Mister you’re a better man than I

I live in a giant bucket. Maybe some of us believe that by internalizing the values of a messed-up world, we can prevent those forces from invading and destroying us. A sort of psychic inoculation or an offering to gods whose motives are inscrutable. I keep seeing this everywhere; last night, at the consultation meeting, where more than one person was concerned with finding ways for our library to make money. I always thought that the point of a library was tha it stood apart from the forces of commercialization and commoditization. After all, if you wanted a library that made money, why not call it a bookstore and have done with it?

But this hybridization is spreading everywhere. It’s some kind of memetic modification of organisms (MMOs). These new strains which are designed to pervade every corner of the commercial sphere, drive out competition, and impose uniformity and homogenization — that’s bad enough, but now we are starting to see their epimemetic traits infiltrating supposedly protected zones in the social world.

 

Making a difference

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open. I think that I have made a definite impact on this place. I say that, well aware how egotistic that sounds. Fuck it. I say it because it’s worth nothing. When we decided to get out of the city and go somewhere smaller, one of the main reasons was so that the effects of our actions could be more direct. You get feedback that way. It’s rewarding.

We wanted to be in a place where we could make better connections with people, connections that were not centred on the workplace but on the community. We wanted to become part of a community of people working towards resilience, self-reliance, honest dealings, and mutual support. And I think we’re getting there. We’ll never get there, but it’s no further off.

And I think that I have found a niche in the community, as someone who connects things and people together. Social glue. You put two things together and you now have four. One plus one equals four:

• Thing one;
• Thing two;
• New thing consisting of the union of one and two;
• The connection between them.

Now you can put those things together with more other things. Or put the new combined thing together with something. Or connect the connection with another connection. See how that goes?

 

Ranthill

Fear of other people is a thing I hate; I travel in a bubble and I can’t relate. Something is happening to my head; I don’t want to hurt you, but I never heard a word you said. We grumble because we are disempowered. Disempowerment comes from the fact that our involvement pretty much ends at the ballot box. We have no standing to have conversations with C——- about their boilers. We can only wait to hear the result of these conversations, held on our ‘behalf’.

Our choice pretty much comes down to: grumble (and sound like sad grumblers) or don’t grumble (and sound like we agree with what is being done in our name). It’s what they call a Hobson’s choice. Neither prong of the dilemma is appealing.

To mediate, you need to sit down in a position of relative equality and talk honestly. It’s very difficult to do that when one side is inherently invested with authority and ultimately the force of the state. What compels the city government to treat us as equals? Nothing. That might sound harsh, but that’s how you get a fly-ash landfill dump in a residential neighbourhood. If the citizens of W——- could put the councilors and Mayor in jail for the landfill, things would be different.

Politics, at bottom, is ugly ugly ugly.

The only alternative for citizens is to create autonomous centres of power outside of the purview of the state apparatus. (Anarchism 101.) Independent organizations which provide real services to the community and are not beholden to the government have real power. But everyone chose to forget everything we ever learned about social organization since the depression and WWII because we were all too busy eating potato chips in front of the TV set and calling it ‘culture’. Anyway, thanks to resource depletion and the complete and total ineptitude/cravenness/malice of our beloved elites, we all get a chance to relearn some of the harsh lessons of history.

If this sounds pissy, well, it is a little. I think we’re just sliding down a razor blade into a pool of vinegar, and meanwhile we are ruled by dolts and bathed in a culture of utter doltishness. And if you talk about it, you’re being a big mean meany and someone runs to get teacher.

(Then again, it could all be down to two+ weeks with no sex.)

 

When you used to tell me that you chase tornadoes, deep down I thought it was just a metaphor.

I wish I could spend four hours every day reading, and another four hours writing. It seems to me that I am getting better at nurturing, or noticing, or harvesting, the synchronicities that flash between my attention to problems in the real world and the things I’m reading. No doubt what I choose to read in some way bears on what is going on around me — sometimes this is explicit, as when I read about collapse or social development as a way of learning about and coming to terms with the direction the world is heading in; other times, there is some undercurrent or unseen force or forces guiding my hand… or possibly simply an attentiveness to features of a text which might otherwise slide unnoticed into the background.

The ringing of the text sets the world to humming along. The ways of the world bring the texts that sing harmony.

