2:0 - the world of 2 (2)

Let’s list dualities, not from some solid space, from the pinnacle or interior of some obelisk, but rather as if we’re collecting them—like the seeds of dandelions—from the gaseous swirl above the foggy meadow of history.   (Perhaps to place in some future metaphysical museum.)  Do they point to certain elements that circumscribe experiences?  What kind of words are they?  Is such a list simply crass and juvenescent?  Do these primal words—these big and scary words—neither exist in isolation from our experience nor are more real than our experience?  Such lists may be play, but is not authentic play related to the real, a deep and particular articulation of the real?

good – evil (day – night, white – black, light – dark) (love – hate, justice – injustice)	male – female	seen – unseen (visible world – invisible world; sense – imagination)
transcendence – immanence (heaven – earth, earth – hell, heaven – hell)	creator – creature (parent – child, god – humanity, humanity – technology, humanity – art)	freedom – necessity (choice – fate, free-will – determinism)
body – mind (life – knowledge)	life – death (being – non-being)	nature – technology (human – machine)
master – slave (ruler – ruled, sadist – masochist, tyrant – victim)	eternity – time (infinity – space)	subject – object (I – It)
desire – acceptance (action – non-action)	truth – falsity	specific – general (one – many)

[

Thinking about God has historically been at home in the world of 2.  One of language’s core past functions may have been to help us cope in this world, which seems so liminal and real simultaneously.  Yet with the breakdown of Word, the partial transference of the divine functions to language, the birthing of the plurality of words and languages, the irreducible contradictoriness of existence, thinking about God must also change.  It must accept 2 and yet expand, leaving the supremacy of 2 (and so duality, myth, binary constructs) behind.  How does this happen?  It happens by grounding thinking in 2:0 as a diverse whole—in short, by rooting thinking in the body. 

2:0 - the world of 2 (1)

We conceptualize the world through opposites or dualities.  Our senses detect differences and we starkly name them.  We say male and female, night and day.  We crave hot and cold.  We hear hate and love, taste and smell bitter, sweet.

Our minds seek meaning in our movement in the world.  We say, “This is good, that is bad; this is true, that is false.”  We are forever categorizing and analyzing—endlessly dividing things in two.  To live is to separate and to join.

We experience and name degrees between the vague and stern extremes.  There is dusk, a partial eclipse, a crescent moon.  We have a lukewarm bath, walk out into a temperate spring day, place a bittersweet morsel on our tongues.  Some blur gender distinctions through dress and biology.  Something is a half-lie, a dubious action, imperfectly good.

But it is the dualities, not the grey, which we use to circumnavigate our limits, as a primal and impossible comparison for the murkiness we live within.  The dualities are a foundation of language and the portal to the world of 2.  We are able to say grey because we have perceived black and white.  We sense the ambiguity of truth because we concoct notions of good and evil, even after we have said we have moved beyond them.  We feel contradictory and confused because we have known, even if but somewhere within our souls (and does not this place of knowing seem so real to some of us that other places sometimes fade?), the extremes of passion.  While our lives are lived in the muddled indefinability of everyday existence, it is the dualities themselves that wrap the foil of dream around us and stab our empty centers.

[

Over the past few centuries, with increasing vigor and clarity, the reality of the dualities has been questioned.  What is male?  What is female?  What is good?  What is evil?  What is truth?  What is falsehood?  Everything essential and objective has been made value-laden and subjective.  Many are lost without the appearance of such firmness.  Traditionalists grasp at the familiar patterns from the past.  Materialists and hedonists ignore the question through possessions and pleasure.  The avant-garde in philosophy, art and education say such questions are no longer relevant—we now know that definitions are a matter of utility; they serve the interests of a given age and are the collective creations of that society and the internal struggle of its members.

But the familiar has been fading and those who choose past patterns live in dangerous cloisters.  The quest for possessions and pleasure knows no limits and, without limits, we endanger the earth and ourselves.  A radical focus on the social and political context of values is a pendulum swing away from the past radical focus on an objective, God-given creation.  Such pendulum swings are normal historical correctives, but should not be taken as normative themselves.

