickster. If a "were-" manifestation is poetically metaphoric for a cultural category, as teacher, Trickster illustrates that even seemingly rigid categories can be transcended. As destroyer, it illustrates one need not keep what one "wins" or opens:

Metis, in its transformative action that undermines power relations and does not keep what it wins, cannot be used in the service of notions of possession, ownership, legitimacy and sovereignty. It is an action without origin – no single subject is its cause or reason – rather its movement emerges from the multiple and the heterogeneous. Metis transforms the constellation of power but crucially never comes from or acts from one place. In this way, metis produces an action or an intervention that does not depend upon a unitary subject or intent. Its transforming capacity is precisely in its multiplicity and simultaneous movement in divergent directions. Without this crucial characteristic of not keeping what it wins, it would inevitably become another potential form of domination and or mastery.
 

– Amber Jacobs, The Life of Metis: Cunning Maternal Interventions

In Jacobs' interpretation, the Greek "deity", Metis, is clearly a Trickster. And she tries to synonymize metis itself (the aspect or "adjective") with motherhood, that is, 'motherly'. Trickster is not an identity. It cannot be identified. It is a principle or a way. If Tao (or Chao) is a way of being, Trickster (or Metis, Coyote, fox, hare, bear or Raven) is a way of doing which is sort of like spinning, sort of meandering, sort of creation. And in so-called "goddess" mythology, Tao itself lines up well with 'Mother', Feuerbach's "essence" or "matrix", the "aether", not "other" except in its indeterminacy. And who mothered the goddess, even in Greek Myth-time? Chaos, the big cosmic egg, a three-dimensional ellipse in descartean or objective linguistics (that is predicate-free). Otherwise infinity, more butterfly than hourglass – 'in point of fact', not just ungendered, it's timeless.

Outside of power relations and cultural 'style', gender has little significance, even where sex abounds (it could be vice versa), and that just means a kind of symbiosis, kind as the kindness of kindred spirits and kids – in some parts as children are known ('kinder' should you speak German). Every box should be opened, particularly Pandora's (the word means 'all giving'). It was originally deemed everything a person could desire (bricolage), but with this note attached: "Be carefull what you wish for". That is a mother's gift. Prometheus (like Coyote) only added what was missing or withheld due to oversight or exclusion, illustrating even further that, once contents are "liberated", some boxes themselves can be destroyed, leaving the formerly contained to re-arrange, quite with their own accord or devices. Hence, everything is provisional, even parasitosis. Only one's sense of aesthetics, not just taste but smell can tell there's difference which may or may not bode well, that will be decided by experiment or experience. Then choice iteration is less teleologic but more 'patamimetic.

phenomenal truth, mostly for invalids

I

It appears we will have no chance to eradicate the word, "truth", from our collective dictionary. Who looks seriously at definitions except philosophers and the bearers of superhuman dogma? Feuerbach spoke not of truth in words but also of the "eye and ear, the hand and foot":

but for that very reason it is antagonistic to minds perverted and crippled by a superhuman, i.e., anti-human, anti-natural religion and speculation. It does not, as I have already said elsewhere, regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and ear, the hand and foot; it does not identify the idea of the fact with the fact itself, so as to reduce real existence to an existence on paper, but it separates the two, and precisely by this separation attains to the fact itself; it recognises as the true thing, not the thing as it is an object of the abstract reason, but as it is an object of the real, complete person, and hence as it is itself a real, complete thing. This philosophy does not rest on an Understanding per se, on an absolute, nameless understanding, belonging one knows not to whom, but on the understanding of a person; – though not, I grant, on that of man enervated by speculation and dogma; ... it places philosophy in the negation of philosophy, i.e., ... it appears to be no philosophy at all.

– The Essence of Christianity, 1841

R. D. Lange spoke of the validity of experience: in as much as our experiences are invalidated, we become invalids. There is also the discouragement of experience in the first place, a sort of educated, instituted or qualified helplessness. So invalidity works both ways; invalids are invalidated.

Science itself claims only to invalidate the false, like justice, to reject the null hypothesis beyond all reasonable doubt. Well, religion eliminates all doubt, science is satisfied with paring it down to a minimum. The key to the juxtaposition of law and science is reason, or more correctly, claims to it. Not truth as absolute, but truth as a matter of probability, and we see in each case this probability is still subject to consensus – objectivity is a pipe-dream. "And what", you might ask "is that burning smell coming from the bowl?" Whatever method of rationality or discovery is entailed, agreement is thought necessary to establish official truth. It's politics, and as Lange insisted, the establishment of truth is a matter of political persuasion – hence, there must always be a schism between the establishment and the bodies it claims to represent or control. Truth always produces invalids.

Now, it is one thing to maintain. with Weber. Thomas, and the other giants of Sociology, that to understand human action requires us lo attend systematically to its subjective component: what people perceive, feel, believe, and want. But it is quite another thing lo exaggerate this sound idea by maintaining that action is nothing but subjective. That extravagance leads to sociological Berkcleyanism (the allusion being, of course, to the English champion of philosophical idealism, not to an American geographic or academic pIace). Such total subjectivism conceives of social reality as consisting only in social definitions, perceptions, labels, beliefs, assumptions, or ideas, as expressed, for example, in full generality by the criminological theorist, Richard Quinney, when he writes that “We have NO reason to believe in the objective existence of anything.‘” A basic idea is distorted into error and a great injustice is visited upon W. L Thomas whenever his theorem is thus exaggerated.

Exaggeration of a seminal truth produces its own brand of error. Total subjectivism, which maintains that only social delinitions of the situation (or other subjective equivalents) determine the character of human action and its consequences, in effect manages to transform the Thomas Theorern into this fallacious maxim:

If men do not define situations as real, they are not real in their consequences.

. . .To correct the imbalance that comes with total subjectivism and to restore the objective components of social situations to their indispensable place, we pIainly need this counterpart to the Thomas Theorem:

And if men do not define real situations as real, they are nevertheless real in their consequences.

– Robert K. Merton, (1995) The Thomas Theorem and The Matthew Effect p.396-7

But really, just how real are some of the "real" situations we habitually enter into in the first place? There is always the Queen Mab syndrome to consider.

