Energy and the Object: Objects and Subjects

Forgione indirectly attacks the foundations of etiology, ontology, epistemology, political science, journalism, glue-making, dentistry, husbandry, egg-farming, biochemistry and ... well ... practically everything.

4.      Objects and Subjects

4.1.   Whether God (the inaccessible other), another human (the seemingly attainable other), one’s self (the omnipresently elusive other), or an artifact (the cheap other), the object has always circled around desire like an artificial horse around a carousel’s engine.

4.1.1.      The subject has traditionally been said to circle around the object; more recently, around itself by means of a mirror.

4.1.1.1.            Mirror?  Another word for doubt.

4.1.1.2.            The mirror still is necessary, but for what?

4.1.1.2.1.      The mirror transforms something to nothing.

4.1.1.2.2.      The mirror negates construction and negation.

4.1.1.2.3.      The mirror laughs at subject and object by means of silence.

4.1.1.2.4.      The mirror plays with shadows in Dream’s dim purgatory; we think we wake, thinking we’ve been played with; do we laugh?

4.1.1.2.5.      The mirror murders its devotees as dutifully as morning’s mawkish millions moan.

4.1.1.2.6.      The mirror resurrects flesh as spirit and sees this as routine.

4.1.1.2.7.      The mirror wanders in the halls of mirrors, not as trickster or priest, but as darkness peering through itself at light.

4.1.1.2.8.      The mirror beckons, but just to beckoning.

4.1.1.2.9.      The mirror mirrors mirroring and, mirrored, dies.

4.1.2.      Neither subject nor object has the power to center gravity; a more amorphous beast from another realm has done this, one whose tentacles mock proud conquests and flesh’s transient designs.

4.1.2.1.            What is this beast other than that we once thought centered gravity but now intuit is gravity itself?

4.1.2.2.            So desire is grave and wears play and laughter as its clothes.

4.1.3.      With energy, though, there is no center; the carousel continues, but each object and subject is horse, mirror and engine.  This multi-functionality and role-revolving is the source of our exuberance and confusion.

4.1.3.1.            To be centerless is to have everything as center.  But isn’t this a kind of centering?

4.1.3.2.            This contradiction is energy’s, but only we call it contradiction.

4.1.3.2.1.      I see a dancer who refuses to name, not from discipline, but from her love of movement.  She might be like something that we seek.

4.1.3.2.2.      I see the dawn gobbling up the dusk using dusk’s own laws.  This might be a methodology dreams dream of.

4.1.4.      Subject and object move in relation to each other like protons and electrons.  Is there a quark or are there quarks around which they spin?  There may be art and madness and God, but what are these other than subject and object questioning each other?

4.1.4.1.            I think the question is all that remains of nature.

4.1.4.2.            I think quarks are questions, and questions mindless Cronoses of the mind.

4.2.   Discourse about individuality, the ecstasy of communication about freedom, the perpetual tsunami of names¾these are processes attendant with the appearance and rise of subjects.

4.2.1.      This appearance and rise, subjects’ dominance, is the bright face of the two-faced god.

4.2.1.1.            The other face is grief that we must bear ourselves on the carriage of our names.

4.2.1.2.            The other face communes with the one we see at interstices of injustice and incomprehension.

4.2.2.      Would we be human without the constant overwhelment?  If we were taken to the dawn of names, the gentle lapping of that distant sea, would we recognize ourselves?

4.2.3.      The present name-tsunami was caused by an undersoul tectonic shift, whereby newling plates of desire collapsed into ageless pits of energy.

4.2.3.1.            Normally I do not speak of causation and even here the cause behind the cause throws my speaking to the wind.

4.2.3.2.            Even now, the waves are diminishing and names return to their function as markers to guide us on death’s pitch path.

4.3.   While desire always makes its objects desirable, it does not necessarily make its subjects desirable; if the subjects produce, however, their products become more desirable than the objects of desire’s subjects.

4.4.   The more the subject of desire displaces desire onto desire’s objects, the more he moves away from desire’s center or circumference; this process is displacement and it is fatal to desire and the human.

4.5.   Males and females experience objects differently¾the latter as diffused dances that momentarily coalesce into satellites, the former as extensions that blink.

4.5.1.      Male and female are not the embodiment of subject and object, but the dimensions of experience we have in relation to mirrors.

4.5.2.      If you think of male and female as solids, you might extend your name.  If you think of them as liquids, you might know love.  If you think of them as gases, you might see God.

