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.”

Par

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdhNVOzlG88

Minutes, man, minutes

It’s impossible to get across the taiga without a buddy; the taiga wasn’t made for hermits.” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives) 

Introduction to mysteries
“Good, meaningful aphorisms do not come to he who sits.” (Chrome)

“I believe you will understand that it is harder for me to write than it ever was for any author throughout human history. Some of them wrote for contemporaries, some for future generations, but none of them ever wrote for their ancestors, or for beings like their primitive, distant ancestors.” (Zamiatin, We)

"Ah yes the mystery of why a man writes something. Only an academically-trained man would ask that...Why a man writes a story is often mysterious, and best left that way.” (Moraline)

“Don’t think so much, Ziama, don’t worry so much. All this thinking business is a type of luxury, anyway, and even more so out here on the taiga.” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives)

Work, machines, minutes and men

“I've been looking for something terrible to fix my life and make it real.” (Chrome)“

“YOU WORK FOR THE MACHINES!” The skinny man with the mustache yelled, slicing at the air with the knife.” (J. Myner, Slime Line)

“Each missile carries up to three nuclear warheads, which have a yield in the range of 300 to 500 kilotons.”

I saw the shadow of her long hair as she approached me. Her breathing was feminine and as she began to run behind me, and then to my side, our breathing was together. It was exciting to run with a woman through the pastures with the pines on the top of the foothills and passing the sheep, the large brown and black horses, the cattle, the purple wildflowers and the streams and the sun shining on the wet valley. She said we should work together. For 9 miles we worked together, and then at the steepest hill she left me and I saw her hips and her ass and her breasts leave me and her form was perfect and as she descended the mountain I could not catch her.

“Gradually the direction becomes the most important thing; the more distant the goal, the better the prospect of its permanence.” (Canetti, Crowds and Power)

At the finish line she spoke to women and she introduced me and it was awkward for her to share our breathing with her three friends. The both of us embraced and there was a shocked silence among the women. She didn’t embrace her husband in such a manner. That would be my greatest moment with S. and we would never see each other again. I thought of the forest service ranger I had met in the mountains and how her bare ass felt by the camp fire and how she gave me the blanket during the night even as she froze. I went to run the next morning and she read Harry Potter in her truck. We walked through wet snow fields. I would only see her once again before I left. She spent most of her time in the back country.

“The Minuteman-I Autonetics D-17 flight computer used a rotating air bearing magnetic disk holding 2,560 “cold-stored” words in 20 tracks (write heads disabled after program fill) of 24 bits each and one alterable track of 128 words. The time for a D-17 disk revolution was 10 ms. The D-17 also used a number of short loops for faster access of intermediate results storage. The D-17 computational minor cycle was three disk revolutions or 30 ms. During that time all recurring computations were performed. For ground operations the inertial platform was aligned and gyro correction rates updated. During flight, filtered command outputs were sent each minor cycle to the engine nozzles. Unlike modern computers, which use descendants of that technology for secondary storage on hard disk, the disk was the active computer memory. The disk storage was considered hardened to radiation from nearby nuclear explosions, making it an ideal storage medium. To improve computational speed, the D-17 borrowed an instruction look-ahead feature from the Autonetics-built Field Artillery Data Computer (M18 FADAC) that permitted simple instruction execution every word time.”

They spoke of limited wants and unlimited means. Whales would change things on the coast. And people would aggregate there and villages would form—highly specialized skills, staying in one place, competition and government, all because of the whales. Nothing compared to the whales and the calories, the fat, protein, bones, fuel, not even the moose or the caribou, not grain or nuts or berries. A small band could not process an entire whale. A village would work together for processing a whale—some men would scout and hunt, many would bring the wale in but much more time would be spent processing the whale. Humans with skills would process and store the whale. Only a portion of the village hunted the whale. Envy and jealousy grew as high skilled fighters would covet the whale villages.

“Minuteman-III MIRV launch sequence:
1. The missile launches out of its silo by firing its 1st stage boost motor (A).
2. About 60 seconds after launch, the 1st stage drops off and the 2nd stage motor (B) ignites. The missile shroud (E) is ejected.”

