Urge to Purge: Karlos Basak Omnibust – Batch 10

Excerpt from 0022-Ageism-the future revolutionary struggle (2010)

Don’t fight to instantiate new laws. Fight the idea of laws to begin with! Laws are constants that slow down the vitality of the young. Your metabolism is too fast for the laws of the elder that want everything modified and slowed down to their pace… to their turf! The artificial fakery, their entrenched beliefs will begin to grow in you if you let the idea of laws to be some sort of end goal. Don’t let your desires be channeled by those who have a fading ability to desire at all!

Why is your life being planned out by those who have less life left to live than you? Why is the path they are putting you on the very one that they lament being placed on? Co-workers of all ages from their 20s to their 60s hate working and avoid working all they can, yet they all seem to see no alternatives… they’ve gotten too old to see alternatives, they are too one tracked. De-rail your training while you still can. They aren’t you, they aren’t the youth. They are the closed. You can remain open, you can open yourself to these ideas, and you can open yourself to ones unthought of yet.

Many youth see the alternatives, they live the alternatives, but they are reprimanded when they go too far, which isn’t very far at all. A huge contradiction exists: those who dictate life aren’t themselves living, and those who potentially may be are dictated over.

They might be saying JOIN THE ESTABLISHMENT OR DIE! But if you join the establishment you will not live. You will experience yourself through a calender, through an ordered chronology. You will turn your life into a series of lists and tasks, things to get done so that you can get to yet more things to get done. Most of which are not your choosing, none of which are liberating your drives to be alive. They are a quieting, a reduction, of what you are, and of what you can become.

0018-synchronization-and-reification – The full part to The Ontology of Motion.
0018-synchronization-and-reification-outline
0019-philosophy-of-math-uinverse – Also serves a prelude to the Uinverse Series.
0020-kant-as-ontologist
0021-sorrows-of-suburbia – This from 2011 has some social critiques written out, like built in kleptomania, time claustrophobia, and language causing thingification.
0022-Ageism–the future revolutionary struggle – besides the excerpt above, will not be released in the hopes of a 2017 release in combination with other ideas to present a manifesto of sorts.
0023-novel-beginnings – A confused document from 2011, full of bits of incomplete conversations and points. A bit ashamed am I of this one, but I will post it anyways, letting the surge to purge old documents take hold.
0024-suburban-guerilla-war – abstract excerpt “The economic currents carving out the future landscape are determining what looks to me to be a fight of limited scope, by bands of limited size with limited fire power. The site(s) will be chosen by several factors, but two of the most salient are a) where people already are and b) where they can remain and survive. Cities fail at the second of these criteria for reasons discussed elsewhere, and rural areas not having many people already there, might have a relatively peaceable time. The suburbs are the main transect that fit both of these criteria, and are therefore ripe for strategizing the best way to conduct a defensive war.”
anarchists-during-the-hurricane; bill-and-the-hurricane; teacher-world– Found in the folder “2012 NOVEL PARTS, these were my first attempts at some sort of anarchist novel which would be full of long-winded discussions on strategizing and actions to disrupt civilization. The blackouts following Hurricane Sandy were a partial motivation. None of these ever reached any useful point, in my opinion.
txt-docs-methodology-of-organization-2007– This and the next several documents are “meta” documents about how I categorized and organized ideas and plans for where to put my energies and when and how to release. Let it be known that very little of these plans and systems I made actually continued and went accordingly.
txt-docs-agenda-for-organization-2007
november-2009-decision
tags-number-and-letter-coding-database – this one explains what the letters for the tags in all the ideas found in Batch 1 and Batch 2.
number-system-for-ideas-and-essays-x-variable;
number-system-for-ideas-and-essays-x-variable;
number-system-for-ideas-and-essays-without-tags-x-variable– these three documents are content-less templates for numbering the idea list in a base-4 number system. This like many other system creations I devised ended up being excessive, as I didn’t utilize the overall system much after starting full-time work, and now it has fallen out of favor for me.

PG002 – Audio – The documents below (and in to the next batch) will be extracted from projects that I was undertaking. Some political, some just personal organization of music.
pg002-a-state-of-trance-good-dance-episodes-with-rankings;
pg002-cut-up-vocal-tracks;
pg002-ipod-organization;
pg002-names-of-my-future-traxx;
pg002-trance-wishlist
pg002-asot-tracks – In 2014 I had to give up working on this document (and listening obsessively to A State of Trance to fill it out) as it was interfering with my life in a broad way. However, unlike many of the other documents, this one has borne many fruit as it has allowed me to perfect my listening time to tracks that I find worthwhile and beautiful. It is the tracking of my progress to find “gems in the desert”.

PG003-PG005
pg003-strikeagainstbaseball-flyer-2002
pg005-001-boycott-list
pg005-list-of-outsourcing-corporations

PG006-PG099 – upcoming Omnibust Batch 11

…a poem to follow shortly…

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Urge to Purge: Karlos Basak Omnibust – Batch 03

Like Batches One and Two, I omitted ideas from the documents below (from 2007-2010) that either are too sensitive or are being saved for a future writing project (essay 17 definitely fits in to the latter category, which will be one of my major wintertime philosophical introspections). Like the previous two batches, these documents have those ideas which were to be refined and combined in to a draft of an essay. Some of the essays are partly drafted (#1 – reification and materiality, #4 – philosophy of trance, #14 – mind body split, others perhaps?), and a couple are equipped with abstracts or journal submission literature.

There are still more “omnibusts” to come, a few more essays that I have to sift through and omit particular passages, and also several miscellaneous projects, and then the 150 page backlog of more recent writings of the last 2 years I might release some time in the fall.