To think how many people go through life having little or nothing to do with reading! The only worlds they escape into are like the shopping malls of the mind. Nothing is freely given; although it all looks so inviting, so all-enclosing, that completeness and sufficiency is an illusion. These are places where your mind goes to be comforted with thoughts of exchange, value, and cost. These places close at night and have security guards.

 

Oh, you must know it was the last thing on my mind

With a gulf that lies between — among — us; blind from closed eyes, deaf from shouting, unable to speak for fear of making sense; wandering alone unable to send or receive, radios waiting for signal in a long night of weeping. Well, how cheery is that?

A slow day, moving at a hairsbreadth over zero miles per millennium. I engage in some desultory cleaning and neatening (taking on and besting the bookshelf which occupies its own special dark hole of bad feng shui over there in the corner, attracting and holding tight a muddled disarray of unread books, papers, CDs, bookmarks, odd scraps of sketches, expired magazines, and so on); occasional forays outside to stop some of the plants from finally dying under my care; reading (Runciman and Dracula); and listening to some extremely spaced-out music (e.g., Experimental Audio Research, Dissolve, J. Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans).

It’s funny that I haven’t taken advantage of this break in the routine to get out more, have people over, or otherwise take advantage of this b. in the r. I don’t mind. I enjoy the tranquillity that comes from just being by myself, taking care of what needs taking care of, allowing the moments to fall through the spaces. I need community around me, and I need to know that I am taking care of those things to the best of my abilities; but I do not need the clatter and clang of constant companionship. I don’t crave a rush of attention or egocentricity — if anything, I shun that. I don’t think I’m misanthropic or overly solitary; only that I know how to devote my energy to other people to a good extent, and then I come back to myself and watch over my own sense of being. One has to be careful not to become a martyr to other people’s expectations, or (worse) one’s mistaken ideas of what those expectations are.

 

Because Lincoln helped

If Seals & Crofts had had a backing band with proper cojones (e.g., Hawkwind, The Stooges), they would not be a byword for soft-rock slush. All I do is connect, stitch, glue, seal, join, bind, and bring together. It never ends. A hundred little kind words and deeds each day. You put out that good energy and something comes back. Or not. Like I care.

Coming up: a weekend of beating this hovel into ship-shape. Numerous chores. Luckily, my radius of wandering is shortened, since my wheels are in the shop being re-bearinged or something like that. (Future project: seriously, become more able to do these repairs myself.) So no market for me. Just some slow walking around, maybe hit a grocery store, fetch supplies, read read read. And listen to music.

Less than a week until this dratted solitude ends. I can say that I am enjoying this time alone less than I thought I would. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe not a thing.

 

●

A disappearance into the black hole. The world exploded yesterday. BLAM! And so today I am the pieces that need picking up. And that’s not a bad thing. A quiet nappish day of sloth and reading. No more to say.

 

Then there was that time I went into anaphylactic shock and spent four hours in a comma.

The return of soft rock. I think I have a fully functional conscience. Maybe overly functional. Today I was at the market schmoozing and semi-working, and had a good talk with M——, about I whom I have had a bad conscience for some time. I feel that we should have tried harder to support her business, both when we arrived here and then later on when we tried to develop the buyers’ group. There is a thin line between being constrained by the options made available by the local marketplace and being able to make free choices about economic action. I wanted to explore the latter as far as we could take it, rather than assume that we had no real choice about how to provision ourselves. Well, now I can do something to make up for feeling that we short-changed her. And no need to dwell on that. It is what it is.

For some perverse reason best not looked into, I decided to take a little journey into the heart of soft rock. All those sensitive singer-songwriter solos, duos, and trios that have such a dreadful reputation nowadays (arguably they have aged less well, in critical terms, than progressive rock). I mean, I know some of the hits from the radio when I was a kid. And I own that Bread anthology. But I know, and I know that everyone knows — that it is known — that this stuff has no real value now. It’s all about mood rings and beanbag chairs and easy coupling and decoupling and all of the other cultural baggage of the seventies that we can so easily now, from our perch of if not omniscience then magniscience, judge to have been a wrong turn, a pointless trip up the blind alley of narcissism and self-obsession.

