Keep it together, or the immaterial nonsense in the distinction – arbitrary split between invention, discovery, nature and artifice

When you have a sultry egg and slice it anywhere to produce a separation or divorce, a single slice but clean through and through (crosswise or in that fashion would be two – however well-met at the intersection – two slices at cross purpose doubling the results, to the degree of an exponential insult where, between me and you, one would do) there is born three: the mother-egg (it's not a fire-hydrant no matter how you slice it) and two crescents, cross-sectioned offspring with faces whose similarity is reversed in one sense, and in any other, or by comparison, depends on how you cut the mustard or how thick you spread it.

The scalpel or demi-urge, of course, and excluding for the moment asexually reproducing organisms (we are after-all, on the topic of eggs), stands in for the father, any of which will do, but has some lingering say on matters of appearance and even more-so if motherly (or at least like a kindly uncle), but otherwise is hereafter inconsiderate to our purpose and has no further bearing on the matter unless she invites him back or at a later date another just won't do.

In cell biology, mitosis represents a discontinuity of trangendered mother-father embedded-embodied unity: With the principle of identity one divided by one is two (1/1=2) – if the second one was any other, the result would have been three. In family life, division and addition are co-equivalent, lest there comes along an unforeseen subtraction. Meiosis has no long-term disruption to continuity of the original matter/mother or big picture: 1/1=3(or more); 1+1=3(or more) and then things get sticky until it's time to start over again with a secure sense of prodigality at one end or cantankerous old age at the other.

– Introductory Biology & Counter-Mathematics
(Hardcore, Brace & Bittington, ISBN: 72)

We've been well informed and should by now accept without question that humans have an innate fear of the unknown, at least until it's been accurately quantified. To be sure, the only thing less feared is death. Tomorrow, BBC Science Headline News will report the discovery of the gene responsible for manufacturing the protein actuating universal paranoia. Induction reminds us that this production must come later in development, since every newborn would expire from shock due to instantaneous saturation with unknown variables at birth, or at least shortly thereafter. Even were this debilitating tendency overcome by a more powerful defensive protein to counter the hideous effects of the natural environment impacting the senses, no child would thereafter need be punished for an over-active imagination or curiosity beyond the limits of a recursive tautology. Our own experience suggests otherwise, and inverted logic provides an alternate and more comfortable hypothesis: there may be a ubiquitous fear of a difference of opinion. It can't be a matter of resistance to ambiguity, else neuronal activity would cease and we'd all swoon at every modern inconvenience.

The one immortal truth is that nothing can be discussed without reference to something else, even if unintended: as one thing leads to another, all discourse is metaphoric, and metaphor is the juxtaposition of forms set side by side, hence comparison, hence artificial, hence natural, all at the same time and not indisposingly so. It is an a priori deduction subject to such passioned embitterment its truth-value would best be ignored.

There is a sense of security called trust essential to everyday life (very likely, to any other sort as well). One approaches a chair almost mindlessly. It's name, title and definition are irrelevant if we can set upon the sensory appearance matching up well with any relayed or recalled experience. One rarely questions it or even plans ahead so-as to be certain it will not metamorphose into a dragon's nostril and set fire to your ass. Conversely:

No matter how high and mighty the throne,
what sits on it 's the same as your own!

– Chad Mitchel Trio

When you've seen one ass, you've seen 'em all, or so goes the saying in proctological circles. Inductive reasoning does not lead to knowledge but to decision, that is, action coupled to the sense of psychological security one would wish it accompanied had we only lived in Eutopia. It applies to sticking to a path as well as pealing off it. Right or wrong is inconsequential to the action taken, the criterion or hinge or justification is the sense of calm or excitement or pleasure or relief it brings – it comes bearing gifts so is considered politely correct, even when in the form of a double-dare.

Therefore, there is no immutability to be expected, movement can continue on a transitory, provisional basis, truth is excluded. Investigative consciousness only comes to play after the advance of the unexpected, like the wrong appendage protruding from one's backside. Induction has no concern with the unknown, which is to say is not otherwise curious except when a perturbation seems somehow familiar or reminiscent. The inductive facility steps to the background, incompetent regarding such matters, when the playful poetic sense is called forth if not a second opinion. Suppressing play early-on leads to both morality and political-economy, generating such encyclopædic reams of dogma as to warrant it's own name and title: Modernity. It only rhymes with Maternity like honey to an orbiting cyanide capsule, and the fruit it bears is just as deadly.

If truth exists as is colloquially expected, because each claim differs from or contradicts every other but the nepotistic (where nothing is excluded or defined away just to force an issue, which is to say, "sans politics"), then every interpretation or representation is false, in error or fuzzily indeterminate. If, on the other hand, axiomatic truth is excluded or suspended as itself a dead end, a conversation stopper, a sleep inducer or any other stoppage or provoker of war (a true answer, in its infallible finality is all of these) then each interpretation is appropriate, each performance an act and every utterance is silently preceded with an "as if" as loud as any winking eye. It should be given or even taken that it's only a pretense – education can only ever familiarize one with the current script. It's not like we should take it with us after the show.