0000 – Ideas Shelved for Future Papers
0001 – Reification and Materiality (the riddle of matter)
0002 – Subverses Introduction
0003 – fanaamenology outline
0003 – Sources for Paper
0004 – philosophy of trance, outline, and promotion
0004 – submission proposal to be part of conference panel, for a philosophy of trance, the algorhythm of the nu
0005 – alternate explanation of speeding up of time (ex-change and time)
0006 – Going deeper, making more matter
0007 – The Eternal Difference – Published here already, but here is a document regarding its promotion – 7’s other – internal inturn
0008 – No Out of Context
0009 – What is Violence (motion of bigger things, combine with ex-change and reification)
0010 – Reclaiming the Circular Argument
0011 – Origins of Reification
0012 – Realities of Fiction
0013 – Time is Money
0014 – mind body split
0015 – Hegel and Godel

0016 is not going to be released, it was a particularly confused project that I don’t want to release unless I have some time to rethink its purpose and revamp.

0017 I am saving for a possible winter time redrafting and release. This release would be very important for me and would relieve a lot of unnecessary but real tension I feel with the ideas of a few philosophers.

Essay Organization Database – this is a spreadsheet for essays I had submitted for some college classes and the first several of these initiated essays above. If this document seems unnecessary, just you wait until you look at the next one. A psychologist might have a lot of fun studying and analyzing these two, though doubtful anybody beyond that.

Ideas – Sketches Database (removed lines) – this is a lengthy spreadsheet I created to track all the ideas found in Batches 1 and 2. It certainly is OCD to an absurd level, but I remember it being useful on a couple of occasions. However it was certainly not worth the time investment I had put in to it back in my post-undegrad, pre-full-time job, life.

 

 

 

free writing fight and flighting response

Our problems are given agency, as if they are somehow ghosts that haunt us… the human mind has been so tortured, so fucked, allowed too much time to sit in it’s own shit. Too much sedentary time allows us to objectify and then subjectify aspects of our tortured selves and then personify them to be real things. Well, something deep inside me calls bullshit, and I say emphatically you CAN run away from your problems—mobility isn’t just something life does, it is the very thing that life IS (life is motion). Problems will die and atrophy, or stop being a problem, if you have time away from the spatial milieu(s) in which they originate. Flight is a form of fight! For those of you narrowed to the American historical narrative, look at George Washington’s strategy for winning the revolutionary war! Try telling the squirrel she’s better off staying where the wolves are and inventing some way other than running up a tree and to another area; try telling the birds this season they should try and overwinter instead of always flying towards the sun and away from the cold. Why would the human experience be so different that we have to face our problems? It’s true you might have the same problem if you leave one suburb for another, because suburbs will always and continue to pile up problems just like stagnant societies always have a sewage problem. Flight has been so denied to us, and always fighting is too burdensome on such weakened, malnourished creatures as we are, that just accepting the problems is cathartic and healing, radically accepting. Accepting our medication, our docilizing, accepting the loss of control, the loser status, the subaltern voiceless people we are. We can just meditate unto death, learn how to be compliant caged birds who can get the joys and live vicariously through stories that are other to us (reading books/blogs, writing a blog, watching television, plays, and other cultural constructions that are available for distraction and soothing); we can be imitate our cages and oppress other cellmates through physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse. And we can then have the experience of what are officially labeled prisons, to learn horrors that we were usually numbed and hidden from. Another route to channel our energies is that we can put on a play and force an audience to accept our role—they’ll believe our performance and we will also, because there’s no outside referent allowed through the narrow perimeter prison windows to show what life actually is. As a priest or politician, either will be fulfilling enough as long as it’s self-fulfilling. A king who rules over anybody other than himself is just a king of the small pond, no matter how large it appears to be. All are forbidden to be kings of themselves—they are coerced to dress in clothes of many fashions, including tattoos and jewelry. Public undressing is usually an act of coercion or somehow other absorbed into the culture industry Adorno’s thing about dissenters/protesters being absorbed by the totality.

Maybe this perverted mode of thinking is itself originated from perverted circumstances which deny both effective fight and flight. Perverted almost as if by an agent (perhaps agency is relative, and our lack of it does give our infrastructure some degree of it?).

Perhaps domesticated humans aren’t animals anymore, but not because we are something elevated as many stories we tell ourselves would indicate. No, animals are said to have the fight or flight response, but humans usually have neither, and just bow down and “wish it were Friday”. Looking forward to recess, or looking back to recess, because the present is so intolerable. What a social contract we have signed on to…

Edit: I’m going to babble more: Life is largely un-examined when we focus on the individual we find a narrowing of choices because we have narrowed life down to a single cell, we have chosen the part over the whole. the noun life refers to an individual human’s experiences to the negation and detriment to the wider range of life, but also so too to that individual human’s. We will never reach the experience of hell because our very ability to experience anything of great depth is constantly being compromised by the dumbing and numbing wreak of our own shit (and I’m referring to our possessions)… depression isn’t sadness, it’s the being weighed down.

it’s not the lack of feeling with depression that has people kill themselves, it’s an acute feeling of the oppression of things like depression, or like something dubbed “mania” that speaks to how life could and should be, but how it is not actually being lived. depression is adaptation through downgrading to a hopeless situation, unfortunately we’re not built and taboos don’t allow hibernation, but other animals do pretty well in handling their depression, they medicate it with sleep and a quiet vegetative state. We try to make it some metaphysical and physical thing which needs to be overcome by medical technology, but really it is just the geo-forces way of trying to balance us, but we resist balance as evidenced by so many of the things we entertain and make part of our daily lives.