For the scientist, it is not reality or truth per se, but the assassination of falsity and error, the virtuous assassination that is his forté. How easily this logic turns on itself and exposes the moral justification for slaughter anyway – historic christianity, high school biology, the modern state. Truth has not even loosened the grip of belief and faith except in totalitarian regimes, where all understand that truth is just a decree of the whimsical, but powerful – the valiant prince holds all the permission slips, dispensing validity, like death and parking vouchers, in increments. "You may proceed to dissect your frog, now!" Actually, truth is not a concern in such systems, as experience itself is forbidden without proper authorization. Truth only becomes important in relationships of power or control which tolerate a certain degree of experimentation, and authority is always ready to step in to invalidate any experience it may find threatening, or for no other reason than to keep in practice^[1]. The grand illusion: the hegemonic helpless horde justifies authority as the grandest of self-fulfilling prophesy. How soon it was forgotten that before the institution of control forces (a redundancy?), there was no horde, mob nor even a student body.

But if we look from a superstitious perch, that is, from a stand high up in the tree, in a blind waiting for a passing buck but not for that which is (to the highest degree) not-buck, not to know the false before we let our arrow fly true may err, but only on the side of expediency. That is, that we disregard the principle of opposition altogether (not even to speak of false opposition or dialectics), for the not-deer no more defines our target than would a blindfold or introspection as auto-vivisection in search of a morsel reminiscent of venison. Or the 'law' of the process of elimination, that if we must calculate all the false cities we may never get home to Detroit in time for supper. What is it they say? The truth strikes home? Even this only suggests a vague sense of familiarity, a limbic vagal arousal or a sudden urge to find a toilet.

In the real world of 1928, the Thomas Theorem was published in sociological literature as an aphoristic side-note to an anecdote about a paranoid man driven to murder passing strangers seen to be talking to themselves. Basically reiterating a thing every child knows instinctively, the theorem (so-called after the fact, by an inspired Robert Merton) suggested that, since even delusion produces real consequences, why the compulsive obsession over truth & reality other than to establish a motive for judicious incarceration? Well, the second part of the question is my own. But is it not already apparent that nothing unreal can exist, whether or not one defines the situation? Perhaps negation is the only positive afirmation. This theorem is more like a law of nature in that it can be glimpsed lurking behind child-play, Hoodoo magic, modern medicine and in fact (a sic fact, to be sure) the entire society of the spectacle. The prophetic horse, Clever Hans, pretty much showed that it is not only humans who can play at this game, Halley's comet not-withstanding. But that was a Fortean horse, of course, and easily relegated to superstition.

What has been labeled superstition is merely non-dialectical, non-euclidean thinking, and in a big verse, that embraces just about everything but "the good, beautiful & true" thought itself; a verse where fact is a word for a point of interest (or its placeholder) and truth is the experience you then take along with you – a trophy, perhaps, but not something to lose your head over, or anyone else's for that matter. Obviously, other hunters should wear loud orange vests. Only Hollywood would consider plastic poop a prop. Dada would use the real thing, and all our senses are offended. Maybe flamboyance only says, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, "Make a spectacle of yourself!" Well, that may be so, but not when you're on the hunt or have secrets to protect.

In a world whose chief concern is security, secrecy is only needed to cover the phenomenal consequences of one's experience. R. D. Lange said in a world whose chief concern is security, it is experience itself which must be invalidated. In a world which was not just one big lie after another, would a concern for truth ever even come up? Etymologically, the word refered to "trust", and that is certainly situationally provocative or easily disproved.

II

Truth as a function of eclectic experience (what other kind is there beyond regimentation and vicarious voyeurism?) is not a matter of re-inventing the wheel for yourself every time you need a quick get-away but digging through the garbage for something new. There are always more chips than arrow-heads. By ignoring the detritus and concentrating on the point, one might, like an archaeologist trained in the old school, miss seeing the target altogether. Such steadfast alienation is David Bowie's groupies refusing to even listen to Jethro Tull. Patriotism. Ian Anderson is beside the point.

You've completely lost me here. Ian Anderson is the target, Bowie fans are the detritus, and Bowie is the arrowhead? Bowie is the target, his groupies are the detritus, Jethro Tull is the arrowhead? I can't put it together or make any sense out of it even if I do.

That's the point. It's complicated and not amenable to reductive calculus. Bowie fans are the economists, largely from the left. Jethro Tull is Bakunin. Ian Anderson is Lao Tze. It doesn't matter. Whatever turns your screw. Tull's fans think Jethro's a real guy and are too young to know who Ian Anderson is. Ian is defined away because the world is dialectic and there are no creative culprits, hidden thirds or tag-alongs allowed. Only brand names. Metalica bears little resemblance to old Celtic tunes, and now Ian Anderson is completely superfluous. There was this smoking cigar and even I can play those grunge licks on my crummy guitar. Funny because if Brian Wilson was Mozart, Ian would be Bacharini.

Among the detritus of obscurity, Ian finds his trusty old mates, Pete, Roger and Eric of The Who and The Animals, the authentic targets of interest from a time when Delta Blues was not confined to New Orleans or three minute 45's, but flourished and loudly variegated in every smoky back street tavern and lyrics were bringing up the scepter of beat poetry (or at least becoming radically meaningful). The Beatles are only the spectacle's witless diversion. Not really bad boys at all. See? We dressed them in suits!

LP means six times more work to produce a single commodity. All eyes turn to the economists, completely missing the point that music is supposed to be enjoyed rather than calculated. There is a matching pattern in Bluegrass besides the fact that Beatles harmonies early on, somewhat resembled the Everly Brothers. Homer & Jethro (no relation to the Tulls) are who and the animals, only a bit older. They were right there when the old country tunes were speeded up to fit on a three minute 78 rpm disc. Everything thereafter changed, in three minute increments. All the important parts were trimmed away, and then excluded altogether. Truth is always a process of speed and exclusion if we are to retain any sense of commodification. Even so, bluegrass makes some pretty awesome sounds.