As Proudhon once observed, there's nothing supernatural about it: the Absolute is the holy trinity in all of its three-headed aspect: religious, political and economic. The absolute extends its insatiably sticky fingers into everything. It gropes, grabs, grapples, gripes, grumbles, groans, grinds, graduates and grows, all coated with honey to both cover its ass and suck you into it like a fly to a sticky yellow no-pest strip, because the omnipotent has but one limitation: it can't reach to lick its own ass (except metaphorically) without being booed off the stage for an all-too-obvious costume malfunction. How else is it that the greater good is invariably seen walking in the company of a large evil and even a lesser evil is always the preferred champion? Well, as Baudrilard tried to reply discussing the simulacron, instead of no reality hiding behind the present situation, he might have said "there's nothing lower than the slimy truth", and more safely got away. No one likes to hear another dis their mother, not at least without sufficient pay.

Time for "The Legend of Immortal Truth"

Figurative speech is paint by earlobe but not always arriving just in time: Like the form of a mother beating around the bush, "Time" is the metaphoric juxtaposition of recollection with the mathematic ratio of possibility to probability of what does not exist – even as a blueprint – a rational expression impossible to solve without irrational numbers until it has already passed. Hence at one time, the future sneaks up from behind and kicked you in the ass. The literal interpretation of time produces "Truth", an aphoristic affirmation always formless, coming out but occluded by the horizon of one's perception and therefore problematic, whether considering childhood memory or a weather forecast. The past is history (a handy alibi for the present), the future mystery and like fish or an inundated dry creek-bed, with bare hands, the present's too slippery to catch. In the visual realm, time is a comet following an invisible arc (because it's not really there) across the sky, itself followed by an unwagging tail but off at a kilter (because it is there) for all to see, and after a few revolutions, is gone for as many as a thousand years just like an Algerian plague but not always in conspiracy with earth changing catastrophies and insurrections after which we must come up with a new story because the old ones aren't jiving. To any question, the immortal answer is always "Maybe", but then, only figuratively.

Ten million million years and a day have rolled, since these events, away;

but still the peasant at fall of night, belated therenear, is oft affright by sounds of a phantom bear in flight; a breaking of branches under the hill; the noise of a going when all is still! and hens asleep on the perch, they say, cackle sometimes in a startled way, as if they were dreaming a dream that mocks the lope and whiz of a fleeting fox!

Half we're taught, and teach to youth, and praise by rote, is not,

but merely stands for, truth.

So of my goat: she's merely designed to represent the truth—"immortal" to this extent:

dead she may be, and skinned—frappé— hid in a dreadful den away; prey to the churches—(any will do, except the church of me and you.) the simplest miracle, even then, will get her up and about again.

– Ambrose Bierce, Cobwebs

Barnyard Grammar

"I say, you!" bawled a fat ox in a stall to a lusty young ass who was braying outside; "the like of that is not in good taste!"

"In whose good taste, my adipose censor?" inquired the ass, not too respectfully.

"Why—h'm—ah! I mean it does not suit me. You ought to bellow."

"May I inquire how it happens to be any of your business whether I bellow or bray, or do both—or neither?"

"I cannot tell you," answered the critic, shaking his head despondingly; "I do not at all understand it. I can only say that I have been accustomed to censure all discourse that differs from my own."

"Exactly," said the ass; "you have sought to make an art of impertinence by mistaking preferences for principles. In 'taste' you have invented a word incapable of definition, to denote an idea impossible of expression; and by employing in connection therewith the words 'good' and 'bad,' you indicate a merely subjective process in terms of an objective quality. Such presumption transcends the limit of the merely impudent, and passes into the boundless empyrean of pure cheek!"

At the close of this remarkable harangue, the bovine critic was at a loss for language to express his disapproval. So he said the speech was in bad taste. – A. Bierce, 1874

"Pray walk into my parlour," said the spider to the fly. "That is not quite original," the latter made reply. "If that's the way you plagiarize, your fame will be a fib— But I'll walk into your parlour, while I pitch into your crib. But before I cross your threshold, sir, if I may make so free, Pray let me introduce to you my friend, 'the wicked flea.'" "How do you?" says the spider, as his welcome he extends; "'How doth the busy little bee,' and all our other friends?" "Quite well, I think, and quite unchanged," the flea said; "though I learn, In certain quarters well informed, 'tis feared 'the worm will turn.'" "Humph!" said the fly; "I do not understand this talk—not I!" "It is 'classical allusion,'" said the spider to the fly.

– see The Discovery of Writing & Democracy

Moral: An intrusive preposition couplied with an article (see, for example, the distinction between the two imperatives: "Punch the clock to the end of time" and "Punch the clock to end time". The first verb looses its metaphoric ambiguity and the second verb metamorphically actualizes itself from the nominal state. The appropriate substitution would, of course, be: "Punch the clock for the last time" and all three Thesaurian confusions disappear).

