Monday, May 30, 2011
Fridays she had her wetrag and the bar counter
so many glowing diodes on her face you can hear
the billiard balls striking
together like chipping ice
Burning pink LEDs puddling down her cleavage
always about to fall down it anyway
she can flip bottles like a cliché
So stop by
see the manager glaring at me
go home Friday
just go home
What can you say
She’s in bed ’til it hurts
tousled rag like a field dog
or a dead vet’s Manhattan blanket
don’t even notice from the office
What can you say, Saturday?
and the rest of the days of the week
you know about those days
The world it kind of
makes me want to be one of those guys
swinging the big signs
by the side of the road
I took her hand on one of those Wednesdays
This is the day, baby
leave it behind with me
leave it behind
no, maybe not
I gotta get to the bar, it’s hour of smiles
like a phone call from Jesus
I held the remote like a shaft of man
two packs of melted cheese
in the impression
she’d always leave in the couch
It ain’t lonely if you got cheese
and the lights from the tube
like LEDs on her tits
We had a Sunday night relationship
So feed the fuckin’ dog
yipping at the screens
like it belongs
in my life
feed the hog
strangle the chickens
I never been on a farm
but it always feels like I just walked
away from one
look over your shoulder
there’s them cows
I wish I could get back to that farm
let’s just run away
Friday’s comin’ Grav
always with the Friday
how’d you look
melted cheese in your hair
like the stains in the heart
of this life
burns even when it taste good
Gravl Wilkes, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Response to KK. KK: Cool article and I agree with much of the author's sentiments about the tyrannical nature of Christian marriage. And I now understand your earlier reference of the monster. But isn't the article a bit paranoid and pessimistic about the meta- story of humans? The author concludes with "Life, [diversity], and unrestrained sexuality" as the way out of the beast's grip. Don't you think this would best be served by liberating/ sanctioning/ legalizing these forms of human partnership that bring many of us LGBT happiness?
“Tyrannical nature of Christian marriage.” The description was not only of “Christian” or “western” marriage. Antilife motivations and social structures may be found in any culture, and the imposition of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy bolstered by the smashing of nascent minds through pyramid families is one common across the globe and across religious sentiments.
“Paranoid and pessimistic.” on the planet of mass slaughter delivered by smiling nobles in ten thousand dollar suits, depleted uranium munitions scattered globewide, phosphorous melting skin and little brown corpses ground under the husks of olive trees, there is no paranoia in recognizing a problem. Evil fights life; life yet lives.
“Liberating/ sanctioning…” Look more to the latter half of the last post. Encouraging/supporting/or just tolerating free human partnership, or simply playing fair in an ideal "market," are Life. The opposite behaviors are antilife. This is why they resonate so strongly with impoverished, harassed, abused poor whites (to the average savvy American, these pitiful creatures are “red-staters” or “ignorant” or “conservatives” or “religious wackos”), who cling so desperately to evil (warring, killing, restricting, prejudice) to both lash out and to express their own fear of the changing world. The sad fools who passionately resist different sexualities, along with the smirking elites who stoke those fires of cheap prejudice, are both in the wrong.
The other side of the coin here, and the deeper sorrow, is that working against those sad fools are the necessary, predictable other half of the equation that keeps the death machines grinding. As “blue staters” or “urban Americans” or “educated people” or “modern people” or “liberals” pursue the cheese offered by elites, they think they’re fighting the power by battling the ignorant red-staters and demanding token shifts in “domestic” policy. In actuality, all they’re doing is running next to the red-staters on a different hamster wheel, keeping things moving smoothly.
Yes, anti-gay prejudice is bad. Yes, the red-staters are acting foolishly (rudely, violently, awfully). Yes (as said before), an ideal market economy would provide for similar/identical/substantially equal benefits for couples of all orientations (if any should necessarily be granted to any kinds of “couples” at all that should not be granted to “individuals” or other associations of whatever kind, but that’s a separate argument for the white robed philosophers of the next utopia).
Nonetheless, this is an illusory battle. It is one that was fabricated expressly to distract attention from the next level of questions and problems. Namely: who has the money; who has the power; who has the food, and who is being blown to pieces. (And above even that silly, terrible game, which the elites think is the real one, is Evil’s use of the elites in the ultimate end of the snuffing out of all light and change, forever.)
Consider, in comparison, the ways that the Central Intelligence Agency and other black ops pit various ethnic groups against one another in Iraq. Yes, one ethnic group may be more right than another in their conflict—it may be morally right, or even strictly necessary, for the members of Group 1 to fight against Group 2. But what is the real purpose of the conflict? To keep Group 1 and Group 2 fighting against each other, instead of against the occupying army. Poor dwellers of the American ghetto shoot each other under the façade of this or that gang or ‘hood. In Hitler’s concentration camps, the guards were all too eager to turn Jew prisoners on one another. Read Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.
What gays need to realize is that the awful red staters, for all of their wrongness, are still their brothers and sisters, connected in life throughout this planet and under this sky. They lash out at gays in stupid ways because of their own sadness and desperation, whether through the conduit of a poor, downtrodden individual, or a wealthy one semi-cognizant of why the fight needs to go on.
And the wealthier urban gays and liberals, who spearhead and spokesperson movements against the media-acknowledged prejudice of the moment, lash right back. They beg support for the president who cuts education spending, smiles on Bill Gates the Destroyer of Public Schools, refuses to give health care to all, continues sending the desperate, poor kids of the red states off to die as (non-college-educated, non-officer) grunts responsible for murdering the brown people far away, and they sneer at the ignorant, stupid red-staters who, in desperation, lash out at an easy, pointless target.
