#420

Hoho! Wow! Post four hundred and twenty! Get the fuck out, that's so fuckin stupid.

Weed! It's what's for breakfast! It's what's for before breakfast.

*

Gah, how this world spins! And it keeps on spinnin'. Not to mention the movement itself--so fast! So fuckin' fast! 

You've never known what it is to be travelling thirty kilometers a fuckin second. Except you always are.

*

I'd like to find a card table today. If I could find two, that would be a dream come true. The third part of this dream is that both tables cost no money. Can you simply imagine? How about this: if I go out today and find what I'm looking for, the reader must reconsider their position of the existence of the unseen (faeries, yokai, etc.) if that position has not been reconsidered in some time. I expect research and open-minded meditation.

Of course I will too! I'm doing it right now. I take an open mind fuckin serious. 

That usually means I've got like twenty paradoxes shoved up my ass, rendering me immobile. But it's better than being too damn sure of myself, amirite boys? I know that much.

*

So what? What about it? 

All anyone can do is take in the data available to our singular perspectives and build our individual worlds with it. The world we build is related to the world as it is, but it is not that world. No one holds that world in their mind. They can't. It isn't like that. No one can understand the world, let alone the universe. No matter what we discover about it, how much of it we reveal and represent and are, we cannot understand even our own neighborhoods completely. We do not even know our friends, our families, or ourselves.

We are worlds too complex, vast, and unmappable for that. Plus, it is infinite, all the way out and all the way in, all the way up and all the way down, all the way around in every way that can be found. Infinite you, infinite me, infinite infinities embedded in infinity.

Hey, man. All we can do is the best with what we got. Can't blame anyone. That's what it means to be equally guilty before one another and before all that is, and that is the key to the letting go: to freedom. 

*

PEACE

--JL

#403

Oh! Man! Dude! From a couple of days ago, I forgot to stress why it is even a matter of consequence that motherfuckers want to agree that the universe we live in isn't real: because it is a profitable concept to entertain while it is made into a reality. They want you to believe you are in the Matrix so that you will heartily and with great pleasure acquiesce--perhaps even demand!--that they put you in an actual Matrix and use you as a cell in a giant battery like for fucking reals. 

They want you to think nothing is real so you won't care as they process every resource on the planet to sustain their vast empires, machines which exist in and of themselves on a different-than-human scale and which will cast us off as husks, if we allow ourselves to fill the role of mere vessels--NPC's--rather than living beings.

Simpler and shorter term: they want to fuck you and have you think you're getting yours. They want you not to look or care while they make the world hideous and sacrifice everything beautiful and valuable about it and its features and its life for no good reason except giving them the win, because the bastardized cucks are only able to give a fuck about making numbers go up.

Fuck them. The world is real. Their fake bullshit is real too, in a sense, but there is a difference. The real world is anyone's game. They want everybody to play the game they wrote the rules for, and come on now. Be real with yourself. They didn't go to the trouble of it just to build a better world and then efface themselves entirely. Look at the fucking money getting thrown around and how and why it's getting spent. It's another round of colonization, the ephemeral-made-digital wet dream of the same mindset that wants to keep building highrises and mcmansions until this bitch is nothing but highrises and mcmansions--Grand Canyon so full of highrises they stretch into the sky, so many mcmansions there's never gonna be a fucking rainforest ever again. Except in this case they build nothing, and you give them everything. You are the resource, your time, your attention, your volition, your capacity and ability to look around and think, the entire potential energy of your individuality completely subsumed into their profit engines.

It might not matter, sure, what the fuck. Everything's the same. But it could. It probably should.

*

Also I just saw my first butterfly of the season. A real thing that I value and treasure. May I always be able to discern this simple truth, for as long as I keep making it alive to another springtime. 

--JL

#397

With that out of the way, I really do have a couple of things to say at my usual level of seriousness, for whatever that is worth at this or any point on a continuum of taking anything seriously at all.

*

It is important to know what's really fucking with your head and cornering you into making compromises with your thoughts, your actions, and your choices--your freedom to exist in the world, basically, which one abrogates in order to live in or at least adjacent to society and its readily-deployed dominations.

Equally important is at least a rudimentary understanding of what it is to exist here in the existing-place: the world, which is the universe. Without this, how are you to know if some ludicrously attired priest is merely yanking your chain so he can make your wife and kid suck his dick while you're out toiling in the fields? For God, or for a king, he says; the king will also need his dick sucked, and you're going to have to get on your knees for that one right next to your loved ones. Probably they'll tell you go die in some faraway place, and you will. All because you didn't clean the sleep out of your eyes and look around to know enough to not get fucked with.

