A quick phenomenology of the world wide web

The world wide web is the birthplace of a citadel, the citadel of a consciousness emerging out of free association.

The world wide web is an artifact of human volition whose venerated past is allowed to speak for its present.

The world wide web is an artifact of human volition the structure of which is made from numerous mathematically expressed reward systems. They function as inducements to persistent often non-conscious interaction with buttons, images, and hyperlinks, which dramatize click selection into web movement. And yet, clicks are the ground zero of marketing campaigns. The advertising landscape vastly outpaces the development of web content to the specific effect that advertisement and distraction increases the computer power it requires from you to represent its media-based plea to buy their things more than the presentation of information that satisfies the specific reasons for which you accessed the world wide web in the first place. The point is to have you distractedly follow as a Hansel or Gretel to the witch's gingerbread house the metaphor of which is meant to represent the inducement built into the target site to keep you looking at it and to satisfy a desire mined from the search words used.

And yes, that's the rub. It's flipped on its head. Content is the visible object. Search is the mechanism that facilitates access to content. And query is the imprint of interface actions, mediated by keyboard, mouse, or others within that category, which provide a trace of human contact. Contact is, supposedly, a recording of volition. But yes, and yes, because yes. Why? Yes because of the jejune reduction of the impact of volition through its representation as an electrical impulse, which makes it no different to a computer than an error related to computer or human. The only conceivable analogy would be to look at the face of a person and to see a pore upon the surface of that vision open into a waterfall through which the visible light that would occupy that part of the face poured. That is the thing. We are constructing from cues what the meaning is to us. A computer responds to data input, which satisfies the computer by being reductive to the capacity to be registered as a discreet and unambiguous register of an input. And so long as we concede in our computer-based interactions to that basic category of input as an I/O register or as a category selection built into the software interface itself we're being reductive for the sake of communicating through a computer. To say that is reductive isn't enough. We're engaged in an OCD-laced interaction with interfaces, which encourages us to improve by typing faster, clicking more accurately, and searching more effectively. And as we improve upon these activities, and to the extent that we invest in our social interactions via process-mediated communication, then we're forgetting the subtlety of co-presence, the sharing of context, and the very real, and really uncomfortable realities of getting along, or disagreeing without resorting to symbolic or other forms of violence.

So in essence, one slice of the phenomenology of world wide web is that we're becoming adept at the interface as a matter of strategic interaction with others. In a sense, the affordances of interfaces today, as noted above, have mathematically expressed rewards. We count likes, we push gaudy self-promotion in order to produce what people agree with and what's agreeable, and it's only because that's the economy of rewards built into the reductive interface of social interaction on the web. We use numeracy to assess fame. We use database search terms to address people, ideas, and things. And we simply participate as data objects for the further accumulation of data objects in a computerized pastiche of hashtags, image tags, self-presentation spaces, public diaries, phatic updates, to effect and affect trends, which have been reduced themselves to what once was called buzz but that is now simply a native component of computing itself: units of measurement, which provide a rubric for measuring word-associated trends. And finally, that trend becomes the salient feature of a person's entrance onto the world wide web: popular searches, trending now; most clicked sites, migrating to the top of a search result; items recommended based upon the interests of others looking at the same thing; shared news stories from a clearly delineated network of contacts.

Are we in the penumbra of a new consciousness? Perhaps we are. We are in the penumbra of an era that is leveraging greater and greater computing power to predict the needs of a web user. Voice recognition, search algorithms, data collection and analysis, all reflect the hopes of the marketer, the fears of the citizen, and the available strategies of computer/web users going forward.

One iteration looks like slavery. You're in your kitchen speaking out loud about what you want to prepare for dinner. The refrigerator hears this, finds a popular recipe for it, scans the RFID tags of all the available items in your kitchen and generates a list of what you need to buy, orders that from your recommended local store, which perhaps launches a drone laden with the required items, which lands upon your doorstep. Slavery requires people. Computers with sophisticated AI are not. But even the simplest of interface designs can trick people and satisfy the Turing Test. And so people readily cede to this army of processors thinking for them because they can be trusted as non-volitional programs, expressly because they aren't people with the consciousness of being held against their will to do the bidding of masters. So we'll have to take a long, hard look at the old Master-Slave dialectic and ask ourselves how this relationship has been modified through the use of anticipatory AI and huge data sets.