Oh and I did want to say and am not sure If I did say it above, that running from problems will weaken the problem immensely, as a hostless disease, so long as your not running on the treadmill that changes scenery but not the grounding.

Our problems got to the strength and embodiment that they currently wield precisely because we haven’t run from them in the past. They’ve grown as we’ve stayed to tend their furnaces always putting ample new fuel in. Concretely, if humans did all leave the planet, and ran from this place we’ve made such a problem, the planet would surely heal our deep wounds, and wouldn’t be a problem for us when we returned. It might be more appropriate to say such a thing would be our planet running from us, making us so dissatisfied as to eject us through persuasion of ugliness.

Oh and this post I found aggravating and representative of the cliches that so anger me:

http://philosiblog.com/2013/09/11/running-away-from-your-problems-is-a-race-you-will-never-win-so-just-face-them-head-on-and-overcome-them/

notes 4 today: 2015-11-08

Title: The Sacrificial Lamb’s Parents

I felt pretty low when I first thought this—given my love for youthful innocence—but perhaps this will make me (and you) feel less horrified when seeing in the nature ¿we? love so much, the young being targeted and killed by a predator. As much as I get mad at the predator, I get mad at the parent (while simultaneously empathizing with the parent, and the previously hungry predator). However, in the larger picture that evolution provides us enmeshed in the daily struggle of our animal beings, there is a clarity to the deaths of innocent babies. Not all babies are killed, just the ones that have parents that have the unfortunate nature/nurture combination that puts them in places of bad, unprotective parenting. Perhaps the parents had too many babies to tend to, and the predator is nature’s way of stepping in and not allowing that particular “over-population gene” from over-populating through a plethora of children, weakened by the initial lack of resources because of too many mouths to feed. Perhaps the parent(s) are ostracized to the outer ring of a large herd because of some anti-social quality that they possess. This anti-social quality that would be passed down to their children by both nature/nurture channels, is now reduced or extinguished through the death of their young by a predator (or a disease, a less thought of predator).

I guess I am just trying to find some meaning in the death of those who I feel shouldn’t die, without myself resorting to some higher authority that has schemes of his own. My authority is the immanent vital universal force, of which I am just one (or several) of countless important parts. What I can’t stand for is the death of young people that aren’t being cycled into the food chain, but are done in by non-organic violence, like that of a metallic bullet or an un-evolved disease that has no place in the larger eco-system.

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Title: Of Canadian Migration

There’s a niche exploited by migrating this far north for enterprising birds who can manage the long annual commute. So too there is a niche for hibernating animals that can be extremely resourceful during the lengthy winters as well as during the waking seasons.

Humans are not internally resourceful, which has made them grasp at many many outside resources to survive these harsher environments. Their lack of foresight to survive such environments as far from the equator (and from warming climatic factors) as Canada will lead to an eventual depletion of resources. Also, possessions, including land ownership, are not marks of human freedom, but signs of bondage to a particular place that one feels a loyalty to. A loyalty to a land for whatever constructed reasons means that a person cannot be fully loyal to their own bodily needs. Humans are “digging in” and may see it as patriotic loyalty, when really it is a ditch that blinds them from seeing the horizon.

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Title: Some examples of the antithetical relations between cars and people

Speed bumps: good for people because they keep them from getting hit, but bad for the cars—suspension damage, brakes being worn, loss of momentum (gas efficiency).

Accidents: Older cars from the ’60s used to fair pretty well in accidents when they were made of more metal, but people in the accidents were a lot more likely to be seriously injured or killed because of the extra jostling. Now as people are supposedly safer in their cars (minus the fact that there are more cars causing higher likelihood of all types of accidents), the cars are taking more of the brunt as they are built to be breakable and absorb a lot more of the impact, and so the cars are more likely totaled than the people.

Increasing Automation of Cars? :As the cars become more sophisticated supposedly, there will be even worse cerebral damage as people get dumber and more aloof about spatial awareness, which will be having serious implications if it couldn’t be argued that it already has.

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Title: Old Bones Taking a Break: Ageism and The Origins of Civilization

Among one band of nomadic humans approximately 11,000 years ago, the eldest—venerated for their wisdom—had the wily thought of retirement. Such a desire coincided—or indeed was influenced by—a beautiful place that they had happened upon and that they decided was good enough to suit their needs until the end of their days. They broke the bond of eternal renewal through migration and settled in a fertile place where their devoted children and grand children stayed by their side, knowing more and more the life of a sedentary species. The privileged position went to that of the eldest who made subjects out of their own children, treating them as means to their own ends.

These people problem solved as issues arose due to this new sedentary lifestyle, and they put down vegetative roots mirroring that of their new agricultural staples. Humans playing at trees begin to overshadow the forests; we transition from valuing the living inner bark as a source of food, to valuing the dead inner wood as a source of shelter. Perversions abound over the next several thousand years, and now we know nature, and think of it as other to ourselves.

