the coalescence of suffering into an incident (of the daily pain and oblivion we inflict on our own species and far more on other species into an ostensibly unified and visible corona crisis), of sudden, inexplicable and wholly unbelievable care (who couldn’t play the game of sorting the various institutional and personal pronouncements of concern into categories of amused acedia – how do i compare the care gaps of aeroplan, the various levels of government, my coop and neighbours, the banks, the airlines and myriad online presences, google and the new religions, … ?), and the narcissism (staggering to reframe a politician’s framing) of a species now so insularized in itself it wears blindness as a virtue (without any of the compensatory inner sight of a vatic blindness). the covidiotic age highlights through the distillation of the unexpected some of the attributes that contribute to our present socalled crisis. socalled as the crisis has been articulated for centuries and to have it now named crisis oozes (cums, seeps, spouts – choose your action) from the historic mud various statements including jesus’ irony : because you’ve seen you believe! – blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet have believed. but isn’t it this seeing among the unseeing, this capacity for interiority and its mystical family of foresight, intercreature context and relation that the bulk of nowshocked humanity lacks, possibly to its catastrophic peril
that there is all this (financial) support and grace (despite its endless inconsistencies, holes, injustices, future backlash) suddenly available to those affected by our societal shutdown – when those affected by our ongoing societal shutdown (that is, the habituated dysfunctions of normal society shutting down critically necessary alternative ways of living) are routinely discriminated against, shut down … it’s hardly that humans are showing more care but embodying more irony (and as if we aren’t already overwrought with irony, so gorged with it we’ve become ironyobese and puke irony out as when we drink vodka all night without hydration or food …)
society running like this – the basic infrastructural elements (the supply chain) keep functioning but humans just sit at homes consuming entertainment, food, coffee, booze, weed, (each other,) … (how cannibalism more than ever makes sense as a lost productive rite. montaigne surfaces again like a clear bubble on the shining toxic refuse of the lake of culture)
humans talk about the process of dehumanizing – of effectively turning other humans into animals and so entitling themselves to behave cruelly to these dehumanized others. other than the obvious point about the inanity of (privileged) violence and cruelty, there are typically a few things wrong with this talk that are rarely included. 1) by using this language we often are justifying our cruelty and violence to non-human animals, 2) we further entrench human exceptionalism by separating ourselves from other living creatures, by not considering ourselves animals, 3) linked to 2, the problem isn’t dehumanizing (if we separate it from its wretched and tyrannical elements, to which it by no means is necessarily coupled) for the human itself is massively troubled – we can even say far more troubled than the dehuman. there are competent arguments to be made (whether from religion, philosophy, art, consciousness, evolution and survival, strategic planning and so even business and finance) that the human should be striving to dehuman itself … or at least inject various prefixes before its monumentalizing substantive laden with legacy gods and glories which have been too often little more than pacifiers in the maw of an infantile species. we can look at various proposals (inhuman, transhuman, posthuman, patahuman, uberhuman, metahuman, …), add more (dishuman, anahuman, parahuman, unhuman, unterhuman, …), whatever … but we return to our need to affix the substantive … not adding a substantive affix (one and one only) which is to repeat the error, but to enter the fluid affix which then washes over the substantive, in time (if it could ever remain fluid in its play, playful in its fluidity) perhaps breaking it down
if the future’s feminine we know we’re in as pervasive collapse and molestation as the past being masculine. more, actually – not because the feminine is more (or less) troubled than the masculine but because the future is the future. the only possibility out of deep trouble is the voices working in novel concert – not simple (!) feminine and masculine but tree and mycelium and riparian system and human and the teeming creatures. however as we’re showing no signs of any of this in our progress, but only more assertings (that humans continue to think that substituting content for content somehow changes form is surely one of the greatest signs of our dementia and deserving demise), the tshirts and signallings of many of those hot with new power drip not hope but weariness onto the already thickly polluted ground of society (time, will, …) … and the drippings quickly disappear into the morass of sticky futility, into the gelatinous abyss of the human
the human voice – already tyrannically overrepresented on the planet – in our present covid concentration rather than diminishing its voice – isolation after all provides this opportunity – ratchets it up so that society (though more absent than ever) becomes even more present to the point of claustrophobia. effectively incarcerated in my sunroom – and normally i’m quite content, even happy, to be confined to a space where i can do little other than eat, drink, create – society in its rabidity swarms outside my window thieving the silent solitude required to create, to be content, replacing it with vitriolic rage at the usurpation of these fuckers (what else do we call them? – for they are parents … who in their capacity to fuck and bring forth hideous images of themselves (what talent! what consciousness! what generosity!) assume the right to dominate, to remove the mind and imagination in others that they’ve already too obviously removed in themselves). the private playgrounds of my coop (somehow exempt from the law) bring forth in wretched audibility entitled families and their scatological values, noisepolluting with impunity and righteousness, participating softly in the slaughter of peace, diversity, imagination, health
when we speak of the one there are always two ones : the one we can speak of that carves from the one ones that we speak of and the one we can’t speak of, from which we carve, in part because of our frustration of being unable to speak. this confusion (and this frustration) can be found, however surreptitiously, in most if not all discourse about diversity, plurality, monism, oneness, mysticism (religion, spirituality), philosophy and its siblings and cousins (psychology and friends). one we might want to keep in mind is never one. it may be two but even then, as it spirals and accelerates to infinity along the vast trajectory of numbers and their parents (or children?) - words, we begin to doubt … for two may be three and three eightynine and so one eightynine and then where are we but in quick retreat from our confusions, chaotically building fortresses of toilet paper as temples of whitened safety?
mysticism – the tribe that because it’s human can’t help but want to dominate but because of its ineluctabilities is incapable of domination. it can’t form collective action in contemporaneous time but instead depends on a kind of unteraction, the action that isn’t described as action for it works in and through death – that other contemporaneity – not any death that wills war, suffering, defeat (for these are actions of life) but rather is the symphony and politic of the vermiculous unseen