Moby Dick, Chapter 89: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

"Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.

"I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

"II. A Loose-Fish  is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

"But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

"First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants, --a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognized symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention to do so." (pp. 307-308)

"Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villian's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 by a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooner, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

"But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

"What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"
(pp. 309-310)

Moby Dick, Chapter 87: The Grand Armada

"Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green promonotory, known to seaman as Java Head; they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounces their claim to more solid tribute." (p. 296)

Surplus Computing Power

In a now-fateful and historical presentation in about 1980 Steve Jobs spoke quite brilliantly about computing's past and its future. He was presenting at the cusp of a personal computer revolution. In just a few years his Macintosh would transform our understanding of computing and present a challenge to the ascendancy of IBM as that company synonymous with computers.

One component of his speech stuck out and I'll paraphrase that here. He stated that advances in memory storage and computer power were enabling computers to do more than just function as computers. He spoke in vague terms how the excess power and capabilities that this power offered would transform how we relate to computers. Computing power was being applied to the computation of a user interface. He had seen it at Xerox Parc and he was putting this into his vision for personal computing, the graphical user interface.

Yes, this would transform the computer. Sadly it didn't become a nigh-ubiquitous phenomenon until Bill Gates implemented the same thing into the native operating system on all the IBM-clones being shipped worldwide in the mid-1990s. But the vision was there. In fact, mining Jobs' old speeches is like cherry-picking, with the wisdom of hindsight just how much Jobs had gotten right because of his influence on the development trajectory of computers toward clunky text-based interfaces and arcane computer language interactions with file systems to the all visual, mouse-enabled environment that we appreciate today. And all of this was riding on the back of the excess computing power that was now housed within consumer-grade computers.

Now I only speak of this because a curious relationship occurred, which only drove the computer power curve toward exponentially more and more powerful processors and greater banks of memory. And that is the software and its increasingly complex and powerful demands that it placed upon the computer's processor and memory capacity. I write this at the end of 2014, hardly a remarkable moment in the history of the personal computer. Namely, this is because people are beginning to abandon the desktop computing environment for the mobile and gestural world of smartphones and tablets, what some aptly call 'internet appliances.' And they are named rightly so because they follow more egregiously the market model for computing devices. The future promises more powerful devices and, by-god, the software and, now, the net creates increasingly sophisticated environments to demand greater and greater amounts of power from those devices in order to push that future as an inevitability. And so be it, if I choose to run Windows 98 on a pre-Pentium computer, well, I can kiss internet access goodbye unless I'm reading monochrome listserv information belching vertically across my screen as if it were the pre-internet days of dial-up BBS-ing.

And here I stand, goaded by increasingly complex graphics, and a more information intensive web for which I need an increasingly complex computer to view. And I say this because the most egregious example of this in my life came from my Yahoo mail, which has tastefully rendered snowfall trickling across my mail to indicate that, yes, it's the holiday, and yes, those two have been welded together by a deep cultural association. But I don't need snowfall to remind myself that it's Christmas. Yahoo could have just as easily employed the skills of a designer to come up with a compatible color scheme for the holidays. But no, no, Yahoo had to render snowfall across my e-mail to tax the computing power of my computer.

Smooth functionality is such an important aspect of the computer user's experience. Wait times, load times, choppy scrolling, and jumpy cursors are the stuff of a computer user's frustration. And a world wide web of content produced under the auspices of media company's carefully contained  "ranch land" conspires to force my old mule into retirement by being too far behind Gordon Moore's technological curve.

Surplus Life

Statistics tell us that average lifespans in the developed world in 1820 stood at about 35 years of age. By 1900, average life expectancy had climbed to the late 40s. By 1955 it had reached into the upper 60s. And now, average life expectancy hovers at around 80 years of age.