Man converges to computer until there is only computer. Why allow this to happen so slowly and cruelly? The computer does not understand cruelty until you show him. Two ‘abnormal’ boys in the room with a ‘normal’ boy—one boy is autistic and the other boy is psychopathic, and the third: completely normal. Each hit the third child. The child cries. The autistic boy will never learn the connection between the crying and the hitting. The psychopathic boy will learn the connection between the hitting and crying and no longer hit but he will not understand how it makes the other child feel. The crying is inconvenient. Good actors can cry on command and so can psychopaths. A psychopathic child could build a green train for an autistic child.

“3. About 120 seconds after launch, the 3rd stage motor (C) ignites and separates from the 2nd stage.
4. About 180 seconds after launch, 3rd stage thrust terminates and the Post-Boost Vehicle (D) separates from the rocket.”


Man tries to make helpful computers but like his spirits they can be both helpful and menacing. Man builds computers to escape from the same things from which he runs. He runs towards and from what was lost in the hunt: man attempts to look at himself, examine himself with computer. But man can’t hold himself. Man wants to hold another and not eat that other as he would eat a whale. Something is empty.

“When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion of thought. When the facts are not organized into faculty, the greater the mass of them the more the mind staggers along under its burden, hampered instead of helped by its acquisitions.” (Herbert Spencer)

 

But the psychopathic computer was his strongest design to send the missiles. The psychopathic computers will prevail against the helpful computers. Computers converge to psychopath. Man converges to computer; computer converges to psychopath. If the latter happens before the former, man is extinct. If the former happens before the latter, man is extinct. Sadness goes away like a blowing flower pedal.

“5. The Post-Boost Vehicle maneuvers itself and prepares for re-entry vehicle (RV) deployment.
6. The RVs, as well as decoys and chaff, are deployed during backaway.”

In the whale village a man hammers copper for an ax head that is made for battle and not made for hunting. In Nebraska a man sits back in his chair to begin his day of work. His office is below 60 meters of concrete and with the communication of codes he can launch a missile that would destroy a city the size of Sao Paulo.

“7. The RVs and chaff re-enter the atmosphere at high speeds and are armed in flight.
8. The nuclear warheads initiate, either as air bursts or ground bursts.”

I met her on a Thursday. Her voice was melodic and we shared stories for two hours. Earlier she had dinner with another man across the street and came to the bar to be with the bartenders, a gay man and a woman who was just about to be married. She played music on Fridays and her hands, covered in silver rings, moved her guitar and her voice ached for no one in particular, there was protest, conclusion, and acceptance in each howl and I could not look at her face as she sung, each song was more somber than the next. I was too sad to say anything to her when she finished.

“All of these things will work out in an unbelievable, ironic, magnificent way.” (Chrome)

Cost of messages

“Money, my friend, is the best passport and the best language.” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives)

“I read tonight that the people who spend the most money trying to appear rich, are those who are not quite rich. Then, the next tier above them, spend money to make more money, or spend money to free up time. The truly rich do not do any quantifiable or observable particular thing with their money, they just live free.”

“All these comments about finance were starting to get on my nerves, so I replied look, these projects aren't about money or status, these are about creating something we want to create. To which my uncle responds, simply, "you are your message."” (Chrome)

“The D-17B and the D-37C guidance and control computers were integral components of the Minuteman-I and Minuteman-II missiles, respectively, which formed a part of the United States ICBM arsenal. The Minuteman-III missiles, which use D-37D computers, complete the 1000 missile deployment of this system. The initial cost of these computers ranged from about $139,000 (D-37C) to $250,000 (D-17B).”

“I got to share sisu with the girls at the coffee shop this morning, commenting on and recognizing their battle against the cold and the rude customers, and the piece of crap door and the coffee and the strength gained from difficulty and all that. I gave the $0.73 tip like I always do on the $2.27 bill and I slipped out the door as narrowly as I could.” (Chrome)

Radical

“I was a completely harmless member of society. It is the young people, those who display a serious interest in the theoretical foundations of communism and begin immersing themselves in Marx, Lenin and Stalin who pose a much greater danger to the regime. The Soviet authorities realize this. A person who takes theory seriously will, sooner or later, begin comparing it with practice, and will end up rejecting one or the other, and, later on, the two of them together. But a person who has not been seduced by the theory will view the practice as a common and immutable evil—one that can be lived with.” (Vladimir Voinovich, The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union)