–

Desertification

Desertification (As Earth’s Subtleties Are Extincted)^L

The role that metals play in desertification could possibly be analyzed to be twofold, though more or fewer actual reasons may exist beyond the scope of the author. The first role is what has been mentioned in many places already in this essay, namely that metals in motion reduce organisms’ ability to be as dynamically involved in the environment, which might be a definition for a desert. To flesh this out a little more, consider how a lot of wind erosion on a mountain top keeps trees from growing there, but so too it could be said that a lot of trees growing there could keep down the wind erosion. Either way, the degree to which there is the homogenous motion of larger, less subtle forces—a constant drying western gale force wind that acts as one large rigid force as opposed to a light humid breeze that dances between trees in no particular direction—is the degree to which smaller more complex developments is precluded. Along with the great currents of air that are eroding subtle areas that used to be rich with plant and fungal biomass, so too are greater currents of ocean water playing a role in eroding oceanic life, especially at the coasts where it used to be the greatest. To give a galactic example: think of a galaxy where planets large asteroids, planets, and even stars are constantly colliding and causing large violent impacts whereby thermal dynamic changes are undergoing huge changes in the local contexts; these large bodies gathering elemental matter and making it act roughly uniform (think of a giant gaseous planet with little chemical complexity) will give no chance to allowing any life to endure, whether carbon based or any other type. The celestial bodies interacting are themselves, perhaps, the lifeforms; however, it is a big waste of the smaller potentials within them: the variety of chemical elements from which they have pulled by gravity into strict enslavement could make such a richer tapestry, just as a one building with LEGO blocks can make something far more interesting than one can with DUPLO blocks.

The second role that liberated metals play in contributing to desertification is the way their temperature fluctuations mimic that of a desert. Metals heat quickly with exposure to a thermal energy source, but also cool quickly when that energy source is removed (think of a pan being heated by a flame). This is the same process as goes on in a desert, whereby the sun’s thermal energy warms it during the day, but then when the sun sets the desert becomes very cool very quickly. Our particular earthly forms of life, at least, do best when under a relatively constant thermodynamic heat. This regularized temperature that our life needs is emblematic of the modalities of a life force: harmonization occurring through a common interactive vibrational level. The violent swings in temperature prevent life from spreading those deepening complex bonds because harmony is constantly being shattered/interrupted. Large concentrations of metals at the crustal surface are sure to exacerbate these swings in temperature, and so too will continue to diminish the global biomass which is so critical in regulating temperatures to foster additional layers of life.

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Notes:

LThis publication is a footnote to a larger piece I’ve been compiling, “The Liberation Of Metals” and I thought it could stand on it’s own as a post. The upcoming ”’Liberation of Metals is about the role of the large quantities of metals we’ve introduced to our crustal surface, and how these metals are destroying organic connectivity, of which this note published here was an important facet that I struggled to fit within the linear narrative stricture. There’s even more I would’ve liked to publish in here about the ramifications of human simplifying/analytic interactions with our environment, that leads to such destructions as those wrought by industrial mono-crop farming methods. There are so many other things that we engage in that I probably am so normalized to that I don’t see. We are employing such an effort to average everything into a uniformity where the peaks and valleys of vital life are smoothed into a digital conformity. The “treatment” of emotions is another such example, where the dips and dives, highs and aspirations of a mood wave are sought to be controlled, averaged out, to a constant state of looking at things from a cool distance. We are estranged from our own bodily functionings by a rolling pin of pills. The blandness of eroding cannot be tasted for the taste buds are included in the wasting away…

When Language Penetrates As An Enemy, Gibberish Combats It As An Enema: a tool to fight insomnia

Civilization generally keeps one under slept in both the total number of hours, but so too in the lack of depth to the sleep (perhaps the science would say we are not hitting those really low frequency brain waves that binaural beats can get us too?). Ambient light interferes with the perception of nighttime darkness, putting us to bed later and stealing away the darkness that was afforded our better slept (and arguably better lived) primal ancestors. Our skin isn’t thick enough—as in our eyelids—to keep out the ambient light and so we are constantly in a pre-dawn middling sleep.

However, I would argue (I do argue!) it’s not just light, and other crudely physical phenomenon that keep us from getting sleep. There is another artificial construct that is far more insidious that eastern meditators (one who meditates) are often doing battle with, and that is our symbolized thought. We baby-sitters of civilization constantly listen to auralistic inner monologues plagued by linguified thought; the eastern meditators may choose as their weapon the “om”, which I’m sure must be a very powerful tool indeed as it has stood the tests of time. However, I just want to contribute a weapon to that arsenal to combat untimely thoughts that serve to torture the pensively sleepless.

Gibberish Is Its Own Antidote: The Tailor-made Weapon To Combat Excessive Pre-Sleep Thinking

Just thinking “om”, or even saying it aloud, I find for me is usually outflanked by the onslaught of thoughts that disregard its reverberations. “Om” goes to a specific tone which is not always the stable tone at which our thought is spoken to us. The barrier it may provide I find very permeable, as well as the unceasing constancy. My thoughts dance and are combined with lots of images and emotions and other othernesses that mix together to keep me very involved, but I find I do not have to combat all of this when a need of sleep is on me. As long as I can combat the specifically interpretable lingual parts with gibberish spoken by my mind that accompanies whatever visual images I witness when my eyes close, it seems to be enough to let sleep overwhelm my writhing tense awake state body, and plunge me into the world of sleep. I can’t provide a concrete example, perhaps precisely because it is the lack of concreteness to an evolving jibberish inner monologue, that keeps it relevant to the one in want of sleep.

Up All Night Thinking: Some Thoughts of Symbolic Language

Representative language—because it is such a real falsity—is sort of unresolvable by our brains: it is a square that can’t be circled, precisely because it is trying (falsely in my opinion) to attach to something else, thus the invention of a term like reification. Language is related to the SAD (Standard American) Diet in that it gives us indigestible particulates that frustrate our brain anatomy. Thus the common utterance “I was up all night thinking”. It wasn’t what the person was thinking about that kept them up all night thinking, it was that the thinking was precisely about something, that kept them up all night, usually. Jibberish isn’t not thinking/speaking, its for once creatively using the potentials of our vocal chords and our imaginative tissues to explore some territories of experience that are usually marginalized by the dictates of symbolic language.

