prayers to aliens

if theres anything i feel strongly about its that any novel worth its weight in digiglyphs should have prayers in it

so heres prayer number thirtynine

 

                  dear aliens

                  we know a lot of us have been suckerpunched by lines like

                                    a little lower than the angels

                                    made in the image of god

                                    subdue the earth

the goal of the human soul is conquest perfection security superiority

the human subject is active and therefore exercises agency while the nonhuman object is passive thus nature and nonhuman animals are available for human exploitation

humans are intentional rational premeditated while animals are instinctual

unless you become a warrior youll be crushed and forgotten

humans are exceptional due to their superior language and toolmaking capacities

humans are manifestly the highest rung of the animal order

oh alieni

we know you laugh at us

we diminish oppression in one sector only to transfer it to another

we do and think the most horrible and irrational things and then surround them with virtuous clichés and this confidence game is society

we narcissistically believe whonymitys more entitled than other creatures and artifacts

we accomplish nothing but destruction but are so inept we cant restrain ourselves even when weve lost faith in our accomplishments

we know our institutions loves families religions philosophies arts actions attitudes thoughts are built from the elemental particles of fear deception indolence and greed and stories and ideas so infantile were wholly unworthy of the comforts that grace our lives and the walls that keep the darkness out

were endlessly fascinated by our lives  our every petty joy and misery  that new pimple on our butt  and care more for the comfortable cat that suddenly appears by our back door than we do for the millions of animals we incarcerate torture slaughter and devour each year

we are a worthless and disgusting species  not even a blip in geological time or a modified register in the consciousness of the universe

 

and the aliens shrug and briefly materialize

from their abstract geometric planes & games

and vaporize the one who prays

m.d.

the feeling that comes with aging … feels like nostalgia but isn’t, lacking its reduced colour, its need to experience certain configurations of time and identity as superior (or inferior – as regret, bitterness).

nevertheless, with accumulation of losses, a feeling visits in relation to these accumulations, these assets, that feels as if it has something to do with time. but, when explored, has more to do with the nature of dream.

my experience of dreaming has increased and it is this – oneirocompetence – that i would name this feeling, and nothing sentimental ... experience that skirts deftly around the scrimmage of opinions, the tedium of politics, the oppositions of feeling, and a false pretense of language toward knowing.

silent spring definitions

society (verb) [pl. anomie or fluoxetine]

1.   a folie à plusieurs comprised of nested folie à plusieurs

2.   admixtures of folie à plusieurs attempting to enforce other folie à plusieurs to believe a forced folie à plusieurs is a true folie à plusieurs and the enforcing folie à plusieurs is hardly a folie à plusieurs but the bastion of necessary sanity and wisdom

capitalism (article, definite) [pl. sigil-transduction]

1.   a brand of laundered eugenics

2.   god, having given up

3.   technology’s social sibling

4.   nature wearing too many clothes

5.   christ selling tickets to his crucifixion

6.   the tyranny of the middle

7.   a religion of soft genocides

8.   plutonomo release 11.7

9.   utopia hyperuranios

today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.

The Dangers

When one ventures into nature, warning signs abound.  Moose!  Steep Cliffs!  Falling Rocks!  Duck Crossing!  Lightning Frequently Strikes Here On Thursdays!  High Winds!  And should you approach too closely to the ocean or defy a current, your fellow species-members will reveal a usually taciturn compassion and warn you of rogue waves and wayward sharks and malicious rocks.

These same people, though, when in the city, will happily watch you drive a car or step into a plane … and not say anything.  They won’t even think anything.  They won’t be alarmed in the slightest.  They do it too!  Yet unless you live in the middle of the Nile, you have far more chance getting damaged or finalized by a fellow species-member or one of his creations than anything from nature.

Danger is where you live, in your environment.  And our environment is the city, where rabid killers roam, requiring ransoms; raged drivers careen, seeking random revenges; terrorists lurk above eyesight, waiting to drop.

Of course, we built the city to escape the tiger and crocodile, the battalions of bees, the flesh-obsessed ants.  And in this escape attempt, we’ve largely succeeded.  Most reasonably reasonable people admit, though, that all we’ve done is substitute the danger of ourselves—our missiles and vehicles—for all those indifferent hungry animals.

True.

Unfortunately, we haven’t simply substituted dangers, but have added to them.  Let’s draw a chart to illustrate the compounding dangers.

	Man in Nature	Man in the City
Dangers	1.   Beasts and Insects 2.   Acts of God 3.   Disease and Pestilence	1.   Technology 2.   Acts of God 3.   Disease and Pestilence 4.   Elimination of Beasts and Insects
Dangers Minimized or Eliminated	—	1.   Beasts and Insects

The fourth urban danger is not the separation of man’s environment and the tiger’s, but the gradual destruction of natural environments that, in turn, destroy—or threaten to destroy—key threads and nodes in life’s web (such as the bee) that, in turn, threaten to destroy us.

Thus, in a comic irony—comic from a divine or demonic perspective anyway—the very threat we’ve spent so much time and effort to diminish and eliminate, while appearing to have been dealt with, transforms itself in the shadows to a different form … and all we’ve done is add a new danger (our creations) and transform (unwittingly) an old one.

Yet we still, perhaps from desperation, consider ourselves clever.  Likely from desperation, as we go so far as to proclaim this the age of knowledge.

What should we then react to?  When should mothers scream, grandfathers solemnly warn, and sensitive people everywhere breathe cautious cautions?  Well, obviously, whenever they spot the real danger … the source.  Whenever they see a man.