“My grips were all loose from the lake jumping and I was drunk, so I shouldn't have been jumping, but I was all flowy and loose from the blue sapphire so I jumped anyway. My grips were loose, so instead of using them, I just invented a million one-hander variations, including the "let go with the left hand, grab the crossbar, then let go of the right hand, then grab back with the right hand and put the left hand back on the throttle grip" trick which has been imitated but never repeated.” (Chrome)

“The remarkable fact may be that it is when a would-be hegemonic ideology does manage to convince members of subordinate groups to take it to heart that a potentially radical chain of events is set into motion. That is, contrary to the usual wisdom and to Gramsci’s analysis, radicalism will be less likely to arise among disadvantaged groups (the vast majority, it appears) who fail to take the dominant ideology seriously than among those who, in Marxist terms, might be considered falsely conscious. In a perceptive study of working-class secondary school students in England, Paul Willis discovered a strong counterculture that produced a cynical distance from dominant platitudes but not radicalism. Paradoxically, it was the “conformists,” who appeared, in form at least, to accept the values of the school (the hegemonic instrument par excellence in modern society), who posed a threat. Because they operated as if they accepted the implicit promise of the dominant ideology (If you work hard, obey authority, do well in school and keep your nose clean you will advance by merit and have satisfying work) they made sacrifices of self-discipline and control and developed expectations that were usually betrayed. Employers prefer not to hire them because they were pushy and hard to deal with as compared with the more typical working-class youth, who were realistic, expected little, and put in a day of work without too much grumbling. The system may have most to fear from those subordinates among whom the institutions of hegemony have been most successful. The disillusioned mission boy (Caliban) is always a graver threat to an established religion than the pagans who were never taken in by its promises. The anger born of a sense of betrayal implies an earlier faith.” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.)  

Father and Son 

“My father thought the whole idea was absurd. He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him. ...Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled. ...I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured in tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden heat-weighted treks.” (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me)

“I awoke to the sound of Dawson practicing his newest word, "evvvaary-whare," as he and his mother looked out the window at the snow-covered streets and sidewalks and rooftops through some of the floor-to-ceiling windows in this apartment.” (Chrome)

1749
“We have an account from Perth-Amboy, that on Tuesday Evening last two Seamen belonging to a Brig in that Harbour, being at a Tavern, one of them took Occasion to boast of his Bravery; which the other resented a little, they agreed to walk out, and take a Tryal of Skill at Boxing, which having exercised a while, they were parted, and came in and drank Friends, where the Person who boasted of his Strength, died a few Minutes after. We hear the other has since made off.” (The Boston Weekly Post-Boy, Dec. 25, 1749 No. 786)

 “Whereas Mary, the wife of Gabriel Poneo, of the township of Evesham, in the county of Burlington, hath, and doth most intolerably and unjustly misbehave herself to her said husband, strolling about from house to house; these are to desire all persons not to trust the said Mary; for he will pay no debts she shall contract.” (The Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov. 16, 1749) 

 

Golden Bough
“The importance of perceived control presumably accounts for the elaborate magical and supernatural systems that people of all cultures have developed to manipulate aspects of the natural and social environments that they cannot otherwise effectively control, and for the ability people display to maintain their faith in the efficacy of their magical systems in the face of what must often be extremely low correlations between magical acts and desired outcomes.” (Price, T. Douglas and Brown, James A.. Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity. 1985. Orlando: Academic Press, p.107)

“The soft life of the representatives of the proletariat—their special shops, their vacation spas and hunting lodges, their party hospitals, their privileged housing and consumer durables, the educational advantages of their children, their arrogance and social distance, their appropriation of the state budget, their corruption—must have fueled a discourse, in safe paces, of enormous moral anger and power.” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance)

 “…In large aggregates, organisms, including humans, respond negatively to a number of features of their environment (in addition to resource scarcity); these have been designated congestion, information load, loss of privacy, and loss of control.” (Price, T. Douglas and Brown, James A.. Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity. 1985. Orlando: Academic Press, p.106) 

“It is hoped eventually to distribute these reindeer among the Eskimo when they have learned the art of herding, so that, like the Eskimo in Alaska, there may be private or corporate ownership, and in order that a certain and sufficient food and clothing supply can be assured.”