But it’s just too easy to forget that each and every one of the artifacts produced by these people is the result of human beings doing the best they knew to follow a vision of artistic value, to hear the sounds in their heads and set them down so that others could hear them too, to bring the spark of life and love and beauty to the world. This is holy work, and even though it gets dirty feet from the world of commerce, it’s not like we’re any better now than we were thirty-some years ago. Quite the contrary. There is an innocence and purity even in the most commercial music from that era which is hardly to be found nowadays: at any rate, it has been pushed so far out to the margins of acceptability that it can no longer accompany the commercial urge. Or only rarely? I don’t even know anymore.

But listen to this music. Yes, it is saccharine at times. And from our cynical standpoint it is too lovely, too full of peace and tranquility and he joy of simple things. But what do we have to offer in its place?

So much judgment. So much pretending that we know jack fucking shit about anything. Oh yes, we who are so evolved — so fucking endless miles beyond the pitiful state of humanity in the early seventies. Oh my god, what a wasteland of human values that was. Jesus Christ, get a load of the ego on us. It’s astounding.

But I don’t mind. I love us both. The us from then, and the us now. Life has flowed around us, both of us, and here we are. Let is be what it is. I love everything.

 

A relentless bolero of extreme menace — the slow and steady rise in pressure foreshadowing an awesome release

The eighth untitled track from the album (). Back from a trip to the grocery store. Rolled oats supply was getting threateningly low, so I grabbed the handy ten-kilo family-sized sack, plus some fixings for a Thai curry for tomorrow. The place was humming and thrumming with pre-holiday shopping. Sunshine was screaming down upon us all. The muzak was playing “Africa” by Toto, a song I believe I have now heard enough in this lifetime. The woman ahead of me in the checkout line admired the healthfulness of the food I was buying, as well as the fact that I was riding a bike. And you know, I felt good and feel good about that. I can’t imagine how much less good I would feel about my life if I didn’t have the freedom to do things that waste time and generally detract from efficiency. People in cars? Don’t get me started.

And then I zoomed back, backpack laden with oats and vegetables. Hung the clothes out on the line. Had a teleconference. Listened to some early early Bee Gees. Dumped some photos from the camera, including some very spectacular (if I do say so myself) shots from the community garden: bee balm, berries, beans, and giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum).

And so I may have picked up some more work. Something about a conference to be organized. Details to emerge as needed.

Another day, another evening, another meeting. Will I go?

 

Lately, I’ve been thinking of some ways we can curb the awesome power of all of the knowledge, experience, and wisdom that lies out there in the community.

I feel mild trepidation as I send out another post publicly, putting myself out there again for all to judge. We are addicted to judgment and positioning ourselves with respect (or disrespect) to other people. A terrible game with no winners. Another gorgeous day, but me struggling somewhat to pull myself out of the doldrums. I think I succeeded, and anyway it’s just the usual background noise plus separation from my beloved which is doing my head in so slightly. It’s not that bad.

I think I’m out of it. And (bonus!) I racked up another draft post in that other blog, because — as seems to keep happening — although I started a post which I intended to publish this week, inspiration struck at the last minute and I found myself writing about something entirely unrelated. This raises the frightening possibility that I could be writing more than one post per week to that blog, plus seven to this one, and one to that other one. Maybe I am a blogoholic? Uh oh.

 

Defending the home front

Private paths and public paths: a split down the middle of the new world we seek. Wandered through a halfhearted drizzle yesterday, with my feet growing increasingly damp, in search of that coffee house at the end of the town across the water. Wouldn’t you know it? It was closed for the day. I shrugged and began to walk back. Because I needed to piss, I walked down a path that led off the from the street and which turned out to lead towards the very cohousing project that I had tried (not very hard) to find a few times.

As I was walking around among the houses arranged in a set of culs-de-sac radiating outward from the central building, I stopped to take a photo or two. There was a man working in one of the gardens who called me over to tell me that I was supposed to stay on the public walkways, and that this was private property. I’m sure he meant well.

That put a bad taste in my mouth, and frankly confirmed all of my concerns about cohousing, namely that they are largely vehicles for satisfying people’s desire to feel that they are living in community without having to do the hard work of living in community. After all, they are open only to those who can afford to buy a house for three hundred thousand give or take. It’s an improvement over atomized living in an anonymous urban neighbourhood, but not as much as its proponents want to believe.

This little episode made me remember how uncomfortable I was when we lived in that house and had to protect the perimeter and worry about the barbarians. I don’t like the energy of separateness and self-protection. We all engage in that energy when we need to, but to live inside it? That’s too constraining for me.