Next couple decades, it’ll be a fight over Arabs, or Muslims, or pick the group you like. And as this one asked in the last post, what’s the victory if gays end up getting treated like everyone else in this awful death machine? Show some solidarity with the future generations of whatever subset group that’s next in line for the civil rights struggle.
The powerful ones may be able to force you to eat their pudding, and we all do, because we’d starve otherwise, but if they make you independently like eating it, then they’ve won.
Cut the infighting. The real enemies are the ones in the boardrooms and penthouses. They need just as much help as the rest of us, because they’re only hurting themselves, and their own offspring, life and planet, in the long run. This one can’t personify the source; only see the gravity wells it leaves behind, know the way it works, and try to steer the ship around it.
Evil itself; Antilife itself: these (motivating philosophies? Intangible shadows in the backs of our minds?) are the enemies. Even if it’s a good thing—the teeniest-tiniest of incremental steps toward a subset of a certain generation of people being forced to be more institutionally nice to a different such subset—dancing on the elites’ puppet strings and being pleased at being given a little treat like a marginal increase in the legal framework protecting gay marriage will never do anything but set up the next sad ones to be dumped upon.
When you read that an incremental anti-prejudice step has been taken, then look lower on the page and see that 17 kids in a far-off land got turned into chunks of bone chips and dusty bolognese, it’s not time to cheer, but to get mad at everyone in the media and the leadership who thought that throwing you a little bone would get you distracted from what’s really hurting us all.
Response to celebration over this.
Marriage in itself tends toward antilife. Love is good, and tends toward life, as does lifelong attachment and appreciation, desire for continued company, and trust and reliance. Marriage as an institution stands counter to life, being a means of controlling genetic mixing and limiting the diversity of later human generations by discouraging cross-mating and change. The elaborate marriage rituals of the past emerged from the rise of fear and the resulting evil in human consciousness, where humans created noble lines in order to limit genetic exchange in an attempt to achieve immortality through interbred (more like their forebears) offspring. Noble lines continued this pattern planetwide, marrying and associating with other noble lines, with outward-rippling social mandates attempting to limit acknowledged reproduction in general mimicry. The violent end result of this cohesion, the Anglo-Saxons, murdered the Scots and Celts and ultimately spawned America, while retaining an inbred noble line on the island and disseminating a mercantilist elite to the new world, which proceeded to exterminate the native population there and entrench itself and its offspring lines in an unnamed nobility.
As marriage developed, it became a patriarchal tool of subjugation, whereby a man would control and own a subordinate wife and family. However, this was the lesser purpose for its spread; evil preferred marriage because it formed the lower rungs of a ladder justifying hierarchy throughout a society. Children who grew up under an authoritarian father, with a mother on the next rung down, and older siblings on the rung beneath, controlled by physical and emotional abuse or coercion, were more prepared to accept the pyramid style of authority offered by a king and nobility or an oligarchy operating under any number of masks. As they stepped into adult society, children knew subconsciously to position themselves at the bottom of the pyramid, through years of training under the absolute rule of the father, head of household and owner of the family. They knew also to viciously resist those of their “siblings”—in adult life, fellow members of the lower classes—who would threaten a rebellion that would get “daddy” mad and result in collective punishment for everyone, from bad moods to beatings (metaphorized to riot police shooting or tear gassing a crowd, police harrassment of African-American neighborhoods, et cetera).
America provided a pressure release valve of capitalism—mostly deceptive, as the majority of wealth remained passed down through inheritance, but occasionally useful for individuals so extraordinary in ability, combined with situational luck, that to use the older methods might have caused a rebellion and a genuine power shift. By allowing these aberrations to join the ranks of the elites (or alternatively, to spend poorly and fade their own lines out in a generation or a few), the system could be perpetuated further.
In the postmodern wunderland of Christ-timed century 21, marriage shifted to become an economic compact between the sexes, whereby various legal and financial passports were granted to those who participated in it. A tax benefit, property consolidation, shared lawsuit vulnerability, and shared medical treatment access allowed two individuals to join themselves economically and socially in an indication of trust that relieved the capitalist friction against reproduction. This friction is caused by the fact that capitalism disincentivizes reproduction: individuals in American society are forced to bear solely almost all the economic burden of perpetuating the species from which all society’s members arose. Investing in a unit of offspring which also shares a 50% contribution of another’s investment, then, is a risky proposition without marriage, because once you have mixed your genetic material with another’s, you can be blackmailed through the use of your worry of losing your initial investment by your business partner, who can then “pull out of the deal” and force you to validate their own investment by raising the child that is also your investment, without them having to contribute anything. This is the rude “victory” of successful rape or domineering sexual relationships: the imposition of a 50% investment on one who must then bear the operating expenses of the venture from the conclusion of intercourse forward.
Capitalism’s pressure release valve, to allow the system to escape collapse, is the inadequate patch of child support payments or shared custody, which offer—as mentioned—inadequate relief, but nonetheless, greater reassurance to those considering the investment. On a related subject, laws which attempt to restrict abortion are not generally motivated by morals, but instead, are economic in nature, seeking to shift even more of the burden of maintaining the species onto women. By forcing women to bear children, or making it tend away from choice and toward mandate, the negotiation table is slanted further in favor of men. This forces more of the costs of maintaining the species onto women, and additionally, provides an incentive for women to seek protection from men (generally those of the older generation; again, a tendency of antilife), thereby subjugating their will, finances and freedom, in part or in whole, to such protectors. It’s not religious insanity that drives “Pro Life”; it’s wicked, cunning, very clever economic planning (more later).
This “cold” equation in looking at the wonder of new life is the necessary, though generally subconscious, kin to reproduction under capitalism, and it is why marriage is (and has ever been, in mercantilist societies, and especially among the wealthy and conservative) promoted as an absolutely necessary precondition to children. Alternate legal and social mandates can be arranged to perform this function, but much as with standard voting rules for corporate common stock traded on national exchanges, the provision of generalized marriage mores allows more efficient trading to occur.