Is Spider-grandmother a seductress or is it entrapment?

[Posted in May by Dave on the Synchromesh Transmission]

Au contraire, Pierre, a spider never seduces its dinner. Seduction would not even apply to the Venus Fly-trap, which only indicates an error in judgement on the part of pollenating insects. The web is well-placed alongside another's path, a point of transition, a bottleneck like a Chinook fishtrap or a cop posing as a hooker on a busy downtown intersection where one might expect a bit more authenticity. The extent of the web is the horizon of a spider's perception extending its sensation of a perturbation. The spider still must move to the vibration to enwrap and consume it. It is a joyful noise played on the spider's web of expanded consciousness. If anything, it is the fly which, albeit inadvertently, seduces the spider with an angelic pluck of the harp string! A sublime sound for the spider, a frantic wiggle for the fly.

Seduction, on the other hand, is an invitation for some mutual wiggling and not a matter of consumption at all. It is not, as Baudrillard suggests, a faux appearance for possession; it is merely an expression of receptivity. A faux appearance for possession is a sales pitch to enfavour a commodity exchange. A seductive adornment is merely an expressive emphasis, to attract another's attention, a perturbation within their perceptual horizon. A pleasant surprise. A question of extension by means of a simple redirection where a loud vocal announcement such as "Hey baby, wanna booogie?" may seem inappropriate for the situation.

There is a difference between seduction and entrapment residing in one's motivation. Hell, they don't even rhyme! The confusion is brought on by the posing of equality when we notice matching patterns. When we witness overwhelming entrapment in our own lives, we redirect to that side of the equation as par excellent or primary index of the other. Thus, in the same manner that Baudrillard cannot find an "authentic" gift (he thinks it therefore cannot exist), he says seduction is at base entrapment, jiving with social psychologists who pronounce all communication antagonistic.

Pretty quickly, half the equation disappears altogether by virtue of linear sequencing. Reductionism reduces meaning by shrinking the horizon of perception. It does not annihilate meaning, which is always a potential. From a mechanical point of view, the same muscles are engaged in seduction and entrapment. It is a matter of polysemy which gets the poet in us excited, whereas the mathemetician proclaims identity and "end of discussion". The romantically susceptible has at least a fifty percent chance of error. Over time, our own language illustrates the poetic associations of similarity without demanding linear causality: a tela 'web'; a toile 'sheer fabric'; a toilette 'bag for clothing'; a toilet 'receptacle for shit'; coming full turn back to toilette water 'perfume to cover the stink' and network telecast a 'web of lies' inviting all to serve themselves another helping of, more toil. That once just meant "the way we weave our baskets".

An after thought: By insisting on clarity, linearity and unvarying precision, mathematical distinction (definition always being a process of exclusion of what never really goes away – we just proceed to ignore it), we're set up for confusion. Consider how, to this day, we mix up the social with the political – I'm sorry, in my book they're not equivalent nor in adjectival relation (except as one negates the other) and maybe that's why they'll always be at war. Self-fulfillingly prophetic, the victories and the victims always rekindle the political (that's as well to say the economic) and everything else stays the same. But then, I don't consider language an exclusively antagonist game.

– see Fanny Söderbäk, Impossible Mourning

Performance as Act

The distinction between history and myth is blurred. History, just as truth, depends on myth to come to life. The productive tension between the two underpins the Platonic account too: It is only by resorting to the myth of the cave that Socrates (as rendered down by Plato) is able to bespeak the truth in the first place.

... (As for culture) it is only insofar as we play games and tell stories that reality comes to be, and is allowed to change. Without the awkwardness and inadequacy of language and dialogue (In terms of intention or even representation) life becomes mechanical, perfectly dead. And it is exactly the excessiveness that these failures inhabit that reminds us that we are dealing with art and not philosophy. Socrates claims that he wants to expel the artist from his city because art is too far removed from truth. Behind that claim, however, hides a fear of that which cannot be reined into neat categories, that which always exceeds its own boundaries, that which in fact threatens boundaries as such.

... that every act of appropriation is bound to fail; that the human condition is a perpetual playful becoming that would be extinguished and annihilated if the metaphysical dream of eternal and self-same being was realized.

– Söderbäk

In terms of intention or even representation not every metaphor as a symbol has a meaning that endures, so what's the point of sticking to the truth? But this does not mean it has no history or future anywhere but as a curiosity or trinket on a shelf, worn on the outside (if excavated) not unlike a hood ornament wrapped around your neck, loose-fitting so it doesn't strangle. It is often said that in the old days people wore their subconscious on the outside and buried Mr. Greymatter so their day-time dreaming or play wouldn't be interrupted by all his calculations. When subsumed, so goes the thinking, it's accelerated to quantum speeds like leaps and jumps that we would label intuition, flash, a sixth sense or telepathy. It's maybe all or none of these, how would we know if it's running under cover, subliminally? Sometimes all you can do is go with your gut, and that's not to say "follow orders", it's just a temporary presumption of something you can trust. Distrust is only proved when it's been broken. Like I said before, along with others now and then, we haven't got it wrong, we've just been folded wrong-side out and told that every other way is sin (or something even worse, an embarrassment).