Cohousing won’t work. It’s too exclusive. It reworks the fundamental problem of our society in the course of solving several minor ones. As Illich would say, it’s not a convivial tool, which is a funny play on words when you consider that it is designed to be the ultimate in conviviality. Irony.

 

Majestic

Wet feet, sore neck. Sent to find the person responsible for starting up this proposed venture, he found himself ricocheting through a series of increasingly despondent state capitals in the north of the country, seemingly headed for the Bolivian border. Each time he stopped to rest, the hotel was little more self-loathing and the food was a little more — sometimes a lot more — overcooked, underseasoned, and so salty that he would wake up in the night with his tongue literally hanging out. One time he forgot where he was, staggered to the bathroom, and guzzled water from a hand held under the running tap. Two days later, when he could finally walk a few steps and keep his bowels closed at the same time, he vowed not to do that again.

Every few days, he would put himself through the serious ordeal of finding the local telephone service and call the office to find out what was happening in his absence. Mainly he was interested in tracking the progress of his scheme to undermine a competitor’s attempt to bring The Blavatskys to town. This scheme consisted of his assigning the staff of one of his overseas call centres, a centre which was facing a shutdown due to lack of work, to the task of focusing their attention (individual and collective) on the failure of this planned concert. This was motivated by more or less equal parts of personal spite and scientific curiosity, and resulted from a chance luncheon encounter one day, in which he had run into his competitor, who began to boast about his grandiose plans for the largest concert ever seen in this town, full light show, no expense spared, and something about how this whole endeavour was in the way of being a kind of bid for spiritual grace in the community of rock promoters and a shining example to all others that they likewise should eschew the vulgar and unserious and focus instead on good works. Or something like that; it was all so confused and murky and uninteresting. But when he dared to question the venue and certain of the planned technical arrangements, the competitor accused him of psychically undermining the whole operation. This piqued his interest. Was that even possible? Could one — through mental power alone — actually overturn someone else’s business plans? If so, this was the greatest thing since double-entry bookkeeping, and merited some experimentation.

So, for the past thirteen weeks, twenty-eight men and six women in some godforsaken outpost in Bangladesh or Biafra or Bhutan (instead of being at their usual work of trying to sell vinyl siding or sets of Betamax tapes of the 1984 Olympics) were devoting all of their time and energy to creating a powerful mental resonance field holding the image of a riot, fire, or some other disaster to befall the proposed concert. He assumed that it was best to aim for something truly catastrophic in case the effect was weaker than expected, in which case the failure might stem from food poisoning, a missed flight, or perhaps something on TV that night keeping the crowd at home. Something about Poe or table-tapping; that sort of thing.

 

Not so much a backlog as a backwoods

That was grueling. Just finished dumping and cleaning the text of five hundred and forty-one posts from this very blog. One hundred and thirty thousand-odd words. Two-and-a-half years of daily (or at least quasi-daily) writing, which is a level of discipline of which I would not have thought myself capable. So there. I learned something.

Extracting the text from the HTML dump and formatting it was hell. I won’t do that again, except for that other blog. Oh dear lord.

 

Over

Just look over your shoulder, honey (ooh!). Caught in the machine, looking for a way out. Only wanted to please, to entertain, to amuse. And inside, always waiting for the moment to come when the lights go out and the quiet falls, and the real love shines through the paid love. And that moment never came; or, worse, came so rarely that it was able to sustain false hopes and keep thwarting them. Something glimpsed and sought forever after.

Broken and torn apart for elusive admirers. Exhausted, always treated as a king. But shattered. Never given a moment’s peace. Never wanting anything other than the destroying angel of the crowd’s fickle attention.

 

Now that the market has crashed, she’s stuck polishing the thumbprints off stainless-steel appliances she doesn’t like.

The Commodity Virus infects its host through participation in normal human activities of exchanging, buying, selling, planning, and working. Insidiously it takes over control of these functions and immerses them all in a free-floating atmosphere of money, value, and speculation. The host’s sense of true wealth becomes atrophied and the word can be seen only through a false but alluring cognitive filter. It’s 5:55 PM. I’m supposed to be somewhere at 7:00, but instead all I want to do is swig rum, loll about in a THC-induced state of torpor, and listen to Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star (which is a really bent album). My usual diligence is delaminating under the harsh glare of the ganja butter; one more drink and I will be ready for anything. Not that anything will happen, to be sure.

