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

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

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).

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".

Friday, May 24, 2013

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.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

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.