Deepest apologies for any grammatical mistakes I’ve made, but I be losing any sleep over it!

Rule of Thumb in King Joffrey’s Court: A Game of Thrones Extension

Cersei entered the hall with her usual escorts, and a groan escaped from her son’s mouth, as he sat atop his sword seat.

“Mother, must you interrupt justice?” he said with mock sternness. She said nothing and continued to approach him, indifferently stepping around a fresh puddle of blood and other indistinguishable bits. She was wielding a polite smile, in full view of the king now, and her guards fell back. She began to ascend the stairs while utilizing both hands to pinch her skirt so that it would not drag underneath her.

“What is it mother?” the king moaned. “I only have two more cases.”

“Cases? Are you a detective now too?” she smiled, showing genuine interest in her son’s growth as a king.

“Well mother, I have a hunch for figuring out the inner workings of my subjects, so yes I am quite an exceptional detective as I don’t need many clues, if any, not to mention that I can do all this while also judging.” He looked at his hand stretched low, pleased with himself. “But my talents are too many to list, and I would get quite winded telling you of all of them. Besides, it’s frustrating—my talents are too often wasted in the service of justice for the realm, and not often enough used for my own benefit. To that end, I have just two more cases, mother, and then I will go take care of my own interests, not have you dawdles beside me.

“Well it’s of those two cases, actually the next one really, your Grace, that I have come to discuss with you” she said courteously, in a lowered tone.

He adjusted himself to a lower tone: “I can’t be seen taking advice from you… make it fast please before the people start to notice.”

“I understand,” she said. “Your next accused is Walton Wissel of House Melcolm, and I think we’d be better to not upset any potential allies from the Vale.”

Joffrey was just going to speak when a side door clanged open and four guards, two in front and two behind, entered with a haggardly looking man. The man looked as if he weren’t aware that his surroundings had changed from the days of a solitary prison cell. Joffrey smiled.

“Ah, Ser Wissel, so nice of you to join us,” Joffrey got up from his seat. “Guards, you can leave his side, we are all friends here.” The guards stepped away and found wall spaces that were empty.

There was a nervous tension in the room that only Joffrey and Ser Wissel didn’t notice. Someone cleared their throat and Cersei looked up and swallowed, chasing away some inner thought.

Joffrey cleared his throat, “Ser Wissel, I have often been appreciative of your creative mind. As it is you are the only knight I have ever heard tale told of who has never owned armor. Your words are a real talent to you, something I can really relate to as an artist of the letter myself. You are a real muse to me, really,” he said with questionable sincerity. He let that last phrase linger in the silence.

“On previous occasions, when others had advised me to treat you with the full weight of the law,” he shot a stare at his mother, who was now standing very awkwardly. He continued, “When others wanted you brought to justice, I looked the other way, and took your perverted thoughts as necessities to generate your artistic proclivities that I find so akin to my own.”

Joffrey’s smile faded, and his demeanor became stern and thoughtful. He began pacing back and forth across the small platform, his hand pinching his chin as in deep reflection. Ser Wissel looked up at him, anguish now in his face.

“Sadly, Ser Wissel, this time your thoughts have led you astray, and I must assume my post as supreme protector of the realm, both it’s body and mind. I can’t have you disrupting the counting traditions in the kingdom. Peasants are confused enough, and what would The Seven think if they were no longer seven out of ten, but seven out of four?” Joffrey laughed aloud at his own comical mathematical analysis. “I have considered this too in my infinitely subtle mind, and in consulting with my own godliness,” he paused so the hall could consider his deity claim. “No god would stand for being counted as double digits.” Joffrey leapt from the upper to the lower platform of the approach to the throne.

“Just imagine!” Joffrey laughed, getting into his element. He mimed a hidden form: “Here is one god”. He stepped laterally, “here is the second god.” His mother stepped forward to say something to him, but he gestured her a look that made her step quickly back. She held her arms and took to biting her thumbnail and looking down and away. Joffrey moved another spot over.

“Here is the third god,” he outlined. Then he stepped over again, “and then here, here Ser Wissel, is your tenth god.”

“I won’t…” Ser Wissel began to say, but Joffrey continued without acknowledging him.

“Here is your eleventh god, Ser Wissel, and your twelfth god, and your thirteenth god!” his voice growing louder as he spoke.

“Thirteen gods! Just imagine the confusion of my people, Ser Wissel. Many of them are, well, not up to our caliber I’ll say. A base ten number system is challenging enough, moving to a base four system would cause great confusion among my people, it might cause a shut down to the economy. Thumbs should not be counted as fingers!? We have four limbs and four digits on the ends of them all, so four-ness carries the day. Do I have your argument right, Ser?”

“Your Grace, it was just an intellectual musing,” Ser Wissel pleaded “I didn’t mean for it to become anything more than…”

“Just,” Joffrey emphasized, “jussttt an intellectual musing? Well my people’s confusion isn’t the worst of it. What would god’s ten through thirteen think of your,musing?”

“I won’t do it any more, your Grace,” Ser Wissel said in the most apologetic tone he could muster. He was still kneeling but he began to approach Joffrey, grovelling in his own fashion.

“No, you won’t” Joffrey said, in lower tones, disappointed actually. “Maybe, you will,” the beginnings of an idea were evidently growing in Joffrey’s mind. “Since you have an obvious disdain for thumbs, lowering their rank in the hierarchy of digits, I’m assuming you won’t miss them.”