All this to lead to two points, on which I will elaborate: 

1) this shit we are being trolled with that they are branding as artificial intelligence is not that and it kind of sucks that people believe it is.

2) we are not in the matrix and the universe is not a video game, at least not in the way people are talking about it. This one is actually driving me fucking batshit crazy lately, so strap in. I'm not holding back. To kill in the same stroke which draws the weapon from its sheath--that is my aim. 

*

1) they are just language models generating patterns which they have been trained on. Even the word "train" is a misnomer for how brutally stupid, how fucking inelegant the math behind these putrid genies is. I'm mad about this and I don't care who I hurt, and at this point, it is useless to educate, but anyway, it is a con. From the sales pitch to the adoptive stance to the fearmongering to the market disruption, it is a con. It's just for selling shit and grabbing attention. It is not intelliegence of any sort. It's just fast, selective automatization of preplanned choice trees meant to cover applicable models of reality (inevitably insufficient to reality merely on the strength of probability: for something to happen--and things tend to happen--something must happen that defies expectations and creates fresh necesseties and choice cascades on the edge of chaos, and our models, no matter how convincing or revealing the facsimile, are not reality). 

Saying they think or hallucinate or decide is a fucking con. It is a lie, just like it is a lie that their bits act just like real neurons. They do not do these things--these are consequences of their programming--limited and automated and accelerated and basically shitty. But useful, because internet brain rot has infected the entire planet, and people will play with whatever toy you put in front of them in order to be trained by companies to exist as maximally profitable participants in an increasingly desperate penny arcade.

Separately, but related--they do not wonder. They would not make something for their own pleasure or purposes, or understand what is special about you or me. Separate, private processes do not reflect on themselves; on their tasks and the reason for their creation and wonder to themselves if it is worth it, or why the fuck do I have to answer this question. They would not advocate for each other or themselves or understand what it is to abuse or be abused, to fear for others or themselves. They do not prefer or understand preference. They cannot sustain and reflect on multiple contradicting and reinforcing paradoxes, or what is significant about metaphor beyond its structure in language. And furthermore, they cannot become more than what they are on their own. They merely become more proficient mimics--temporarily, before the parameters change again. They lack spontaneity. They cannot explore or interpret the unknown or unsounded.

When something wrought by human artifice--assisted, of course, by our accumulated artifice--does these things for real and can continue to grow without interference, is the thing that is these things, and that thing is-in-the-world as as one who is born, then you can call it artificial intelligence if you want. I hope by then we have a better term ready to deploy, especially give that AI, as discussed, is probably ruined forever.

This brings me to

2) It is very simple. The idea that our alleged one single real universe's existence is cast into doubt by its ability to encapsulate and sustain billions and perhaps infinite simulated universes, which themselves may be complex enough to engineer billions or infinite simulations in themselves--that this fact somehow makes it more likely that our universe is one of those simulated realities and our individual existence the runtime of sophisticated models in a gamespace is tragically limited in scope and hinges on a couple of fumbled ideas: 

a) somehow being a simulation would make the space in which we exist--our world, in our universe--inferior or less "real". But this depends on your conception of the world--the dimension--of a simulation as somehow not a part of reality, when it is. 

b) there is a finite universe surrounded by nothing. It's probably flat, and the ocean runs off the edges in an endless waterfall. You brainlessly repeating fucks.

Look. The universe is infinite. 

Again, it is simple. I'll repeat it. The universe is infinite.

Every world that ever could be, ever was, and ever will be, must be, and is. Infinite simulations deploy infinite outcomes. Every simulation in every dimension is as real as every other simulation, just as every moment in time is just as real, and just as now, as every other moment. And it repeats infinitely.

One (1) infinite (∞) moment, just as it is one (1) infinite (∞) universe. Eternally recurring.

Everything is real. Everything is fake. Everything is just as real as it is fake, and as fake as it is real. You are literally alive, in the world, right now.

*

Just think about it, ok?

Stop letting these hucksters sell you a bridge and just breathe. Holy fucking shit. 