In so maintaining marriage, however, this created “single units” which, like all other entities in the zero-sum game of capitalism, must work against other entities in the struggle to succeed. (Supra economic genetic bonding structures, usually religious on their faces, can loosely consolidate married or sole entities into greater collectives that operate the same way on a larger scale.) Ergo, marriage is (yet another) harmful component of “the system,” or rather, the antilife structures animating society in such a way as to perpetuate a deathly order; the zero-sum jungle of monetary eat or be eaten that represses hope, chance and life. And that’s the nice side of marriage as it stands now, leaving in the past the history of chattel slavery, socially acceptable child rape and all the rest.
So, marriage has a sordid history and everything about it isn’t perfect now. Notwithstanding that, when an adult finds him or herself living in such a society, the economic, legal, social and medical benefits conferred by marriage are a plus, and within the awful system, it’s only “fair” (if anything in such a society can be called fair) to allow an individual to marry whoever he or she wishes. Yes, society benefits from children, and yes, Britney Spears was allowed to get married and not have any, while homosexual couples may well do a better overall job on average in the raising of adopted or artificially inseminated ones. That is all beside the point. The very problem with the “gay marriage issue” is that it is an artificial, non-threatening issue. It is, in itself, another pressure release valve.
To cite popular culture, this is a “perceiving the Matrix” situation. The ways that evil destroys and dominates the human societies of the world are basic: evil seeks the poisoned, murdered death of the species. Even now, as it has been doing for hundreds of years, evil works busily at slaughtering and starving people in various currently-appropriate portions of the world, and dumping poison and waste in various other currently-appropriate portions of the world. More on this in part 2 of the previously-linked essay, which is forthcoming, but in preview form, the great nations of the world are heartily engaged in mass post-industrial butchery in certain places, clever economic mass starvation games in others, the enactment of repressive laws elsewhere, and the massive creation and dissemination of artificial chemical and nuclear wastes that poison human and animal habitats in ways that cannot be fixed for millions of years.
As the neck of this planet’s life is slowly encircled by skeletal fingers, living humans are controlled in a variety of ways to limit their ability to defend themselves and their future. Those being killed and starved in impoverished or war-stricken corners of the world are obviously being affected; those already poisoned or ground under are no present threat that the elite managers recognize. However, what of those few who still remain as educated, informed citizens, not currently charged with crimes or imprisoned, who might theoretically do something to change things?
These troublesome entities are controlled in a beguiling way: they are given easy, non-threatening problems to solve. Of course, to make these problems believable, they have to appear to be big, domineering, major ones; yet, they cannot actually be the actual problems, which is to say, they cannot interfere much with the ultimate agenda.
One such of these problems in history is the Magna Carta issue: the Magna Carta, dating back to 1215 A.D., involves the weighty demand that the British King only punish freemen based on the “law of the land.” The law of the land was wholly controlled by the British nobility, but this is still heralded as a grand achievement. And naturally, these great rights didn’t apply to serfs. And also naturally, the nobles and judges all did what they would’ve done anyway; they just had to justify it as “legal” rather than “by the will of the throne” (much like the U.S. Supreme Court just invalidated the Revolutionary War by codifying the right of police to enter and search homes without a warrant). Repression, massacre and waste continued under a slightly-altered guise. But, much like the succession of Obama to the position of Mass Killer of the Children of Various Middle Eastern Places was heralded as some manner of achievement, the “achievement” of the Magna Carta is still regarded (by those controlling the publishing and dissemination of western history curriculum, nach) as such.
The 20th century, and some of the 21st, saw Americans distracted by various other issues: racism against African-Americans, and discrimination against women. Yes, humans of (more recent) African descent, and female humans, should not be mistreated due to these characteristics, but the only reason the conflict exists is to distract us from the greater danger.
There will always be a harmless crusade to go off on—always a windmill to fight while evil slaughters and poisons.
The parasites who control the great states toward our ultimate destruction can easily absorb the end results of these insubstantial changes. These changes are not “insubstantial” because it doesn’t matter if African-Americans, or women, or any other group, minority or majority, are treated with respect or fairness. Rather, they’re insubstantial because the only reason that group was being treated unfairly to begin with was to create an easily-solveable problem to keep the middle class occupied for a few more decades. Economic tensions, along with subtle cues from managing elites, do nicely to cause lower class individuals to funnel their anger at losing out toward whatever group is next on the approved list: the British, blacks, Yankees, Rebels, Chinese, Vietnamese, Germans, gays, Arabs...who's up next? Stay tuned.
Evil is just fine with African-Americans being treated the same as other Americans. There is no threat there. The plan of death and destruction continues unabated. African-Americans can join the Army and kill Arabs. Right now, it’s cause for celebration, or maybe light consternation for some “gol-durned liberals,” to murder and torture Arabs and/or muslims. In a few years, maybe a big new movement will sweep the country to fight against anti-hashemitic or anti-Muslim discrimination. Great! In fifty years, maybe America will have an openly Muslim Arab president spearheading the firebombing of China or France.
What reward is it (or will it be) for African-Americans to dodge Jim Crow laws so that the majority of that population can then end up in lower class, economically-threatened America? Not much—ask Martin Luther King (in a fantastic speech that bears reading—the elites killed him for being a famous public figure willing to actually say something like this).
What reward is it (or will it be) for American women to get the “right” to be treated just the same as American men? To serve in the killing forces? To become part of the exploitative, manipulative, soul-crushing, runoff dumping corporate world? To struggle for jobs and health care?
What reward will it be for America’s gays to get to be “just like everyone else”? (Or whichever the next group is on the corporate-approved cycle of “let’s take a few decades and gradually work through this particular issue.”)