4.5.3.      I cannot will myself to experience the world differently, but if I am receptive to the world, though I may die, I may experience the world the way it is.

4.6.   I see the object, but in a mist.  I hear it, but underwater.  I touch it, but sheathed in letters.

4.7.   The closer one gets to the center of energy, the more one loses oneself.  This is true equally for political and spiritual power, although we associate selflessness with the latter because of the paucity of our vision and the horror of our solitude.

4.7.1.      So politics and spirit were united once; so they are again.  So they have always been, but words have spun and pointed down any avenue that happened to be built.

4.7.2.      We each long to live in this center of loss.  Together we stand and love and kill to bring ourselves united to this space.

4.7.3.      Who though has oneself?  Do those moderately distant, far, from energy’s center?  No.  They have lost themselves less and seem to have even themselves less.

4.7.3.1.            So losing and having are most potent at energy’s center, though this center is itself lost by virtue of its omnipresence.

4.7.3.2.            That Galilean, being a precise articulation of energy in desire’s terms, provided a passable symbol for energy’s vision.

4.7.3.2.1.      If a subject had been his neighbor and observed him, as has been suggested by another of energy’s lovers, would time have lost two thousand years?  For are we not his neighbor, and are we not describing his psychoses now?  Was not Christ the Christ because we were lacking?

4.7.3.2.2.      That symbol, spanning two millennia of human suffering, has collapsed into energy’s hunger and itself been buried under a cross.  Yet its burial has produced energy equal to its life; those spiritual archaeologists and paleontologists who might have received training in these material times should be forewarned.  There is much to do, few hands, and many mines.

4.8.   Energy does not unite or dissolve subjects and objects.  Rather, it makes them interchangeable.  Energy is the code and era of mysticism.

4.8.1.      In the age of energy, everything becomes interchangeable.

4.8.1.1.            As mechanical parts became interchangeable with Taylorism, so spiritual parts are becoming interchangeable.  This is a natural consequence of the commoditization of energy.

4.8.1.2.            As interchangeability becomes the law, so humans object to the law through their proclamations of specialization, uniqueness, and dignity.

4.8.2.      The mirror is the agent of this interchangeability.

4.8.2.1.            While the mirror has not changed, what we see in the mirror has.

4.8.2.1.1.      We once saw trees and kobolds, divine designs etching awe on slaughtered towns.

4.8.2.1.2.      Now we look and see vague constellations of electrons.  Might these be us?

4.8.2.1.2.1.            We are the moon rising in the east, the sun’s death dance.  Will we be too frenzied to be silent in the confrontation of ourselves?

4.8.2.1.2.2.            We are the law that lies within itself, we are the mad transgression that denies.  Will we be too divine to remember awe, love’s last vision?

4.8.2.2.            Nature’s mirror offered the hot comforts of desire:  lust, blood, night, death.  We now see the cold comforts of energy, which are without the mediums of trees.  The priests of trees have died and what have we left between us and nothing?

4.8.2.2.1.      This is the portend of Protestantism, its iconoclastic rage.

4.8.2.2.2.      We could imagine trees were priests, but us?  We are no priests, but all wanderers before the god of night.

4.8.3.      Physics, mathematics, engineering¾these are the codified articulation of the wordy intuitions made by sages intimate with dreams.  We live in the architecture of our visions.

4.8.3.1.            I am the wriggling worm below my eye, below my microscope.  I am the deadened claw.

4.8.3.2.            Miasma of sputum stare at us in what we call reverse through misoscope and eye and this is that again.

4.8.3.2.1.      What detours are made in the labyrinths of time to arrive at an acquaintance of words!

4.8.3.2.2.      How many tonnes of hate are necessary input to produce a gram of love!

4.8.4.      Hasn’t the human been created solely for cold vision on cold current, an eye of awe on death, a wordy tail on God’s random comet, silence struggling not to be itself?

4.8.4.1.            Those who deny teleology are as dense as those who deny chance.  If you know energy, you know we are plans, but blind plans, blind recurrent plans stabbing time’s thick back with tears.