Anyway (here comes the excuse), the weather is too crazy for me to venture out on the bike. Gusty, rainy. Not nice. I keep waiting for it to change into the usual — where’s that late-in-the-day sun-break? — but no dice so far. I might be stuck here, all alone, gigantic rekkid collection, booze, weed. This is either pathetic or deeply gratifying. Tomorrow will tell the tale.

And so, dear friends, I salute you. Your singleminded pursuit of consensual reality does warm my heart. As for me, I’ll be falling off the edge of the map of my psyche, starting… now…

 

Never trust a prankster

We’re building a cultural ghetto. Come join us! All of the noble gestures of yesterday, within each atom of which — tucked into each millisecond of which — lie enough microscopic details to occupy the biographer or chronicler for an æon at least. All the times, the walks and talks, the parties and late-night bull sessions, the arguments and lovemaking, that took up the hours and days and years, we can never add it up fast enough to keep it from spilling out over the edges and flooding the rooms. It leaks out into the hall and pours down the elevator shaft, shorting out the wiring and causing fires on lower floors. And still we try to make sense of so much sensory information that even the ones who lived through it all, the ones through whom it all lived, can’t begin to catch the tail of it and wind it into a ball.

The building is on fire, people are screaming for help and jumping from windows, the roof caves in and a whirling gorgon of sparks and smoke flails the scorched clouds. And here we are, rummaging through the junk drawer in the kitchen, wondering where those scissors went. And didn’t we have another scotchtape dispenser? Just as the floor falls out from under us, and out last thought is: who will make sense of this for us? We did our best for others, and failed. Yes, we failed. But someone else might succeed where we didn’t. Let’s hope. Let’s hope.

 

Solitude

A Storm of Drones. Spent time in the garden today. Walking slowly. Getting small things done, unhurried, unbothered. The time is what we make of it, and so often we blaze through everything, touching on nothing, alighting so briefly on the shining heart of the task and flittering off to something newer and shinier. Our imaginations are caught up in the always-changing which dulls the imagination. We believe that variety is richness, but it is the false richness of ephemerality: the inability to sink into anything, even something pointless and small and only to be skipped over in pursuit of something better, more important.

Am I becoming more aware of these false trails to meaning? I don’t know. It comes and goes. Sometimes I feel I catch myself in full flight from the moment. And then the blur descends and I wake up hours later, lost in another moment, briefly coming up for air in the real world of stop-time.

I’m so busy! But somehow getting it done. I can see the end of the thick pulse of work and grind that I have been pushing my way through for the last few weeks. I want to get out the other end and start to relax and enjoy the summer more. Stress less.

 

Life is the lucid dream of the cosmos

The outlines seem so sharp, the colours so real, we stumble about in search of meaning when the point of it all is right before us all the time. Don’t wake up! Go deeper into sleep. A dream of drifting days, hot winds blowing off the ocean, hundreds of houses clustered up a slope, gathered into an imprint of someone’s mad master plan. Above it all, dark woods and clouds press down, waiting for the moment to slide down and take it all away, washing us into the waves.

If you hold your arms close to your body you can control the spinning flight of the camera eye which is you or your spirit flickering amongst the heavy fruit trees, over sun-browned hedges, through sprinklers metronomically ticking away the drought, down rows of gardens cropped with green arrays of roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits — edible and otherwise. The soil is warm at the surface, close and comfortably cool beneath. Follow the twisted strands of root and tuber down to places where the minerals flee from the pull of the plants. Immeasurably dark, moist, an uninvented place with no need for names.

 

The disinformation superhighway

“Lack of money makes certain things very difficult. Examples include gambling, loan sharking, extortion, bribery and fraud.” How did we get to a place where guilt looks like the worst thing that can happen to people? We’ll go to almost any lengths to conceal our thoughts and beliefs for fear that someone might be put out by them and thus forced to question her or his own actions. And that would be the end of everything.

Guilt is a sense of remorse for our actions. We reflect on our behaviour and see the ways in which it conflicts with our ethics. This dissonance between belief and action causes us discomfort. And then we have a choice:

1. Change the belief;
2. Change the action; or
3. Ignore the mismatch.

[1] takes intellectual effort. [2] takes initiative and a sense that one has control over the conditions of one’s own life. [3] is by far the easiest way out, and the one most commonly taken. Most people will do anything to avoid having to examine their own belief systems or make serious changes in the way they live. But everyone can learn to live with denial. It’s what makes society tick.