The world may not have been as objective as the past perceived it.  But it also may not be as subjective as the present perceives it.  The dualities are needed, not because they have a solidity which provides us with an unalterable security, but because we cannot live life without reference to them, even if such reference can be cloaked in caprice.  The dualities lurk in the wispy circumferences of our dialogue.  Life’s meaning—we use the term, knowing how it, like all terms and things, plays in shadow and rain—stretches to 2 and, in the stretching we feel the risk of snapping.  Do we stretch to feel the risk?

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.

2:0 - opening 3

We can think of God as the ratio 2:0.  This ratio itself is an object.  But, more fundamentally, 2:0 is an experience.

2 is the myriad world of opposites — love and hate, life and death, female and male, creator and creature.  It both includes and does not include God.  But even the exclusion includes God.

0 is utter emptiness, and reduces humanity to the starkest midnight isolation.  0 is wholly other.

2 is in relationship with 0 because of : or Spirit.  If it were otherwise, emptiness would be wholly unknowable to us and us to emptiness.  : is the bridge between our unspeakable void and our word-filled life.

God is the totality of the worlds of 2, 0 and the relational space perpetually in motion between them.  All errors spring from emphasizing one part of the ratio and diminishing one or more of the others.  God only lives as an irreducible totality.

[

To use language to speak of God is necessary, real and inevitable.  Yet to leave God in language is a reduction and desecration.  To think that God only exists in thinking and speaking is not to have had experience of God.  If you have not experienced God, words may point you to God but they can never in themselves show God to you.  More likely, you will want to treat words as an object and dispute them.  Language and ideas are partially objects and so can and should be disputed.  But God, in the divine totality, includes but is beyond disputation.

Friday Thoughts

I wish to establish systems for those who live outside the systems established by the systems to look after those outside the systems.

One builds and maintains diversity through structure in the postmodern world.  But in order to lead this building, one has to be diverse oneself:  to include within the self—and to possess the techniques required to cope with this inclusion—contradictory, irreconcilable, irreducible voices and values.  Technology (of which structure is a form) becomes Spirit’s (spirits’ ?) strategic partner.  God cannot enter humanity except through technology.  This is the breach, the wound, at the heart of Spirit presently.

I live now at the limits of language.  I speak from a space outside of language, using language to translate the silence, the emptiness, of that space.  An odd convergence of Wittgenstein and the Tao.

Authentic subversion is not perceived to be subversive, as it is unseen by the instruments of standardized power.  Authentic subversion is the subtle, slow workings of Spirit to alter the blind drive of nature through almost imperceptible acts of love.

Human 1:  Things aren’t what they seem.

Human 2:  Things are just what they seem.

Myth is subject to life, the body; history is subject to myth.

The vatic function is a function of geometry, a paying attention to the shapes of relationships.  The entropy of the average life is indirectly proportional to attention to relationships, to the vatic function.  The prophet resists entropy—to the extent possible permitted by physicality—by allowing him or herself to be contained by the empty spaces within the particular shapes given to him or her. 

I stay healthy by being legion, by indulging (accepting, observing, recording, listening, explaining) the diverse voices.  In so doing, I defeat Christ, and the pigs into which Legion was cast are safe, and the mad man remains in his cave in the city, and there is no messiah to cast Legion out.  This is the new good.

There is a community of the violated hiding in society.  This community refrains from violation because they have seen, they have felt, what violation does.  This is ethics and it is born from darkness.  This community works silently, subversively, cunningly, in little chunks, to undo the tsunami of violation that occurs each second on this planet.  Justice thus happens far from the marketplace; it is a form of art.

Perhaps what hurts most deeply in existence—the core acceptance which society is structured to resist—is that all the stories are valid, they’re all equal, they all must be authentically encountered.

The difference between vision inside something and outside it.  We posited God as a necessary fiction to expand our sight, to expand consciousness.  But now we posit what we call a non-fiction to perform the same function.  What is the discipline of this?  What are its methods?