4.8.4.2.            If you can play subject and object like a fugue, you can do the same with intent and consciousness.

4.8.4.2.1.      Too long, human, have you welded words to steel.

4.8.4.2.2.      Let them free to breathe.

4.8.4.3.            Don’t we wish above all else to be energy’s scribe?  Isn’t this what we are?

4.8.4.3.1.      The gap between our wish and our existence is language.

4.8.4.3.2.      The identification of our wish and our existence is vision.

4.8.4.3.3.      Who can speak with vision and who can see with words?  Wouldn’t such a one be God?

4.9.   What really cares if it is a subject or object?  Only the fool.

4.9.1.      Subject and object, like male and female, are ingredients on a recipe list; only an inexperienced cook follows a recipe like law.  Surprises and substitutions are the prerogative of the true chef.  The destruction and creation of recipes are the chef’s delight.

4.9.2.      Subject and object are eye and eye, left and right; who walks around with one eye shut?

4.9.3.      What would be a who, with amputated vision and fossilized name?  Only the one who spurns energy’s infinite mad love and seeks solace in the trade of body parts.

4.9.4.      I would be subject, object, fool, chef, who, what and recipe.  I would be I and thou and it and all and none.

Energy and the Object: Energy

Forgione continues his warped Spinozean geometric ontology with shards from the sphincters of his philosophical imagination.

3.      Energy

3.1.   Energy is the present and future name for desire.

3.1.1.      Renaming of core concepts indicates a regrinding of the lenses of human vision.

3.1.1.1.            It is not as if what there is to see changes, but that we are compelled to see what there always is through different words.

3.1.1.1.1.      These different words mean for us that things change.

3.1.1.1.2.      What compels us?  The seduction of words, the weariness of words.

3.1.1.1.2.1.            Words not the Word compel us.

3.1.1.1.2.2.            This shift from the definite to indefinite indicates energy’s omnipresence.

3.1.1.2.            Lens regrinding is the poetic task.

3.1.1.2.1.      The poet regrinds according to the dictates of his profession.

3.1.1.2.2.      The other professions fulfill the direction of his words, unpacking them into structures we inhabit until, again according to his profession’s dictates, the structures collapse and we move around the board again.

3.1.2.      Desire was too fleshy, primal, unevolved; energy is the chic metal jacket fashioned on desire’s rawness.

3.1.3.      By this renaming, desire becomes democratic and neutralized.  It becomes available for purchase (by anyone with money), mobile (as a virtual commodity), tradable (on the world’s exchanges), transmutable (into any currency or object) … the one value-free entity.

3.1.3.1.            This value-freeness is what gives energy its value.

3.1.3.2.            Once energy is transformed, it assumes specific value.

3.1.3.2.1.      This transformation itself is energy.

3.1.3.2.2.      Most human dilemmas and horrors are related to the transformation of energy into specific value and specific value into energy¾which way to go, when, and the monstrous horror:  why.

3.1.3.3.            The fact that energy can be owned¾and the fact that the ownership is a fact is itself a sign of energy’s ascendancy¾spins God into the human orbit.  This re-cosmologization is akin to discovering the earth spun around the sun.

3.1.3.3.1.      As the revised relationship between earth and sun indicated the decline of theology and the rise of science, so the revised relationship between God and man (a function simply of shifting energy, not fact, though we call it fact from energy’s necessity) indicates the decline of science and the rise of energy.

3.1.3.3.2.      Science still hobbles on the crutches of nature, even as theology hobbled on God’s crutches.  But energy dances to the tingling tunes of atoms.

3.1.3.3.3.      Let us watch crumbling science in its geriatric droolings.  Let us feed it soft gruel and pat it on its back.  It has served us as well as any generation and we would not commit a patricide but lead it gently to the grave in certified and standard halls.

3.1.3.3.4.      But let us make love to energy; it is science’s wide-eyed wonder child, vulnerable and hard, a maelstrom of non sequiturs.  Let us coax from it taxonomies.  Let us chisel professions in the reflections of its eyes.   Energy is the great grand goddess gone, the grave undone.  It is our mantra and vision.  It is the self we never see.

3.1.4.      The renaming of desire, its subjugation to energy, indicates the body’s obeisance to technology.  Taxonomies are shifting, new terms are negotiated, flesh’s weariness begins to show.  A new master arises.  It is energy.  It reveals the body for what it is:  impersonal, nameless, commoditized, commoditizable, extendable, mutable, transmutable, masked, conducive, conduitive, dreamlike at its zenith, solidly sluggish at its nadir, as cold and hot as a wire, as valued as a NYSE listing.

3.1.4.1.            Whereas blood and skin were nature’s flesh (and so desire’s), technology is energy’s flesh.  Hence our fascination with it; it is as if we were able to crawl into energy’s body.  And perhaps we are.