“No, Your Grace!” Wissel pleaded. “I’m only suggesting that thumbs be understood actually as part of a greater order.”

“Are you correcting me Ser?” Joffrey asked. “No, you are quite upset, I can understand why, my being someone who is also often frustrated by the stupidity that leads to misunderstandings of my great ideas.” He looked over to his mother.

“Your Grace,” Wissel ventured. “I am guilty as charged, and I had not considered my claims to the depths that your great mind has taken them. I never intended any offense to you or The Seven.”

“I understand Ser Wissel, I understand,” Joffrey said in a strong and reasoned voice. “All the same, a punishment must fit the crime.” Wissel was crying. Joffrey motioned to Ser Ilyn. “You may keep your fingers, for your counting, but your thumbs are mine.”

Ser Ilyn took out a peculiar device that he regarded as a wonder as he brought it to fix on Ser Wissel’s thumb. Ser Wissel screamed out in pain, but the guards holding him didn’t show any signs of emotion. “I want his big toes as well,” Joffrey said, “I wouldn’t want to rob him of the symmetry.” Wissel now had to be propped up as his old body was giving out.

“Ser Wissel” Geoffrey said walking down onto the hall’s floor, but Wissel could not respond in between his furious sobbing. “Ser Wissel” Geoffrey said louder, standing a short distance away.

He gestured at Wissel’s groin, “Do you consider that to be a thumb, or just a mere finger?” Joffrey now began broadly smiling, he walked right up to the whimpering Wissel, “Finger? Is that finger, I heard you say? Good choice! You can keep that digit for your counting, though I’m sure it is, should we say, quint unessential, ha!” he laughed to himself. “Yes, I believe his counting days have long been over by the looks of it,” he said to the guards with a smile, and he regarded the old man with kind pity.

He walked back towards his throne. “Dog, take him away.”

[minor edits on 2016-03-30]

Previous Game Of Thrones Related Writing –

https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/the-red-viper-and-the-golden-dwarf-tyrion-proved-oberyns-champion/

The Human Air Condition

I’ve always enjoyed sweating, whether it was a result of my own efforts or resulting from extremely humid weather. Not until the summer of 1994 when I was 10 years old did my parents get a one room air conditioner, and that was for the back “addition” room with the one television we had in the house. We used it rarely, and in all the other rooms and for all the times previous and since, we would sweat through the days (I remember laying on the floor a lot), without television but usually one another’s company. For the nighttime we had a big attic fan that created a beautiful artificial breeze by pulling in the cooler night air. I would stare out my window and “nightdream” as the breeze had in it such vitality that I couldn’t help but be swept away, euphoric visions permeating my “open chakra”.

I wasn’t aware of the relative geographical and historical uniqueness of my temperature, barometric? (not sure if using correct), and air moisture upbringing until much pondering about the experience of others and of climate itself. Such rumination would also be met with snippets of conversations overheard from my geographical neighbors lamenting how much they hated the New Jersey humidity but loved hot weather that they could access in Arizona: “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity that kills me” they would repeat one another in the obnoxious whiny Jersey accent. How different I truly was in my preferred flavor of clime became more obvious to me still following a winter in Central America. That excursion allowed me to almost fully skip over a cold North East (and more importantly still, the indoor heating that is what our bodies most associate with winter these days, even if our thoughts focus on the outdoor chill!). Every winter since then I have lambasted my fate to be born into a climate that has to deal with such a low swing in its weather!

It is my thinking that air conditioning in the summer and dry heated air in the winter (and shorter spring and fall weather, but that is for another post) have caused an unhealthy adaption in many modern humans (western hemisphere white westerners, at least) that is atypical of all but specially adapted life, such as the cacti family. I say this is atypical because the places most full of life are those places that have the highest humidity, whether they be on land (rainforests), the interchange between air and fluid atmosphere (mangroves), and the obviously humid, water atmosphere locales with a cuddling warmth and good sun exposure like that afforded to coral reefs. How can one living not feel a love and a kinship with such a place, especially as a hairless ape not really designed for cold weather sans technological handicaps? There is an obvious dynamism at play in jungles, when water concentration in the air is at a certain “sweet spot” which we dub humid; when this humidity is not there (or is not trapped by the wild plant and fungi life there), then deserts or desertification begin to occur. Deserts to me, however, are less frightening than the places that are desert-ifying such as the should-be lush New Jersey. This is evident to me not just by means of intellectual observations, but by the increase in dryer days that my body can immediately sense, along with the night-to-day grand temperature swings that give evidence to a weakening biomass unable to as effectively modulate heat.

When I was young the obsession for environmentalists—at least what penetrated into school classrooms—was the depleting ozone layer, but I’m thinking for humans to be screwing up the ozone layer, we must by necessity be screwing with a lot of layers as well, especially the ones closest to us and right under us. The top soil, which is the nonnegotiable home to the besieged plant and fungi kingdoms, is eroding in a vicious cycle started and fueled by “human development”. Such development means a clearing of forests (murdering of trees) and thus looses the grip on the soil, which is then quite often to be buried and dried out under concrete and asphalt tombstones.

Some people may like the immediate effects of this climate change because their bodies and their values (anti-sweat) are partial to it. The long-term effects of such climate change they can easily dismiss as ideological, and there are a smorgasbord of easy cliches available to comfort them, such as “if it’s meant to happen, it will happen”… What about, “If our grandchildren are all meant to die, it’s out of our hands… but in the meantime I love having a nice leather steering wheel in my hands!”? Most of my neighbors thought today was a beautiful day. Me, I was comfortable in shorts, but my skin and lungs felt the dryness and so I’d call it an average day—the new average. Most may have been conditioned to love it, but I miss the old vitality in the air that my body remembers being much more frequent. But I don’t get to individually choose my climate without migrating to a radically different geography, and so I guess the conditioning of some becomes the condition of all.