Sometimes archetypes, just like bad habits, appear to be shouting orders, and we notice 'arche-' loses its connection to "olden" like the -ology that digs up bones and arrows from the dirt and instead turns its spade toward the assholes that anarchists are against. You dig? Like, the words we use (a word is a psychological attachment to a boundary around an utterance just to claim some property, not as if it's a child or lover – or for some, maybe it is) once upon a time referred to something very different. In fact (which is just a statement of induction, it's a cover for "I could be wrong, but...") you could say that this concerns most anything. Culture isn't something superimposed on or emergent from nature. It's a pattern recognised and sometimes pathological from everybody's point of view, even when the pattern's still mimicked. Every pattern just endures by telling stories, dramatised and performed like it's a ritual, the motions become automated with increasing practice, forever overdoing rehearsal and forgetting all about the show.

The good news is every script can be re-written, another lesson I'd call "fact" of histories that anyone remembers, and increasingly today comparing news headlines with those last week and how the meaning of a word has changed in just one year when shouted by the same directors, we shouldn't write it off, erased as mere hypocrisy when we can apply to it grafiti, throw tomatoes or read from another script, and prepare to self-defend literarily by plowing on ahead, insisting that beating's only what we do with eggs but on occasion we turn the beaters to a bowl of leaders or directors of our little theatres.

Ignore the chief but if he doesn't go away (he has that option) you may have to resort to thirty seven arrows. Artaud would make the play, a thing considered by some "deception", just to show the option of running just before the arrows fly. If we do it in the theatre, it needn't have to be considered true and reality changes in the telling and the doing – Kristeva's "confinement within the stases", like our arrows now are locked up in museums.

Monsters were created just to stay aware, not necessarily paranoid and running scared. They only came to life when we stopped believing they were there. So even Merlin's law of basic ignorance, which seems so enticing can be broken. If you ignore them they might just conjure up something really frightening (well, so can we!). Unless it's done with some perfection, which is to say electro-shock or surrounding doses of paranoia-inducing substance, theatre for the cruel would quite resemble a poetic curse. It may not be enough, it may need some help with props where all the players' masks are made of mirrors reflecting only the monsters that are the audience. Well that's also been tried before; it doesn't work when monsters cast no reflection.

Of course, Artaud would dispense with the audience altogether (everybody's IT and also in it) as just another set of indeterminacy, a variable, not something to control. In Artaudian theatre, players and spectators are in-distinguished, or such is the intended appearance.

In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed.

We want to make out of the theater a believable reality which gives the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all true sensation requires. In the same way that our dreams have an effect upon us and reality has an effect upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the public will believe in the theater's dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty.

Hence this appeal to cruelty and terror, though on a vast scale, whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our possibilities.

– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre & Cruelty

Pandora was right to open up the box because in it was our resistance that the bosses labeled "every thing that's evil". That's always just a point of view, especially when you're running frightened that you'll lose control. Pandora never meant a sacrificial state, it meant 'all-giving' or 'all gifted' otherwise her name would be "Panthusia" or "Pantheon", like the oligarchs or bureaucrats that keep you in your place. The Greek words for "sacrifice" are either thusia, the noun which means nothing beyond "victimized" or "a victim", and the verb form thuo, meant "to slay, kill or slaughter" – Theo is of course a receptive god in the bible, the only consumer at the table, and we're supposed to be his cooks. Once upon a time the killing was what was done just before a feast because most folks still preferred it cooked if food could run away before you eat it. In the olden days a feast was just a gathering from which no one left still hungry.

Why would wearing telescopic glasses or time-travel be considered just a cover or disguise if it helps to make things clear like "watch out where you're headed"? And why should we trust anything presented so clearly and distinctly, that is to say so logical or banal that it puts us to sleep? Better to just move on to something else if you don't feel the need to exercise or have already had your brain-cells wiggled – it's just a game and you're not required to play in it. But don't forget about the beasts who may have wrote it. If you don't like it, plagiarize with nasty cuts or broken glass and wheat-paste it upon their peepers, they're just announcements of a new show soon to be playing near you! If you don't understand, that "jeepers!" sounds like "gibberish" or "Greek", then think of it as just another entertainment. After all, what else is there when the monsters take a fall and go to pieces?

Stasis, Chaos & Detournement

"First of all, I am not sure what a ‘full-scale refusal of the Symbolic’ would mean, whether it is possible on [Judith] Butler’s own account, and whether it is even desirable. For Kristeva, poetic language is ‘the ultimate means of its (the symbolic order’s) transformation and subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution’. Subversion, for Kristeva, means transformation, not complete breakdown or erasure. And the aim of poetic language, as I read her, is not merely to destroy the symbolic order, but rather to allow it to survive – a term which I suggest that we must understand quite literally as the sustainability and injection of life and aliveness into discourse, as opposed to a kind of mechanical and dead discourse that would reproduce itself eternally and exclude alterity and alteration altogether.[21] In fact, Kristeva warns us of the potential danger inherent in the transgressive element of artistic creation, and calls for a ‘structurally necessary protection, one that serves to check negativity, confine it within the stases, and prevent it from sweeping away the symbolic position’.