This, ultimately, will be the fate of fighting the ridiculous, illogical, stupid, money-wasting anti-gay laws and customs: gays will end up being treated just like everyone else. I.e., equal cogs in the machine of endless death. As soon as gay prejudice is eliminated within the system, it will be replaced by something else. Equal rights for Muslims, equal rights for Arabs, equal rights for agnostics, equal rights for the short, the slender, or anything else. “Equal rights,” in the land of mass homicide, profitable “health care,” poison dumping and improved cruise missile fin design, is a bitter, if not a poisoned, pill to swallow.
And this is why the glorious struggle for gay marriage is, ultimately, a sad thing. Fighting vigorously for gay marriage, within the confines of this system, is part of the process; it’s solving the safe little puzzle that they want you to solve, which is why they aren’t putting you in Guantanamo or making you disappear for trying to solve it. It’s not a threat to them—it’s exactly what they want you to do. And being happy when they give you the cheese at the end (because this battle over gay marriage will be won, as part of a predictable process of slow pressure release that began with AIDS awareness and moved on to Clinton’s DADT, Obama’s repeal thereof, and increasing incremental steps toward full acceptance), not only validates the evil at the end, but is a necessary step in setting up the hatred and prejudice that will be granted to the next subset of human beings placed on the discrimination table.
Is there an answer? Is there a way out? Life is the way. Life in all its wonderful randomness and vagary, including unrestrained sexuality. Maybe evil will win (and it certainly will if all resistant energies are spent on false crusades), but even if you have to eat the biscuit out of its hand, don’t let them make you like it. Don’t let them make you proud that you earned it for doing their tricks.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The Animated Dead, Part 1
The dead control the societies of the world. From every corner, the undispersed ghosts of the past stretch their fingers into the living. But it is not only the animated dead, as in those who have died before, who control the human societies, but the deathlust within the sickened souls of the living. This death is Evil—not to be confused with beautiful, good, natural death, which is life, which is ending and beginning and cycle and flux. The limitations of an absolutist language, here English, make “death” the simultaneous term for two opposites. Ergo, “Evil” or “Antilife” for the wrong, harmful and perverted death, as opposed to “Life” or “deathlife” or “Good” for its counterpart.
The work of Evil is in destroying all of Life. Evil seeks a return (Return? New beginning? New unbeginning?) to state of utter nothingness. Evil seeks perfect order. The only perfect order is in the ending of chance, change, opportunity, and hope. This can be imagined, perhaps within modern conceptions, as an expanse of black space, unaffected by stars, dark matter, et cetera. But even in this image is error, as blackness and physical void within the living universe are part of the living universe. The expanse between the stars is beautiful wonder, filled with the potential for vacuum shift, the creation of new subatomic particles, the passage and mutation of time, and more. In much this way, “black” or “dark” become, through the limitations of absolute language, necessary synonyms for “nothing,” or “evil,” or “order.” (The only English word that can be truly employed to describe the opposite of life is “evil,” which is why it becomes popular in postmodern, neoliberal, post industrial dystopias to deny the relevance or usefulness of such a word, or perhaps to pervert its meaning into “one who is against the State.” This linguistic flaw justifies the adage about the greatest trick the devil ever played on mankind was to convince them that he did not exist.)
Nothing is the opposite of Life; Nothing is Evil. Nothing is a state where time does not pass
Everything is forever fitted into an orderly place, because there are no places; nothing can ever be put out of order because nothing is there to be disorderly. Nothing ever happens which is unpredictable or cannot be controlled. The intrinsic sickness of fear of death that may arise in the conscious mind, through instinct or cognizance, drives beings in a certain stage of consciousness toward a desire for the ending of all things. Social conditioning into the subconscious that death is fearsome, unnatural or worrisome leads to the desire for Evil—i.e., the desire to end all things—being expressed as a desire for death. What, then, does this mean?
Governments impose laws upon populations. Regulations of behavior, as an aspect of order, tend toward Evil. This does not mean that all regulations or agreements are evil, but that the nature of regulation tends toward Evil (ergo it can sometimes not be aimed directly at it). Humans may form a society where they restrict violence, reward contribution, or create markets, without necessarily tending toward, or being motivated by, evil. However, the way that evil controls societies is through the unnatural creation of immortal entities and undying words. Regulations of behavior based upon the absolute codes of order that resist change, such as charters, constitutions or declarations, embrace this.
The occurrence of change within such systems, such as constitutional amendments, is not proof that the absolute order—the fixed, immortal words of the dead—does not exist. In the living universe, change is constantly everywhere. It is so intrinsically a state of human physical and mental reality that to refer to it as though it is a separate act or occurrence proves a flaw of thought.
(The existence, then, of the word “change,” and its strong definition and common use, serve to demonstrate a linguistic insight into the problem of human consciousness: it should not be quite that necessary to have and to employ a word like “change,” since to need it so often suggests that a static state is more natural. Countless human literary pretensions of “development” and “growth” regularly and subtly imply that change is the less natural state.)
Governmental systems based upon immortal documents, though, have long been subject to scrutiny of a sort, and tend to be revered as monumental. In their unchanging (or less changing) state, they represent an ideal of evil death, while power is actually exercised through other aspects of society. This is why the American Constitution can be revered as immortal words of an ideal or close-to-ideal government, while being actively suprainterpreted or disregarded by the ruling entities. It is a symbol of eternal death—a zombie statue—but not its actual expression—a moving set of hands seeking the throat of the universe.
How, then, do the dead control the human societies of the world? Through government, any restriction upon change and dynamism tends toward evil and nothingness. The purest Living forms of society will be based upon an “order” that is not an order; a rule by a vehicle of things which tend toward Life: chance, infants, youth, weather, curiosity, exploration, learning, lust and imagination. These expressions would include unrestrained, or open monarchy, utter democracy, or anarchy. Consider them in turn.