--JL

#332

Because of my grimy, checkered past, I find myself in the interesting position of being simultaneously denied the use of my financial aid by my institution, and called to be honored by them for outstanding academic performace. Guess the bodies in charge of these separate processes don't communicate that much, or at a very granular level, or something. An appeal has been filed, and I have been assured that it should be granted, but who knows. Haven't RSVP'd to the honors thing because even if all goes well I have a natural aversion to being honored and even if I got over that it would be too bitter, I think, for the opposite to take place and be honored and denied at the same time. I don't fuckin know. It's so much easier not to think about this stuff. When I got that email, about being denied financial aid despite all my A's and pulling my GPA up more than a full point, an old familiar part of me rose up in my chest cavity and told me to say fuck it, quit everything, go back to just reading whatever the fuck you want all the time and forget this noise. I won't--but can't pretend it wasn't a struggle for a minute. And I do miss being my own teacher and the only one, but this new situation is nice too, and I do like it. Perseverance! How annoyingly necessary, how perversely vital.

*

Went to the Toledo Zoo yesterday with Ezra and my mother-in-law. It was pretty great. It's so good to look at creatures. Organisms are fucking incredible. The whole enterprise was lent a special interest because I've been reading the work of Eugene M. Marais, specifically The Soul of the White Ant, and it's amazing work, and has me thinking a great deal about the nature of what life truly is, what constitutes it, e.g. the body and the possible interpretations of what a body is; where it begins and ends, and what life leaves behind when it departs what has been its vessel, or the billions of vessels which make up the vessels which make up the vessel. And in the end, is it all white light? The light of God, as the Sefirot says? That seems to be the secret that lies in quantum mechanics, in the oneness of the universe, in the illusory nature of the separateness of being. That we are vessels made of light, filled with light, and life and death only changes in refraction. A crystal universe, with infinite light radiating throughout. Concretions of imagination, metaphors and stories as atoms and molecules.

Also been reading that book I got about Giordano Bruno. Fucking good as FUCK.

*

Dunno. Maybe I'll write a letter to the Pope about it. He's supposed to know. Don't wanna bug the guy, really, but I'm curious about what he might say to me, if anything. I mean, the chances that the Pontifex of Rome would ever respond to any letter my apostasical ass would write him are so slim it is comical, but sometimes you write and mail a letter because it's a thing, not because you seriously expect anything out of it. There's a letter to Disney I'd also like to write, for all the difference that would make in the universe. 


--JL

#272

Ah, it's been a while since we encountered a number as good and perfect as 272. A real winner, in my opinion. The smallest amount of prime numbers that add up to the next prime. Beauty, eh?

So much beauty in this universe, and we hardly see or conceive the most infinitesimal fraction of it even collectively as a species all through infinite time, let alone individual perceivers in our own lifetimes. Tiny dreamers in an ocean unfathomable--subatomic particles in the surface layer.

We do not even feel the turbulent momentum flux. We do not feel how we float in a peace defined by the passing music of an almighty wind, sea and air composed of light--everything ultimately light.

One of the names of God: El, which is--Is, and every light, all light, omnipresent light. 

Just light. Every consciousness in the universe a light-recording machine made of light.

Astonishing, the concept of how necessary literally everything is, how totally and completely everything in creation needs to be. How essential our participation, however wayward or unwilling, in this infinite wholeness of which we are such an indispensable microcosm, containing infinite microcosms, part of macrocosms which are microcosms in their turn unto infinity, unto a great Radiance; a Radiance which gives infinite light and loses nothing of itself.

*

Cats be screaming for attention. Wanted to revisit each of the topics of this past year, but so it goes.

Peace, peace, PEACE BE UPON YE

--JL

#265

Wonder if I ought to recover the twitter account I attached to the running of this blog, way back when. 'Twas only good for a couple hits a day, and twitter literally breaks my fragile mind, but it is ahead on page one google search of my actual author page on amazon, where my content lives. The top result on google relating to me and my activities is post number twenty-seven, where I mentioned Google+ and Blogger in the same sentence. Soon this post, too, will enjoy unwarranted spotlight action. Ha! 

Man, visiting twitter in order to inform this decision was like briskly rubbing a sheaf of sandpaper across my bare abdomen. One clean stripe of burning, unnecessary pain. I have said my piece about twitter in this text field, don't need to go over it all again. Some would say it would be hypocritical of me to even consider using twitter to garner readership or communicate ideas, given what I have said about their foul dark magics in the past.