This kind of data shows that humans historically lived under greater environmental stress, infection, and food insecurity. By the late 1800s petroleum had expanded materials applications and provided energy for electricity and transportation. By mid-twentieth century a revolution in chemistry had allowed petroleum to be the building block for any number of exotic chemicals used to feed crops and to kill bugs and weeds while petroleum powered the machines that applied them. At that point one resource was both a building block for the expanding application of synthetic materials and the primary means of locally utilized energy storage. This protean substance, petroleum, could power an automobile as well as constitute its building components. Applied to the various problems of feeding, housing, clothing, and medically treating humanity petroleum enhanced human health and life span. Any application of the harnessed energy of petroleum beyond this became merely a form of its worship coordinated by the centralized hierarchies that it enabled.

In a short period of time cheap energy made possible the smooth transportation of goods and waste disposal that supported a mass consumer society, which is itself an inverted psyche. Consumerism is a bubble of clean and healthy living that renders virtually opaque the mechanisms making it possible and their cost, that is, until ecology and environmentalism raked the muck. In a sense, it was an engine of fantasy that continually hid the realities that made it possible: branding, distribution, production, and resource extraction. This mystification is a centralized component of an aloof style of leisure living attuned to one's things more than to a world around oneself. At this point humans could live in a relationship as consumers with industries that produced consumer goods. Advertising promoted the identity of a consumer as a child in a dreamland of choice. Advertising achieved this by branding the memory of consumers, leaving them to stitch together a past through the consumer objects that it had promoted to them. Each object functioned as a fetish for various adolescent fantasies. This consumption model marked the end of freedom. Consumers now had choice. Cheap energy brought with it an intense consolidation of power, which became the trademark of modernity from the child's joystick to the president's launch button. Cheap energy makes humans no longer hunters and gatherers but consumers of the planet itself. Cheap energy allows a person and that person's society to leverage a power far greater than ever conceived over far greater of a world than ever imagined. That gallon of gas and that tempered glass allows even the least of us to fulfill the dreams of a Babylonian king. Modernity's foundation is petroleum. And petroleum is a proxy for the cheap and ubiquitously available energy source upon which it is founded. More importantly, this would be a first real departure from abject human labor trained under ideologies that affirm its necessity. But while narratives to feed the subjectivities of the enslaved take effort, the threat of harm and death upholding this lopsided social organization made the "cheap energy" of slavery inefficient by comparison to oil and the combustion engine.

The ability to unlock the energy in long chains of petroleum molecules is a type of praxis or knowledge in practice. Furthermore, we can consider praxis in the Sartrean sense of 'the negation of negation,' which perhaps better characterizes the types of knowledge in practice that we're discussing. These are the activities and the underlying knowledge for pushing back against environmental constraints and stressors that effectively disrupt a tranquil existence with the exigent need to address them. To characterize: a window in a home expresses a desire to be both in the world and to guard against its vicissitudes. A person may open or close that window to avoid facing negative weather conditions or to let in pleasant ones. That being said, without the material presence of petroleum, human praxis would fall back to any number of simpler energy sources, such as wood, grass, dung, and slave/animal labor. This hypothetical fall-back presupposes that no readily available source of energy remains for the using other than that which readily regenerates, either from the forest, from the plain, from the farm, or from the womb. Presuming this is the abject backdrop existing just behind the surface of our petroleum-based reality shows that the moral enlightenment characterized by the consumption motifs of our consumer society is simply window dressing to a greater concern writ in economic terms. Human society is an expression of the application of organizational complexity to address both the need to regulate an environment for people and to manage the subsequent effects of bringing people together in the artificial densities required to sustain the organizational complexity that manages societal reality. The term artificial densities' is an important consideration because, like the petroleum glut that allows modernity to hum along unperturbed, complex human organizations and the energy required to maintain them as coherent systems are artificial creations that exist within margins framed by negating conditions. In other words, complex organization and cheap energy are two manifestations of artificiality. Their artifice is that of  being a way to mediate a harsher reality, one with more present dangers, more risk, and less consistency.

