Clean plate club

Man has philosophy to try to show himself to himself. (What if he closed his eyes and listened instead?) He has computer to show himself to himself, but was the computer an accident or destiny? Is the computer just a very good example of what man has been doing all along? A good example until there will be no more examples—the missiles, remember the missiles. Was philosophy an accident? It is very easy in retrospect to see philosophy as a set of evolving and battling schools, but we have to be open to the idea that, like the computer, philosophy may have started out as something different—that is, what looks like philosophy now might have not begun with the intention of looking like philosophy—or perhaps it intended to look like philosophy, but for different reasons. Meaning, what?

Perhaps computers began as simple tools, labor saving devices. The goal was to make a profit, crank out a product, and the punch card and magnetic tape systems were useful. Yet the profit mindset--the cause or the symptom of computer. It is easy to think of a mad genius in his attempt to make a human mind, a Frankenstein. But what if Dr. Frankenstein just wanted a servant and not a friend or a child? If you get something to do enough work for you, it begins to mimic you, your habits, your patterns. Take away your labor—if labor is doing, and if doing encompasses experience, computer becomes experience. It’s said that surplus is the problem. Fire, water, nothingness, Forms, all sorts of geniuses have problems. None of them worse than those fish spines where they cut off the finger afterwards. You think you have problems (surplus! computer!)? What about the boy in the wet snow?

“I entered a cold igloo and in the pinched, chalk-like faces of five children saw starvation. Their parents were dead, there was no food, and they simply sat there, silently waiting for the oldest boy who was hunting alone on the sea ice. I looked at Ohnainewk and somehow he has known all along.”

“Either because of my presence of perhaps out of genuine compassion, the children were adopted into various families. Into the igloo where I stayed came a boy of eight, an unattractive lad with great dark eyes. His foster mother never spoke kindly to him. The other children pointedly ignored him or abused him. He couldn’t control his bowels and constantly soiled the furs. On this excuse, they forced him to sleep in the damp snow floor, condemning him to pneumonia and inevitable death. Just before the lad died, I saw him standing alone in the center of the igloo, trembling with cold and fright. I took a gret knife, a spectacular thing someone had given to me, and offered it to him. He stood confused, then slowly, with the most wonderful light in his eyes (he must have thought he was going to be spared) reached out for it. But a hand shot out—Ohnaiewk’s—and the knife was taken from me and given to a favorite son.”

“It is a hard land. A knife like that goes to one who will live to use it.”                              

But computer may be the problem. I can’t get over that man is converging to computer. Man’s total loss of privacy will be when he becomes computer. The problem of freedom will have been solved. No one will complain about states. No Inuit to make us feel guilty or give us hope (guilt or hope depending on the side of the gun). It is said that a man must be careful by using one thing to explain everything. This is why I have both missile and computer. And there are others, look below. You can say that computer it surplus made manifest—but surplus, surplus for some was whale. Yet I say that surplus is just a way of seeing the world, and this way of seeing the world is computer. Man had to wickedly change his vision for his ever being able to see the world in such an evil way. Man’s innocence was his never seeing surplus in the world. Surplus is the original sin but it is a change of perspective—man changed his way of being. In order to store surplus you have to see surplus, you have to want more than you need and then do something about it. Man then covets. Man wanted more than he needed but he needed a plan and he needed to get away with it. This, this was the beginning of surplus. Some men look for surplus and they never find it. Some men look for surplus and see it everywhere. But all of the sudden man saw earth in an entirely different way. Surplus is an attitude in the heart of man—that can be in the heart of man. Whether surplus is in the heart of all men is another question. But surplus is not a thing.