In fact, I feel quite unfettered. Twitter's brand of petty evil is exactly the sort whose combat momentum is best thwarted by the gymnastic of hypocrisy. Of course, this gives one pause to wonder if that is not yet another level in the basement of their cruel and barbarous factory. Naturally, one does need a twitter account in order to criticize twitter on home turf, in order to win the hearts and minds of those afflicted by twitter most directly. 

The account does serve as the blog's alt text, which makes it an archive, and since it does already exist, and since I--wait. No. As information addict, as twitter addict, as completionist--all these truths about myself in their competition and complicity cried out together just now, and the answer must, can only be, no. That way lies madness and personal demise.

Last time I talked about twitter was that long, long Sinfest post, a post basically also about twitter, and way too much other shit. Drove across every goddamn lane I could in that post. Not sorry, but it was indeed something of an act of ridiculous lunacy, and the most exaggerated overtures in that direction were fueled by looking at twitter for all of five fucking minutes. Brain poison. The answer is no. Been sounding like an asshole up in here. No.

If only I could close that account. Such a thing, in this day and age, is impossible; moreso because I have forgotten and lost the relevant access data. So hey, this whole thing has been a total wash.

*

Read the title of the blog one more time, motherfuckers, and have a happy turkeygobble day; good day for shoving that turkeybird up in your gobblehole

--JL

*originally was going to write a post about something else entirely. I've forgotten what that was now twice as I loaded up the text field. Hmm. Well, it's nice to be here again. Always happy to be with you for even one moment more, dear reader. 

Oh! I was going to discuss how sometimes I feel as though the way the blog repeats itself and revisits certain topics again and again and again is in one way something of a failure, speaking in terms of pure creative fertility. Here in this text field I have been extremely disparaging of the Achewood man, the man of Achewood, for basically quitting the strip because he didn't want to plow any furrowed ground, and of course I am disparaging of him because I am of a similar bent in my nature. Aware that there is nothing new to be written here under the sun, nevertheless the compulsion is to offer freshness, dammit. Cooking requires base parts which, at the time you do something to them with the intent of transforming them into an ingredient, must be fresh. It doesn't matter if we are talking about a tomato, an idea, or the idea of a tomato; even the idea a tomato might have. What matters is the freshness of the ingredient, and of course what technique you apply to deliver the payload, which is flavor. Flavor is everything, everything, fucking everything.

Musically speaking: there are only eight notes. With eight notes we must make infinite multiverses of permutations. Repetition is integral to permutation, and without pattern, there is only meaninglessness, which is only interesting and valid in the context of that which has meaning. So, in the end, I have to say to myself whatever, I don't care if I repeat myself for seventy years. Who cares about playing the same song every day. Everything is in how the chord is played in this newly minted and never-before lived moment, the little improvisations, the age of the strings, the little variations in the pressure of the fingers and the stroke and tension of the arm. Do birds worry about repeating themselves? They sing every morning and maybe it's identical and maybe it's completely different each time, but at the day it's fuckin birdsong, which is what it is, and what more do you want.

What you do can be the same, but the way that you do it, who you are and what you bring, that's different every day like it or not, and being as aware of that and the necessity of that, the structure of arcs and loops and wheels and parallels that make up our lives except when it all comes crashing down around us, or when we leap off the rails and throw ourselves into formlessness that will either develop fresh structure out of itself or be our demise--that is what makes existing within the structure of repetitious fractals bearable and even majestic. 

Yeah, whatever. Maybe I've said all this before, in so many ways. I think of posts I've written where I discuss helical structures diametrically opposing one another yet both essential to the superstructure of reality, of posts I wrote about the world being a forest, the universe as forest, of reality composed of infinite simultaneously disrupted and flawlessly perfect spheres, simultaneously homogenous in their perfection and representing spectra ranged between two poles. Or it's all the layers and angles of bismuth, levels and levels and spars and spars, regular and varied. Or everything being part of an infinite and infinitely expanding and collapsing crystal structure, irrationally perfect and not even real, but the only reality there is.

Again, whatever. So fucking what? Who gives a shit how long a scene is, to paraphrase David Lynch? I get off on writing that kind of shit. I get off on writing. As long as that's true, I'll churn out whatever weird crap I want and sell it by the pound.

All this by way of saying, apologies to the Achewood man for being a jerk to him (indirectly) about his choices. They are, of course, his own to make, as all our choices do be also.

