to be or not to be

A book about disciplinary power situates it in the habits that state institutions drilled into the denizens. To be a state is to act according to the habits drilled in you by the state. The hearts and minds come later; they're epiphenomenal. What one can do is act, and act without really understanding the philosophy of that act. It's meaning, be it ultimate or not, comes later, an after-effect.

To act is to be. Some acts conjure into existence things that others do not want to exist. I speak my mind. I act on my feelings. These conjure something into being, a subjectivity that threatens the subjectivity of others. It's all in the mind, but the acts are where we find the only real stuff.

Perhaps I place too much truck in this activity. I trust that drilling habits makes power automatic in the political body. If some act in ways that seem to flout their respect for others, their exclusive relations with others, and their relationship to the object of their actions is that real?

Is it real? Does acting, even if it's a performance, conjure up the very relationship to which it elides? Yes. Does this performance, this act, have an effect if someone dances dirty with someone who isn't one's partner. That is trickier to diagnose. Swingers are older couples, couple who are so deeply ingrained in their habits with each other that no matter of performance, no matter how real, no matter how deep cannot shake that habit.

Love is drug abuse. Love is a habit that one cannot shake. Love engages those same neural structures that reinforce habit, to engage in it again and again.

Love is a poverty of creativity. Over time, love frames our vision, our relationship with a significant other becomes a paradigm that is hard to break. To do so requires a revolution. History of public dissent shows how quickly, once the discontent piles up, that a simple act of sitting down, rallying, or petitioning can raise the consciousness of a group. But I'm talking about couples, dyads, not masses.

We interact with ourselves through our bodies, our eyes, our ears. If we can conjure up an alternative version of ourselves, which is nevertheless real, we drive a wedge between our current habit-filled, banal situation and a scary, unforeseen possible future, one that perhaps disavows the past and those people who populate it.

How do we guard ourselves? It's a matter of attitude. If you can play along in the careless joy of simulation, play-acting, performance, and you're ok with it, perhaps you can get dirty with the wives of your friends in a drunken yet consensual act and walk away. But this, like that simple real act, can plant a seed in that network of habits. To call the effect a cascade is too metaphorical. The stuff of nerves is real, electric, and mathematical-geometric in organization. When we play-act we're only trying to fool ourselves; it's how we transgress the seemingly stable networks briefly without believing ourselves nor convincing others that we have transgressed.

Why is self-reflexivity viral? Perhaps our view of the virus is merely a metaphor for considering our own displacement, externalization from the nature of things through self-reflexivity. The virus is a stunning simplicity, a zero condition from which all else is measured. The virus is not self-replicating, yet it contains its code and knows how to pirate the production facilities of foreign cells in order to sustain itself. Ideas, are they self-replicating? They emerge out of something and they spread like a virus. Their ability to infect is yet another metaphor. A virus is a prior condition for life: motive without means. It reveals life as an aggressor. Life must take in order to sustain itself. The virus, it is a transgressor.

Perhaps thinking, and thinking as such, taps us into this deep stream. It's probably an incidental feature, something made possible by the nature of neural organization only because it was a path of least resistance.

Thinking's substance is the world around us. Acting's props are the world around us. This substance and these props can be people, things, and ideas already in circulation. Cognition isn't a centralized activity. Cognition is displaced into the scene. Knowledge and wisdom are in the world; it's a source of endless wonder, and how we choose to relate to it bears upon us.

So if the stuff of thinking and acting is out there, when we choose to do what out there affords us to do, is that real? Does it have a motive? If one chooses to swap partners because that possibility is there, is that motive or merely opportunity? What goads this? Is it merely insecurity or lack of creativity that keeps us from acting upon it? That's a very tricky situation. The phenomenal existence of cheating is in the presence of situations that afford this action. But these opportunities usually go untapped. But they're there. Are we any better to break from our habits to act? Are we any more in control if we do so?

Perhaps control is a precarious balance of habit and innovation and a burgeoning propriety about how to manage this. The habits of mind, body, mouth, and social relations are how we build ourselves. Extracting ourselves from that social setting changes us. Trying so very hard to maintain those is about trying so very hard to keep these neurons pulsing. Strange that our minds become so beholden to their networks, so that we must try very hard to sustain the ties in the world that correspond to them. Keeping a lover is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that relationship. Keeping a network of friends is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that network.