The older we get, the harder it is to opt for [1] or [2]. Our lives become encrusted with affiliations, obligations, and predispositions. [3] is always there for us, its numbness a calming antidote to the fear of seeing ourselves take charge of our own life, inner or outer. That is our greatest terror and one we will go to almost any length to sidestep.

 

It all adds up

Brick by brick, stone by stone, growing ’til he’s fully grown. Funny: I passed by the library today and took out Illich’s Tools for Conviviality again. I feel a third reading coming on, and maybe this time a blog post (to one of those other blogs) about what it has to say about our predicaments.

I was thinking à propos TfC, that unlike many or most books, which provide a portrait of the world, that Illich is giving us a lens through which the world can be viewed and some hitherto unseen or barely-descried features of the world come through loud and clear.

Portrait or lens. It reminds me of the distinction I always felt aware of, even without being able to articulate it clearly, in linguistic theories of acquisition: on the one hand, the assumption that what is innate is a fully- (or largely-) formed set of linguistic structures, primitives and combinatorical rules, sequences of operations, and so on. With some variability to be worked out through exposure to the linguistic input, but pretty much all there otherwise. And on the other hand the innate component being little more than instinctual predispositions to attend to certain aspects of the input and induce structure, rules, tactics, and so on.

I don’t know why, but the former theoretical position always rubbed me the wrong way. Overloading the theory with too much of the well-defined and static just doesn’t seem like the way things really work; at least, not naturally-occurring things like states of mind or sensory/cognitive modalities. Why expect that all we need is a full-fledged picture of reality? We have reality, or at least our construction of it. Why believe that our cognitive apparatus is just a kind of internal mirror of what lies outside? It just doesn’t add up for me.

It probably has much to do with my anti-authoritarian stance. I don’t want the mind to be like a little authority inside the head, stamping reality with the seal of approval inasmuch as our perception fits the facts. That’s nowhere. There has to be enough freedom in the system consisting of out-there and in-here, enough wiggle room to make it possible for there to be variations in the way we draw up the final portrait. The lens is fairly consistent, but there are enough differences from one to the next that we all overlap to a high degree, but not perfectly.

In the same way, a portrait-book is a nice ruler. You set it beside the world, take the measurements, keep everything neat and tidy. But the lens… there the possibilities are much broader. You can look at anything through that thing and sometimes get some real surprises. Not to mention that a portrait assumes some idea of isomorphism between noumenon and phenomon. The lens aims at something like that, but acknowledges that your mileage may vary. And anyone can make their own lens and get to work on studying the world they way they want to see it. It’s much more liberating.

 

A letter to a Buddhist friend

Sometimes my life is so eerie. Dear —-,

Consider this a well-meaning query from a non-Buddhist (perhaps a non-practicing Buddhist). I am definitely attracted to the picture of the world laid out in standard Buddhist teachings, especially the notion that we are not as separate as our senses and our cultural baggage make us believe. I find congenial and somewhat intuitive the idea that our physical manifestation as discrete individual people is an illusion, one we can see through with some effort of will or by direct experience of altered states of consciousness.

But, the accepted idea of identity is that we are each a temporary manifestation of what is nonetheless a persistent identity, one which undergoes reincarnation time and again. This comes out in the idea that we are all striving on our own to overcome illusion, end suffering, and become closer to a state of awareness, on our own. Thus, salvation (or ascent to a condition of greater spiritual purity) is predicated on their being distinct threads of consciousness whose progress through time and successive existences a superhuman mind could follow. It’s as though each of us is a piece on some cosmic snakes-and-ladders board. Sometimes you go up, sometimes down. But the piece remains the same throughout.

I find this troubling. To my mind, it’s so much more congenial to think that we are really truly the same consciousness ‘under the hood’. This consciousness, for reasons unknown and almost assuredly unknowable to us, likes to wander off and play at being people and other creatures. But when each of those games are at an end, the consciousness that wandered off pretending to be a distinct individual folds back into the general consciousness. There is no personal salvation, only occasional moments of enlightenment localized to some piece of the Universal. No one is saved unless all is saved. And anyway, there is no salvation; only a never-ending game of back-and-forth, hide-and-seek through an infinite mirrored gallery of assumed identities which have no persistent reality.