Like leaning on the needle making the heart go skip, a-skip, a-skip, helpless alienation is a certain position clinging to the trunk of a single tree in a forest, as if immersed in the bark trying to resemble a branch. We aren't so stupid as to think there are no other trees, but they are superfluous, and what is flourishing is not our concern – "ooh the temptation!". This trunk is our personal genre. Exploration without a lifeline connected to a productive cavity like it was a shiny arrow well stuck into the vein, is unimaginable. A pre-trimmed, three-minute tree, not all soppy like an egg or strenuous like productive activity – "ooh the responsibility!". We fear dropping out of any secure nest. There be dragons. We need our rest. Am I making myself clear now?

III

"Truth is the utopia. A utopia is an imaginary description which ultimately should be reached after following a certain path but is never going to be reached. This seems to fit the whole idea of science in which the reach for the truth is the central and main aim and a theory stands till another theory seems to reach the truth better."

– Friso J. van Houdt, In search for clarity a bunch of definitions reaches the sky

"Then Give me Fiction or give me Death!"

If we concentrate on the rich context of myth-time narratives, even as they have been 'corrupted' for a modern audience, most of whom, we suspect are children, we see two connected themes flowing through both history and prehistory. These are the notion of the self-fulfilling prophesy formalised by Merton after the aphorism by Thomas, and the Be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenario played out so often in literature and oral tradition that one might have suspected wishing itself would have by now been abolished as not only preposterous, but dangerously so. If we look at all narrative as parable, then a moral easily emerges: "Don't fuck with mother nature and she won't fuck with you. Elsewise, prepare to defend yourself, rogue!" These words are applicable to everyone, irregardless of class or station (not just in the sense of a power station).

The recognition of fates should not produce a sense of fatalism until all is already lost. Even then, some have risen from the certainty of a death-bed confession to live another year or two. It just means that one can adapt (as a principle of conservation) rather than force the issue, force the world to accommodate to us by meddling with its operating parameters in grand destructive gestures, like removing mountains so that some fat cat can barbecue a burger on a climate-controlled patio. Such a stand is ultimately self-defeating. It only means we may not be the all-sapient species we let on for all these years, assassinating false gods and then thinking we could become them by merely re-defining the situation. Modern narrative erased the bumbling and comedic aspect of the Trickster and replaced the heroic aspect with ourself – Masters of the Universe, RPG™, forgetting altogether that Trickster is also Destroyer.

This is no hypocrisy to a sense of insurrectionism: insurgents are always under an occupation army so blossom-like capability in fertile soil to become Feuerbach's "real, complete person" is already out of the question. If it's not an occupation, colonial or otherwise, it's just a mundane war between states and we all know these do nothing to the overall march (literally) of civilisation – they are it, according to its own self-written histories. Insurrection's a matter of self-defense, a will to live despite the odds, and living is a matter of adaptive malleability or it is nothing. Malleability is the saving grace which grants wishes by encouraging choice, even spontaneity in our movements. This has nothing to do with accommodating to a system of power, like the darwinian moralists would have us believe, but transgressing in, through and around it, like a superweed already saturated with enough herbicide to render any further application ineffectual. The main proponent of this theorem was Rasputin, the Intransigent Russian Peasant shot dead by the British secret service for obstructing the Bolsheviks and industrial expansion into the Eastern Steppes.

Utopia was once called "liberty", before that became a dead metaphor as well. The sense, of course, is in sin, the ability to transgress objects by touch (or other receptive organ: the "eye and ear, the hand and foot"). Virtue only seeks to destroy them, and this becomes so fun, or at least habitual, that they must ever create new objects ripe for destruction, new reasons for slaughter, new laws ripe for the breaking. Forget the meek, the righteous will destroy the planet even in their attempts to save it. All us sinners have ever wished for is to be left the fuck alone. Take truth out of the picture, and utopia resides no longer in fiction in the same fashion that losing the insistence on a distinction between governance and organized crime confines both to the realm of a single ambidextrous dystopia Perlman labeled "Leviathon". What Lao Tze did not say (or did he?) was "Take away truth, justice and morality, and the mass horde will itself disappear" The beauty of the SFP is that, like Poe's Imp of the Perverse, it is "occasionally known to operate in furtherance of good". "Leave us be!" need not be an epitaph, but a wandering vagary. You might just catch it – psychosomatically.

 

note: [1] hence, there is neither structural nor functional difference between legitimate government and organised crime – opium is the legitimate solution to over 700 legitimate problems, the other three uses being illegal, all the while the financial beneficiaries from both legitimate and illegitimate use are one and the same, as are the large-scale horticultural and manufacturing sources of the product. And remember, even if you have a legitimate problem to which an opiate would be a legitimate solution, your participation in the network will have equally dire consequences without the proper authorization, one way or the other. More folks have died in the Opium wars than all the Crusades put together.

– see The whole truth? It's overated.

News from the Orphanage

"An adult is just a child's way of making playmates."

– Flagon d' Canter, 1888

Before King Richard, the Lion was the personal familiar of a goddess. That is to say, they were in a metaphoric relationship. One might call her a were-kitty. Of course, the three-headed goddess herself was in a similar metaphoric relation with women in general, which is also to say an abstraction of any particular person to the generality of mothering or nurturing. So poetically, lion refers to that aspect of maidenhood (before it was usurped by the menfolk and their patriarchal institutions) as opposed to nymph or crone, just like Venus rising, ripe (but unseen) at mid-day and setting are three aspects of the star coming out of the eastern sea, traversing the sky and returning to the western depths each evening, hence the common eulogy "...and unto dusk it shall return".

The nymph is merely a prepubescent sea or forest creature like a child or lamb (often feminized in literature), so when we hear that universally misinterpreted prophecy, "the lion will lay down with the lamb", we should not impulsively think of an impossible utopia without predation and then laugh it off like a bad case of crabs. This is nonsense as even vestal vegans must exercise a certain predatory muscle hunting down young cabbages and broccoli. Remember that it is the lioness who is the par excellent huntress, the queen of the forest, and chief nurturer of her young who happen to thrive on mutton, so named because it rhymes with glutton – a condition which may cause a swelling in the belly apt to produce fat cats. I myself have seen a grandmotherly mountain lion lie down with five lambs, and she seemed very happy and they felt no pain whatsoever, and like a naive ass with impulse-control issues, shot her for kidnapping. A grandpa once said, "you can never trust a horse but you can always trust a mule – it will kick you every time".