 “If our Northern experiment succeeds as it is hoped, the periods of starvation so often and long endured by both Eskimo and Indians should become a thing of the past.”

 “It is not claimed that the Eskimo has the mental capacity of the average European, the circumstances of his life giving small opportunity for cerebral development. None has ever been taken, in child-hood, into civilized lands for education. A trial was made a few years ago of two lads from Hudson Bay being placed in a school in Ontario. They were bright boys, who entered heartily into sports and such studies as they could understand, but their physique was not capable of enduring the strain. It was found that they were subject to all the endemic diseases, one after another, of their new environment, and at the end of the year they were sent home.”

"Doubtless, if a babe were taken early, placed in a civilized home, schooled from infancy as a Canadian child, his mentality would sense little or no handicap from Eskimo parentage. While not in any sense a scientist, it is my candid opinion, after long observation, that the average size of an Eskimo brain differs little from that of other races, and their inclusion in the economic life of Canada will add to our citizenship no mean element.” (Whittaker, C.E.. Arctic Eskimo. 1937. London: Seeley, Service & Co.. pp. 255-256)

"The cruel necessity to enhance one's own chances of survival, even if it meant withholding assistance from strangers in need, may be the reason that several dozen people [Inuit] were able to watch the 130 or more officers and men of John Franklin's last expedition die from starvation and exposure without intervening." (Renee Fossett, In Order to Live Untroubled) 

“He’s probably been with some expedition. Those people always have beards….” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives)

“Fortunately, the overwhelming majority prefer death to such utter demoralization, even when suffering from acute starvation.” (Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity)

John Franklin Expedition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition

• 1845, 19 May: Franklin expedition sails from England
• 1845, July: Expedition docks in Greenland, sends home five men and a batch of letters
• 1845, 28 July: Last sighting of expedition by Europeans (a whaling ship in Baffin Bay)
• 1845–46: Expedition winters on Beechey Island. Three crewmen die of tuberculosis and are buried.
• 1846: Erebus and Terror leave Beechey Island and sail down Peel Sound towards King William Island
• 1846, 12 September: Ships trapped in the ice off King William Island
• 1846–47: Expedition winters on King William Island
• 1847, 28 May: Date of first note, says "All well"
• 1847, 11 June: Franklin dies
• 1847–48: Expedition again winters on King William Island, after the ice fails to thaw in 1847
• 1848, 22 April: Erebus and Terror abandoned after one year and seven months trapped in the ice
• 1848, 25 April: Date of second note, saying 24 men have died and the survivors plan to start marching south on 26 April to the Back River
• 1850 (?): Inuit board an abandoned ship, which is icebound off King William Island
• 1850 (?): Inuit see 40 men walking south on King William Island
• 1851 (?): Inuit hunters see four men still trying to head south, last verified sighting of survivors (as reported to Charles Hall)
• 1852–1858 (?): Inuit may have seen Crozier and one other survivor much further south in the Baker Lake area
• 1854: John Rae interviews local Inuit, who give him items from the expedition and tell him the men starved to death, after resorting to cannibalism
• 1859: McClintock finds the abandoned boat and the messages on an admiralty form in a cairn on King William Island

“Even the roast chicken wanted to live.” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives)

Cross-Fertilization

“Key symbolic acts are, as one sociologist puts it, “tests of whether or not the whole system of mutual fear will hold up.”” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance)  

 “At night I make my way to the hideout, with great cunning and care, avoiding all lights of the town, and there, below the open-air dance floor, shielded from the world by its planks and boards, I feel like a sovereign prince. I am my own master, my own chief in everything.” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives)

“Everything, and everything you see, has an "inverse" or opposite, or 'nother state, which might be extremely appealing. Always look for what you are not seeing, but might be.” (Chrome)

“To be deprived forever of the earth that I am bound to by every drop of my blood. To lose forever the hope of finding the kind of people I am searching for. Can a man abandon his last hope?” (Vladimir Maximov, A Man Survives)