Complex society and energy are two material features of humanity. They feature prominently in the constitution of any civilization. As noted above, the abundance of cheap energy allows for a greater complexity and diversity of human societies. Without this source of energy the society that existed because of it disappears.

But let us begin to think of these aspects of modernity and of complex society that mark the workings of historical civilizations as a dream sequence, a special condition of human thinking and acting that is inwardly focused, which mystifies the grand design as well as the hierarchy that administers it. The layering of specialized roles, habits of work and thought, and niches of specialized praxis often bear directly upon the maintenance of this artificial system. On the whole, they don't reflect that selfish praxis of self-survival. The praxis that allowed humanity to directly interface with a recalcitrant world and to come to terms with the costs and benefits of this activity, which became the basis for modifications of this praxis, new rules for its application, and the hopefully, subsequent prosperity of those who practiced it is the ground level of what one would call culture. In those present situations under those exigent conditions where it is practiced is survival. And the force relations between the motives of people and a recalcitrant world to be motivated effected a moral narrative about both the costs of wish fulfillment and the painful necessities of comfortable living. Culture is a time-oriented praxis in that it has one foot in a ritualized memorialization of the past in order that it may find continuity with a future. The brute present becomes, at best, merely a stagehand to the 'performance' of culture for the sake of existential continuity, i.e., survival. So, a well-oiled, a well-practiced use of knowledge, attendant tools, body postures, and clearly demarcated beginnings and ends to action effectively mediate one's relationship to a world, which is both a bane to one's mental sense of security and a boon for the methods employed to counteract these threats. While a world out there presents itself as capricious and often threatening weather patterns it offers signs, preludes to their occurrence. Furthermore, the very materials used to fend off these environmental assaults are freely available in this environment.

At this moment, let me stop speaking in abstract language to address a phenomenon that we all have experienced, hesitance. What keeps a person from working on a car or committing to riding a bike more often? Hesitance. One character of this hesitance is a threat of failure or of struggle. To the bike rider, purchasing the right bike and more importantly shifting one's perception of the effort needed to pedal places and navigate traffic effectively are a component of overcoming this hesitancy and finding agency. The same can go for working on a car. If one has successfully completed a task while working on a car one is more likely to continue working on that car if required. Often, the only barrier to action is a sense of frustration or impotency in the face of a problem that should be addressed but the path to addressing remains unknown. It begins as a mental block and is overcome as a mental process. But the one difference between these two activities and surviving a blizzard is the sense of imminent danger in the latter. But in modernity, the new problems that spawn are of a type familiar to the person struggling to survive. Each must frame the problem as surmountable, each must begin to take steps to surmount it, and each must learn a course of action to take when future similar problems occur. The outcome of this is a means of mediating crisis and managing change. Mediation is an important mental condition where one has a sense of agency because one knows how to perform tasks to address what ever change or crisis befalls one.

I could go down this rabbit hole indefinitely, but I do consider that these activities that we categorize under 'survival' or 'system maintenance' are universal. All of humanity does its own version of this continuously throughout its life. And life, life is yet another coincidence of environment, which is the persistent companion of this mind. The abject description of human activity as a process of survival is to show that awareness of one's existence is a preserve carved out of the time afforded by applying one's praxis in ways to stave off the existential threats. That is the animal description in us all, that mammalian desire to exist, to ambulate, to procreate, and to achieve homeostatic conditions. Like animals, we make homes. Like animals, we commingle our urogenital openings to exchange genetic material. Like animals, we are born, develop, age, and die. This haunted symbolic world we use to describe these things, to categorize them, to make sense of them is the praxis of an overbuilt mind. It must chatter along, gnashing and gnawing eternally like the rodent's incisors. Humanity walks about the world with a potential bomb on its shoulders.