The grand christian mistake may have been the function of non-overlapping magesteria, a particular confusion of modern thinking which imposes categorical membership like it's dispensing prison terms. What was meant by the proverb was in all probability this: "Do not confuse your children with your daily bread!". There was a time when the idea of a meal ticket never even came up (much less state or parental "ownership" of their progeny) and hopefully, at least the very young will live to see such sociable relations again.

Hyphenic Parthenogenesis: Phantasmagoria is no Venereable Disease

"NOW I HAVE a theory that our existence is a hermaphrodite –

Or the unproductivity of it, in the sense that the beings, and seas, and houses, and trees, and the fruits of trees, its "immortal truths", and "rocks of ages" that it seems to produce are only flutters that seem to be real productions to us, because we see them very slow-motioned.

My interpretation of theology is that, though mythologically much confused, it is an awareness of the wholeness of one existence – perhaps one of countless existences in the cosmos – and that its distortions are founded upon intuitive knowledge of the unproductive state of this one existence, as a whole – and so its visions of a divine sterility, which are illustrated with figures of blonde hermaphrodites. Of course there are stray legends of male angels, but such stories are symbols of the inconsistency that co-exists with the consistency of all things phenomenal –

Or that parthenogenesis is the essential principle of all things, beings, thoughts, states, phenomenal.

I'd be queried, if I should say, of the consummation of any human romance, that it is parthenogenetic: but humanity, regarded as a whole, is sustained by self-fertilization. Except for occasional, vague stories of external enrichments, there are no records of invigorations imparted to the human kind from gorillas, hyenas, or swine. Elephants fertilize elephants. I conceive of no bizarre, little love story, with a fruitful outcome, of the attractions of a rhinoceros to a humming bird. Though I have a venerable, little story – account sent to me by Mr. Ernest Doerfler, Bronx, N.Y. – of an eighteenth-century scientist, whose theory it was that human females can be pollinated., and who experimented, by exposing a buxom female to the incidence of the east wind, and of course was successful in establishing his theory, I have no other datum of human and vegetable unions: so this reported occurrence must be considered one of the marvels from which this book of not uncommon events holds aloof.

The parthenogenetic triumphs of the human intellect are circular stupidities. The mathematicians, in their intuitions of the state of a whole, have represented what to the devout is divinity, with the circle, which, to them the "perfect figure," symbolizes getting nowhere.

Much of the argument in this book will depend upon our acceptance that nothing in our existence is real. The Whole may be Realness. Out of its phenomena, it may be non-phenomenally producing offspring-realnesses. That is not our present subject. But up comes the question: If nothing phenomenal is real, is everything phenomenal really unreal? ...But, if I accept that nothing is real, in phenomenal existence, I cannot accept that anything, therein, is really unreal. So my acceptance, in accordance with our general philosophy of the hyphen, is that all things perceptible to us are real-unreal, varying from the direction of one extreme to the other, according to whatever may be the degree of their appearance of individuality. If anybody has the notion that he is a real being – and by realness I mean individuality, or call it entity, or unrelatedness – let him try to tell why he thinks he exists, in a real sense. Recall the most celebrated of the parthenogenetic attempts to make this demonstration:

I think: therefore I am.

We have to accept that in order to think, the thinker must be of existence prior to the thought.

Why do I think? Because I am.

Why am I? Because I think.

The noblest triumphs of the human intellect are about as sublime as would be the description of a house in terms of its roof, whereas the description would be equally sublime, if in terms of the cellar, or the bath room. That is Newtonism – or a description of things in terms of one of its aspects, or gravitation. It is Darwinism – a description of all life in terms of selection, one of its aspects. Gravitation is only another name for attraction. Sir Isaac Newton's contribution to the glories of human knowledge is that an apple falls because it drops. All living things are selected by environment, said Darwin. Then, according to him, when he shifted aspects, all things constituting living environment are selected. Darwinism – that selection selects.

The materialists explain all things, except what they deny, or disregard, in terms of the material. The immaterialists, such as the absolute and the subjective idealists, explain all things in terms of the immaterial. My expression is in terms of the continuity of the material and the immaterial – or that one of these extremes is only an accentuation on one side, and the other only an accentuation on the other side, of the hyphenated state of material-immaterial.

I am a being who thinks: therefore I am a being who thinks. In this circular stupidity there is a simple unity that commends it to conventional lovers of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

I do not think. I have never had a thought. Therefore something or another. I do not think, but thoughts occur in what is said to be "my" mind – though, instead of being "in" it, they are it – just as inhabitants do not occur in a city, but are the city. There is a governing tendency among these thoughts, just as there is among people in any community, or as there is in the movements of the planets, or in the arrangements of cells constituting a plant, or an animal. So far as goes any awareness of "mine," "I" have no soul, no self, no entity, though at times of something like a harmonization of "my" elements, "I" approximate to a state of unified being.

When I see – as for convenience "I" shall say, even though there is no I that is other than a very imperfectly co-ordinated aggregation of experience-states, sometimes ferociously antagonizing one another, but mostly maintaining a kind of civilization – but when I see that my thoughts are ruled by tendencies, such as to harmonize, organize, or co-ordinate: that they tend to integrate, segregate, nucleate, equilibrate – I am conscious of mere mechanical processes that mean no more in the arrangements of my ideas than they mean in the arrangements of my bones. I'd no more think of offering my ideas as immortal truth than I'd think of publishing X-ray photographs of my bones, as eternal. But the organizing tendency implicit in all things – along with the disorganizing tendency implicit in all things – has admirably expressed itself in the design that is my skeleton. I think so. I have no reason to think that my skeleton is in any way inferior to anybody else's skeleton. I feel that if I could arrange my ideas with the art that has arranged my bones, I'd have, for writing a book, the justification that all writers feel the need of, trying to excuse themselves for writing books.