Hofstadter said silicon replicants could help humans survive if carbon based organisms do not survive. There was a backlash when he gave the speech. No one wants to think of dying, there is that, so the backlash may have been as simple as the crowd’s protest of death. But are you willing to accept a child that is silicon-based? They say the Inuit did not see death as death, that is to say, as the end of man. What was alive was the spirit, which lived in man’s body at times and when the body died the spirit lived. Hence there was no death in the sense modern man sees the word, because death to modern man is loss of self which modern man just so happens to identify with the body—but to the Inuit there was never a loss of anything, irrespective of the matter of whether there ‘was’ a self back then, whether the concept was relevant to the Inuit. People had names—but really people were both their name which was spirit. All of that together makes a person, a man or a woman. A body was not a person until it was given a name—a person is a body with a name, and a name is a spirit. You cannot skip a single step. Are there unnamed men wandering this earth? They would not be men to the Inuit because they lack names, and if a body lacks a name it lacks a spirit, and if a body lacks a spirit it is not a man. Modern man looks at himself in the mirror and asks himself what am I? Man is not alive and now anything can happen. He is looking for his name. But no one can give man his name. No one can give man his name. No one. There is no one left to give man his name. Each name is a spirit, but all is forgotten. All is forgotten. Can the spirits come back? Can man give a name to another, thus giving man his spirit? Does man create a spirit or get in contact with a spirit? Modern man goes around naming everything but he is a magician with a powerless wand. Call it surplus or call it computer. Man attacked the earth. Doesn’t the whale make this clear? Don’t look to agriculture. Don’t look to the currencies. Whipping boys, scapegoats. Surplus isn’t a force. Surplus isn’t a thing. Abuse, I tell you, abuse. Abuse, sickness, and degeneration. It’s true the rich in Northbrook had too much, but that’s not the original sin here. Original sin is far deeper. Look it how those white devils, one of them from Northwestern, wrote about ‘complexity.’ There’s nothing more now! Nothing more now! It isn’t surplus, it’s transformation! It is attack on earth. Man has lost his name, no soul! Man has lost the hunt! No freedom! The cancer to replace his lost helping spirit, the holes he digs in his backyard, like a dog gone mad looking for his bone? Man blames anyone but himself. He externalizes all his demons. Anything a man makes is a reflection of his soul. When a man makes a system that enslaves other man, that traps that labor, that denies the existence of souls and spirits—there is no smack out there that someone is selling. Evil is a force—it is a way of being for a man, and if evil is not sustained by men, it has no power.

But the question is can man give a name to computer, and in his giving a name, can he give computer spirit, and in his giving computer spirit, can computer become man.

One problem with replicants is the lack of spontaneity. A girl or a boy? There is that unknown, but now people can know. How will a human ‘turn out?’ How did the cake turn out? How was dinner? How did the game go?

There is a long narrative and struggle and uncertainty in human feeling. Biologically there is uncertainty. Think of genius. Think of the possibility of new languages and new cultures. Think of how humans influence each other. You cannot pin down a human based on biology if you allow human beings to do what they do freely. The concept of genetic modification only makes sense if you corral human conduct, if you build and attempt to control a human matrix almost as you would build a computer. But look at wildflowers and fish. Look at the diversity. Look at the myriad of human beings. Don’t ever make it or allow it to get boring. It is the spontaneity that you not only have to allow but must enjoy. Computer is neither man nor nature. What humans make now--neither man nor nature. What was Inuit art? It was nature shaped by spirit. If man is to make something, it must be nature shaped by spirit. What else will shape what man makes? Into what shape will be man’s work? Does man meet nature and does nature become art?

Or does man first attack nature and attempt to re-shape nature and then make something? Man can be sick and lose his way. The sky scraper or the space ship. The nuclear missile. Man doesn’t want nature any more. He wants his space ship. He wants to live in space in his space ship. What would happen to nature? Would man make his own sun inside the space ship? Man would raise his own vegetables, for example. How quaint a farm would be in space ship. Would man make protein from machines? Would man create synthetic meat? Why have man anymore with man in spaceship, making his food with machines, all of his food. Where does food come? From the machines? Do machines live for man or does man live “FOR THE MACHINES!?”

Because think of it this way. The return on equity formula. Man is fucked if he isn’t this formula made manifest. They ask a man about his culture, this is all he needs: This is how rational man is supposed to live now. Everything a man does has a monetary value. In some countries this is a dollar value. In other countries there is the peso—the weight. In Brasil there is the Real, the real, really. The great convergence of the system with man as system, man’s thinking, man’s action. Is it true that we are what we eat?