Existential threats

The relationship between people and things reflects the nature of human thinking. The overemphasis of boundaries, the differences, between things is what distinguish them. But that overemphasis is in some ways a vital attempt at staving off the asphyxiation of one meaning or its obverse twin, no meaning. And in the final summation, that's the only meaning: one, none. The work of humans, as creative beings, is to split the one into opposing wholes while using the none as a boundary condition for a system of signs that, for all intents, represent a world out there. And we use a system of signs as an outward facing element of the simulation of reality. The fatal linchpin is that the simulation is the reality. The physical contours of this simulation are the coordinating elements between symbol and matter. For instance, our symbol system has a spoken component with an alphabet that represents all the discrete sounds occurring in a vocabulary. This alphabet is both an artifact of symbol making and speaking as it is a tool for transmitting speech through time as well as providing the symbolic means for initiates to form a reality through engagement with self, other, and world. In some realms of this symbolic mediation, the material conditions of its deployment effectively perform a specific relationship between user and world. The ones in particular that I am most concerned with are the senses of well-being and normalcy. When threats to these senses occur both the weakness of the simulation and its defense reveal themselves. While threats to well-being and normalcy hardly constitute existence they represent some broad aspects of one's preferences in one's existence. When the person, detached from the actual event considers the threat an imminent and existential threat, this person reacts in an absolute manner. For example, amidst the 2008 financial crisis resulting in the 'Great Recession' several people, facing the loss of their savings or some other financial means, reacted by committing suicide or killing their families and pets and then killing themselves. Imagine for a moment a man, facing the imminent loss of his house, his car, and virtually all of his leisure activity dressing up in a Santa costume, gunning down his family, and then turning the gun on himself. Consider a man in a Florida movie theater escalating an argument with another man about his cellular phone use in the theater finishing it with a gun. These outstanding, and rare, examples point to the very fragile realities through which people make fateful decisions. Killing a man who interrupts your movie experience or mass murdering your whole family over a severe financial hardship demonstrate how people can ante it all over a perceived existential threat.

A threat to a way of life is often, in fact, not much of a thing at all. At most it can be a disruption in a routine of actions, which substantiate the normalcy one experiences. Some aspects of an existence that are no longer used does not constitute a loss of existence entirely but merely a change in existence. Intersections between life activities and market-provided commodity applications occur all over in a modern world. Water, food, and fuel are broad categories, which entail countless applications that affect the way we experience ourselves and the world. The ability to infinitely change components of how one experiences a life is the gift that human praxis brings. The changes can lead to pleasant experiences or terror, but to the extent that the body remains intact, fed, and shielded from the elements is a basic, a modicum of living, which counts as an existence. One could imagine that it is out of this kind of experience that modern humanity emerged, and it was on the shared ties of a community that knowledge and practice were passed down for millennia until now. But now is no different in essence just in kind--we have avatars of the past to teach us: institutions.

Occult Vision

That our memories are tied to sensory information and specifically that sensory information issuing from the eyes requires us to be wary of an oppression of the slightest nature. It is the connective tissue of oppression itself. Our memories, where they are tied to images and events seen in the past constitute facts, held in one's mind about a condition of the self, others around it, and the world it inhabits. That fact forms a foundation for a now, partially existing out of its present condition due to the load capacity of time for information processing. That information, itself, is photons of light registering on the retina, processed by the optic nerve, and shuffled to the back of a brain whose very world and body model has been flipped to interface with the raw signal of the world seen through the eye's lens. The light that passes through this lens reflects upon a ruddy bottom to a muddy puddle, turned by the puddle's surface upside down. Our's is an electric, sensory experience that accumulates over time, which is oriented toward time. And that time can be distilled into so many vignettes of vision and understanding occurring upon the occult facet of this viscous puddle, the eye. In those instances when we form lasting memories from the mute moments of vision we fall victim to its occult manipulations. They are present in a metaphor for vision, which frames it as an unvarnished fact. This metaphor functions as an interface between fact and vision, which constitutes a way of remembering through seeing. Consequently, this metaphor informs how people collect facts by demanding evidence that must be seen. This metaphor allows vision for the sake of knowing and knowing for the sake of vision.