[21] Kristeva asserts that, ‘only the subject, for whom the thetic is not a repression of the semiotic chora but instead a position either taken on or undergone, can call into question the thetic so that a new disposition may be articulated’. What is at stake here is renewal, not absolute destruction. Later in Revolution in Poetic Language she reminds us that while the thetic is ‘absolutely necessary’, it is nevertheless ‘not exclusive: the semiotic […] constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called “creation.” […] what remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic’.

– Fanny Söderbäk

Despite the presumed impossibility to send something into nothing without a trace or memory, one must at this point wonder what is left in this symbolic order called modernity which anyone would want to save. But few consider the symbol by itself an arch-enemy, it's the ordered system it maintains and most now know by means of some induction that no structure can be indefinitely sustained. That word's itself a triple negative, three times absurd is always more than twice an oxymoron unless one leaves behind Euclid or forms all dialectical or jump off the butcher block beneath cadaver's come-on with his scalpel redirected toward the dripping adam's apple. Like, it's the corpse that's cutting you upon dissecting tables.

A newborn or one inside a period of gestation is no commercial product of either fathers or mothers. It's a self-creating symbiont of creatures once residing in them recursively and then later leaving and when they meet there's always an explosion: they call it "cell biology", without the jargon, "birds and bees" just to avoid that romantic word some once called 'love'. That very word is black magic when it causes moderns to get queasy and then vomit and think sex is property that must be taken. There's little doubt to history that a meeting's just a place and time for having, cutting, eating meat. but speaking prehistorically, that meter was just metaphoric for mothers giving milk, a reduced-to-liquid meat for infancy or hostess pouring mead for company where it's not a job but results from her interest, not necessarily in it but by chance instead? Aesthetics finds a difference between an interest and just more usery. We may just place too much emphasis on agendas, looking out for something really which is in and looking in for everything that's out, as if we couldn't shift or oscillate or even simultaneously experience a hyphenated in-out, in-out state without accusing or complaining or to find that something's always born from our wierd juxtapositions, never the same experience for anyone but commensurate like Alfred Jarry's "equivalence of all absurdities". Discovering them of old was called, by practice, "divination", now all chance encounter is eliminated or forbidden or excused "It was an accident! Who knows where that shit came from? Must have been the booze."

Like the trickster, maternity is no identity or destination except at the time and space when it's adorned, like a face-mask that does not change or cover anything. It's no secret, just a mystery how all those tiny molecules come together making trees and then sustain them. Maternity itself, in terms of semiotics or the building blocks of symbols, is a repressed line of thinking as it often leads us to contemplating chaos, crime and sin, not just in factories constructing parts for your replacement, never punching father's time-clocks, ever in containment. That's why ever since the first commander, we've been told we are the population problem. When there were only nine of us, someone didn't off the thug.

UTERO-SEMIOTICS: concerning signs in an indeterminate context, a random distribution, not in themselves as such (an sich) but without reference other than transitively transitive poetic, briefly pointed or provisional. The paradox for Jung is in this group of undirecting signs live ancient symbols, a foggy graveyard of undying archetypes some call vague memory, undisclosed history, mirrors of an eternity that Freud and others called "unconscious" brimming, less considerate name "oblivion", pessimists: "imagination", optimists: "hope" or source of curiosity and home to possibility, one thing's for sure: it's always misty. What it is for freaks that dreamers would call "beauty", sometimes "horror", this semiotic fluid linguists search semantics or for grammar, is just an academic's synonym for "psychedelic" (I call it "paisley"). It may be the site for resurrecting dead metaphors, it is also arsenal for detournement of the living. According to Julia Kristeva, it's a conservative force like maternal renewal and also box (think of the sweet Pandora) of revolutionary potential – it's subversive. Both rhythmic and metric, it is itself a symbol system repressed by symbolic stuff from grey matter as if (patrimetric) material emissions, it's contained not like a house, a bed or flower pot but like a prison. When it escapes (it always does) in dreams or art (when even as commodity) or other port-hole, windowpane or crack left open, Mr. Greymatter (self-repressed euclidean) assures "they're lies" or justifies the label called "neurotic" and the righteous parental types call "childish", everything unorthodox which priests call "sin". But this is the case only when greymatter thinks it's god inside a body that's a prison or a temple, an orphan never knowing nurture from a mother or ripped off from home for education or by slavers or just way too much time in front of father empire's big screen T.V., a window only looking out on corporate fabrications like all else is just the background of psycho-mystification.