3.1.4.2.            Technology is the male womb into which all enter and lose their gender in collective rebirth.  Not one by one, but our species whole and wholly is born again.  We have assumed Christ’s vision and made it our own, for his was only his and for that he died.

3.1.4.2.1.      For our collective vision, we too may die, for what is vision other than a cessation of life to see life, a subjugation of activity for observation.

3.1.4.2.2.      By inhabiting the regime of energy, however, we do not name observation death and so bypass death through the subterfuge of words.

3.1.4.3.            Our flesh sighs in geriatric pilled relief.  New skin.  These nylon gloves¾tell me how to get them on.

3.1.4.4.            In the semantics of desire, the body is crucified on the cross of fate and resurrected in illusion; in energy, it is neither killed nor reborn¾no hope or despair is permitted in technology’s kingdom; it cannot be described with the traditional adjectives of life¾but electric, impulsed, constantly changing, tediously the same.  Hope and despair are ironic ions, binary code, pulsing meaninglessly across waves of nothingness.

3.1.4.4.1.      Are you a supplier, transmitter, consumer?  Where are you on the grid?  These are the questions of the once and future evangelist.

3.1.4.4.2.      You are part of the great electric body, which shakes and tries to sing.  You are produced, you move, you are consumed.

3.2.   Mysticism ceases to be the exploration of the God behind God and begins to be the description of the choreography of the atomic dance, its codification in letters, the activity of translating movement into words, or rather, one form of movement into another¾an establishment of a parallel stage.

3.2.1.      Kabbalah becomes not esoteric art, but all language arts.

3.2.2.      Imagination assumes its rightful place as queen of the sciences, and words are her servants and lovers.

3.2.3.      We pile interpretations on interpretations and develop airy schematics of convoluted proofs.   We do this to honor energy and imitate what we wish were her mind.

3.3.   Energy still needs to do what desire did, but it no longer believes either its actions or desire.  Yet it remains compelled and this compulsion maintains movement on the network.

3.3.1.      Energy retains the motions of passion without passion’s environment.  This may be the first time in the universe this has happened.  Is our species alive in such conditions, or dead?  We are not alive according to classical definitions, yet we aren’t dead according to modern ones.  We require a new category.  Prosthetized?  This categoryless state is the root of all our confusion.  We wish to resolve it, but must wait for desire’s legacy to be recorded¾itself an interminable process.

3.3.1.1.            We emulate the memory of passion, which technology facilitates.

3.3.1.2.            Soon art may be not passion’s divine sigh, but memory’s scribe.  Already much of art is this.

3.3.2.      By virtue of energy, belief becomes a value-added service energy’s customers are offered on their monthly statements.

3.4.   The laws of the emerging kingdom of energy may very well permit the participant and the observer to access each other’s wardrobe without ever feeling a taboo is being broken.

3.4.1.      Energy takes a taboo, sticks an adapter in it, and calls it freedom.

3.4.2.      Taboos in energy’s kingdom are like adultery before Protestantism¾so expected and institutionalized they rise above names.

3.5.   We are told by the consultants of nomenclature that we are living in the age of knowledge, but what is knowledge other than the name they give to a particular configuration of energy, or rather a particular feeling they have about particular configurations of energy?

3.5.1.      Knowledge is feeling, but energy is fact¾this is the future’s law.

3.5.2.      Energy spawns all and subsumes all.  Energy is Shiva stripped of his anthropomorphizations.  Energy is godless God.  Energy should be it, but we feel that anything both divine and devoid of divinity must be female.  If this gender-play with energy be a convenience and projection, it is also an inconvenience and an autism; this is what the gender dogmatists miss.

3.6.   Energy forms an alliance with power, its brawny social sibling.  Whereas power is hierarchical, transient and passionate, energy is disrespectful, eternal and indifferent.

3.6.1.      This is not to say that all things are equally infused with energy; in some, energy is weak; in others, diffused or fragmented; in still others, concentrated.

3.6.2.      Power is the mask humans hang on energy to allow themselves to participate in energy; without it, their participation would be too cold; they require heat.

3.7.   Balance is advocated by certain humans in relation to energy, but energy is balanced only in a way that these same humans would call imbalanced.

3.7.1.      Energy’s balance is inclusive¾from shimmer to seeming deadness to explosion; the human’s balance is the average of all energy; this average to energy is simply one of its manifestations.