Am I wrong about this? Once you begin accepting that there is no meaningful distinction between this and that, I and thou, why not get rid of it altogether? Do we need to motivate our attempts at better living by appeal to the individualized soul’s progress through infinite time? That to me is inconsistent with the destruction of all dualities as misguided thinking.

Yours sincerely,
—–

 

Mizh-mazh-makazh

Through the unintelligible to the ineffable, a short but blistering ride. I try to be helpful; I try to be attentive; I try to fit in and help people get what they want.

I try, I try, I try. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t.

Failure to succeed is not failure. Life is full of grey areas. We forget that so easily. Disagreement on one little point is taken as a knife thrust, a betrayal, a war crime. If you don’t obey my rules, the ones you don’t know, I will fucking kill you. Separate! Split! Divide! Destroy and weaken them, undermine and taunt them. They are like sawdust beneath your feet.

And anyway we soldier on. We peacemaker on.

Our world is littered with the words and phrases we have borrowed from the subculture of murder we have raised to the superculture. We are fine killers. Love, we struggle with.

I don’t I don’t want I don’t want to I don’t want to continue.

 

I want to walk where the power is

WE ARE GOING TO PULL THIS OF. gr€@t n€w w€bs|t€ w|th s— c—- @nd th€ pVrp°s€ |s wh@t sh°Vld b€, bVt @rt|cl€s wr|tt€n fr°m th|s p°|nt °f v|€w °f; l°°k @t th€ s@cr|f|c€s | m@d€ °r |f | c@n d° |t why c@n’t y°V d° |t qV|lt tr|ps (€g: h°w m@ny c@rs d°€s th€ @v€r@g€ p°w€ll r|v€r|t€ °wn, @nd h°w m@ny v8 €ng|n€s p€r p€rs°n) d°n’t h€lp mVch (y€s, |m°). wh@t h@pp€ns |s th€ |nt€nd€d @Vd|€nc€ th@t kn°w th@t ch@ng€s @r€ g°|ng h@pp€n @nd t@lks m°r€ @b°Vt wh@t th€y w|ll d° th@n @ctV@lly ch@ng€, r€@ds c°Vntl€ss @rt|cl€s l|k€ th|s @s s€lf pr°m°t|ng, pr€@chy dr|bbl€. @nd °f c°Vrs€ th€y d°n’t m€@sVr€ Vp, @nd s|nc€ th€y st°pp€d Vs|ng pl@st|c b@gs, wh@t m°r€ c@n th€y d°. | wr|t€ sVst@|n@b|l|ty @rt|cl€s |n @ bVddh|st p@rt °f th€ w°rld, @nd @t th€ st@rt my w°rk w@s h@rshly €d|t€d |f |t w@s f°cVs€d °n mys€lf, wh|ch c@n b€ sh°wn h€r€ n°t t° b€ @ppr°v€d by th€ r€@d|ng pVbl|c – Vnl€ss y°V’r€ @ c€l€br|ty.

 

I swear, if we had infinite technological power, at our present emotional level, we would destroy all the clouds, replace them with holograms of clouds, and have fleets of airships drop water, instead of just letting it rain.

Increasingly I find myself caught in reverberating patterns of involvement, affection, conflict, attraction, and repulsion. The science comes in the effort to stay attached and aloof at the same time. Remember: it’s only games all the way down. The radio station is being fought over by two teams of imaginationless pro-corporate droids. The association has been thrown to a new set of puppets. Other efforts wax and wane and mostly the latter. Sometimes I feel down about all of this. Sometimes not really. It’s just what it is. People and all. Sheesh.

Instead, I try to stay amused by the whole display. I try to remember that these are creatures like myself, confused and distressed, disoriented and not always in full control of their emotions or behaviour. Those moments rarely last long, but they work while they’re around, before they fade into the usual background static of separation and annoyance.

I am consciously working on not getting too freaked out in anticipation of things, always a classic downfall. It may be starting to sink in on me (finally!) that there is really nothing to be gained — not even the fleeting pleasure of rattling my cage and provoking a red-hot emotional reaction — from letting myself slide down the slope of worry. It just goes nowhere but back to the top for another slide. Stop it. Easier said than done, but it’s getting easier. I think.