Eating is hard, but not on the eater (unless it's autocannibalic)

CANNIBALISM: 1. quasi-sex – see 'eat me' (don't confuse with SEx, an anagram for self-exchange); 2. unquestioningly consuming knowledge or kneading (rolling it for raising dough); 3. the theory of employment (converting your own kin or strangers into energy and products to increase your mere survival without leakage from your ducts and capillaries); 4. consuming a disposable shell, mold or form such as an Aztec pump organ, dropped placenta or fingernails:

"For the moment, we need to keep in mind three types of things: 1) that which comes to be, 2) that in which it comes to be [receptacle], and 3) that after which the thing coming to be is modeled, and which is the source of its coming to be. It is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring ... a mother or recepticle (is) an invisible and characterless sort of thing".

– Plato

But that's only a pointed metaphor of male matters – try saying it to vinegar, praying manti or black-widowed spiders. Nothing? Even when a way of talking like a corpse, for the child the source is always mom or even grandma! And sans an endorsed contract from the state, who's to say who was your father but the catcher at the plate? Does it really matter? What would change if you were born as someone else? Isn't everyone precisely that already?

Concerning mothers, Loki teaches one can swim both ways and then repeat it! One can see that mothering's what matters, (nothing's immaterial when "matter" is a verb) and that's a trick that anyone can turn, we even call it "nursing", "nurture" when the context isn't milk or gmo's becoming nature (that which preachers used to call "god's factory") to monopolize (emasculate) all future culture – what some call "symbolic order". That's when the young Trickster must transform into Destroyer, like your gods did to their fathers. I can see what your game is, Mr. Plato: the seeds you plant will only sprout as allergies. I'm thinking only gods are cannibalistic – they're unappealing for the eating except by others who are tasteless or whose appetites have turned to shit; I'm thinking of unsweatened (lite), the liposucking sycophantic.

METABOLISM: (roll along beside, nurture (gently push) from behind, also eating mothers or mother-eating) 1. any grinding process toward the hips before excretion, by which food is converted into the energy and products needed to sustain life after separating out those which might just end it; 2. conversion of matter to energy, ie, what appears death of a substance is growth and reproduction of another, but only through inmixing into chaos and then emerging reconsolidated into something new – it's sort of like technology (when that's not free, it excludes all the middles and whatever's down below) but more resembles art when it's opened up for anyone to see, an autopsy of the living.

Generating no-cost heat for neighbors as a by-product only appears excremental. Plants and bugs who scavenge waste say it's absolute, essential. The shock or awed explosion occurs at that moment of transformation, but should not for your observers (unless their orbit's been disrupted):

– Fig Newton

In myth-time it is only thought a transubstantiation, a new solidarity in what was expansive or explosive (from certain observation posts "it all turns to shit" but from that post they cannot see potential). Density, expansity, density, the law of three is the eternal return, but not of an identity since all density is unique and transitory. Entanglement, a teratory, an open fieldbook of more than a trillion stories that are dances – a bent doughnut only looks like a figure eight from the side – nothing is contained and nothing's emptied. The only for-sure vacuum is ascending gravity (see Desire if you're still hungry). Black is only the inversion of a color to accentuate an image (pay no mind to the void behind the curtain, it's just another image for your inconsideration – it's just the unknown author or a fit of blank imagination).

CATABOLISM: (roll/throwing down) the production of energy (capital) through the conversion of complex (living) molecules into simpler (dead) ones, one little bite at a time. – see the difference between parasite and paracide.

Beating babies even mataphorically tenderizes spirits toward and for authority.. Metaphor was once the form of mothers up till gods proclaimed perogative to open and close wombs so they could eat the newborn, a potential every generation for another revolution, its consumption thought to halt a foregone conclusion but even so the fates were only tempted, and Zeus's grand solution was to supper on the mother.

– Euchronius Funk

Birth is as much a rebirth, a return of the mother-as-young-girl or maiden, as the infant who is, for all appearance, new, all the while the placental organ is born dead and rendered into food. The singular event of parturition encompasses or is commensurate with every transition, even puberty, and that is likely near the time (or is it tome?) of baby's first, but in this sense a mother's second birth. The I/you split's ambiguous, especially at first. It was all about a rythm and a meter, now it's just a rhyme producing blues because it's called a "labor" as is anything juxtaposed to pain and then projected onto others. For men who like their answers cut and dried, maternity's a mystery so they proceed to treat them just like any other piece of meat and then proceed to rewrite history, to own and keep what's been digested – developmental growth is ever after confined to matters of economy – the only things that they can bear are prisons. "Bearing" is the clue that something in their head's gone missing.

FREEDOM: 1. A satanic promise of Utopia the priest and his police will never know. 2. the "ownership" of the means of, neither production nor reproduction, but mischief, which is only the ability or energy or potential to turn against the wind, to go more with the nurturing than toxic; to turn for no reason whatsoever in or outside of an experimental context. There is no choice available 'til one comes to a turning point. This is the basic law of navigation. A turning point is just a noticed reinforcement suggestive of another way. The law is never legal cause its only definition – it is really just an insincere appeal, otherwise the lawyer-judges wouldn't have to keep concealing that behind them stands the guns and clubs and knives and bars of steel. Who would need a law to tell them not to leap off, high on spinning ferris wheels nor to eat your grandma 'cause your gut says "feed me please, or I will eat whatever in you I can feel"?