That would put spaceship man in a unique position. If his sun is a machine—the machine he uses to grow his plants, what is he eating? Man has made his sun, and then eats his sun. You could say the soil came from the earth. Yet can’t man make his own soil? And even if the original soil on the spaceship came from the planet, won’t the plants eventually eat that soil and then make more soil? Won’t soil become plant—sun plus soil equals plant, then plant equals soil. Eventually the soil is the result of generations of manmade sun. Man has made his sun and soil and plant. Man has made these things? Man, or his machines. Machines, under the direction of man. Can’t machines direct themselves? But man always reserves the right to intervene? Man doesn’t trust his machines? Does man even like his machines? Does man love his machines? All man eats comes from machine on the spaceship. If you are what you eat, and everything you eat is made from machine—comes from machine—isn’t man eating machine? Man worries about a replicant, a silicon replicant, but he has to ask himself is he has already arrived at that state or is very close to arriving at that state. Man’s convergence with machine—man’s convergence with computer, may happen without his knowing it. Man’s convergence with computer may happen without his trying. What a terrifying, terrifying evolution, beginning with man’s attack on the world, which leads one to ask whether man may have chosen the wrong enemy. A man must have a worthy enemy though—man would not feel pride if his enemy were below him. Man would feel shame with a lowly enemy. But why couldn’t man have himself as enemy? Man can’t wish to kill man—if he killed all men there would then be no enemy and only himself to kill. Man gets no satisfaction in the murder of another man—there is nothing left. They say it is the spirits and the gods. But then we are speaking of the gods. If we are speaking of man as enemy—if man is to obtain satisfaction in his attack on something, and if this something is man, he cannot kill all men. Man cannot kill man. If he does he will never overcome. What does man want in an attack? It’s said he wants to destroy something—in this case, man—but what’s this all about? Someone wants his food, his woman, someone wants to control him. Man likes the fight. But if it is the fight he is after, if it is the battle, then he will not get this if he enslaves other men. The old parable of the master-slave dialectic, how the slave is defined by his master and the master by his slave—that in his attempt to dominate another man, he is dominated by his own definitions, the key to his identity is the identity of the man he wishes to enslave. Man never escapes slavery.

But why not then the battle? Perhaps it is the battle, then. The thrill of the battle. If that is the case, then neither murder of all men nor enslavement of all men will be man’s goal. It will be battle with other men. In man’s battle with other men—if this is his goal, the thrill of the battle, might he do anything whatsoever with nature in order to forward this battle, in order to give him an advantage, in order to keep the other man guessing, in order, in order to keep the battle interesting?

Computer is neither man nor spirit nor nature. Man cannot pass the baton of war to computer. Man is computer because computer is his food—man eats computer. Man makes computer, eats computer, computer makes man. Does man use computer or does man become computer. It is said that a man gets exactly what he wants. Certainly man gets exactly what he gets. But no he doesn’t. Look at the earth. Tell me, what do you have here? What does man have? The problem is with the question. There is a man who thinks in terms of having and a man who doesn’t. Some men are, and some men get and have. It is the getters and the havers that have fucked it all up. They will tell you that man gets exactly what he wants but they are the same men who further broke down ROE into the DuPont equation, which was an equation the DuPont corporation created to run its own matrix. Look, DuPont wants you to believe in the illusion of surplus. And you know what else they want? They want you to become formula, they want you to roll up every last moment into ROE—and if you can’t fit your own children into the formula, they will help you.  

Yet what he wants? Tell me what a man wants? If a man attacks the earth out of sickness, and from sickness comes computer, what does man want? Look around you—what does man want?

It is said philosophy gets off track when it is removed from experience. It is said that when man ceased to follow animals over the raw earth in his hunt, he lost his way. Anything not tied directly to the hunt. Man loved his hunt, didn’t he? What was original sin? Why did man attack nature and make computer? Why has man become computer?

I am trying to retrace man’s journey from hunter to computer. How off track can I get? Do I risk becoming computer?