A final question for you, dear reader:

If we can be conditioned to something so basic as air, what else have we been and are we going to be conditioning ourselves to?

Ontology of Violence Before ‘Ontology of Violence’

Ontology of Violence Before ‘Ontology of Violence’: Two Excerpts from Two 2005 Papers 

2015 Preface

It is close to the decadinal anniversary for two of my undergrad essays that contain within them early forms of some originary ideas that recur in my thinking, and occasionally reoccur in my posts here (such as Becoming Out of Line: The Misalignment of Straightness, though in general heretofore I’ve been bashful with sharing too much full on philosophy; this may change); the “ontology of violence” is also discussed in a podcast episode that I am also shy about sharing, but maybe one day soon it will be out there in the world!

As I’ve encountered many new ideas and concepts since the fall of 2005, much of the vocabulary of my thoughts has evolved, such as learning the term “ontology”. Once I learned of this term, it quickly replaced “a priori” as my adjective and “ontological” was inserted; it was combined with all the big political and philosophical concepts: “ontological democracy”, “ontological freedom”, and “ontological justice” to mean that there was no bullshitting going on, that this was the real deal, latent content, if you will. How silly I can be!

In any event, this particular ontological way of thinking that is hinted at in these papers has remained with me. It is a world view that has at it’s core a universal battle between the two forces—more precisely one force and its recoiling when it doesn’t act free—of organicity (freely developing life force) and violence (logic). By necessity, and by definition, it is easier to speak (and write) of the violent recoiling force because of language’s very own constitution as an inherently violent methodology. In 2005 and before I was not yet thinking about the intrinsic violence of language—that would take some prompting by Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, though I did always have an intuition that language was somehow false and inadequate for the richness of reality—rather, I was (as I am) more concerned with physical restrictions of movement that I experienced daily through my encounters with the world.

The theme of ontological movement restriction comes through in the first excerpt from the one paper I titled “The Paris Commune – A Failed yet Successful Experiment in Self Governing“. Not mentioned in the paper, but the most striking to me (then and now) of these physical restrictions to our mobility was how much cars channel our movement. This same logical reduction occurs when locales known to be violent (e.g. inner cities) restrict-through-deterring people from going there, solidified by normalization. Visiting the Middle East, for an other example, is politically incorrect because it is politically incorrect (sorry for the tautological word play!). As far as the cars, I still do feel highly irritated by a swarm of traffic that keeps me from accessing the other side of a road, or the highway that interrupts a forest; there is the road that makes a protective parent have to assume a high level of anxiety to keep their child from getting killed, interrupting their hike through a woodland that allowed them to forget 21st century civilization. In the excerpt I use the term “freedom to roam” as being limited by these types of phenomena as well as the institution of property doing this. In this way, I think I was hoping to link up with Proudhon’s “property is theft” in that property is the theft of maximal movement. Today I am ambivalent on the extension of the concept into “infinite violence,” which is the violence embodied by murder. This concept assumes a standpoint of a conscious subject being robbed of consciousness, but at the time it seemed like a cool qualitatively distinct use of a quantity/spectrum driven theory. To argue that death isn’t a qualitative break but just a nadir on a spectrum one could point to how very near death people probably aren’t very conscious if at all, and are already decaying: “the smell of death”.

Turning to the second paper—A Kantian Critique of Capitalism and a Proposition for Transcendental Anarchism—it was during the fall that I encountered the concept of ecological islandization which really resonated with my feelings about the world (and still does, for sadly it is evident everywhere I go). I toyed with the islandization concept within a larger critique of capitalism using Kant, as the course was a senior year seminar focusing on him. That was my first exposure to the seminal figure Kant and listening to Drucilla Cornell’s lectures spanning all three critiques certainly gave me a plethora of new categories to play around with.

I excerpted the first two pages of the Commune paper and put in bold the relevant passage, and I excerpted the sub-section titled “Islandizaton” from the Kant paper. Hope you can get something out of all this babble, past and/or present!

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People ruling over one another is an age-old social convention that exists not out of necessity but rather is just a continuation through history that has not been effectively challenged. The main reason for this lack of challenge is simple, namely, the ruler or rulers in any society have interests to stay in power and do not give the intellectual and/or physical ammo to the oppressed that could challenge their power. Rather, through various institutions (the church, the monarchy, the military and now the modern state), tradition, and legal laws that stack against the oppressed, the ruling classes maintained a stranglehold on power. However the dominance of any ruling class has been threatened time and again in history, most significantly during revolutions, when a new ruling class comes to power, but afterwards there still remains oppressed and oppressor. The mere fact that once ruled over can come to be the rulers, shows an Achilles’ heel in the enterprise of subordination in general, and that is that it has no basis, and that people are indeed capable of ruling themselves. The Paris Commune of 1871 is filled with evidence that people can rule themselves, but it also displays the antagonistic relationship between violence (internally and externally to the Commune) and freedom.