 

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Electrostatic resonance ululated majestically along impossible frequencies, disrupting the placid surface of the sub-tropical vortices. We made our escape just before the columns of flaming air descended upon the island, consuming the animate and inanimate alike. Nothing like a day spent idly reading and napping.

 

I think my spaceship knows which way to go

Everything is everything. Consensus is impossible. We need an explosion of individual, idiosyncratic energies poured out in a complex network of interconnected projects and constructions. Consensus of a sort will emerge only from the constellation of complete and partial works, even the ones that don’t work.

Don’t expect anything. Think and take care. But let the worlds you make unfold in their own time, in their own way, towards their own ends. Much depends on the intention and the state of mind that oversees the autopoietic process of becoming. Keep your thoughts calmed and focused, relaxed and alert. Stay with it. Look. Listen. Reflect. Guide the coming-to-be as you would direct a stream by digging here and piling up there to deflect its flow.

 

Perhaps you just been bought

Am I accused of being passive-aggressive? (Passive-aggressively?) A nice long conversation with my collaborator T–, which had a lot to do with reconciliation: we need to start working towards communities that can openly dissent and disagree, but the precondition to that is a community of people actively engaged and working positively towards rather than against the future(s) they want to be part of.

There is too much idleness, too much Monday-morning quarterbacking of every move pulled by the powers that be; and that is because opposition and roadblocks are the only tool in the armoury of the mass of people who have no coherent vision — whether personal or collective — of how to go beyond the checkmate of wild growth and environmental strangulation. Right now, the vision consists of not much more than stopping the worst of the ongoing abuses. But that is so far from enough.

But how? But how? How? I don’t know. Does anyone? Provisionally, the only answer that makes sense is: start doing something. Anything. Find allies. Build a piece of the future you want. Kepp building. Defend your region and the things you care about, but never at the cost of creating your own alternatives. Work in community. Work community in. Experiment constantly: no grand long-term projects. No Casaubon’s Book. Prepare to be wrong, prepare to fail. Love your mistakes more than your successes.

 

The elder spoke and time slowed to a sullen trickle

RLCs, LOCs, CALPs, ESL SAPs. These opportunities to get people together are almost always spoiled by the imposition of too much structure on the event, pushing aside time for the organic conversations which would produce the greatest results. And so we listen to talks which we could as easily get the benefit of on paper or electronically. People come from communities all around the region to sit and listen to someone talk, when they should be getting together to make everyone’s work better.

It almost looks like a deliberate destruction of possibility. So why? Is everyone afraid that leaving things loose and less structured will be a disaster? Not worth trying? Has this been tried and it failed?

 

Long Lake Heights

Four litres of maple syrup and we’re off. Driving makes me crazy. I hate being cooped up in a fast-moving vehicle surrounded by other f.m.v.’s. What a way to go, flung at top speed down through huge long gashes in the natural world, spewing toxins and making horrific noise. Who thought this up? I hate it.

 

The persecution and assassination of Erik Estrada as performed by the employees of the Olive Ave. Taco Bell in Fresno, CA, under the direction of Ian Masters (formerly of the Pale Saints, Spoonfed Hybrid, ESP Summer, et cetera)

There is a strange nobility in a shoestring operation. I feel like drawing up a map of the chunks of internet environment under my control. Blogs, Twitterings, email addresses, domains, passwords, identities, and accounts. It’s all getting much more densely interconnected and mutually supportive. That might be a good thing and might not.

I would worry if these online personæ were not mirrorings of offline reality. It’s easy to see how the virtual life could supplant the real world — and does for many people. But for me the online work is only a way to publicize and popularize projects which are going ahead anyway. If the internet were shut off, we’d just move to pre-web technology like bulletin boards and word of mouth. No big deal, and frankly I’d like to see that working once again, if only for interest’s sake.

I want more of the real world and less of the virtual one. But the virtual one will do as a tool for making the real one realer. As long as that’s how it works…

 

Thinning the turnips

She doesn’t have a schmick, and it takes ten schmicks to make a clue. Every day the discipline, every day another piece of the puzzle picked up and placed where it belongs. What goes around goes around again and comes around again and again. It’s fractal work cycling among the levels, working with the little pieces and the bigger clusters of pieces, constantly interrupted to reassert the already-settled order.

The only way to win in the end is by not losing focus. One must keep the faith and keep working, polishing, adjusting, constructing, containing, and connecting.