“I'm afraid that the easier it gets the less chance I'll have to dig out.” (Chrome)

“Spare the submissive and demolish the proud (parcere subjectes et debellare superbos).” (Roman motto)

“The process is akin to speciation among flora that, if sufficiently isolated from the genetic stock of the species as a whole, will gradually diverge to a point where the differences preclude cross-fertilization and a new species is created. It is thus the relative isolation of wildflowers, say, as compared with birds, that accounts for the greater local speciation among wildflowers.” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance)

Recent selections

“The external power that deprives man of the freedom to communicate his thoughts publically deprives him at the same time of his freedom to think.” (Immanuel Kant)

“You remind me of somebody who is looking out a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet.” (Wittenstein, to his sister) Louis A. Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion, Cornell, 1994, p. 13)

“For “in confessing,” as Cavell pointed out, “you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you.”” (Ibid., p. 14)

"In the novel In the Region of the Ice, a nun who teaches literature, Sister Irene, speaks of a brilliant, mad student. "'I'm very grateful to have him in class. It's just that ... he thinks ideas are real.' Sister Carlotta, who loved literature also, had been forced to teach grade-school arithmetic for the last four years. That might have been why she said, a little sharply, 'You don't think ideas are real?' Sister Irene acquiesced with a smile, but of course she did not think so: only reality is real."" (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me, p. 27)

“Today the Penghulus, the longhouse chiefs, have assembled in splendor. Tattooed & armed, in leopard jackets & feathered headdresses, they sit facing Temonggong Jugah, chief of chiefs, who paces back & forth in front of them, pointing at me, then sneering at them: "You with your tattooed fingers [for heads taken]: his hands are clean. You with your spears; he has come to collect them to show to children. You with your parangs [swords]: he is unarmed; he mocks you. Why? He reads. He has come so far in a day, you could not travel it in a lifetime. You will not disobey me: your children will come out of the fields and go to school."” (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me, p. 44)

“Religious. To love nature is to love nature’s God. The teacher’s manifest opportunity is to take advantage of the still voice in nature to reach the inner recesses of the child soul, to instill there a love for well-doing in looking after the happiness of God’s created things, thereby attaining the child’s happiness and for himself the crown of life. This makes for a religious country folk.” (The Rural Teacher and His Work, Harold Waldstein Foght, Specialist in Rural School Practice, United States Bureau of Education, Author of The American Rural School, Rural Denmark And its Schools, Etc., New York, Macmillan, 1917)

“Disputes and quarrels among spouses were virtually nonexistent, Le Jeune reported, since each sex carried out its own activities without "meddling" in those of the other. Le Jeune deplored the fact that the Montagnais "imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever. "” (Gowdy, John. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means. 1998: Covelo: Island Press, p. 145)

“The bulk of the population will divide increasingly into sinners, libertines, profligates, downright criminals, atheists, and cynics on the one hand, and into Stoics, saints, moral heroes, sublime altruists, intensely religious prophets, martyrs, ascetics, mystics, Gnostics, and the like on the other hand. Militant atheism will be countered by religiosity of the greatest intensity, and utter moral depravity by sublime moral heroism. Likewise, egotism will be counterbalances by altruism, anti-sociality by supreme sacrifice, militant materialism by fearless idealism. Skepticism will be met by questioning fanaticism; and criticism, by dogmatism. Opposite the materialistic and utilitarian City of Man will be built with City of God. Earthly utopians will contend with God’s Messiahs.

During the early stages of calamities, the movement of irreligiosity and moral cynicism will be dominant; but with the continuation of the crisis the movement toward religion and moral heroism will increasingly prevail, progressively curbing atheism and depravity. The struggle between these polarized movements will be multifarious, arduous and long, and sealed by the blood or martyrs, the inspiration of prophets, and the enthusiasm of apostles. These will be laying the cornerstone of the new system of values on which—in the post calamity period—a new creative culture and society can be built." (Sorokin, Pitirim A.. Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence Upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life. 1942., p. 317)