Before proceeding with an analysis of the Commune, I would like to lay out my reasoning of how violence or the threat of it is inversely proportional to self-autonomy (freedom). Infinite violence—the killing of one person by another—is taking away all freedom of one person and putting it completely and permanently in the hands of another, the murderer. To a lesser degree, violence that injures a person physically, serves to limit their mobility (freedom to roam); and similarly violence existing that could injure a person also limits where a person can go (a person generally will not walk into a space where violence is known to occur). Private property, a more subtle restriction on freedom, because it limits where people can go (and what they can access), and if not honored, private property is backed by the violent, punishing force of the state. The more violence there is, the less freedom there can be empirically, and the more an ideology is dependent on violence, the less freedom it can bring.

The Commune as a Concept: Prior to March 18th

The Paris Commune as an official alternative government for Paris, separate from that of the French Government, was proclaimed on the 18^th of March and elected on the 26^th, but the preceding months saw extremely important developments throughout Paris that made the Commune government possible: “without the unique circumstances created by the ‘people’s war’ against Germany, the Commune is inconceivable.”¹ The ideas of socialism, anarchism, Jacobin/Blanquist-republicanism and other ideologies that ran counter to the establishment, had been gaining increasingly favorable viewing among the oppressed lower class Parisians. However, these ideas didn’t move from the backs of the minds of the oppressed until their practical application seemed possible: when Paris underwent a siege by the Prussians in the fall of 1870. This siege coupled with the ineffective responses being taken by the French provisional government, which angered many, served to galvanize the Parisians and many began creating and attending radical socio-political clubs and organizations, where practical and long-term issues were discussed en masse.

The oppressed Parisians, the ones predisposed to radical ideas, had a unique chance to bring into practice their ideas without incorporating violence as a means to push them into power. A vacuum was created in Paris when the Prussian forces fighting the French forces,

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“Islandization”

Islandization is an ecological term, also known as habitat fragmentation, in which once continuous habitats have been divided by varying degrees, because of human activities, such as: roads that cut through a habitat, land clearing, and various methods of resource extraction.¹

The concept of islandization, is not only a relevant way to look at the ecological world, but also at human society, most especially human interactions. Chauvinistic “isms” such as racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and others, serve to divide human kind rather than unite us. Such divisions have grown under capitalism, aided immensely by an illusion of individualism, to the point that humans have become atomized, the more so in the advanced capitalist nations. Such divisions through society can only exist with underpinnings of similarities… there are greater things that transcend these dividing “isms”, that exist a priori. Firstly, and most generally, we are all united as being in space and time, and this is a must for concepts like racism to ever even exist. For there to be racism, we must all have a race, for their to be sexism, we must all be common in our having a sex, and so on with all the isms. This is something transcendental philosophy points to, a commonality we all have, commonalities we must have, before there can be subtle differentiation. And the postmodernists get it wrong: “by not listening to Kant, they go back before him.”²

Lucid Living: Tendons Of The Organic Trance Totality

Lucid Living: (Important) Tendons Of The Organic Trance Totality^L

Trance as a name for a musical category is a misnomer, as it doesn’t put us into a surreal context, it pulls us out of one! Our daily surreality (or should it be sub-reality?), imposed by an unhappy and mediated world, dissipates like a contrail, and we are left with a clarity that is unmistakably real. Any haze that remains has a laser plane shone through it that highlights its organic curvature, beholden to no structural logic that would normally draw our focus a la our capitalized and technologiized societies. The experience we have gradually draws all of our bodies into motion (as they should be given our biological predispositions). Feel free… to listen to the exquisitely titled “fake awake” as you suffer through my breaches with logic.

Sweep The Filter: Towards A Revisceration Of Im-media

Trance allows the real world (that is, the cold technologized world) that we have now to enter in elements such as filtered down sounds. Through acts such as filtering and amplification, trance is displaying in sound what all mediums in our over mediated world really do. Mediums don’t add anything to vitality—they strip away many surrounding overtones to give a very contrived, weak, and alienating connection; a controlled and corrupted connection. Trance utilizes this feature which we as the captive victims from civilization’s domesticating modalities (as in Stockholm Syndrome) are so allured to, and then it quickly yet gradually adds back the wholesome tones. It does this perhaps (because not all trance ingeniousness need be the same) through both a filter sweep in the single lead, and a volume sweep through the larger movement of the full orchestration, all instruments choosing to be in full interrelation as cells of a body. Before this unity, in the previous minutes of the song, the individualized or cliquey instruments were all introduced as powerful yet fiercely independent and essentially lacking to reach their full potential (though still beautiful if the composer chose the elements correctly).

The domesticated sounds from before the breakdown are then all transformed through synthetic combination and amplification that lay out a path for all of we freedom seekers to leave our alienated pigeon holes of reified experience. Trance does all this—it displays our cages naked, then it melts our chains, and then finally we are guided in the art of flying.

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When the song is in full swing, there is the overflowing of emotion and energy, and the rhythm sings to all of our emotions and speaks to all that is neglected and marginalized in our current world. It recognizes the waking reality that we feel, but it takes us in waking life in to the literal dreams that we have of rebecoming the animals that we were so intended by a mutualistic natural milleu. Animals that are so free we wouldn’t even call them human. Indeed, there would be no suggestion, no impetus, no need to call…

Only the most brilliant trance songs have us climb up the mountain and jump off the world. Most fall short and return us to earth, elevated perhaps but still as caged animals. The select songs (or the songs that select us) are the matchmakers to wed our true dreams with a truer reality. It would be wrong to say it was goD’s music, but not so to say the music of gods.

Notes:

L – As the title suggests, this piece is a tendon, or element, of a larger philosophical expose that I have kept caged up for almost a decade. It has overgrown its cage many times, and I thought I’d give it some play time now. May that time come soon, if not in writing then in the unleashing of the bottled up organic forces of difference that we suppress in lieu of conformity.