#498

It is not beyond me to grasp the same handles on this existence as one who has realized that violence is inescapable, an ineluctable part of our cosmos, its warp and its weft, and that this being so, there is no way to reach heaven but through violence, if heaven is a place at all. Therefore what matter how many lives are ground to dust under my heel? For the truth of this universe is power, which is beyond good and evil, and wills itself whether you accept all this or no.

That the world will grind us all into dust is beyond dispute. 

That I should act however the fuck I want is also simply true. There is no special virtue in holding yourself back from power and pleasure merely because you are convinced it proves that you are somehow better than those who do not. It doesn't.

What we choose--choose--to do is what sets us apart from one another, and it is my way--no better or worse, no purer or more corrupt than any other way--to use my power in ways that minimize suffering and maximize pleasure, beauty, coolness, and other things that are dope--not only for me, though I come first--why trouble to deny it? Those of us who truly put others before ourselves are rare as hen's teeth and too busy to read this blog, since their sisyphean task is infinite, so I need feel no shame--but for everyone in my vicinity and, whenever possible, beyond. 

Some of us don't care who we hurt in our quest to ensure our pleasures. Not built that way. That's not a worse hero's journey or whatever than what I do, it just runs counter in principle and, if successful and endemic, creates conditions that make my way difficult to survive in. So it goes. These are functions of power. This is not a complaint. Some of us have far less choice in far fewer matter than others, by dint of birth, position, or the waters and winds of fate. 

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Perhaps at least a few of scales have fallen from my eyes! I have remembered that my duty lies not in raining calumny down on those who I would call sinners, in my hierophantic aspect, but in simply working to be their opposite in all ways, to the extent of my scope and my ability in this life. Better a vagrant than a hierophant, after all; though admittedly I hope for a better compromise with society than that. It's not off the table, of course.

Also, why do eyes grow scales? And the fuckers grow back, they do. Personal hygiene never ends.

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Ok, listen. All this is by way of saying that I can barely fucking move over the guilt I feel over the genocide in Palestine, over and above other ongoing genocides I guess--this one seems the most, I don't know. Personally and nationally aimed at the heart. Seeing these dead children is agonizing to the point of paralysis.

How do I get a job and help, however minimally, an economy and a tax base that contributes to this? How do I continue to benefit from it every day? I always have! Everyone around me, we all do! But where does it end? Oh, where does it fucking end? How do you ever divest completely from something like this, other than the obvious self-abnegation (vagrancy as I have mentioned today, living in giant jars as I have mentioned before, etc.)  or the obvious waiting around to be deported?

It comes back to power. I don't have the power to stop this, and if offered, I could only accept this power in a form that in in line with my aesthetics and principles of being-in-the-world. A thorny issue and a narrow, switchback path to walk. But one must walk one's path as it is set, not as one would set it.

Tolkien condensed the strictures and truths of the matter in the form of Gandalf and what he had to say on the subject: that to reach out one's hand to take the power of your enemy with the desire to be different, to do what you know to be good in your heart, is to become first your enemy's mirror; then, something worse.

Gandalf also said, aptly to another part of the idea at hand, that it is not given to us to choose what times we live in; all (all) there is to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. This decision is what defines us, showing the world and ourselves who we are, or, at least, who we were allowed to be and to what extent we allowed that to influence us in the span of time allowed.

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As superpowers go, shooting scales out of your eyes is superficially not the most radical thing--but what kind of scales are we talking about here? What do they do? Could be something interesting. Plus the whole trick is a worthwhile hero first--someone, in this case, who sees things in life, the world, and existence more and more clearly? And is able to put these lessons into some form of creative action--making the world a better place. Not merely fighting crime, now, not saving the world from some crazy problem from the outside, but making it a better place in the here and now, materially, durably?

Crazy talk. Who even am I? Laughable.

--JL