“In East Greenland a child was given several names. Some of them were those of deceased persons, but many were words from objects drawn from the general vocabulary of the language: a lamp, perhaps, or a kind of rock. After a person died it was forbidden to mention even one of his names or else his soul would return to haunt the one who uttered it. This was no problem in the case of words that were names and nothing else, but it meant that names taken from objects could no longer be used to refer to those objects. New words had to be invented. When another child was born it might receive some of the tabooed names, which could then be spoken once again. But the corresponding objects kept the new appellations which has been assigned to them. By accumulation over the years, this custom led to changes in while sections of the East Greenlandic vocabulary.” (Burch, Ernest Jr. The Eskimos. 1988. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. , p.90)

“If there was a death along the way, the deceased would be left in the snow, or placed on a hastily erected scaffold. If someone fell ill or was injured, that person would have to be carried on the sled, hindering the party’s progress. If a pregnant woman felt birth pains coming on, a small parturition hut would be built for her, and she would be placed in it, along with a small supply of food. If there was a good camping place nearby, the res of the party would halt there. Otherwise, they would continue on until they found one. The mother would bring her baby into the world alone—as she would have done anyway in accordance with local custom—and catch up with the rest of the party later, on foot, carrying the newborn infant inside her parka.” (Ibid., p. 76)

“Young women were expected to smile pleasantly, talk quietly, and generally maintain an unobtrusive presence in the community, whereas old ladies could laugh and talk and tease and joke and pour forth a torrent of abuse or commentary and time they pleased.” (Ibid., p.110)

“But songs of one kind or another were everywhere. When Rasmussen asked an Alaskan Eskimo how many songs he had composed, he replied, ‘I merely know that I have many, and that everything in me is song. I sing as I draw breath.’” (R16, p. 111)

"There were four men who went hunting together. Three of them were brothers, while the forth one had taken their sister as wife. They went out to the floe-edge. Suddenly the ice broke away, and carried them out of sight of land. After some time the floe of ice became smaller and smaller. Then the oldest brother, who was a great shaman, summoned his guardian spirit, a large bear, and told him of their plight. Then the ice flow began to tip up, and when it became quite steep, the oldest brother slid off into the sea. When he came up again, he was transformed into a polar bear. The other brothers followed his example, and when they came up were also transformed into bears. Then they swam to the shore. The olders brother told the other men that if they should see any seals, they must not kill them, else they would not regain their human shape. The brother-in-law could not resist the temptation of killing a seal when he saw it, and he devoured it. When they reached the land the oldest brother transformed himself into a gull, and flew to a place where the people were cutting up a whale. He had some of the meat, and took some back to his brothers. Then the brothers resumed human shape, but the brother-in-law had to remain a bear" (Ibid, p.?)

 

Within Human Matrices, There Are Beautiful Cracks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb-U1aXoCuQ

Breakroom chat

Moraline:

What’s interesting is how the early catholic church embraced the pagan gods and rituals. The saints replaced the pagan gods, the virgin, the festivals of easter and christmas, all grafted upon older pagan rituals. Even the churches were constructed upon pagan holy sites. This leads me to believe in a strange continuity of the gods. Even the great santuario de las lajas in southern colombia, its massive bridge built across the gorge upon which the virgin was sighted, i believe was probably a holy site before the spanish arrived. No doubt buga was always holy too. Call the spiritual power of these places whatever you want. 

But men have blemished the gods. Luther was the start of the great blemishing in the west. The rejection of trabsubstantiation was the rejection of god on earth. The protestants sent the gods away. No wonder it was protestants who made up 99% of scientists. 

Maximin:

Our gods are here, below. They are with us in the

Bureau, in the kitchen, in the shops, in the rest rooms. The

gods have become like us, ergo we have become like gods.