Chance. Whimsy. Rule by whimsy—is it madness to contemplate? The safety of rule by whimsy is in its lack of order. An unrestrained human monarch is a living being, animated by a living mind subject to the ebb and flow of the living world. A single, unrestrained monarch, even if a tyrant (one motivated by Evil due to inherent flaw in his or her consciousness), can be moved by passion. A dream; a lust; a hope; a vision; a random turn of desires: all these things can effect an unrestrained monarch, and then allow the society to be changed. Life and goodness will save societies, and humankind, from absolute death under this form of rule. Endless gulags and perpetual oppression will not exist when shifting rulers change their minds. However, rule by a “throne” or “crown” or “royal line” is then flawed, as a restriction upon the dynamism of the monarch’s whims can fix in place an order worse than even the mad passion of a loose tyrant. An apparatus of hereditary nobles, parliamentary regulations or institutional emplacements that the monarch cannot change will allow one mistake—a single bad monarch or a few bad monarchs—to create a lasting policy of death or a downward spiral toward oblivion.
By contrast, even the worst monarch can be swept up by love, and change a bad policy to a good one; can be moved by emotion to turn the entire society toward the alleviation of the ills of a neglected group; can pursue a curious interest that leads to amazing discoveries that might never be made. Just as all worldly possibility may lie within a single spark of life, a monarch removed from the trappings of external control may produce unimagined wonders.
Individuals, as burgeoning monarchs, would necessarily be conditioned by society, forebears or tradition prior to taking office. An unrestrained monarch could, however, by whimsy, change rules of succession, the ways in which future governments would be organized, or any other aspect of the society. Our traditional western fear of absolute rulership is conditioned by straw man examples of dictators who employ the tools of fixed, longstanding regimes and cooperation with established elites to rule. If their whimsy were to step outside the bounds of what established mores would accept, they would be violently rejected and replaced with a “dictator” more in keeping with what their society like in its dictator. The successful modern dictators, who are not then absolute rulers, but rulers working within an established oligarchy of wealthy, powerful entities (families, corporations, trusts; see below), then become the “face” of using this power to limit the freedoms of their “citizens” and commit antilife actions “at home” and “abroad” (Obama? Stalin? Hitler? Hussein?).
The very illusion of the all-powerful historical dictator as an aspect of badness is false, for there have not been any in modern societies, nor have there been societies prepared to accept them. (e.g., if Hitler had ordered the SS Corps and German Army to abandon plans for expansion, exchange their uniforms for pink tutus, and begin spending half the day training at ballet and the other half building grand new dance houses in Berlin, he would have been overthrown.)
Humans now constrained by the bounds of evil society would, if abruptly given absolute authority, lash out, but in the movement toward a living society, a free monarch would, like a free soul, trump in result, both aggregate and specific, the actions of a bound oligarchy or republic. In the endless, random possibility of a single life there is the tendency against evil.
Unrestrained or total democracy is in macrocosm what unrestrained monarchy is in microcosm. The whims of many people, decided by popular vote, would have a freedom akin to the whims of the single monarch’s mind. Like an unrestrained monarchy, antilife has built conceptions against total democracy: be afraid of the ignorant masses; it would be impossible to have a referendum on everything; et cetera.
“Ignorance,” in the face of modern corporate media, can be a blessing. The traditional “ignorant rural conservative” so lambasted by neoliberals is not, in fact, “ignorant” per se; rather, the ignorant rural conservative is thoroughly educated in the superiority of America, the badness of fearful foreign peoples, and the necessity of maintaining certain social traditions in order to keep society bound together. A truly “ignorant” human—an infant—given bland love and no other education, would grow to be wordlessly horrified at death and destruction, and impossible to manipulate into accepting such things.
The impossibility of total democracy never existed, particularly considering the massive expenditures American society, as one example, has made upon elections, advertising, promoting, and political fighting. Additionally, this “impossibility” was only created through the antilife requirement of superstates, which transcended communal bonds so widely that, for a time, technology would have made total democracy fairly difficult (though not impossible, and not necessarily even as difficult as the advertisement-based republican system turned out to be). Now, as technology would make instant, daily total democracy more possible and more fun, the antilife arguments against the unrestrained freedom of whimsical living souls continue to hold power.
The American Republic, with its rigid Constitution and long series of overlapping checks upon change, was, like most existing government entities, arranged by dead elites to limit the freedom of future generations to rule themselves. Again, see the tendencies of life and antilife.
Tend toward life: chance, infants, youth, weather, curiosity, exploration, learning, lust and imagination.
Tend toward antilife: order, numbers, bondage, rules, ending life, immortality, the preservation of remains, counting, tabulation, classification, seniority and authority.
The American Republic imposes age requirements on its rulers, be they Congresspeople, Senators, judges, Mayors or Presidents. Seniority rules within the parliamentary bodies work to ensure that, even if idealism and hope is maintained through a successful election process, one who would seek to be part of influencing the future will be even further controlled by those who come before. This ensures that the bright spark of new ideas from new soul arrangements will have a chance to be oppressed by older generations and established mores (molded by even older generations) before reaching a position of authority where they could be imposed. A government of children might demand the production of too much chocolate ice cream, but it would rarely, unless violently abused first, drop atomic bombs, crash suicide planes into towers, or scatter napalm across occupied rice huts.