But I do not think that mechanism is all that there is in our existence. Only the old-fashioned absolutist conceives, or says he conceives, of our existence as absolutely mechanical. There is an individuality in things that is not of mechanical relations, because individuality is unrelatedness. I conceive of our existence as positive-negative, or as mechanical-immechanical.

But my methods are the largely mechanical methods of everybody, and of everything, that harmonizes, or organizes. One of these methods is classification. I am impelled to arrange my materials under headings – quite as a wind arranges fallen leaves, of various sizes, into groups – as a magnet makes selections from a pile of various things. So, again, when I see that my thoughts are coerced by conventional processes, I can think of my thoughts as nothing but the products of coercions. I'd not do these slaves the honor of believing them. They impose upon me only to the degree of temporary acceptance of some of them.

[...]

BUT WHY this everlasting attempt to solve something? – whereas it is our acceptance that, in a final sense, there is, in phenomenal affairs, nothing – or that there is only the state of something-nothing – so that all problems are only soluble-insoluble – or that most of the social problems we have, today, were at one time conceived of as solutions of preceding problems – or that every Moses leads his people out of Egypt into perhaps a damn sight worse – Promised Lands of watered milk and much-adulterated honey – so why these everlasting attempts to solve something?

...Robert Browning's conception was to take three sounds, and make, not a fourth, but a star.

Out of seven colors, not to lay on daubs, but to paint a picture.

Out of seven million Americans, Russians, Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and on, or so long as geography holds out, not to pile a population, but to organize – more or less – into New York City.

Sulphur and lava in a barren plain, and a salty block of stone, shaped roughly like a woman – signs of erosion on rocks far above water-level – a meteor that had set a bush afire – the differences of languages of peoples – and all the other elements that organized into Genesis.

Data of variations and heredity and adaptations; of multiplications and of checks and of the doctrine of Malthus; of acquired characters and of transmissions – and they organized into The Origin of Species –

Just as, once upon a time, minerals that had affinity for one another came together and took on geometrical appearances. But a crystal is not supposed to be either a prohibition or an anti-prohibition argument. I know of a crystal of quartz that weighs several hundred pounds. But it has not been mistaken for propaganda –

Or all theories – theological, scientific, philosophical – and that they represent the same organizing process – but that self-conscious theorists, instead of recognizing that thought-forms were appearing in their minds, as in wider existence have appeared crystalline constructions, have believed that it was immortal Truth that they were conceiving.

Oxygen and sulphur and carbon –

...Or let's have just a little, minor expression, or organization, a small composition, arranging the data of poltergeist girls. The elements of this synthesis are moving objects, fires, girls in strange surroundings, youth and the atavism of youth.

..."Adoption" is a good deal of a disguise for getting little girls to work for not much more than nothing. It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and "adopted daughters", as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters, under hard task-masters, in strange surroundings –

Or the first uncertain and precarious appearances of human beings upon this earth – and a need for them, and a fostering, a nurturing, a protection, far different from conditions in these swarming times, when the need is for eliminations –

A lost child in primordial woods – and the value of her, which no genius, king, or leveller of kings, has today –

That objects moved in her presence – fruits of trees that came down from the trees and set themselves beside her – the shaking of bushes that cast, to her, berries – then night and coldness – faggots joining twigs, and dancing around her – heaping – the crackling of flames to warm her –

– Charles Hoy Fort

– see Insanitary Conditions or Conditional Sanity

We've got it wrongside out:"Revolt is an intimate relatedness to the world"

Darlings are you ready for the long winter's fall?
said the lady in her parlor said the butler in the hall.

Is there time for another? cried the drunkard in his sleep.
Not likely said the little child. What's done the Lord can keep.

And the vicar stands a-praying. And the television dies
as the white dot flickers and is gone and no-one stops to cry.

The big jet rumbles over runway miles that scar the patchwork green
where slick tycoons and rich buffoons have opened up the seam
of golden nights and champagne flights ad-man overkill
and in the haze consumer crazed we take the sugar pill.

Jagged fires mark the picket lines the politicians weep
and mealy-mouthed through corridors of power on tip-toe creep.

Come and see bureaucracy make its final heave
and let the new disorder through while senses take their leave.

Families screaming line the streets and put the windows through
in corner shops where keepers kept the country's life-blood blue.

Take their pick and try the trick with loaves and fishes shared
and the vicar shouts as the lights go out, and no-one really cares.

Dark Ages shaking the dead
Closed pages better not read
Cold rages burn in your head.

– Jethro Tull, Dark Ages, 1976

The abstractive process only produces things because such things carry, or give shape to, ‘value’, which is capitalism’s true product. The things of this world are accidental, they relate nebulously to human need from which they derive some degree of objectivity, but which are fundamentally counterfeit, displaced from how they should be, hollow and unsatisfying.

Social relations are falsified through the mediation of such counterfeit objects and are thereby expropriated as relations-as-objects and thus further falsified. Where a relation first sets in motion objects as symbols of that relation, the objects feed back into the relations and transform them, truncating them, causing the symbols to supplant the relations and thus furthering the advance of the algebraic discourse of abstraction as the most appropriate discourse of relations. [...]

– suddenly, there is nothing that is not bought and sold.

All objects become pregnant with value, all objects and activities, from strawberries to songs, from water to medicine, from ideas to babies, from vistas to the patch of earth on which you stand, from everything to anything. Every separated object, and all of its components and attributes, is allocated a shifting but measurable ‘value’ which may be realised in the moment of exchange. At the level of interpersonal interaction the productive process realises the motor force, the process of abstraction, which drives it. Abstract generality is made to appear at the most intimate core, and in every detail, of material reality.

The establishment of capitalist production as the dominant social relation reversed the relation of production to the world. From the moment of capital’s formal domination, the world ceased to function as the source, frame and ground of all natural phenomena. This environmental function was supplanted by that of the productive system which increasingly became the life-support machine for all life, and the arbiter of what existed and what would be announced ‘extinct’.

[...]

The historical purpose of the proletariat, as discovered by Oscar Wilde, is to become quite useless. Its struggle is to channel the sensitivities of the corporeal body in opposition to the desensitisation and habituation process (i.e. the surplus reality principle) which is the fundamental prerequisite of world production based on concrete labour activity.