Get back to the hunt, they tell me. Come back to your traplines. But mother, I must become computer, I must become my destiny. I must get exactly what I want.  Do you know what is worse than ‘consciousness?’ The Frenchmen really wasn’t all as bad as anyone said. The whole business that man, sitting alone with all his damn grain in his silo, all lonely without the gods, just playing with his grain in his silo, and suddenly you have all sorts of stupidity. Ego, consciousness, etc. However ugly and sitting the Frenchman, he denounced all of the nonsense. His whole point about ontology wasn’t to reify some Freudian ego—no, it was the opposite. He said it was all a sham, a construct. Fake. Many have called Sartre an Eastern thinker, not a Western thinker, because he said man is nothing, precisely nothing. 600 pages trying to make this clear to people. But they still called him a system builder. Yes he was completely fried after he wrote the book. Yes, yes, he knew a few streets of Paris and his pack of cigarettes and his bottle of amphetamines. I understand it. But just because he looked like a philosopher didn’t mean that he wasn’t able, through some gift, to get man out of the whole rat race, or leave the prospect of writing and sitting so impossible as to make man look for something else, to give up on on system building altogether.

Man becomes missile—both battle and computer. Battle and computer but child and god. Man will have his ‘consciousness’ until impact, just as he likes it. Man will be alive until impact. There will be battle before impact. There will be battle and child and god before impact. Do not be afraid of machine. You are machine. You are your child. Man eats his child but in eating his child he gives birth to his child. In order to give birth, man must eat. Man has made machine and machine makes man’s food. But his child merely feeds him, man does not eat his child. Man’s child makes his food, but he does not eat his child. Distinctions are important here. But the distinction is the very problem as man converges to computer. Does he want a battle? Does he want to destroy? Does he wish to enslave? Or does he want it to all go away to permanence? Man’s own handheld device is the hand of another man or his own hand? Man wants to hold a hand, have this hand be as controllable as his own but as foreign as the hand of someone else. If he cuts the hand from another man he has precisely what he does not want. If he takes the living hand—‘holding’ his hand, as it is said--he has that which will challenge him. Man wants his freedom, they say. But we remember man’s freedom: his movement over the earth as he wants. Man gets exactly what he wants: his animal. He wants a hand that will do as he pleases but is not his own. Man wants a friend but man does not want convergence. But this is why there is war—it is the battle to destroy the risk or prospect of convergence. And in his battle man creates computer, which creates a new risk of convergence. Man must kill computer. Man must kill computer and return to nature. There, Sartre, there is your answer, there is your ethics. All of man’s thinking was leading to convergence to computer. Man’s sickness, man’s attack on earth due to his sickness. Man is stuck between nature and computer. His only way out is god. Man plus nature equals god. God equals freedom and happiness. Man as sickness equals computer. Computer equals death and the end of man.

Yet what is hiding in the passages? What is the substance of his thinking? Is he the bad cook who throws his cabinet of spices at each dish, hoping no one will notice he is cooking the food of others? I had hoped I could tell a story without my having to tell it myself. Indeed I hoped that with so much garnish, no one would guess there was a main meal. Woman, he keeps saying. He writes love stories amidst his bombs and computers.

But man looks to himself, and nothing, no name. He can’t go on a first date without a name. He can’t say, “I was hoping you would tell me.” Each time I see a beautiful woman I want to tell her my name. I cannot tell her I am computer. I am not computer. But I must know my name. Then I will tell her when I see her. I will tell her my name and I will be a man full of spirit. If I remember her name, if I call to her by her name, I will know what I am talking about.

Yes, I know, I know. “Come work with the fellows on the dock. They’ll give you some names, alright. Try them out with your girl.”

I like jokes, humor, funny. A good day it is, when I have an image and milk the image for laughs—I laugh to myself. I’ll just say I read an email if anyone asks, the way I pretend I’m on the phone when I’m talking to myself. But I thought I saw the surplus. There was a line inside the building, perhaps what the Inuit would call a lodge. There were supplies all over the shelves, anything you could want. Some of it was refrigerated, some of it was hot. They had everything, just everything. The woman was harassed and abusive. She had long passed the point of treating anyone politely. There was a Korean exchange student who wanted one of 4 types of the oily food products under the hot lamps. I, a native to the country, a countryman—but not country, which means a man from a rural area---could not tell what the oily food was. Hotdogs, I thought, different hotdogs, some larger perhaps due to their age. Unlike the woman, the hotdogs shrink with age under the heat of the lamps. Like the woman, the hot dogs become less succulent, lose their appeal, and shrivel, wrinkle and become, unless a man is ready to eat his very neighbor, inedible. “You said you wanted a hot dog. Next time you say you want a bratwurst. OK? That’s not a hot dog.” I hope for the Korean man there never is a next time. It was the abusive treatment I received in Junior High from women with no names. This was the mystery—everyone swore the ‘teacher’ had a name. Mrs. Something, every bitch was a Mrs. Something.