Immortal governing documents live beyond their generation. They never die, and are never replaced by youth and hope; the process of changing them is made difficult, and the old teach the young to venerate them, and place a priceless value upon words spoken or written by people dead hundreds of years—a value higher than that the new generation might come up with on their own. By basing government upon the documents of the dead, making any process of changing them difficult (difficult not merely because of a requirement of consensus, but because of a requirement of formality, rather than whimsy, in the steps that would change them), and then only allowing older people to have a hand in changing them, the dead firm their hold on those to come. The dead do this in an attempt to be immortal: they might have passed, but if they manage to convince the young to live not for themselves, but for their predecessors, then they and their spirits can achieve, or attempt to achieve, an unnatural life beyond life, that will stifle the possibilities and hopes of those next to come.
The general apathy of American voters, and more importantly, the apathy of almost all citizens with regards taking actions that could lead to actual, direct, impactive change upon long term policies, is a result of the entrapment of many souls by the fixed rituals of the past. The animated dead have set rules and tricked the living into believing that they cannot be changed. Apathy is an expression of the subconscious realization that the living are not the only ones driving the car; a skeletal hand is on the wheel, and on the back of the driver’s neck.
The repression of lust is an obvious government tactic, ever based upon the mores of the departed, who seek to, in immortalizing their own existences, limit, then utterly prevent, the means for the creation of new and as-yet unimagined souls. The ending of life, too, is the province of governments serving those who came before. Just as evil crushes various forms of lust (with the target changing by the hour), it crushes the results of lust: new human beings. The place where the people are being killed may change day by day or year by year, just as will the crimes for which others are trapped away from freedom.
Even the “victorious” dead, whose fearful policies have been engraved to prevent the living from acting too freely, are themselves gone; it is only metaphor to say that they have achieved immortality. In fact, the “winner” is Evil, who steers more and more of the world under the subjugation of the means of Evil. The victorious dead have won nothing, and their shadow is only the crippling of those who come after.
Where do all these different thoughts come from? You. Yet, many of these thoughts are of an essentially different character from one another. Your mind has the potential to choose between any of them. Even as the thoughts are spawned, you decide which one to act out. You are the “decider.” But if “you” are the one who decides, then where are the ideas coming from? Also from you, because your mind is not a singular entity, but a multi-faceted one. There is more than one “voice” inside.
Your mind can think of things outside of your control. Try not to think about a computer monitor--a black, flatscreen LCD monitor made by Dell. Stop thinking about that computer monitor. Etc. Your thoughts can never be completely controlled. There is uncertainty inside your own head. This uncertainty, this variance, can cause fear.
It is natural for us to feel fear about this uncertainty. When things are out of our control, they might change such that they harm or kill us, or limit our mating potential. That is why the dark can be frightening. It represents the uncertainty of chance, just like the insides of our heads--a place where we can’t always control the thoughts and desires that pop up.
The first step toward ragnarism is to fear your mind so much that you attempt to gain absolute control over its thoughts. Afraid of all the uncertainty, you can tell yourself that your mind is singular, not multi-faceted, and that all its strangeness, complexity and beauty can be condensed into a single thing--a single “you.” Believing that your mind is singular can help stave off the fear of uncertainty if you trick yourself into thinking that no more errant thoughts will enter your mind without “your” permission.
However, the reality of the mind will upset this illusion. “Sinful thoughts” will enter without your permission. You will see an attractive person and register her or his attractiveness despite the fact that you are married. You will see a slice of chocolate cake and want it despite being on a diet. You will worry about problems at your job all evening even when you are supposed to be concentrating on relaxing with your spouse. The reality of the mind will always continue to upset the illusion of singular control.
Nonetheless, trapped within that illusion of singularity built up to protect yourself from the fear of uncertainty, terrible things can happen. For example, when that inevitable negative thought floats through your mind--“I wish that old woman in line ahead of me at the supermarket, who is writing a check by hand to pay for ONE item, would just die, so I could buy this and get home faster!”--the mind can come to believe that because it is a singular mind, it is fully responsible for that negative thought. Because of this, a person who believes that they are absolutely in control of their mind and their thoughts will become terribly guilty over time, because every negative thought that randomly floats through their mind, they will take as an indication of their true nature: the definition of them. If the mind is singular, then any foul thought that pops up must be what defines that person. “I am scum, who would wish an old woman dead just so I can get my supper home faster!”
This cannot be admitted in interpersonal society, of course. It is a fear for the private mind that believes itself singular, and defines itself by all of its thoughts. But its behavioral results can be witnessed in society, as discussed later.
The person trapped within this cycle will then perpetuate it, because deviant thoughts will only become an even stronger motivation to clamp down on the uncertainty of the mind. Striking out in fear, they will retaliate against random thoughts, wallow in guilt, and then become even more alarmed and have an even stronger response when the next rogue thought pops up. The randomness of thought within the human mind will continue to subvert even the strongest “defenses,” making the conflict interminable and interminably escalating.
For example, a married man who resolves not to be attracted to any woman except his wife can become upset when he catches himself staring at a cheerleader. He shakes his head and looks away, and curses himself for lack of discipline, then raises his head, proud that he has taken care of the “problem.” The problem, however, will recur, and will upset him more, driving his anger inward, and motivating him even more powerfully to gain control of his “wicked thoughts.” That control will be imperfect, however, and he will be foiled again, as the cycle continues endlessly.
Most of this goes on subconsciously, and it can take a lifetime to play out. Most people do not sit around thinking “I will gain control of my mind today,” even though some self-help books advertise this. However, having some conception of self is necessary for human beings, and there exists a difference between those who conceptualize their minds as singular--and therefore set up a spiral of fear of uncertainty, fear of self, and guilt--and those who conceptualize their mind as “of many,” and are therefore better able to handle the diversity of the world.