Mrs. Vogler in Bergman’s Persona:  what happens to her after she returns to society?  The post-Persona question.  What happens after one has encountered absolute silence?  Masks and actors in Bergman (particularly in Persona, Fanny & Alexander, and The Seventh Seal) as psychic, mythic, and evolutionary truths.  Persona is like a subtler, nobler Pulp Fiction.

The 21.12.12 apocalyptic phenomenon may be analogous, at a global secular level, to the Jewish expectation of the messiah millennia ago.  The end of the world may come this December, but it won’t be noticed, even as the birth of Jesus wasn’t noticed, for it will be occurring in unexpected ways, in faraway corners, in the cracks of time.  This is the truth of myth.

2:0 - opening 2

The world does not believe in God anymore, not because anything in God has changed, but because the world only believes in objects and God dies if made into an object.  It is not as if God is not known through subject and object but that this knowing is not adequate.

Once God is an object and we are the subject, anything can be done with this portable divine artifact.  We can write God’s biography, we can give God a sex change, we can turn the one god into the many gods, we can heap irony, ridicule, scorn and apathy upon it.  We can give it its due a few hours a week while our lives remain indistinguishable from those who don’t.  God as object is a definition.  God as definition is something to object to—whether we define this God as male or female, dead or alive, a god or the gods, transcendent or immanent, beautiful or absurd, terrifying or irrelevant.

The modern God sits beside cars and investments, houses and entertainment, Caribbean vacations and creative workshops.  A feeble “choose” dribbles from the sagging divine lips. The sound falls like a tear in a torrent rushing towards a street sewer and disappears.  We rightly laugh at its absurdity.  God as object stands no chance.  God as object is a pitiable farce, a three-year fad, a bitter fling founded on protestations of lust and eternal love, a rusting coin in a safety deposit box.

[

The experience of God cannot be taught.  It cannot be set in rules, dogma or moral prescriptions.  The path to God cannot be prescribed or in any way directly imparted.  It can only be pointed to.  It is the responsibility of those who have experienced God to point to God.  It is the responsibility of those who have not experienced God to follow the pointing.

One never finally arrives at the experience of God.  God is not a goal, an end, a static state.  But neither is God an incessant dynamism, a perpetual elusiveness, an unreachable chaos.  While God contains both end and flux, God is not primarily experienced as either.  Fundamentally, God is not experienced as anything.  God is simply experienced.

2:0 - Biography and Opening

Biography

Svoo—born John Smith—was an English aristocrat and Lord Spiritual who went mad when his wife died and wandered for seven years on the moors, munching on heather and mumbling to himself.  At the end of the seven years, he dictated 2:0 to Dominica, a golden plover, who transmitted the text to the Secular Sadoo.  We thank Svoo, Dominica, and the moors for their cooperation.

In a simple—some might say simplistic—and occasionally disarming way, Svoo examines the world of duality (2), nothingness (0), relation (:), and unity (1).  Written in brief, loosely connected vignettes, we’ll post sections on available improper days.

2:0

There is no definition of God.  There is only an experience of God.

Experience should not be understood as an experience from within me or an experience of something “out there.”  While the experience of God contains both, it is beyond both.

Experience should not be understood as feeling or using.  Feeling and using separate subject and object.  I feel love towards this person.  I use this person to gain information or pleasure, to reduce my loneliness.  The experience of God may include these things, but it is far more than these things.

We could also say knowledge instead of experience.  But it is not knowledge about something.  I do not know God if I can make a list of divine characteristics.  I do not know God if I have uncommunicable visions of God’s essence.  I do not know God if I have religious training or follow certain rituals.  All this, while it may be part of knowing God, is not knowing God.  If this is all that one knows about God, one only knows God as an object.