So our mind, in all its resplendent complexity, is a hard habit to break. Our relations, our attitudes, our habits, our actions reflect upon this interaction between some sub-set of our mind and itself and and this mind as constructed and the world that conspired, incidentally, in its creation.

love is like drug abuse

Love is like drug abuse.

Like drugs, love is expensive, but it makes you feel good.

You develop a tolerance, but you don't know when you crossed that threshold.

You lose track of time, but don't mind as long as you're under its effects.

You lose control, but having chosen your means of losing it you rationalize that you're in control.

It makes you paranoid, and you develop irrational thinking patterns.

You become utterly dependent, and your attempts to quit the habit require a belligerent attitude that vacillates between hatred, contempt, indifference, affection, concern, murder, and suicide.

Love, like drug abuse, focuses your attention incessantly and obsessively on the topic. And so you seek out forums for people suffering like you, and so you share, and share alike in a vast community of like-minded sufferers.

But I can't seek treatment for love abuse.

a life in tatters

Why?

Why is experiencing life's strangeness so shocking? Why do I live in a bubble? Why can't I love without passing through a zone of obsessive, irrational, and violent possessiveness? Why do I lose my head? Why am I so sad?

Why am I so naive to believe that I know my friends. Why are my feelings terrifying to others when my actions are so benign? Why do I feel as if I hardly know any of my friends? Why do their actions shock me? Why do I maintain this naivete about who they are?

Why do I let this bother me? Why is my empathy some kind of invasive vine that spreads all over my relations?

I know why they call it a nervous system? I'm systematically made nervous by what I witness.

to have seen too much

To quote Roy Batty, "I have seen things..."

Some things should not be seen.

To watch a party that starts out with drink end with the oddest scenes of simulated sex behavior is one such example. When these are your friends, your close allies, the people with whom you share your deepest, oddest, strangest feelings the juxtaposition is too much. I can't stand seeing a woman, a woman I achingly and awkwardly fell for, dance with a friend who likes to press my buttons.

Marital aids.

I witnessed marital aids in action. I am disqualified from being one. I truly am. I cannot be a marital aid. I can't get nude for the sake of some oddly simulated performance. I can't bracket the experience. It's all too real to me. I can't shake the simulation. It passes for my reality. I have no frame from which to gain perspective. I'm swimming in it. This happened before, and it never happened again. It was my birthday. I had turned 32. I danced with this same woman, the woman dancing with the button-pusher. It was, at that point, the most erotic experience I've had in some time. It was real to me, all too real. I extracted myself like a fussy baby. I lost the nerve. I was disqualified then. The same players were involved then as now, but this time I was benched, on the sidelines a spectator upon this sexual sport.

I've seen things, things, which make sense now, but needed time to settle in. I am a friend. I am part of a network of friends, most of whom can play these odd sexual games with little to no side-effect. I'm a walking, prancing, waltzing, lancing boil of a side-effect. I'm a product of these relations upon which I have little to no effect, other than negative. As I said, I was disqualified from being any more a marital aid. She said she loved me once. Squeezed me, she did. Pulled me into her arms, she did. Told me she loved me, she did. Said it was an inevitability, she did. I was thrown headlong into a dream, a dream come true. Immediately aroused, squeezing her close, I did. Share my feelings, I did. Lost oh so lost in a dream I was. Scared and clawing at her I was. Trying so hard to get close I was. Trying in a fractured, distorted, terrified, attempt at sharing I was, my feelings. Scared her away I did. Disqualified I was. Left in the dark again I am. Forever in the dark, unable to make sense of it all objectively, rationally, to put it away, this ocean of feeling opened up. She opened it. She grew scared of the consequences, that lack of cartoonish simulation, that lack of performance, the unmitigated love, fear, hate, sorrow, longing with which I rushed at her. She shut me out. I've been out. I've been so terribly, terribly shunned, shuttered, discarded, disqualified, feared, made into some kind of monster.

I am a monster merely for sharing my heart, my moody, possessive, absolute, desiring heart. She wanted none of it.