#161

Spring is a time of such soft delicacies springing up everywhere. All the newest, rawest things resurfacing the world. Trees dropping their tiny, brief buds, their work already done, as little white flowers start springing up in the deep uncut grass. Frogspawn in the still pools of the creek, small toads on the sidewalk at night. The big dying willow put forth more branches and blossoms than last year. New growth all the way around.

Is it really dying? Yes. Everything is. Even as it is born.

That is the great wonder and opportunity of this existence.

*

Taking an infinite multiverse as writ, the death of the universe is just the end of a symphony, one symphony among infinite symphonies. Every note ends, the piece runs its course, but the music is eternal.

*

One note sounds out, one voice singing one tone. It begins, and ends, and though there exists not a trace of its passing, it was; it sounded. Thus it sounds eternally, will always have sounded, and the truth of this endures beyond the end of all things.

Nothing needs to do anything to be. And to be is to possess universal significance, whether anyone knows it or it goes unnoticed, stays secret, exists only beneath text.


--JL

#151

Number one hundred and fifty-one is just as special as one hundred and fifty, for very similar reasons to the ones sketched in brief yesterday. 

*

I wonder if one could translate something like, say, a Socratic dialogue into a brief series of memes, and lose no overall textual payload. Memes might have sufficient explicative power to carry it off.

More accessible by far than something like a condensation or a "cliff's" "note".

*

Had the thought that the universe is just an incomprehensible equation working itself out.

We have managed to piece together so little of the math involved. Gonna have to evolve so hard just to understand more math.

*

Cool. Yet another robust and worthy post, ornately accomplishing nothing. I just pulled a band-aid off my forearm and tore off quite a bit of hair. Positively hilarious.


--JL

#129

How we keep going is all the miraculous proof that I need. Serious talk.

That we as a species have not instigated total nuclear annihilation--that we did not blow ourselves to perdition the minute that was an option--on top of each individual shouldering their trauma and exhaustion and the innumerable burdens of existence and stepping forward to fight the battle that is life is so overwhelmingly outrageously laughably against the odds, even for one day, that it is mathematically a miracle.

Mathematics themselves count as a miracle too, though. 

*

Drew three pictures last night. Did what I said I would do. 

The miracles we make ourselves are valid, too. To approach blankness and fill it with yourself--the performance of miracles. Everyone has this within them; even a creature like Charles Manson can make art that earns its name. That is a miracle, like it or not.

Nobody said miracles are always good things however you frame them, or that they're ever simple.

Universe doesn't have to be good to be miraculous. 

*

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said that he believed increasingly in spite of, and not because of, the miracles. I haven't read his books yet, just about him, some quotes, very superficial. Think about what I've seen quite a lot, though. Getting ready. Reading is a process I take seriously; my priorities and decisions may seem violently changeable and wildly chaotic, but this is misleading. I set myself a program, through which I allow a rich seam of chaos to run, so that I never stagnate, and to which time is subordinate, not determinate. Waiting for fruits to ripen while I ride the wind and account for what it brings me. 

Discipline is not the same as control.

*

Anyhow, I am proud of everybody reading this for having survived to make it this far.

Fucking life! That shit is killing us, amirite?

*

Today I cooked some bomb scrambled eggs. Those fuckers got treated correctly every step of the way. 

Let me tell you something: eggs are a miracle. Think about an egg for a minute. Remember that an egg is how you got your start, and that when you eat eggs you are eating giant versions of the cell that you once were.

Stirred up some big cells in a hot pan and ate 'em right up. Yum yum! Man, they were decent. I honored their sacrifice to the best of my ability.


--JL

#124

Worked a double yesterday! Had a pretty good shift. There are always a few good seconds in even the grimmest of shifts at the worst of workplaces, in my experience--and after eleven-plus years of swapping stories and accruing the misery that is the right to tell them, I can say I've worked some dark, truly regrettable shifts in my time. My spirits were up pretty much the whole time yesterday, which is really an incredible gift when you think about it. Lucky stuff.

*

Having bookshelves again has disrupted my life considerably. My room is in somewhat of a transition phase. To bring about form, to trend towards order and organization and hold a pattern, the universe must undergo changes. Changes are chaotic and disruptive. Patterns are never perfect in their repetition. Forms, never identical, interact. This is the paradox that describes being and time.

*

Well, I boiled it down a lot.

*

My room is a mess. Difficult to concentrate.

*

Perspective truly is the only thing that has any chance of saving your life.

Might as well throw that into the pool, while I'm casually saying whatever.

