Monday Thoughts from the Sky

Aging

In the first world, in sufficient circumstances, we’re born into a seemingly infinite candy store.  By the time we no longer feel lost—or, rather, by the time we accept our perpetual lostness as our inevitable orientation—realizing (in our bodies) that we don’t have a taste for candy, that candy (despite its rush and colour) is largely antithetical to our health and vigor, our health and vigor have begun to decline and our waning energy has limited outlets:  to deny our knowledge, remaining committed to candy, though often exerting substantial effort to wrapping candy in different names … or to attempt to join the arduous joyful melancholic murky seemingly eternal effort of building alternatives to the candy store.

The gradual evolution from a vision of one’s individual future to a vision of humanity—the displacement of one’s insignificance, limitations, onto the hope of an unseen significance, limitlessness, of humanity.  But what could ever provide the ground for this hope, considering that humanity is simply the sum of all insignificances, all limitations?  Only mutation, seemingly.  But isn’t what is required mutation on a collective level?  A question concerning mutation is whether technology can be considered an aspect of it, even solely as a prosthetic.

Each child, regardless of its level of articulation, knows that no adult is superior to it.  The assumption of an adult as to its superiority is at the root of developmental anger and, consequently, the cancerous collective anger that frequently defines and underpins society.  The only authentic thing the adult has to offer the child is the hope of continuing expansive awe—something the child innately has, something the adult too often has had forcibly, deeply, buried in it and, through resentment, negative enculturation, and fear, misnames immaturity, psychosis, irresponsibility.

Ecstasy, The Law, Banging Balzac, & Condo Dwellers

Ecstasy as the seeming extension of nature called the human.  To move outside of stasis, darkness, to live in the quivering spark of creation, is not to move outside as it may seem in ecstasy’s youth but to move toward nature’s center.  Ecstasy exhausts itself in the progression toward its negation—or rather the human exhausts itself in its quest to place itself outside itself (though this quest itself becomes the human).  This is perhaps why the purest ecstasy seems to exist in silence, solitude, stillness and its necessary impure other—resident so voraciously and presently in sound, communication, activity—a curious shadow, a ruse, a detour, a manifestation, a necessary and puerile sputter.

The law is necessary to keep the brutes in check and to order technological society—that is, to order the bulk movement of humans in their brutish and prosthetic necessities (e.g. as millions of them encase themselves in wheeled metal in a severely concentrated space).

I say to a friend about Balzac, He banged out a novel a year.  She laughs and rightly comments on the comic inappropriateness of the verb, to bang — for the verb is incorrect from a historic perspective (Balzac didn’t used a typewriter) and a present perspective (no one would say this today, as the verb is now sexual).  One could only bang out novels in the Age of Typewriters and Balzac missed the onset of this Age by about 15 years.

  

A scifi story:  condo dwellers form their own republic:  the world’s first significantly diffused, fragmented and essentially vertical state.  Condo dwellers gradually physically evolve to their conditions:  short squatty legs (as their lives are spent in small cells, elevators, cars), huge heads (from the lack of oxygen), albino (from the lack of sunlight), huge eyes (for voyeurism/as binocular replacement).  War develops between the horizontal (earth dwellers) and the vertical people (sky dwellers).

Communication

What does communication do?  It does itself, but assiduously avoids anything beyond this that humans claim of it.  In doing itself, it balks, in the manner of things doing themselves, and in its balking overdoes itself, and falls.  How much more well-positioned on the evolutionary path to avoid communication or—as necessary—committing it but not believing in it, as one might take a bath without taking the bath.  That is, one’s approach to communication should be the same as one’s approach to god, justice, art, love, or anything supposedly grand and impossible:  engage with it as necessary, but infuse its spirit and action with not-knowing (as to intent, substance, effect, essence).  Communication, like god etc., draws one toward its negation and through its negation to its fulfillment.  Like love etc., we do not do communication, communication does us, and in its doing we fall sway to the routine interpretation of interpreting our being overwhelmed as our overwhelming.  What one overwhelms in communication—what one claims to overwhelm—however, is far less than clear.  So we are spoken and in being spoken we claim to speak.  With human numbers now overcrowding themselves so that each feels like an infinity, our claiming has become almost all we claim and our being spoken almost all we are.

Communication is like a brightly painted carousel with flashing lights and happy music with a creepy undertone, but we rather wish it were a train that kept to German schedules and moved at Japanese speeds, taking us … where else? … to happy theme parks with brightly painted carousels and flashing lights.

Communication—that pet dragon—we suspect wishes to escape its hospitable human home but stays put, not from any lack of capability to migrate to freedom and live in its natural habitat of unbounded ahumanity, but from patience, knowing it is far more spiritually efficient to pretend to be sleeping, waiting until its home implodes from excess saturated care for humanity's supposed pet.