If this is the case, it would then seem feasible to hypothesise that somewhere along the line the metabolic process of recoding and containing the proletariat’s decomposition (the accumulated physical manifestations of disfunction amongst millions of individuals) will lose its own elasticity – and that it will become incoherent as a homeostatic system and thus begin to deteriorate more rapidly (the less capacity there is in the system for re-coding disfunction as containable, the more disfunction will be recorded as uncodable).

The individual’s innate and intimate struggle against social environment never decreases in either quantity or quality, but it does adapt itself in its expression to conditions and is thus manifested in innumerable forms. For example, at the present juncture there is a tendency amongst the proletariat to express the rejection of capitalist relations through prolonged sickness, depression, obsessions, fanaticism, drunkenness, interpersonal violence... rather than say by marching through the streets on ‘protest marches’.

For the left this recomposition of struggle into an intimate bodily response feels like a retreat. However, the affective turn of revolt is actually some sort of ‘advance’ – it is a step closer to the proper ordering of perspective and significance, a step closer to the de-ideologised nature of instinctive revolt.

Revolt is an intimate relatedness to the world, and therefore most real at the level of immediate feeling which functions to orientate the individual in a potentially toxic environment.

– Reproduction and Revolt against Reproduction

- Cruelty means eradicating by means of blood and until blood flows, god, the bestial accident of unconscious human animality, wherever one can find it.

- Man, when he is not restrained, is an erotic animal, he has in him an inspired shudder, a kind of pulsation that produces animals without number which are the form that the ancient tribes of the earth universally attributed to god. This created what is called a spirit.

Well, this spirit originating with the American Indians is reappearing all over the world today under scientific poses which merely accentuate its morbid infectuous power, the marked condition of vice, but a vice that pullulates with diseases, because, laugh if you like, what has been called microbes is god, and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms? They make them with the microbes of god. [...]

- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man.

So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.

- How's that?

- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. I say, to remake his anatomy. Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god his organs.

For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.

Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.

– Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God

Sin & the Machine Model

That the machine is the materialisation of logic is only partially correct, no less so than its inversion, that logic is the idealisation of machine. If art mimics life, then mechanics represents life without sin or play. It is still-life. As a mimic, the logic is in error. As a model, the machine can only pose for a dystopian ideal: a path without sin is movement without transgression. Here found is a consensus between theologists and technologists: the definition of righteousness and purity is lawful obedience. One can see that the goal for science, the singularity or life as cyborg represents no divergence from that for the devout, spiritual unity, not to mention that for the politically inclined, global democracy. To homogenise milk, all fat modules are mechanically reduced to identical proportion in order to prevent separation during storage. While there is a certain nutritional loss, there is a capital gain: one can no longer make cream or butter at home. For machine logic, some sacrifice is always necessary.

Mechanical systems are inclined to produce work to fascilitate organic systems, occasionally to facsimilate them. Biological systems produce movement and reproduction of novelties. Equilibrium in the former represents a stasis of operation or thermodynamic equilibrium – no worries. When energy input stops, so does the machine. Equilibrium in the latter represents distributivity or communication. When communication stops, the organism becomes an energy source for other organisms. This metabolism is even apparent at the chemical level which we have agreed to call "inorganic" only because they are not obviously self-renewing, even when self-motivating.

While also inorganic, no machine is self-motivating. The lunar rover and drone bomber can only follow directions. Machines are stimulus-response units; organisms encourage and are discouraged. Machines may express an aesthetic to an observer, organisms express and are impressed, with or without an observer. While a machine calculates internalised input, an organism can as well explore externality. While a machine can malfunction, it cannot intentionally err or act spontaneously. Organisms play, just for the fun of it.

Mechanical output feeds back to regulate the input. Metabolic output produces perturbation or growth. Mechanical reproduction (manufacturing) produces invariant identities. Organic reproduction produces new systems altogether, where-after self-similarity dissipates. Mechanical systems grow through additive combination. Organic systems grow by symbiotic merging. Hence, machines are composed of interacting parts, bodies are wholes in themselves, even when immerged with or tending to machinic prostheses. Beyond the point of energy input, machines can function in isolation from other systems. Bodies cannot. Organisms are open systems while machines are closed. Machines are organised. Bodies self-organise.

self-organising systems have a high degree of stability, and this is where we run into difficulties with conventional language. The dictionary meanings of the word "stable" include "fixed", "not fluctuating", "unvarying," and "steady," all of which are inaccurate to describe organisms. The stability of self-organising systems is utterly dynamic and must not be confused with [thermodynamic] equilibrium. It consists in maintaining the overall structure in spite of ongoing changes and replacements of its "components".

– Fritjof Capra

Because there are commonalities (feeding and feedback, flows and circulation, inhalation and exhalation), they can be compared. One can be described in terms of the other, but they are never wholly or exclusively interchangeable. Organics can proceed autonomously with regard to mechanics. The reverse does not hold water. The machine is at the mercy of environmental feedbacks, having limited behavioural options; the organism maintains its own internal feedbacks by deviating with regard to environmental irregularity. This multiplicity of options is called adaptability.

Transgression is essential to organic systems, it is catastrophe for the mechanical. Flexible conditions place stress on machines but allow bodies to thrive. One can still say the machine, in many respects, mimics the organism and therefore, can aid in its function. The inversion of this sentence can only produce a tragedy or comedy.

Comparison or analogy is a means of approach. Outside of political arrangements (a mechanisation of society), it is not a logical or mathematical deduction for categorical property or in/exclusion. Overlapping patterns, like mathematical correlations, do not demand the imposition of linear causality or genetic (in the broad sense, taxonomic) relation. When a metaphor or analogy repeats itself or is repeated, it warrants a common name. That is all. Consensual agreement has no bearing on the truth of identities when the actual birth has not been witnessed. Truth is irrelevant when common sense is overwhelmed by resemblance, just as genetics is irrelevant with regard to the adoption of orphans: kinship is not a mechanical process.

Prayer is not a spare wheel that you pull out when you're in trouble. Use it as a steering wheel that keeps you on the right path...

