#430

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

#73

The problem with virtue is that it's stupid, and everyone knows it.

Virtue lies in giving up the advantage. Virtue is beholding an arsenal and keeping your hands empty. Virtue is condemning yourself to death because you must either tell the truth or keep silent. Virtue is a winnowing-down, or up. Always the way grows tighter, narrower, the air thinner, the range of action more constricted. The virtuous path is clear, not because it is straight--a narrower, more crooked goat-track does not exist--but because it is uncluttered.

"Ah! It would be virtuous to pick a weapon from the arsenal in order to protect those who cannot themselves pick up a weapon! It would be virtuous to lie in order to save another's life, or the lives of many! A virtuous person would keep all their options open always, so as not to limit the possibility of action, the possibility of improving upon virtue's outmoded shortcomings. Virtue has been shown to lose, loses always, when it is so simple to win! How is it virtuous to lose to a bad person? You have to win! A virtuous person would be cognizant of how much more utile morals are when placed relative to everything, how much more of the greater good can be accomplished when virtue is defined as volumetric accomplishment in the service of institutions which serve the public. Joseph, I have caught you out: by adhering to the ancient, cast-down idols, you place yourself in a regressive mode, and your so-called virtue is immoral by its decrepitude, by its failure of nuance, by its inaccessibility! Virtue, if it is virtue, is actually not hard, difficult, costly, any of that--it's easy, and it's called just being a decent person. You know? Look. Justice is further along now than ever and it still totally sucks, and what the ancients called virtue was their primitive justification for all their terrible crimes, which stain the pages of our wretched histories. What you want to mean by virtue is social responsibility or liberation, or liberating yourself into your social responsibility. Don't be an asshole."

Bullshit! Ugh.

But it feels right and usually produces preferable material results: other bullshitters will respect you, or seem to in order to use you as social capital; I understand talking this way can actually land you a variety of high-paying jobs; you can give yourself permission to write off a great deal of personal responsibility with this frame of thought; it is currently popular and always easy to speak this way, so you are likely to get positive reinforcement for very little effort; you are very free make your life easier to live and more comfortable and stimulating in a staggering variety of ways; you personally get to feel morally superior to and immeasurably more intelligent than all dead people and most of your contemporaries.

Look, I get why this is extremely popular and that it feels very gratifying. It is total fucking bullshit, though.

Immaterial returns are most of what you can expect from virtue, which is part of what makes it stupid, but them's the breaks. Virtue is as inflexible and unapproachable as the truth, as dangerous and as difficult to find, as profitable, and about as palatable. Almost nobody wants anything to do with it. It is not comfortable. It usually hurts. The people who will thank you the most honestly for it are weaker than you, and can give nothing you can show for it in return. It is almost impossible to live up to and probably not even desirable. But it is virtue, and twisting things around to make them easier cannot change that.

To be virtuous is to suffer, to be a servant, and to behave idiotically; through this, one has a chance to become wise, to live in bliss, and to be free. Probably. Maybe.

I'm not going to elaborate a length on this point here. That belongs in books. I don't give too much of the real business away for free; remember, the blog supplies but sample cups! The good shit costs seven dollars. If you have a Kindle, less.

Anyway, virtue is stupid, but at least it's not bullshit. I am not, myself, virtuous; I'm not even sure that I'm trying correctly.

--JL

#4

Both books are sharply dressed in brand new covers, their third such wardrobe transformation. No more! No more. Third time is said to be the charm; I also consider it in certain cases to be a sort of guillotine gate.

At any rate, the covers will no longer change. By way of apology for not designing covers and then for designing them hastily, I shall share another anecdote, this time without relying on the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes or alcohol.

*

In the second grade a dude handed me my ass in the middle of class because I looked at him wrong. He offered a gentlemanly apology later that week and we became fast friends, as is time-honored and correct. It was his opinion that I showed balls, an ineffable quality that many other men taller and stronger than me have sensed and respected after they have pounded me into sundry available surfaces.

The way it holds up in this example is that I had indeed been looking at him wrong; fuck him! He was looking at me wrong, had done so first--so I did nothing to avoid the conflict, plus I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could the second he dared me to. Not very hard, true, but I did it, and that's the point, upon which key distinctions hinge. Salient also is the point that I did not alter my attitude towards him one iota simply because he then took hold of my head and smashed his knee into my face several times before throwing me into my desk. This proved fuck-all in my opinion, and I'd fight him again at the slightest notice. What the dude recognized innately was this attitudinal, elemental kinship between us, who could not have had more absurdly different abilities, interests, and approaches to the world.

I was a dreamy idiot who breathed with his mouth open and chewed on his bookmarks as he went through reams of paper in his fully doomed attempts to render convincing illustrations of various Dinosauria and aliens from major science-fiction franchises. John was a cold-eyed, piratical hooligan with a lashing-out problem to where the dude had a cobra for a tongue and two rattlesnakes for hands. We bonded over playing Duke Nukem 3D on our computers and game talk in general, and I believe my overwhelming and all-encompassing loves for interpreting data and waxing philosophical sparked in him a life-enriching interest in these things, he who before me had spent his days mostly coming up with ways to vandalize as many things as possible and assert dominance through various mediums.

It was up to the dude to teach me how to be ruthless, how to access the animal beneath the man: the entity that does not merely win fights, but ends them. He also taught me how to lie, steal, brag, confidently approach women, hide weapons on your person, and engineer mayhem, so in retrospect it seems I got much more out of the deal. These are crucial lessons that have served me all my life, either in direct application or to know them when I see them. Dude also came up with the following schoolyard game: take turns climbing the most difficult tree you and your friends can find, and if you fall off, or fall over when you jump off, your friends beat the shit out of you until you claw your way to your feet. Bonus points to everybody if it is possible to fall from the chosen tree onto the barbed wire from the top of a fence and die.

We served each other very well, I think, putting each other so radically far out of our comfort zones. I did fail him, once--overwhelmed by guilt and evidence, I confessed to chucking a raw egg from four stories up smack center onto a dude's car's roof. Imagine a large, angry man genuinely leaping from his car, on which egg has already begun cooking to the metal, and wheeling his gaze up and locking it directly onto yours. Then he comes and yells at your friend's mom, who summons you to have your face pointed at by the man, you, who had before this day never so much as dreamed of engaging in anything even resembling the crime which your friend is denying with perfectly calm, set features. I cracked perhaps harder and with more mess than the egg had. This betrayal unequivocally lacked balls, and the dude let me know it with no mercy whatsoever for my tears, as well as that only dead idiots stay to watch what happens when you lob a grenade--you chuck the bitch and motor. Since that failure I have made ample use of silence under interrogations, and avoided much self-compromise thereby. I try not to do anything wrong, but when I do, I make dead sure it will go right.

This has been my tip of the pen to my old friend, and men like him, who are so despised and misunderstood in this strange age, and my paean to the hypersigil under which our friendship bloomed in those savage, irretrievably serious days of being eight and nine years old, whose resistive power we need now more than ever--balls. Not testicles, which mean and bestow exactly nothing, but balls, which are the difference between a person who crawls away to lick themselves and nurse resentment after a beating, and a person who spits blood and rains cusses on their opponent as they're dragged away, who'll come back tomorrow to lose all over again, who doesn't run out of what they have to prove.


--JL