There, with my heart laid bare, sitting in a chair, watching her getting her ass fingered by the button-pusher. I spoke plainly in a sudden epiphany, "I got it," meaning it made sense now. The button pusher, and my other friends at this evening gathering were marital aids. She got her fill. She got her titillation. She put on her show. She had her fun. I could only watch, uncomfortably, as she was groped as she danced. And she never looked at me once. I wasn't there. I shouldn't be there. I've seen too much.

symbol of transcendence, system of mediocrity

I wanted to share this picture. It’s been the stock banner that has accompanied any official or marketing-related messages from the u. of bird rising from the ashes.

He’s a human archetype—a median of racial morphologies--a Jungian phantasm.

His suit is fitting for an open coffin viewing. His face has a smearing of confidence with a heavy helping of mediocrity's bosom thrown in. He’s the last guy you could imagine having wild sex let alone going nuts and stabbing a neighbor. No, he’s a teacher at the university of bird rising from the ashes—the ashes of a now-extinguished cigarette. He’s worked his way up in corporate America by kissing ass. Now he’s ready to share all that he knows about business with students the world round. He’s a teacher at the university of the bird rising from the ashes.

He’s never had a drink. He only had a coffee once when he had to work that long stretch to cover up for his boss’ blunders. He comes home and watches several television shows while eating a meal the recipe for which accompanied the crockpot in which it was cooked. He has a small dog with a skin rash. It’s teeth chatter as it bites at tangle of fur, dried saliva, and the orange paste of its body’s immune response oozing out. When he takes off his suit and puts on a pair of elastic waistband denim jeans, he’s ready to teach for the next 4 hours at the university of bird rising from the ashes of a long-extinguished dream. He's saving the money he's making teaching part time for his own dream--a larger TV and a cozier couch. His 401k safely continues its monetary mitosis, accreting into a larger and larger sum.

And, drowsy from a long day of perfectly contented labor, our protagonist from the banner undresses from his elastic waistband denim jeans, slips into a pair of pajamas that his mother had given to him in a past Christmas. He takes a few pills for ailments that only his doctor could detect, and descends into a dream. The contents of his dream are nothing, a nothing fueled by tonight’s chicken-rice-tomato sauce casserole. He's maintaining a body destined to become the boat's ballast. This guy's no rocker.

Nothing risen, nothing gained, nothing learned our organic intellectual, the man with heaps of practical skills, teaches like his boss bosses him--by the book. There's no room for creativity, no room for real thinking. No, the students perform to carefully pre-determined measures. That's the only hold on education's reality this man has. He teaches according to the class program laid before him, and for that he is duly compensated to the tune of $800 extra dollars every five weeks. He'll have that TV and couch by Christmas.

And so our protagonist from the banner of the university of the bird rising from the ashes continues to plan, to dream about a future with one minor gain. Slowly he accumulates things as part of his conquest of lack.

my cat boojie

I had a cat. Her name was Boojie. She was an orange tabby. She lived to be very old, too old for her own good. This was my aunt’s assessment. I was content to place a chair between her and the sink, so that she could continue to drink from the tap. She was a creature of habit. So was I. And so I kept her alive much longer than her body could permit to maintain that lie that we both perpetrated as creatures of habit. Death is a fairy tail. Let us believe that we go about our routine, continue in our habits, but one day silently we fade into the slumber of death. Not so.

The day my aunt and uncle came to pick me and Boojie up, it was time to send my cat, unwillingly into her long night. I fed her a can of wet food. I fancied her feast a last meal. While she had not chosen it herself, she obligingly gorged it down. It would be the first to come up when the veterinarian gave her a fatal dose of anesthetic.

My aunt accompanied me as we entered the room. My cat, being the grouchy feline she was, hissed and growled. Her hair was matted from her own inability to groom. She was 19 at the time. I was 20. We were two companions, one old, one still young, who shared a lifeline for a long time. I was unwilling to leave her at the fork in the road. My aunt helped me to realize that I had to make that turn and leave Boojie behind. Her rationale was brutally pragmatic. If the cat cannot take care of itself, then it's time; that’s the rationale of automatons. When the clock no longer tells time it must be disposed. There is no chance of making it a relic, a collector’s item, a souvenir—something with historicity. Bodies are best left to rot, to give their elements back to the soil and the air. Decay is the youngest form of life; it is the context for birth. Cat’s aren’t clocks, but I could fit my own mysticism within my aunt’s pragmatic cosmology.