3.7.1.1.            Energy’s average is non-existent; the average is invented by the human and there are as many averages as there are those afraid of energy.

3.7.1.2.            Energy’s average is non-existent because, while energy is the source of mathematics, it is not the manifestation; averages only deal with manifestations.

3.7.2.      The human who loves energy wants all of its manifestations, but inevitably seeks energy’s concentrations; while these concentrations seem more real to him than averages, they are to energy equally present and so legitimate forms of itself.  Value is not given more to some manifestations than others; value is the human word for a particular passion about a particular manifestation of energy.

3.7.2.1.            Due to mortality, the human who loves energy can love it only by plugging into a portion of the network and describing his experience.  While this feels at times to him like energy’s totality¾and these times are what he lives for¾he mostly knows that his experience is but one particular aspect of the network at one particular moment.  However, quality frequently overwhelms quantity.

3.7.2.2.            Only the network itself is energy in its totality, and humans, while they may be the strongest carriers of current, still are minor players on a minor stage.

3.8.   What I say doesn’t matter, nor does how I say it.  The only factor relevant to energy is that I say it.  Words encourage movement.  If I offend some through my manner of speech, if I should destroy others’ reputations or my own, if I do not conform to an important social code, what is this to energy?  I have spoken, and all words pulse across the grid in the indifferent ecstasy of space.

3.8.1.      As energy has become ascendant among the currencies of the universe, so words’ content has been emptied and words stand alone, empty circulating sets in cold space, pointing to nothing.

3.8.2.      We use more words more often to feel energy more often; though feelings are a tenuous guarantee, they serve to sufficiently validate existence for most, a necessary validation as existence has never been more tenuous.

Energy and the Object: Desire and Suffering

Karolus Cothraige Gonxha Arnulfo Ceuta Isayevich Forgione was a contemporary of Spinoza, but living in self-imposed exile in a Cretan cave.  While little is known of Forgione’s life, we do know that he despised Spinoza (in a manner reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s hate of Hegel), being temperamentally disinclined to systemization and being equally driven to adumbrate the philosophical fragmentation of the twentieth century.  Despite living as a severe hermit, he was known to develop close relationships with various members of some of the natural species which frequented his cave, they finding him to be a warm, receptive, and vaguely entertaining companion.  We use the Papyrus Stuttgart Linear C text, the most commonly accepted most reliable source for this fragment in Forgione studies.

“Desire,” the first part of Energy and the Object, was showcased here in July 2010.  The Secular Sadoo is pleased to continue Forgione’s odd—some would say deviant—exploration into matters usually best left unexplored.

2.      Desire and Suffering

2.1.   The Buddha correctly identified desire and suffering, but he incorrectly assumed the equation should and could be broken.

2.1.1.      The equation is life’s; to attempt to break it is to strive for death.

2.1.2.      The one who attempts to break the equation still has desire, but his desire is turned against his body as opposed to being against other bodies.

2.1.2.1.            Against and For are incestuous siblings in the Preposition family.

2.1.2.2.            Who hasn’t loved his body by rejecting it?  And who hasn’t hated others through consummation?  Only he who is an Adjective¾that cloned genetically modified family of qualifiers.  Slip into his extended family’s picnic¾anyone can if he qualifies; slip into the modifying swamp.

2.1.3.      The cessation of suffering has been made a consequence of the cessation of desire, but this is only true for the one who strives to feel desire’s circumference and only true for this one in those moments of feeling.  The world is larger than these feelings and if the world were to shrink to them, it would end.  There is one world which is comprised of infinite worlds¾a feeling of the cessation of desire and suffering is only one of these, a description of this feeling another.

2.1.4.      The nature of desire is to strive for what doesn’t exist.

2.1.4.1.            Suffering is the distance between the one who desires and what is desired.  The more impossible his desire, the greater his suffering.

2.1.4.1.1.      This is why Christ is the ultimate sufferer, for he desires God (perfection)¾the truest impossibility.

2.1.4.1.2.      Christ suffers more than Buddha, for Buddha can achieve his desire through death, but Christ’s desire is frustrated by death¾Christ desires perfection in life.

2.1.4.2.            The common sufferer, the shadow of Christ, does not reduce the distance between himself and what is desired, but places a veil of flesh between them.  It is this veil that makes him common, for the veil is society¾desire’s commodity exchange.