“No, no, no, these aren’t men! They don’t have names! I know it. They aren’t even lost spirits. I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what this is! Why can’t I wake up? Why did they change the name of the town so recently?”

These were big thoughts to have at 11. What was the face of the woman in the lodge of surplus, that “seven eleven.” What were those numbers? That seven, that eleven. Eighteen. Voting age. No, but her face, her demeanor. I went to Carpenter to search for the phantom that scared me and I was reminded of junior high. But the Inuit drew my demons for me to show me it is OK. They too had seen the scary bitch.

It was a scary and frightful, but it wasn’t the “giant eye”:

“Soon after Anarqaq lost his parents, the gloomy helping spirit Issitoq (“giant eye”), whose specialty is finding people who have broken taboo, came to him and said: “You must not be afraid of me, for I, too, struggle with sad thoughts; therefore I will go with you and be your helping spirit.””

Surplus goes away when man finds his helping spirit. Surplus is just one demon. A demon puts man in hell and a helping spirit helps man fly, lifting him from hell.

At first glance it was a hideous thing. But as I studied the figure, it was almost cute, like a marmot. The woman in seven eleven, her soul menaced by the crushing weight of the bureaucracy of the franchise—but wait a second. That couldn’t be the case. How could she have a menaced soul if she had no name? There had to be a name for such creatures. Ogres and trolls were different sorts of monsters. A no-name body, type woman, yet once-woman, no spirit and no name. Yet name tag. No-soul? Who had the breath in her barrel-chested torso to abuse the foreign guest of the country. A man, away from his country, before a display of hot food. Where was her heart? Why would she not care for the foreign traveler?  

It might be Igtuk, I considered:

“When booming is heard in the mountains, it is Igtuk (“the boomer”), moving his jaws. No one knows where he stays. His legs and arms are on his back; there is a tuft of hair on his chin; his great eye is level with his arms and ears, while his nose is hidden in his mouth which opens, disclosing a dark abyss.”

That was it. Those bodies in the junior high (again, they called them “teachers,” as if presenting demons as helping spirits!!!), the work of Igtuk. The woman in the seven eleven, the lodge of surplus, Igtuk. Igtuk has no decency, no compassion for the man on a voyage, berating the Korean man’s distant journey. To know the name of cruelty itself, finally, to know it has a name. Igtuk. A world in which men walk without their names, yet the demons, the demons know exactly who they are. Igtuk.

“Anarqaq had this vision while wandering in the mountains. The spirit’s silent horribleness affected him so violently that he fled without first securing it as a helping spirit.”

This is a problem, this silent horribleness. But not goblin:

“When Anarqaq met the goblin woman Manilaq (“pack-ice”), she looked so frightful, he fell and lost consciousness and recovered only through his dog licking his navel.” For Anarqaq it would become his helping spirit.”

“One spring, near a village, Anaqaq saw his father’s helping spirit, Qungiaruvlik, steal a child and put it in her parka hood. His mother’s helping spirits, Puksina and Navagioq, killed Qungiaruvlik.”

I still look for woman. I look for her everywhere and I cannot find her. Woman is a rumor like man’s lost freedom, man, when he had name, spirit, when he was man.

“The Sedna myth represents this dilemma, as the Eskimo see it. They never asked that the universe be this way. But, ayornamut (“it cannot be otherwise”); they accept life on its own terms.”

“They do more than accept: they take it upon themselves the responsibility for the fact that life is the way it is. They give Sedna the power of life and death over them. Those who were forced to abandon her now place themselves in her power, dependent upon her good will, her respect for all life.”