Were it not expected to become broken, there would be no law created. A regularity is a mathematic or statistical assessment or it's an observation. It only speaks to frequencies and their seemly distribution. The only use for this 'normality' is to facilitate prediction. That comes in handy; it can be reasuring. The regulation is no assessment at all. It demands the normal is the only possibility and can only give one a false sense of security. A front to hide a major insecurity: it's precarious. You could say that legislators have no mathematic capability, so how could they cope with any sort of poetry or witness more than simple (tit-for-tatish) resonating patterns?

– M. F. (Mathew Flunky) Junky

When going seems a rut that is spinning you in circles, and in lieu of external encouragement or road signs scattered round and bout, which is to say a plan, playful chance (that's spontaneity) creates its own turning points, opens possibility, the word for mischief is play, whether or not it's an act in three part realities. Hence planning remains the most popular sport for the unwilling types of casualties prone to go with whatever a breeze is blowing or line of shit that's snorting. Unfortunately, since games are the mechanisation of play ("there are rules!" they say), the limits of planning resemble the limits of mechanics, and for social change, increased mechanisation is fast falling out of favour. It turns out that mechanised society is precisely the problem folks bitch about, it brings to mind Jo Stalin as well as George Orwell's 1984, and for many, even those, by today's standards, are looking less hostile.

DIABOLISM: Friction. Every internal or external contradiction produces friction, which is heat, which continues struggle (if only to let off steam or some other excretion). Continued struggle after letting loose produces a victor (think 'quicksand'). It is therefore always encouraged by enforcers of control (the game is their salary, seat and earthly cup for tits or tea afterwards – it's tit for tat, the common game of all economy and that's for home security and 'winning', otherwise known as a boring penetration just before yer own capitulation – one gets swollowed or is flushed when the preferred residence is a toilet).

"Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up just where we're headed"

– Pinyin Wan, New Wives' Tailings from Olden Chinese Sayings, 3rd cent b.c.

Capitalist civilisation is the absolute extent of the nature of dialectics. That is the only absolutely agreed-upon absolute. Unfortunately for the civilised, every child understands that nature is itself not dialectical (it's just a con who's hiding behind curtains, like Pelonius, unknowing it's for him – they think they're wizards or that they're immortal beings), at least, not till youngsters learn the word, "opposite" and are taught its universal application. This lesson ends childhood, unless they become it and keep a certain fondness for disorder.

Mischief, ever an invention by the young of every species, breaks one free of all friction cycles set on crumble, excuse me, tumble. Even those that spiral, some would call it syncopated swimming if they're sympathetic drummers. Other than your murder or lobotomy, the only reaction the civil order can engage is to increase its own acceleration, like rapid spin before the drying, and that is always in a cannibalic metabolication – of sorts, a new vacation, and for which there's not a chance of vaccination. To mix your metaphors when contemplating soaking tubs of gin-and-tonic clubs is no sign of madness. Never fear, it's just anger and poetic way to blow their brains out like a curse that looks just like a master blaster. That's the secret to embracing or escaping into chaos like you're hiding underneath someone else's mother's skirts to find some breathing room and catch it, like in Old Norway Hela was a hela pretty goddess and not the joint good christians fear to smoke in.

The Discovery of Agriculture: Road-kill or Supper?

the initiation experience imparts the realization that, given universal holistic interrelatedness, all sexual acts are incestuous and all forms of consumption are cannibalistic.

– John Moore

Raw or cooked, why is cannibalism of the already dead considered morally repugnant (rating just above scavenging upon car-wreck meat and other roadside carnage) while the murder, maiming and deprivation of the living (whatever the species, but particularly your own) merely good business or economic sense?

It's often been suggested that the human is at base an opportunistic predatory animal, and to look around, we see that this in fact describes the workings of capitalism quite accurately, what with its armed forest rangers and the like protecting power-plays of corporate interest ("the greater good" my ass!) or one-sided economic "transactions" (actually, "extractions") just to put bread on the table. Ask them why? "It's just a job!" If you are a poacher or berry-picker on "community property", best not even ask!

Reactionaries against thuggery of all sorts have historically looked at what we're eating rather than how we come to do it, and many conclude meat itself is the problem. Perhaps this is why oppositional defiance is considered a mental illness whereas pure-and-simple defiance is merely a crime, being that it is more diabolical than dialectical. Whatever the case, vegetarians do not like to hear that they are enslaving other species in their gardens just to eat the children produced and turn the less palatable elders into the soil without even the pretense of a funeral ceremony: "they're only plants, after alll!" Egg, fruit and nut growers seem to escape this criticism, trying to keep their "charge" living, but not so productively as to crush the earth and all the other inhabitants with their accelerating weight, their growth rate. It is said a mother oyster has three billion babies in her lifetime just to keep the seagulls happy. If the other critters weren't well fed, the oyster itself would perish.