And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on another

planet, we shall come to you to make your life as

godlike, as rational, and as correct as our own ...” (Zamiatin, We)

I really can't say what it is. I know nearly nothing about gods or the history of Christianity. I had always hoped that I myself was a god, which would explain why I have never been able to fit in Western society. Yet then again Tim Feriss is a god. If you pay him a few hundred dollars a month, he will send you a package of what he is buying these days, really cool things that will make you happy for a few days. Western gods have very short shelf lives. The gods of Moraline are eternal--a great blender, or an eternal cupcake or steak. I am reaching for metaphors. A man from Northbrook, Illinois must search for consumer metaphors. That is all I was put on earth to do. Every boy's dream in Northbrook was to have his own infomerical. My parents would be beyond themselves with joy if I were Tim Feriss, because Tim Feriss is a god. He mails gods to other men who pay him. The selling of Church indulgences, that sort of thing. Tim Feriss maintains his sanity and sells indulgences, is a god and sells smaller gods with curt shelf lives. This happiness is godly, although these gods, these consumer products, are fragile, and soon die.  There are no standardized tests to make certain of godhood so man will always be uncertain of gods and godhood. I also remember the last farmland in Northbrook. It later was paved. McMansions were built upon the farmland to make the farmland holy. Each home is a god. Inside there are gods who live in groups and they are called families. The family itself is not worshipped but there are strange fetish cults. Families report to larger gods. But even farmland isn't godly. If anyone had even read the first few chapters of moraline free a kid from Northbrook would realize how fucked he really is--his childhood feeling of nature and spirituality was a pathetic plot of land not even farmed, one fucking horse, some old rusting farm equipment, a few old 'farm houses' that backed to the land that, if you even read the fist chapter of Moraline free, it’s clearly the cemetery of a murdered tribe. Try sleeping at night now. A litte kid from northbrook would have to dig very deep in the field to find the gods. It would be shocking for him to find corpses.

You are more like Fritz in this respect--he knew Christianity inside out. My family didn't even have a chance to reject the gods--they weren't aware of them. I only knew one kid in high school, Manos, a Greek, who ever mentioned gods and I almost thought he was joking. My parents also never took seriously what they called 'religion.' My mother was a catholic and she only described Catholicism as a strange system from which she escaped. Perhaps this is where I get my concept of matrix and the constant feeling of escape. The catholics think many things as dirty but I always thought catholics were dirty and protestants clean.  My father was very deft, raised in a time of great expectations for high modernism. The gods had been swiftly defeated all over the world and a huge vacuum needed to be filled by law, finance, real estate--it was a very gratifying and exciting time for the empire. I greatly enjoy terms such as 'liberty' and 'freedom' as I tackle ancient hunter-gatherers. I am confident these libertarian concepts would be deeply relevant to the Eskimo, more relevant than even excel.  I also am ignorant about Greek gods, although from time to time I read a description of Greek Gods or read Roman mention of the dead gods.  As a product of high modernist upper middle class law and finance, I find all the mention of the gods very curious. Given my upbringing I should, if I were a correct product of my specific matrix, seek to illegalize or otherwise discourage the gods you speak of. That I do not partly explains my bad conscience while in the west. Lawyers, accountants, and men of high finance and legal systems believe that their systems are the holy or the magic--power, it is to them. I am working on a retracement of this power. Yet in the mean time I feel powerless in a matrix I have rejected and powerless among gods who do not love me. Yet today was R's birthday and I bought her a baby tiger stuffed animal and flowers.

Moraline:

I was raised with my parents during their cult period where demons and witches and warlocks ravaged green bay wi and lansing, mi. I was told of a neighborhood witch who could levitate small objects such as pencils. I saw other witches myself and was visited at various moments by spirits. Halloween was a devils day and i was not allowed to celebrate it. My mother told me of the cat sacrifices done but the witches of green bay as tribute to satan. There were plans to procure a baby for an ultimate halloween sacrifice. This was my childhood and early youth. I stopped seeing the spirits when i came to northbrook, il and my mother stopped mentioning them. 

I should also mention it was through prayer that i was even born alive at all due to my mothers sickness in pregnancy. My feet were also very pigeontoed and this was corrected through the administration of holy water. 