2.1.4.2.1.      The one who knows the veil is a veil and yet maintains it possesses superior spiritual power over the one who believes the veil is the desired.

2.1.4.2.2.      The veil is common, but the relationship one maintains with the veil determines the desirer’s rarity or, in classical terms, beauty.

2.1.4.3.            All that is considered worthy in human history either attempts to remove the veil (what we call the spiritual) or believes in it only as a utility function (the political or sexual).  Buddha and Christ are symbols of the spiritual, Caesar of the political, Don Juan of the sexual.

2.1.4.3.1.      Political and sexual masters place the weight of suffering on others through desire, the spiritual on themselves.  Regardless of where suffering is placed, its weight is equal.

2.1.4.3.2.      The preexistent scales of the world have been formed to give more weight to each unit of spirit than each unit of utility.  This is what is meant, and the only true thing that is meant, by good’s superiority¾all other meanings are sentimental.

2.1.4.3.3.      Spiritual mathematics follow formulae that mock the laws of physical mathematics, even as the latter mock the former and each fears each as each erects a world inimitable to the other, seen by the other only in that ultimate instrument of death, the mirror.

2.1.5.      In desire, non-desire is desired; in non-desire, desire.  But I speak again of centers and circumferences.

2.1.6.      Desire’s suffering has been shown through religion.  But with religion discredited, geriatric or subsidized and subsidiarized by business, where can it be shown now?

2.1.7.      The Buddha then was right and wrong (the more right and wrong, the greater the teacher, for the more he highlights tension, the only truth).

2.1.7.1.            He was wrong in thinking desire and suffering should and could be separated.

2.1.7.2.            He was right, however, in disbelieving in the veil, in that he was one driven to show the texture of a certain brand of disbelief and disbelief is a rare and legitimate relationship with the veil.

2.1.7.2.1.      The veil defines the one who disbelieves in it as much as that-which-is-behind-the-veil defines those who believe only in the veil.

2.1.7.2.2.      That which is not believed in (veil or that-behind) is the soil to the weeds and flowers of belief.

2.1.7.3.            Buddha was right in pointing to that-behind not as any that but as not-that¾the not-that behind the that.  Christ and Plato pointed to a That behind the that¾that greater impossibility.

2.1.7.4.            Shakespeare is great partially because he provided the first comprehensive secular description of the not-that behind the that.

2.2.   True humanity, and thus divinity, is granted only to those who fear neither desire nor suffering, neither do they crave them¾they simply live them.

2.2.1.      The religious founders of East and West were such¾early explorers of desire incarnate; their words may have played on desire’s surfaces advocating different laws, but they inhabited desire and by inhabiting became their habitation.

2.2.2.      Regardless of his words’ content, the great teacher is desire made incarnate in the realm of spirit.

2.2.2.1.            This is technically impossible, for desire should only be incarnationally possible in flesh, where it is expected and at home.

2.2.2.2.            But the realm of spirit doesn’t care for technical laws; it wanders where it wills.

2.2.2.3.            We see, we know, desire in the great teacher, but of a qualitatively different kind than when we desire flesh.  This difference is what makes this teacher great.

2.2.3.      In atmospheres of discourse of desire, where all is spoken and seen desire and the desire for desires of speech and sight, where can one flee to find a place where desire is silent?

2.3.   In the hard ambiguities of the world, justice is distributed through the courts of suffering.  Through desire, acclaimed judge and silent, humans receive not what is their due, but desire’s portion.

2.3.1.      Above religion’s horrible hopes and business’s cold securities, desire randomly determines the world’s oppressions.

2.3.2.      Desire is justice; there is no more unjust judge.

2.4.   Desire breeds desire, suffering breeds suffering.

2.4.1.      Desire in breeding adds texture to the veil, or in other words adds to humanity’s mask collection.  Thus in breeding desire adds mass to the world.

2.4.2.      Suffering in breeding is constant¾it maintains the same mass now as it did at the beginning of time.  Suffering defies mathematics:  it multiplies but never increases.

2.5.   The human project is not to eliminate desire and suffering but to become them.

2.5.1.      We are destined to suffer and desire.

2.5.2.      Only by accepting desire and suffering (discomfort, loss, alienation, incompletion), do we stop fighting them and give ourselves over to their random rule.

2.5.3.      This becoming is the divine project.  If we, individually and collectively, become desire and suffering, we abdicate the need to enact our desire or seek vengeance for our suffering.