The veterinarian did a simple check and determined that Boojie’s kidneys were small and atrophied. Likely my cat’s inability to filter her blood would lead to a slower and perhaps more macabre demise. The anesthetic would be a swift and humane departure. The veterinarian injected Boojie. Immediately she fought back. Since I was holding her, she did what any vicious feline does when disturbed. With all her might she dug into my arm with her front paws and used her back paws to kick and dig into my arm. Growling, scratching, and biting she registered her discontent in the flesh of my arm. Then the anesthetic took effect.

She growled slowly and began to violently empty the contents of her stomach. The reverse peristaltic reaction rendered her lithe cat frame a visible example of digestion. Over and over, her body undulated to the wave of peristaltic spasm and her last meal came forth. Then she began to quiver and shake violently with vomit smeared across her face. At that point Boojie was no longer my cat.

To see a cat in its final throws of life is shocking and violent. My once graceful companion teetered on oblivion and acted as if she were a mannequin with a few of its strings tangled up. Its movements were base, less orchestrated. In this state I knew that life wasn’t fragile. No, life is a monstrosity. Its desire to live extends so far as to kill in order to survive. My cat, after all, was a predator. I probably had eaten some meat, the product of an industry of genocide that slaughters and processes millions of living organisms hourly. My cat’s body at that point was an obscenity; it rendered that poetic vision of life a farce. It revealed the moody and rank interior of life’s violent force. The graceful ballet of a cat in play was stripped away, first slowly by infirmity, and stripped altogether more violently by the vet’s needle. I realize that dying is hard for all of us. What’s even harder is to see the body of a loved one become an inarticulate mass of decay, a writhing spasm of muscle twitching and nervous activity. The final sparks of life are much like a clock that is losing time. What once made the living organism sensible was its carefully choreographed routine, a life in the dance of survival. Removing its ability to perform that dance renders the body a less sensible and perverse version of its former self. Our minds must adjust, but the initial encounter is shocking, utterly shocking. I killed my cat.

Boojie held on after her strings were cut. She lay there, almost as if asleep. The veterinarian probed her body with her stethoscope. “Her little heart won’t give up.” The monster still pulsed. Life sparked on indifferent to the blow the organism had received. With gross motor activity ended and a brain perhaps slowly being starved of oxygen, her weak pulse, a creature of its own habit, continued on. The vet injected more anesthetic into her, and brought all life to an end.

relics

Our bodies are relics from a long-forgotten past. There's an ocean inside us all. We've trained ourselves to listen to that inner voice, but a language older than words motivates our bodies. The neuron is a new-comer onto the scene. Its reflexive orchestration is even newer. Consciousness, situated in a self is even newer than this. Yet we continue to chase the voice, our god, do its bidding. It's the riddle of steel. The bidding of ideas is stronger than any metal. People sacrifice for an abstract agglomeration of colors and shapes. If it's a flag it signifies ideas grander in scope than we could ever possibly experience. Yet we continue to believe that we're free. We continue to believe that our destinies lie before us as a rational goal.

The logic of mass is stronger. The logic of bodies is longer. The logic of the ocean is older. It waves crash upon our inner sea its contents are a slow achievement of eons of molecular arrangements. To consider how exterior we are to ourselves is alienating. Yet we are but a shoal, a coral reef upon this ocean of time. The logic of life which belongs to us isn't divine. It's an alchemy of luck and the persistence of chemical bonds. They find the short distance. They find the path of least resistance. Yet there's no motive to the chemical. There's no motive to the atom. It has properties that function within and in accordance to our physical universe. Purely alien in all regards are the constituent elements of our bodies, of all things, to our ideas. Yet we follow the inner voice, not the crash of waves from the inner ocean upon our reef. We continue to live out a logic that is alien to itself. Simulation is a sine qua non of our reality. It is an inescapable logic of using symbolic representation. Words are but an outgrowth of our inner world picture.

We are, as I said, relics from a long forgotten time. While the years separate us from our moment of departure we are still here at the departure gate. We have not left that time. Our bodies have a historicity much older than any human culture. Our bodies speak of a world of purely exterior relations. Nothing is defined by anything else. That's a fiction that we must rely upon to use our vocabulary. It's our concession to simulation. The real is but a constrained truth that we maintain to recognize the purely happenstance way that our speech and our symbols, our inner world, relates to its exterior.

As I said we are relics from a long forgotten time. There's an ocean inside us all.