Humanity Meets Themself

The despair and speedy desperation at the center of urban humanity is easily explained, although its explanation is not popular.  Humanity’s primary project—the building of the city, with all its arsenal of protections and amusements—is largely built; we live in our dream.  But the dream incarnate is far different than its earlier disembodied sibling—not pure and fearless, as we had planned, but full of the same medley of chaos and control as when we lived at the whims of nature (even if this medley manifests itself differently).  Considering that we have invested all these centuries of effort, of blood, and nothing within has changed—in fact, it’s gotten worse because what is within now intuits that its nature is far more resilient to change than humanity thought—we resort to romanticizing nature (something no one familiar with nature would ever think of doing) and the sillier among us cling to some kind of future rescue—a disappearance into virtuality, alien visits, new exciting hallucinogenics, a true egalitarian democracy.

The problem is that we have become the god we've always wanted to be.  The creator.  The arbiter of good and evil.  The writer of the text of knowledge, the one who eats that text and is not ashamed.  The confounder of language.  The fashioner and remover of fig leaves.

Except to the one who has become a machine—driven by its dictates of productivity and repeatability—all these grand accomplishments seem rather unsatisfying.  To this one who refuses the heady drugs of romanticism, no satisfaction is available.  The Stones’ song takes on a new prophetic significance, more metaphysical than they imagined.  Fortunately, most conform to the machine’s demands, even those who argue against its tyranny, thus the project is sustained and we have something to do that society considers useful.

But the futility of our projects is intuited in humanity’s spiritual subterranes, an intuition we block by throwing as many artifacts, toys, art pieces, ideologies, and images as we can afford into that growing vortex.  The gushing new is absolutely, tyrannically necessary … it’s the force that keeps society intact.  Although the consumer frenzy may destroy us, giving it up would also destroy us, a paradox that is—if possible—more horrifying than the futility of our efforts.

And what does the one of no-satisfaction do?  They do not commit suicide or participate in revolutions, as suicide and revolution both emerge from riding on the seesaw of hope and despair, and they left that playground some time ago.  They neither protest nor hide nor preach but accept what comes and bow outwardly to the rabid building around.  Bow because not to bow is to draw attention … and that isn't worth the effort of explanation or defense, which would fall on incomprehending ears.

In effect, i become an eye, become what God became.  What the God behind the raging, building, knowing God became.  Still, silent, desolate.  A black unspeakable center.

The reader may well ask—what then, to the visible eye, is the difference between the one who conforms to the machine and the one who bows but whose bowing is an act?  This is the irony—in the realm of flesh, there is no difference, and as only the realm of flesh, of quantity and things, matters to machine’s children, life can go merrily along and only those who have swung from hope to despair and can’t get back have to be punished.  That other realm—the realm of spirit—only matters to those who are acting, for they require its strange energy to build and sustain their masks.

Monday Thoughts

Art is the rabid inner necessity, at the cost of anything, of composing an emotional language that precisely describes one’s experience in the world.

The evolution of art is proportional to expanding ripples of subversion.

No real errors exist anymore—only simulated errors.

The word, being dead or at least in the earth reconstituting itself, murmurs in shaky archetypes, and those of us, revenants of the word, grasp at hearing while the world around builds its stratagems of noise.

Life, if you’re lucky, is an enjoyable disaster.

Sipped absinthe and chomped chocolate chips, while listening to Dreyblatt and The Books:  sometimes life is perfect.

Necessities are tedious, irritating, distracting; necessity is seductive and, like all true seductions, deadly.  The artist is always battling necessities to confront necessity, always seeking the inaccessible singular behind (?) the omnipresent plural.

Christ in the gospels casts “Legion” out of the “madman” into the pigs; the madman then presumably reintegrates into society, gets a job, a spouse, some kids.  Yet today, would we not rather say that Legion must remain within:  not only is there no place to cast them into but I do not desire to be exorcised.  The irreducible plurality and contradictoriness within is our fuel and we use this inner ineffable divinity to refute Christ and all in society that are his silent inheritors.  Legio mihi nomen est, quia multi sumus.

Those of us whose souls are formed of many centuries should be able to assemble (cafeteria-style) our own custom time-based century from our own internal psychic one.  Kafka:  the clocks are not in unison.

In the First World, money is a subsidiary of the imagination; in the Third World, neither money nor imagination exist, other than as subsidiaries of necessity.