2.5.3.1.            Technology and art are the couple who can facilitate the appearance of progress toward completion.

2.5.3.1.1.      But while technology increases desire and suffering through its global and instantaneous mirror production, it equally ensures they remain infinitely distant by placing them within another skin, the skin of the machine.

2.5.3.1.2.      Meanwhile, art only facilitates such an appearance for those for whom art and names belong in the same metaphysical house (which, admittedly, are the physical majority).

2.5.3.2.            This becoming is impossible to complete.

2.5.3.2.1.      If it were completed, it would no longer be a becoming.

2.5.3.2.2.      If it were completed, we would not have become suffering, for we would not be alienated¾that which simply is is not separate from itself.  Yet we are becoming more separate from ourselves or from what we feel is or was ourselves, our very definition being (or becoming) that which is separate.

2.5.3.2.2.1.            This separateness is a kind of holiness, and the only holiness we will be offered.

2.5.3.2.2.1.1.      In the ultimate ironic twist, alienation becomes holy.

2.5.3.2.2.1.2.      Against all philosophy, religion and psychology, all systems and yearnings of healing and wholeness, we become truest and best as we cast ourselves in the sea of sin.

2.5.3.2.2.1.2.1.            This casting cannot be active, for such is a rebellion against healing and wholeness, and all rebellions participate in the perpetuation of the rule they attempt to break.

2.5.3.2.2.1.2.2.            This casting must be passive, a falling, a union with our separation.

2.5.3.2.2.2.            What becomes possibility is never what was possibility.

2.5.3.3.            We cannot become desire and suffering, but only desire to become them.  This desire includes their absolute incarnation in us and their absolute eradication from us.

2.5.3.3.1.      While the religious past focused on their absolute eradication, the techno-aesthetic future focuses on their absolute incarnation.

2.5.3.3.2.      Both will fail, but both must be tried.

2.5.3.3.3.      At the end of both attempts, how will the new be defined?

2.5.4.      To accept may be to negate, to negate may be to accept.  If we were desire and suffering, we might know.

2.6.   True¾desire leads to suffering, but suffering also leads to desire.

2.6.1.      Desire and suffering are like two business partners who have formed an alliance in the world of spirit, but if the alliance is broken, life ends.

2.6.1.1.            Against all nature and science, spirit rules physics.

2.6.1.2.            Nature and spirit are like two parallel kingdoms¾neither of which has heard of the other, neither of which has any knowledge of the other, but both of which utterly control the other’s destiny.

2.6.2.      Equally, the attempt to eliminate suffering or desire leads to suffering and desire.  All paths lead there, so one might as well accept them.

2.6.2.1.            Acceptance is dissimilar to seeking.

2.6.2.2.            Seeking fulfillment or removal is still seeking.

2.6.2.3.            Seeking. Accepting.  Is the difference between these the difference between society and nature?  Isn’t the human that which is both and neither?

2.7.   If one could experience desire as equally suffering and suffering as equally desire, names would become like art in a gallery of nature.

2.7.1.      But this would require the experiencing one to know nature in ways that have become impossible externally.

2.7.2.      The only remaining gallery of nature is the unseen one within.  To cultivate this garden and place art within it¾who can do this?

2.7.3.      This union¾of nature and art, desire and suffering, names and namelessness, striving and sacrifice¾within the garden of oneself is to bring Buddha and Christ, East and West, together.

2.7.4.      Such a union does not eliminate desire and suffering, but brings their dimensions into mirrored life, the death-life we live and are, so we can see and groom them.

2.8.   I desire desire, certainly, but I also and equally desire suffering; isn’t this the truth humanity has hidden in the folds of history and each individual in the closets of his dreams?

2.8.1.      To pursue equally desire and suffering, primarily in oneself, secondarily in others, to pursue equally comfort and discomfort¾surely this is the only spirituality, the one uncoded by the past.

2.8.1.1.            Any spirituality of the future, any sacred text that might appear through the holes in the webbed earth, must then include these tensions.  And not just these—but its own antithesis, its own negation.

2.8.1.2.            Uncoded because there was no language to negate language—or rather, in geometric terms, the surfaces available for the code were insufficiently large to begin appearing as a sphere.

2.8.2.      Primarily in oneself because the self must be the prime laboratory for the experimenter and adventurer of new forms of God.  One must feel directly the joys and agonies of suffering and desire.  Without this directness, one is a charlatan.