– Muhammad Najaath

...but unless you transgress and explore the margins and side streets, your path will take you (or something else will), rendering you inexhorably tactless and easily preyed upon. Even for the raven, there are neither straight lines nor smooth surfaces, just as there is no objective detachment.

– Achmed Hibaab Azzizi Homeini

– from Potlatch: Considering the Rough & Smooth

Nothing or Something: Does it matter? Eureka! Phase Two

Philology's main dictum or stand says each word has had a mother, even when its been adopted from a foreign land. Etymology is no tree as it is often diagrammed, it's much more like a tongue, with some taste and some decorum. Especially when it opens eyes, the Muse has almost always been a thing to feminize.

– Not another Word

So who needs a cognitive map when one can read the signs, like stars in yer eyes or little birdies circling skies? Topography has but one or more multiples of three lines (which we like to call "dimensions"), one of which must stand still to be called a "criterion" or "center-line for reflection most inscrutable, but always by comparison to you or to a proxy not entirely disreputable.

And then there are five areas or cardinal regions (one is black and blue) ever mistook for an order or direction: two lines cross to join the ends of the earth to the four corners at the center of the verse (X marks the spot on a sphere but not a box which can be anywhere you happen to go, especially near New Mexico when en route diagonally from Colorado), where the third line rises upward toward a Zenith and is only called a nexus when standing on a pole, the place of nix, neg or death to any lingerers in any season: the fifth area is up, above the snow (even if you're visiting some friends down below). The upward glance can tell you of the way you wish to go.

The real luminescence which we call the Cross down South or Pole Sar is what's meant when we hear "get thee behind me Satan" whether heading North or other way for seasonal vacations. The Sun said something likewise to the moon and then to Venus, pushing females and their children to an ever lower station. But every night and nineteen years when Moon she catches up, there's rebellion on that patriarchal thing, and then he's banished till he learns that no one ever liked a king or feeling famished.

The curvature of bodies in space is easily demonstrated on this rock and on it's nearest neighbor -- why not generalise to the more distantly related or familiar? But the curvature or even unabashed linearity of space is an absurdity, by itself, another 'just so' story. There really are no lines; if you were waiting for them, sorry. One must make a center or a grand periphery, stand and have a stick to calculate a shape or two, and if your space is void, then what's the aim beyond an ever-sinking single point of view?

Nothing's never measured 'cept as distance between somethings. This tells us something about them but none at all of it. The alternative says that space is the only something (and it's female) and "reality" (the sensual) is an illusion of its wiggling, its rhythmically dancing perturbations (they are us, a short-lived local movement of the flux). But really what's the difference beyond exchanging nothing for something? Either way should be a gift, free for all the taking. In this image nothing can not be – that's all for naught – there's nothing to exchange but lots of stuff to move about like finger painting.

I like this version better 'cause the only paradoxes found are those you bring along, but irony is just another word for this simplest of equations: "solutions cause the problems without a moment's hesitation". There's only turning points and they must be your own decisions in a dance with Lady Chance or chasing tried and true traditions. So said, we've heard, the lore of ancient peasants: "Well, sometimes magic works and then again there's times it doesn't".

Aether (whether named Esther, Astrida or Florence), the ubiquitous incorporeal substance, like a womb that goes forever, space is everything and nothing other can occur – nothing must in any logic NOT exist. Even occupying armies of anti-nihilists need a something for a salary or a claim to fame and glory. Without nothing, something's always infinite in extension and eternal in duration unlike impiric, discorporeal designs (and/or the greedy or rapacious corporations). And something like the life-span of a galaxy, if it could register at all, would by comparison to its matrix amount to less than blinking eyes, and even less, a thought that's fleeting. "Banish!" went the cries.

So much for universal consciousness or opinion, not to mention memory beyond its reverberation unless a spark or two comes by to set it to reiteration. There was a time when phantoms weren't a fantasy, but never-ending echoes like the breeze from any bellows setting fires as they go by, and if enflaming only our imaginations, at least it's something. As words go, deconstruction's less contemptuous an ism than any nihilistic or dogmatical religion.

If space is a void, that's nothing. To occupy it seems to me would be pretty awful scary – there'd be no gravity for swimming, without any esteem, there'd not be a you or he or she or it or even me. A wave is someone waving so an atom was invented to accommodate the Empty, not considering where it was pushed from and by which to cause momentum to account for its travels through oblivion till caught on the other side by an eye or a more grievously alluring con-collision so in circles went the cosmos till after Newton's revolution when darkness was inscribed the chiefest quality of all before. God did not appear nor even start his work till the minus year, four thousand four from zero, and he first discovered adam who's own splitting started war.

Hence the bang was proposed to account for the cause since god was no longer pc, having ate himself in frenzy after shitting endless misery, and the one thing on which political scientists will agree is the total absence of a mystery – it ALL must be excluded. And then they had the balls to say exception justifies the law so on with its enforcement, executions free for all. There were no prisons or the law before the crime of heresy. Then up usurped the public (hence the soldiers for the states) and the private properties (who's cops were set for any thrust of persons wishing to escape). Within the walls of city-states or their modern post-communion, to step off prescribed lines causes each kind of retribution.

The new physics settled the problem of a cosmic radiation both into and out of nothing by saying a thing is oscillating between itself and some potential, so fast that we observers assume it's standing still. So solid's just an optical illusion combined with the "fact" that there is always infinitely more nothing in any bit of something so the agreement between vision and touch when contacting a rock or brick or such is about as absurd as an assembly of wise men voting on the number of angels dancing on a pin. Agreement only goes so far – to the ends of the earth – and then falls off when critique appears disrupting the consensus. Reality is always an agreement till a naysayer survives, no matter one's opinion of its fitness.

But again, if there's an ongoing vacillation between potential and a deed, it could only mean the past and future are in a grand collusive scheme, as a simultaneity that makes the present what it seems, victims of what's been and slaves to what's to be. Time then is as well illusion and cause-effect must co-occur – it's the only left solution in a swirling mixing bowl. So much easier to believe in aether, never mind which what the others are persuading to deceive themselves in order, as none can ever say thereafter "I've been relieved! It's over". Turning in his grave our Samuel Butler might have said that adults are only children's way of making babies.