Like the mind, life itself is uncertain. It is random. Physicists have observed that, within vacuums, the smallest components of matter will pop in and out of existence, unpredictably: matter being randomly created, like thoughts popping up in the mind. Likewise, human reproduction is random. When two humans reproduce, their offspring may resemble them or their ancestors, but will not be exact copies of either of the parents--in looks or temperament. The rest of the living world is like this as well. Flowers will not resemble their parent flowers identically; beetles their parent beetles; monkeys their parent monkeys; snowflakes the one that came before. Even down to the smallest level, this tendency toward randomness and change exists. To wit, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
This world is one of endless possibility and constant flux, and so it is suitable that the human mind is that way with its thoughts. Yet, within the world, that same uncertainty and randomness of chance (not "randomness" in the actually-random sense, but in the "beyond our conscious control" or "out of our hands" sense) can cause as much fear as deviant thoughts within the mind. In this case, however, because those fears are not played out inside the head but in the physical world, the conflict is observable.
People who fear the uncertainty of the world can frequently come to dislike it. And why not? When you fear something for a long time, you grow to hate it because of how it makes you feel. The random world continually assaults the fearful mind with things that cannot be predicted, categorized, or stopped. The fearful mind responds with deep hatred, for as long as the fearful mind is alive, that mind exists within a world that does not conform to the singular unity it strives for. The conflict within the fearful mind--the conflict between a singular view of the mind and a multi-faceted view--is linked to this conflict with the outside world.
Trapped in fear and guilt, the fearful mind becomes the hateful mind, utterly loathing its own terrible changing mind, and also the outside world that keeps tormenting it--a “torment” perceived through a fear of the uncertain. Because the fearful mind refuses to embrace the constant change of reality, it craves unreality, or unexistence. The only peace from the conflict in the mind is the death of the mind. The only way to stop being tortured by the change of the world is to leave the world by dying. And the only way to end eternally, once and for all, this fearful, ever-spiraling conflict, is by destroying this hateful, random world.
Ragnarism is this fearful mind, which is always in conflict with its own existence.
Life is one of the most fun things in our changing world, because it offers a fantastic example of the randomness necessary to create existence in place of void. As opposed to empty nothingness, a rock is a very exciting thing. However, whereas a rock changes its position very, very slightly and slowly, and does so without a conscious intent of its own, life is dynamic. It directs its own change at a rapid pace, and it provides a forum for even more randomness inside the incredibly complex minds it can produce in some organisms. In our world, life is the fullest expression of the ever-changing nature of existence. And so, life becomes the thing most hated by the ragnaristic mind.
Life changes with every second. Life is chaotic and random. Life cannot be predicted or controlled one hundred percent. To the ragnarist, life is the enemy that must be fought at all costs. It must be resisted in whatever it does, and it must ultimately be destroyed.
I didn’t want to believe this conclusion. On the surface, it sounds ludicrous--people who hate life? How can that be possible? It’s self contradictory. Or at least, it should be.
hey guys...with all that is going on, the excitement is palpable!!! I was (and have been) reflecting lately on what the actual rapture moment will be like (whenever it happens....lol).....i Know it's instantaneous but do ya think we'll have like a second of "realization" like (**horn blast**) and then thinking, "OH IT'S HAPPENING!!! THIS IS IT!!" Or we'll actually feel ourselves being lifted up and sailing through the air??? OR, do ya think we'll just like blink and be in the presence of the Lord that quick??? (yea i know i think about crazy stuff sometimes....lol)
But sometimes when i consider the times, i almost can feel my spirit ready to leap outta my body (if that makes ANY sense....) oh well......back to the news.....just wondering what u guys thought......lol
The above quote came from the Rapture Ready bulletin board. The “excitement” the author was referring to was violence in the Middle East, and the prevailing Rapture interpretations among American evangelical Christians, who number in the millions, involve worldwide wars and the butchery of billions being presented in a positive light.
I used to believe there were just a few religious wackos out there that had silly ideas about the Bible and wanting to die so they could zoom to heaven. It’s hard to imagine people wanting to die, even though you occasionally read about the cult that poisons its members so they can be “saved” on the alien spaceship.
The ragnarist fears and hates the uncertainty of him or herself, of the surrounding world, and of life. This, then, provides explanation for the correlations between the endless numbers of social, public and political behaviors which, at their essence, seek to repress, control, or destroy life and the living world.
Continued in Life and Evil.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Life and Antilife influence both of the traditionally identified sides of the American/Western abortion debate. Without understanding Antilife, the traditional conclusions of “selfish” or “ignorant”-slash-“religiously insane” remain the common answers to the other “side.” However, these conclusions fail.
Morally, socially, legally or otherwise, should the intentional termination of human pregnancy be condoned? The “Pro Life” argument goes as follows, to varying degrees: Once the choice has been made to conceive the child, it is an ending of life to terminate the pregnancy, thus akin to murder, even though it may be murder of a human who cannot yet be seen. Alternatively, the specifically (or admitted) religious “Pro Life” argument suggests that a deity, generally the Christian God, condemns abortion; this often (perhaps more often than not, or perhaps nearly always) underscores the core “Pro Life” argument.
The “Pro Choice” argument goes as follows, to varying degrees: A conceived child is part of a woman’s body, leaving it her choice to alter her body and terminate the child/pregnancy. The “Pro Life” argument tends to favor terminology referring to the post-conception contents of the woman’s body as a child, while the “Pro Choice” argument tends to avoid such.
The American media climate tends toward insubstantial voyeurism directed at the exchange of those offering fervent or pragmatic retellings of the traditional arguments discussed above.