When I was a child learning to fish, I objected to what I considered a cruelty in the 'hooking' enterprise, and it was explained to me that "fish have no central nervous system so can't feel pain". John Moore used the same logic to justify eating lettuce babies. Corporate suits & generals have always looked on others as would a Greek god: as "mere people", ie., disposable. No need to bring up the ku klux klan. Over the years I've come to see that I was not alone in thinking rutabagas and fish have feelings too, and developed a theory to explain this squeamishness over killing and maiming fellow creatures (a "sentimentality" often mistakenly attributed to females and children), that the human was neither predatory carnivore nor herbivore, but like the coyote, vulture or dung beetle, a scavenger helping to keep the landscape fresh and fragrant. I've never had an existential problem arise from eating the unborn egg (helping to resolve the deadly conflict between fertility and fecundity) or stuff that's already dead. Our pig-like teeth and stomachs agree with me on this point. And now I seem to recall a word from grade-school science: "omnivore".

Apparently, when a wolf eats healthy mice in the spring, she is participating in the chance-driven eco-systematics operating all around us, where even the good (as far as a mouse goes) die young. Eating's always an accident from one perspective, good fortune from the other. No need to get all arrogant or self-righteous about it; fortuity is not something under our control. In fact, even for the most favourably conditioned or well-practiced and intentioned, favourable conditions are still necessary for a successful hunt or gathering of any sort. And we still say "Good luck" when sending others out into the world. We know it may be the last words we speak to them.

Grover Krantz once suggested that the original hand-axe was a multi-stage, multi-purpose tool useful in pantomime as well as a kitchen aid. When coming upon a carcass being consumed by other scavengers like jackals, the little Southern Ape-man (our ancestor by virtue of dramatics and technological disposition) might have held the pointed rocks up to his mouth mimicking the threatening body-language of a large canine-equipped predator, and then used them to cut off bite-sized bits from the vacated corpse. The only risk would be if the primary consumer was not swayed by the "virtual" antics because of her own bigger teeth. A Saber-tooth cat comes to mind. The first sentence spoken might just have been "Run away!! Run away!!"

Speaking of accidental death, it is rarely calculated the actual biomass of the live, creepy-crawly variety that sheep, cattle and elephants consume in their grazing, wiping out whole families of bugs too large to survive even the first stomach, should they miss being crushed by the last molars. It is only the very smallest whose metabolism is hardly distinguishable from their reproduction, the microbes, who actually want to be eaten so they can have a nice warm abode adequate to feed all their children and grandchildren. In fact, prohibiting them from residence would result in death-by-starvation for ruminating beasts, no matter how much pure leafy matter they ate. You could say microbes mediate their metabolism without the merest speculation toward causing alienation. Sometimes the indirect or mediative is the safest sort of action.

I was astonished to find out I had similar sorts of creatures navigating my intestinal tracts, only harmful when evicted. Is there a hidden implication for those who would charge rent for tract housing in the cities, particularly since each and every squat is at best an intestinal occupation? I was also astonished to discover it was only the actual predatory animals who had the compassion to kill the sick and injured, as well as the gluttonous and arrogant critters incapable of sharing, with a quick bite or blow, all to help limit the suffering in the world. Authentic predators and prey have one nothing on the other in the departments of kindness and warrior spirit.

The logic seems impeccable, yet we are not to follow it:

if we consider an apple tree a living organism, and if economic pertains to 'how we make a living', then the mode of production for an apple-grower is represented by an early-term abortion induced by the orchardist – a potential tree cut off before the prime of its life, so to speak. This may just be how a seagull approaches a cluster of oyster eggs should we restrict all meaning to functionality.

Such a metaphoric extension as apple abortion, despite its biological accuracy comparing perceived patterns, would be considered eccentric, to say the least – evidence for institutionalisation by means of thought disorder. Yet the safer alternatives raise existential problems concerning death and equally disturbing ontological problems concerning our own species. If one considers that the apple, a burgeoning tree that might be, merely undergoes a metamorphosis (with our help in the eating) jumping across not only the presumed unbreakable species boundary but that impenetrable border between class or kingdom, becoming the other (us, that is) no less easily than we merge with traffic on the freeway, we are labeled harmless spiritualist, but definately sailing on the "wrong" route. But really, who suffers in the transformation, the transcendance of class distinctions, this re-incarnation (see carne: 'meat')?

But no! How much easier to consider life (and death) a particularly nasty interruption like sleep apnea, or to embrace brutish behaviour with a vengeance, or merely hire or delegate others to do one's dirty work (as well as dirty thinking about what that work should be) than the rather more enjoyable "inmixing of otherness"?

Of course, the "kind" thing to do after depriving the little seed of its supper is to share with it your own evicted intestinal residents. Such might be how Johnny Appleseed discovered agriculture.

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