Every night the surest truth is swallowed by the sea, and whether birth or vomit, it returns as guiltless innocent as anything can be. It seems kinder to consider that a movement is the only sense of solidarity. Gravity is only there to let you know your mother 'cause you have to start from somewhere and 'cause Zeus's nutcase just won't do. The alternative is chewed and ground and swallowed by a black eternity which you'd then call "my home" between each brief, explosive and spontaneous generation – a virgin birth as terror from a ruptured, peaceble oblivion. Look your royal Dudeship, that thanatos within your mirror is all just so not so! It's just reflecting you. Sometimes our oborus or boreal Coronas look emerging from a mouth as if a river-dancing snail, in a fit of laughter suds are dripping down its own placental chin. But hunger gods can only ever see a snake consuming its own dutifully bound tail – any other way to them'd have to be considered constipation's "sin", a painful bout of bloody diarhea.

– see The Scientific Alternative, from Rabbit-hole to Nutshell

Organising without the Charismatic Word

Every charismatic leader, or "priest-king" needs a business manager, or "war-king" at his side.

– Kennith Rexroth

"But we should not look for only one or even two meanings of the syllable ur [the root of both 'urge' and 'organise']: the more numerous the poetic meanings that could be concentrated in a sacred name, the greater was its [magical] power" (Robert Graves).

Some words downright lie. Consider 'administration' (literally, 'toward or near a servitude'), which could be short for "Add-men mimic nature's bounteous ministry" at least or "Ad-men represent divinity" at worst. With the abandonment of a religious integument (sometimes called institution on analogy with constitution, in a chiasmatic confusion of skin and bones), the proper form should be "admenstruement" on analogy with encasement or entrapment or government, all situations where men construe or are construed to bleed on schedule, like construction-workers for pay, in both productive and reproductive activities.

Where -ment is short for "men (did i)t" (just think of the artificial mountain or a monumental moment), -(t)ion suggests a spontaneous ('natural') process, like "creation", referring to "flesh-becoming" (see creatin: 'flesh', 'muscle') from an indeterminable flux, source or womb. Where the manufacture of flesh has a certain ring of emasculation and fakery (man-factions fashion men), creation and evolution pose no such arrogance until they bring in an autocrat or other godly apparition. It may not rhyme, but a 'rhythm' of sense is there nevertheless, and that suggests a possibility: Can marianettes conspire to string up the puppeteer?

Io, the root of the suffix '-(t)ion' was in poetry, a river nymph pursued by Zeus and transformed into a heifer. In history, Ionian is both a party culture and dancing dialect of a soon-to-be Greek (uni)verse. Zeus as raper-transformer is here merely the scape-goat blamed (actually, poeticised) for a natural process of a native alliance between a riverine people (fishers) and cattle pastoralists, both confronted by an oppressive or meddlesome civilising encroachment (the Olympian gods). The result of the conflict is that cattle became men's property and women, through the institution of permanent marriage became chattel. The story, semantics or context is lost but the usage remains entangled in our language as a grammatical artifact of an insurrection in myth-time against patriarchal meddlement and its pursuit of progress and rural economic development (a labour force, its oaths and its tribute – the only thing "meant" to flow other than blood – and the origin of the means and ends argument and statistically calculated normality as the first laws of exclusion).

Consider Ocean, the big liquidity which many consider the mother of all life (and therefore, invention). Whether called Miss Oceania or Mr. Oceanus, it is still a chaotic cream of every trace nutrient a creature could crave, like a big mixing bowl or pepper mill nurturing not only fish and the things they eat, but land crawlers, slithering creepers and fliers when, in a blustery dance with the sun, it redistributes rain on parched ground and up spring flowers, come to drink it in, and all the pollinating urges of birds and bees only end up more piss in the seas under a flatulent sky. If the cycle of life is not a poetic organization, nothing is. As the orgasm must accompany organic reproduction, the orgy just as likely preceded ergometrics and work once took on an entirely different sense than it does today.

Despite all the anti-organisational rhetoric, some of which is rightfully disregarded, perhaps accompanied with a puzzled expression, many only see another argument over semantics in the pursuit of an improved insult like a better mouse-trap. What, after all, could be the beef with planning and coordinating, which is also to say, with thinking and communicating, whether concerning past or future events? The advice to tend to the present is no call for amnesia nor walking blindly into a brick wall of the future. And where is any harmony or cooperation to be found without some degree of coordination? The absurd argumets over semantics only expose manipulators as shit-stirers with self-agrandizement issues. What lurks beneath all political debate is the distinction between an acceptance of spontaneity and the imposition of force, if only the force of argument backed up with strong arms should one's logic be weak.

But who remembers that meaning is a provisional attachment to a fluctuating context? The par excellent definition of a word is only appropriate to contexts which seem not only to endure through time, but are re-iterated across space, or keep cropping up like dandelions in a monotone garden of grass? And when the context does change, the word persists as an old habit, and meaning soon becomes irrelevant, if it is considered at all. The debate on organisation is really one of preferred weeding tactic, as if we're talking about appropriate grammar and agreeable syntax encased in a good (rigid) educational environment. But left to its own devices (at least the poetic ones), there are no weeds in nature.

As both "sides" are committed to their position, the antagonism is not unlike that between the political and antipolitical or the social and individual, providing the sophistic ammunition to justify total war (or insult) among those who would be thought allies against a common oppression, whether in the form of an occupying army or a fascist, autochthonous regime whose vicious cycle becomes our criterion for assessing and judging nature. When with strangers (some would call barbarians), one needs an arsenal of words in an ever recursive discourse just to communicate. Or so it seems.

The debate in its smallest form should be recognisable as between organisers as manipulators and those who would let things grow, albeit with tending, nurturing, the occasional application of fertilizer and cross-insemination. We are talking of both poetry and gardening, neither of which would condemn the occasional destructive effort, but it also applies to meat-eaters. If hunters pay as much attention to maintaining the context in which their 'food' is found, there is little to distinguish them from herders, as neither would wish for the extermination of their care and, god forbid, settle down to toilsome farm labour which even a lilly or rose would instinctively refuse. Sometimes the leavings are set aflame just to encourage the growth of something new, and then sustained.