The logical problems with the “Pro Life” arguments are:
1) A human embryo, prior to the development of a fetus, is a mixture of sperm and egg, being then formless and thoughtless. While it has the potential for life, it may or may not be life. To designate it definitively “life” and call the extraction of it from the woman’s body a murder is to designate menstruation, masturbatory emissions of sperm, or expired sperm in the testicles as death, murder, etcetera. Similarly, if dispelling the mixture of sperm and egg is murder, then any of the required chemical processes of building genetic components into child (from the sexual union of penis and vagina to the medical insertion of donor sperm via syringe) have a relation to murder. Menstruation, masturbation, sperm production and intercourse are, in fact, aspects of life, but stopping them is not a murder.
2) The Christian perspective against abortion is in error. The Christian Bible, in Exodus 21:22-23, commands that if fighting men harm a pregnant woman, and she has a miscarriage, the responsible man will pay a fine, but if the woman dies, he will be put to death. The Bible, therefore, offers a clear delineation of value between the life of a woman and the life, if any, inside her; the miscarriage is treated as a wounding of the woman, rather than the killing of a child. The passage also suggests, depending on translation, that if the child is “fully formed” the man may be put to death, which suggests that the Christian God would have little problem with abortion prior to the development of the fetus.
3) More commonly recognized problems with the traditional “Pro Life” argument are, if people are so passionately interested in protecting other peoples’ babies (to the point of extreme emotion, donating money and giving substantial time and effort to causes to protect said babies), why might they also be the same people who actively encourage, disregard or disacknowledge the killing of children of other nations and cultures, or the impoverishment and starvation of children in other and/or their own nation and culture? (An economic motivation will be discussed later, but it does not suffice to explain the motivations of most of those advocating the “Pro Life” argument.)
The logical problem with the “Pro Choice” argument is:
At some stage during the pregnancy, perhaps months away from the time traditionally required for the body or medical staff to induce birth, a child may be capable of surviving outside the womb with basic or advanced medical care, and therefore, warrants treatment equivalent to that provided a newborn. Conjoined with that fact is the fact that human infants cannot survive without external care immediately after (and generally for a long time after) birth. A 100%-of-the-time abortion policy based upon the infant’s need for the woman’s body is, therefore, equivalent to allowing mothers to kill children up until a certain age of independence (which would give rise to another debate as to the identification of said age), unless the only difference offered in support of maintaining the argument is the mere physical location of the child (i.e., inside the womb).
More interesting and useful than the problems with the original arguments, however, are the problems with the reactions of each “side” to one anothers’ arguments.
A “Pro Choice” argument which desires the allowance of only abortion of the embryo, but disallows abortion of the healthy fetus with heartbeat, human shape, sensory organs and brain activity, however tiny be said fetus—has no inherent logical flaw. However, outside the flat dimension of logic, the “Pro Choice” argument fails against the aspect of reality vigorously defended by the “Pro Life” argument: the fertilized egg is life in the same way that humanity’s ancestors, the early protein chains in the primordial soup, are life. Life is potential; life is chance; life is growth and change and dynamism, though not—necessarily or ever—an absolute promise of being a self aware, self-sustaining bipedal mammal. The core flaw of the “Pro Choice” argument is its attempt to disguise, subconsciously or consciously, the act of removing from future existence the nascent human, be it termed abortion, murder, or anything else. Genetic material in the form of unspent eggs or sperm tends farther away from life than does a fertilized egg, but a fertilized egg—the union of the species’ two sexes’ coding for expanding life—is the very stuff that human life is made of.
The reconciliation of this error is found in the acceptance of the act of abortion as an act of killing; allowing that abortion may represent a sliver of the pie chart which includes all possible definitions of “killing.” While Evil and Antilife stand against Life, death is life, is death is life. Mercy killing of the unwanted, unaffordable, sick or twisted fertilized egg, embryo or fetus, can be advocated for, just as the neoliberal would be more likely to excuse mercy killing of the suffering elder than would the typical “crazy red-state Pro-lifer.” The “Pro-choicer” would move closer to truth in accepting that the advocacy of abortion is one of the positive dealing of death, rather than dealing in the absolute and ludicrous claim that it is somehow not death. To do otherwise manifests the same fear of death (as part of the necessary cycle of renewal and growth of Life and Good) manifested by the “Pro-lifer” in other aspects. If a distinction cannot be drawn between the (possibly) positive death of (mercy?) abortion and the evil of murder, then the advocate on either side remains on an unreal plane, constrained by two-dimensional semantics.
Just as the envisioned “Pro Life” advocate may be a servant of evil through embracing the miserable enslavement of impoverished hordes unable to limit unsupportable offspring, the envisioned “Pro Choice” advocate may be a servant of evil through the selfish lifestyle of consumerism, capitalist career advancement, and lustful fulfillment without its associated rewards: the emergence and wonder of new life, which sustains and grows all that the advocate consumes and has come from.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
My own personal experience has been either fat, fleshy goths, or skinny ones, but this is an American perspective. Here, the resistance to popular culture (even if/when not fully understood by the resister) expressed itself in a desire to not strive toward what the corporate media presented as the ideal body type: male muscular or female slender-slash-curvy. As a result, the body expression of goth became "let the body go," which resulted in tendency toward being overweight or being skinny, as helped along by genes and food preference.
Since then, the media has co-opted goth imagery and, helped along by Anne Rice movies, Tim Burton and Twilight, focused on a heroin chic mishmash of autocultural retromodern kitsch. This has, not coincidentally, coincided with the rise to prominence (via adjusted advertising dollars and allowable screen time) of "dark" bands that may either lack the substance of what was originally goth music, or have that substance downplayed, much in the way the media has neutered hip hop.
Rallying against that image, be it fat or emaciated, is in itself a concession to said powers-that-be. Whether or not the battle is won, to have the argument at all tacitly concedes to the mainstream the power of ultimate definition. Remember: anyone, Donald Trump included, can put on cool black clothes with chains and studs. The spirit of the expression, not the expression itself, is what ultimately matters.