Forgot one of my main points yesterday, and thought to edit the post, but forgot that too. Will I remember this point before I mark the end of today's post? We shall see. It's hovering there, just out of reach--I remember the location and prevailing conditions of having the thought, and its content is tantalizingly near.
Maybe gone forever! Doesn't matter. It was a thought, and it was good. Take my word for it. You know how you have some thoughts and it's kind of like they're pitching the yaw of your brain? Like your mind is roating, revealing more of itself to the perceiver and extendng its own field of perception in one.
Our minds and bodies and spirits are ships in an endless space. Sensing phenomena, chaging direction and speed, reacting to stimuli and investigating events according to their purposes, timing, and placement in the universe.
TAKE ME TO HYPERSPACE, GOD! TO THE BEYOND!!! far, far away, praise be
*
Hm. Yes.
What did I even write about yesterday? The scurrying of the human organism? Pathetic! Who cares. Geology is more important than that stupid chattering nonsense.
Rocks, brethren! The rocks and stones, the mountains and gorges and continental shelves are the true protagonists. Through that lens, nothing else matters one fuck. And the story is pure, crystalline; dramatic and comedic in the highest. What could be funnier and more terrible than the collapse of a seamont that has weathered the storms of seven hundred throusand years, its supports at long last bowing to the motion of water and its pinnacles to the unchanging word of gravity? All that time standing, then a few seconds of absolute, hysterical madness, then it's over. Over almost as it began. Over in a laughably short amount of time even if it had been built in a day and stood for second day, but after seven hundred thousand years? Totally and completely hilarious. What timing! What slapstick! A new stillness reigns, a new horizon exists, another vast span of incremental change and general stability before the next punchline hits home.
That's just a little taste, and a lot more fucking poetry than a dude spitting bullets into a crowd of innocent strangers because all governments everywhere have ruined the world and the ideas that his masters implanted within him to control his thoughts and behaviors have curdled and gone septic, at war with reality.
Well, I know which one our lords and masters want us to pay more attention to. On their terms, not mine, though. They just want to shake their heads at the unaccountable madness of this world--who could explain such a tragedy?--do some thinking and praying, and get on with maintaining the situation that created the tragedy in the first place. And they want you to want them to, which is one of their best and oldest tricks.
We all want our fathers to do something about it when something scares or confuses us. It is his mechanism that the onanist devils who live to fuck us up keep their one hand free always in order to manipulate.
And manipulate they do.
*
It irks me more than it should, perhaps, this long line of assholes shitting on the rest of us. It irks me because I am the type to answer questions and solve problems, and the problems they have caused, the warrens they have built for themselves, the deceptions they employ tactically, their bitter, selfish chess--all of it is hard to do combat with and maintain your sense of self. Maintain, as I always come back around to, your virtue.
One cannot, must not, employ the weapons and strategies of their opponents against them in order to "do good". You just can't. Gandalf won't take the Ring. You can't either. It's very simple, but I have elaborated before and can--will--elaborate again. Strap in.
If by sheer force of personality and will, strength of character, and unimpeachability of virtue I could bring evil to halt and grind its wicked machinery to dust beneath my righteous heel, I would. And if it worked that way, I could, but it doesn't work that way, and I am not simply the best of myself, but my complete self; riddled with venalities and as corruptible and prone to losing my way as the next tiny speck of regular human being.
To accrue enough capital to clash capital on capital is sin and folly. To play that game is to endlessly sharpen the teeth of your oppenent in the direction they want them sharpened, and you will have grown your own set of teeth, whose purpose, no matter what your intent, is to bite and masticate.
To add prestige to your voice and clash a different capital on a different capital amounts to the same. However you accrue this prestige, you have entered into a market, and the market besmirches the temple. It just does.
We let the opponent choose the time and place as well as define the terms of engagement, which they will break however they please in order to ensure victory. That is the position we have been in for all of recorded history. To be perfectly clear, the opponent--at least, my opponent is always the same twofold pair: the conqueror/master, and the parasite/hustler. These archetypes and their manifold derivations are the forces I set myself in opposition to in this world.
So. Art of War this mess. We must choose our own ground, our own timing, and define our own terms of engagement--terms which must be incomprehensible to our enemy. This may be incomprehensible to you, as well, but I'll stand by it.
Maybe it sounds trite to many ears, but I feel like it is clear and still vital: violence cannot be the answer. That is not the type of combat I am talking about. It will always breed more violence. It is a tool of the conqueror and cannot be used in defense. If physical confrontation is inevitable, is virtually impossible to avoid, then only nonlethal methods may be applied in defense and protection.
We must never set out to kill. Never.
The best way to engage in this conflict is to embark on a program of targeted and intelligent disenagagement. Of divestment. Of reclamation.
We quit our jobs and do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. We destroy all these clocks that press into our flesh and start time again. We stop buying so much shit from so many companies all falling over themselves to prove to you that you always need more shit and start remembering how to provide the things we legitimately need for ourselves. We raise that knowledge and spread it around as much as we can, for free. We unchain the signal. We stop suckling on the power they provide and generate our own. We cease and refuse enabling war and poverty through participation in economic systems that drive inequity and concentrates wealth and resources. We stop paying attention to their programming. We stop engaging with their websites and build our own. What the fuck is a news cycle? We don't need that shit. We stop allowing others to tell us what plants to plant, what foods to buy, what time to wake up and how much of it to give to someone who'll spend it and never even look at you on their way to their own dreams. We stop allowing them to destroy the planet in the name of our comfort and our ease by working hard enough to save it that they can't make a profit off of fucking it up anymore. We defund prisons and militaries and mechanisms of surveillance and we tear down monuments and documents that proclaim that we should fear and hate one aother for reasons of state.
We open our hands and we let go.
We divest. We lose our money and redefine our values and our wealth and what it means to be responisble to one another and the world. We try to remember how to live as people, rather than subjects. There are billions and billions of us who would be peaceful and happy, and we burn in the fires set by the few millions who know not what they do. Needlessly. We can stop it.
They have the momentum. But if we choose, we can create an irresistible inertia. One born not of leaders and movements but by people waking up and realizing they can be free. Freer every day. In simple, easy ways that have everything to do with doing less, fearing less, engaging less with less toxicity and drudgery. I mean why should we? So some guy can have a golden toilet? Please.
By letting go, we can walk the path of the open hand. We can remember, and therefore invent, the Way.
Final note: this is not to rail against progress. This is to jettison the misconceptions that the appeasement and deceit offered by our opponents in any way represent progress. They seek a form of suicide which they have agreed to call progress because it is useful to them. We must stop that momentum, as I said, and that will be progress enough till the time comes to direct our energies into the dream of true civilization.
*
I could elaborate even more! And I will. But not here, not today. Other tasks call.
--JL