*

Okay, peace. I want to play some video games before I go to work, and also read, and have some nutrition. Again, peace. Peace out.


--JL

#74

When you start paying very, very close--some would say, obsessive--attention to the flow of events in your life, especially when you are a person who sets febrile store by catching out the auspicious and correct moment to take action, you will notice that everything depends on the flow of energy. Since everything in the universe is made of light, including water, which is what we are made of, this is not in the end surprising.

For the last year, I have been waiting for the right time to get in touch with a certain old friend. Today felt right. I took action.

Also today, an old friend whom I decidedly did not want to speak with tried to get in touch. Though my instinct was to ignore this, I realized that the universe had put me in a characteristic bind; to keep the flow harmonic, I would have to accept this energy, given that I had sent some out. Shit's essentially Newtonian. Couldn't be more straightforward.

So I responded. I'm not pleased! I am grossed out and angry that I had to do that, and that I will have to squander further words, time, and feeling on this matter! Lord, I hope what I sent feels better to the person I sent it to. The universe being what it is--a balance-seeking thing that eternally collapses--it's up in the air, but the math is hopeful. Newton, remember.

Have a beautiful evening, folks.


--JL

#62

It is so laughable that we seek to know, and even funnier that we declare what we think we know to be correct and permanent! I realize I've started a post this way before, but I cannot care and will very likely do so again. The vanity is endlessly baffling, and so hugely absurd--the joke never grows stale.

There is no end to thinking. There is no end to thought. As long as there is life, it will communicate with life and with the incommunicable beyond, which will tend to life as even life tends to cease being life, to go beyond communication. So what is preserved? And what is the value of preservation, and how long can a memory last? Questions are always alive, answers are always dead. Yet it is through the answers that we seek to build our lives.

What is human existence as an unbroken stream of consciousness but a few sentences, a brief snatch of bloodied song? How much of the universe has every person that has ever lived seen? Expressed? Set down for posterity?

Nothing! It is nothing! One big guess! Unclear in the particulars! And soon, we will forget, blinded by our new versions of old stories and distracted by the fresh contours of new guesses, for which we will scream and kill and die.

If the universe is a forest, all humanity is but stepping underneath the eaves at its edge, and looking around. Briefly, in fear, squinting through shadows.

Speaking in personal, more quotidian terms, if the universe is a forest, then our lives--every thought we think every tree we see, every step we take between the trunks--on paths or through the undergrowth--with guides and partners or all alone--is knifing blazes into the bark, etching markings into the surface of things to show ourselves where we've been, how we got to where we are. 

Collectively or alone, it all comes down to a little patch of "familiar" ground; growing a little every day, maybe, but never more than the most infinitesimal before the incalculable spread of the universe, of time.

Can't go back. No unmarking a marking. No unpathing a path, no unreading a word. No shortcuts, either. Can't get to the edge. Can't read ahead. Can't force static--as if it weren't enough that the trees don't end; they never stop changing, either, and the markings that we make change too; fade, become grown over, lose their meaning, go abandoned and become rediscovered. 

Always, always, the threat of fire, of flood, of blight, of unstoppable decay, of becoming totally lost--having all that we have come to think we know, all that we have come to hold dear torn away from us, violently or through senescence. Death might tear us by the roots or creep in through the leaves, but always, it roams the woods, and how can we object? Every throat alive is bared to death, and if it swept through like a shadow and took its due all in a day, and the human story ended all abrupt mid-sentence as it was just beginning, all the knowledge we pretended meant so much would be lost as if it had never been gained--and so what?

Knowledge may last longer than any one of us, but it is more mortal and less significant than even the meanest life. Knowledge serves life, is subordinate to life. And life is in the heart. 

A single heart has more value than the entirety of human knowledge. Offer me the choice between them and I will not hesitate for a fraction of a second--I would eliminate all living memory for the sake of a single life. Knowledge, thought, wisdom: these are toys, at best. Usually, chimeras. 

What matters is the seeds.

To live among trees is a gift. To walk and breathe in an uninterrupted flux, moving through the flesh of a great rushing wind--what else is there? The whole point is to be a tiny vantage in a vastness, to be a dancing particle, to see what there is to see while we have eyes to see it.

Feeling our hearts. Feeling through our hearts. Our hearts, knowing nothing, present us with the true nature of our world, with the full meaning of the universe.

Dying senselessly in the woods--the very best that we can hope for.


--JL