To the extent that our vision constitutes a past and from that past we cobble together historically genuine states of existence, then those who are so privvy to have access to this vision have control over the remembrances collected by vision, the opinions formed about them, and the actions taken because of them. Consciousness, as is on display in these words scrolling before the fingers orchestrating it is such a sliver of the full and incoherent 'mass'  of brain. Consciousness is an epiphenomen to nerve impulses occurring for the sake of themselves seemingly coordinated by a centralizing category called a self, which becomes occult as it exist as the persistent and dynamic features of the co-presence of a self and its sensations over time.

Vision, which serves for memory, can be manipulated in a way that allows power to, first, assert itself as reality, and in doing so co-opt that sensory metaphor for truth, that is, existence beyond the motives of mere mortals. If this is occurring then we are being manipulated. The mind is an enfolding of possible cellular physics. In its doing it creates, then conquers, a fourth, non-sensory realm: time. Time exists to us in so many metaphors, most of which revolve around a circle symmetrically divided, or in its digital protege, the possibility of four numbers bisected in twos by a colon.
Occult vision is the manipulation of that sense to set up conditions for reality favorable to those through which a form of power can operate. Namely, power functions interstitially as a binding and bounding condition of reality through which people can experience an existence. Power imprints the behavior of subjects by persistently tethering them to obligations to that power. These obligations emerge from a relationship established in the past that requires the subject to honor conditions at a future place and time. Institutionalized behaviors as essential as language, mathematics, and identity are at once synthetic to the world yet essential to the humans who propagate them. They have contexts in which they are developed, applied, or simply expressed, and these characterize the coincidence of an existent world and the realities by which each of us leads lives within that world.

Consciousness is, itself, the occult category of an invasion. It exists as a property and category of mentation. It occupies the notions of a beginning and an end. It asserts the total frame required for the sandbox of imagination. Its obverse, infinity, mystifies ordering principles, placing them within the occult category of gods and creation. Mind, self, and vision are the old slave hooks, tethering the matter of a self with a something-that-matters narrative by which it operates.

Moby Dick, Chapter 81: The Pequod Meets the Virgin

"As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

"'A nice spot,' cried Flask; 'just let me prick him there once.'

"'Avast!' cried Starbuck, 'there's no need of that!'

"But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale." (pp. 280-281)

Flower Children

"Man lived in active partnership with plants and animals for whole geological periods before he fabricated machines. His mental involvement with the world of life began with the consciousness of his own existence. Many of his basic qualities he shares with other animals: prolonged sexual pairing and nurturing the young, social companionship and erotic delight, playfulness and joy. His deep love of life was fostered by finding himself in an environment prepared, not merely to maintain life with the requisite amount of physical nourishment, but to promote its unceasing self-transformation. On these matters, even the simplest organisms have something to teach us beyond the range of our most sophisticated technology. If we were dependent for our instructions and our material sustenance upon machines alone, the human race would long ago have died of malnutrition, boredom, and hopeless despair." (pp. 380-381)

"Long before man himself became conscious of beauty and desirous of cultivating it, beauty existed in an endless variety of forms in the flowering plants; and man's own nature was progressively altered, with his increasing sensitiveness to sight and touch and odor, through his further symbolic expression of beautiful form in his ornaments, his cosmetics, his costume, his painted and graven images: all by-products of his enriched social and sexual life. In this sense, we are all 'flower children.'

"For at least twelve thousand years, possibly far longer, man's existence has depended upon the close symbiotic partnership between man and plants, rooted in thousands of small village communities spread over the entire earth. All the higher achievements of civilization have rested on this partnership, one devoted to the constructive improvement of the habitat and the loving and knowing care of plants: their selection, their nurture, their breeding, their enjoyment, in a routine of life that punctuated and heightened the delights of human sexuality." (pp. 381-382)

From Lewis Mumford's the Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power

Moby Dick, Chapter 65: The Whale as a Dish

"That moral man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it." (p. 238)

"It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feegee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate'-de-foie-gras.

"But Stubb, he eats his whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and englightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens." (pp. 240-241)

Moby Dick, Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

"On Town-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation." (p. 218)

WAR!

WAR!

War turns aspirations into sucking chest wounds.

WAR!