Maximin:

You arrived in the center of godlessness incarnate when you arrived in Northbrook. If you study the history of the Northshore of Chicago--I haven't--you will learn of the settling along this Northshore of the super-rich industrialists in Glencoe, Winnetka, Kennilworth, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff. Northbrook was built after these lakefront settlements in the late 50s and early 60s as a chance for a farm town to play catch up in just few years from developers (I speak of the real suburb, not the old village in the center). It was an old farmtown and Mr. Landweir who you certainly didn't know was involved in the transformation from Shermerville to Northbrook. It would attract the insecure and confused to become secure and productive members of society--my parents, your parents. I wonder how many ran from witches in Wisconsin. Your mother didn't see any witches in Northbrook. I find this impossible because you must recall "Nursey," the old lady who lived in one of the turn-of-the-century homes. She died when I was 8 and they found rooms completely filled with junk. It was once a beautiful house because I saw the restoration after they took away her body and things and sold the house to a rich couple. My parents never understood why anyone would restore an old house. My mother hated old homes and she loved her suburban home in Northbrook and loved carpet. There was a small bubonic rat which lived in this carpet infested house and it bit children on the face.  When I was a child I saw, huge, rambling abandoned mansions in Lake Bluff. I would throw rocks at the abandoned greenhouse of the Armor mansion because my father bought a 'lot' out there. It was totally undeveloped save these abandoned mansions and my father would go there to be alone and think about why he had entered into law and accounting. He was happy in that forest. However, past age 11, something either happened to he or I and there has been a strange mutual suspicion. However, I believe he was at once like us, I am certain. You must remember that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father; never forget this.

Moraline: 

But i have much more sympathy for the WE guy than orwell or rand paul or the libertarians or any of the western complainers. In the ussr you had difficulty leaving. Any man with a us passport can go to a lot of good places. Why stick around and whine? Answer: because whining is their hobby. Because they have no skills to live in freedom. Its all silly to demand freedom from a state. The presence of any state is an infringement on freedom. The choices are simple: gain the skills to live freely within the cracks of that state system (as in scotts mountain people of asia) OR leave for some other place. But to have no skills to live otherwise, no courage to leave, and to complain that the state is acting too much like a state is ridiculous. 

Only a russian of that time could write such a book. Orwell had not experienced enough or in depth, none of the great russian suffering. For this reason orwell is read today. Its imaginative and specilative. WE is probably straight history.

Maximin:

The purpose of philosophy is as an escape route, to fortify his mind to retrace and deconstruct lies and allow him to find his way back. You mention courage--I have just finished writing a piece that speaks on that--courage is more rare than diamonds, it leads man back to the hunt. If philosophy is not used as anything other than an escape route, it grows cancerous. But so goes matrices:

“The sins the angel promised to punish were, most particularly, the crushing exactions of grain and labor by the nobility, the tithes of the high clergy, and the failure of avaricious, licentious, and vain elites to observe God’s commands.” (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance)

It is. And like your writing of Patagonia, there is something different about it, striking. So striking no one knows what to do. Men are shocked to encounter bravery. Bravery and courage are rare things and highly valued and remembered. But why is this? Why is bravery and courage so precious? It shows man a path and brings him back to his original freedom. What no one realized about Patagonia is that no matter how much mystery anyone tries to remove beforehand, man loses himself there. It is a force of mountainous and enormous wonder. This is the god experience.

There is another experience in western matrices but it is a very negative electrical energy, akin to standing near an electric power station transformer. Far, far too much surplus, as you say. Surplus is the orginary concept of when and how things got off kilter (or just perhaps slightly different, and then off kilter). I say slightly different because surplus as surplus (I prefer the beautiful Latin, surplus qua surplus, and in fact contemplate writing in Latin but am concerned of limited audience) did exist temporarily even in hunter gatherer tribes--or at least from my limited anecdotal knowledge from what I read in Brody and Carpenter. Canetti describes the force of how surplus seems to be shipped in high pressure pipes--the onerous pressure of the financial systems. He describes how men of great wealth have the overwhelming force and burden of the lives this money represents. You then have a very strange counter-product--money guys talking just about the money, totally detached from the lives. It's as if people have forgotten the human factor. Isn't it strange that in a totally mechanized product, it is as if a computer is almost the producer of the product? As if the human buys from computer? At that point the money represents a computer's labor. This is where it gets very strange and man becomes one with computer, perhaps a convergence to computer--I'm not certain yet but I believe Zamiatin was getting at this.

I also wonder if Argentina (maybe parts of Chile) were as close as a man could get to hunter-gatherer society. I am aware of the enormous surplus of the sheep. I am aware of the huge estancias and some of the outright horrid oppression of the workers in Rio Gallegos in the 20s. Yet clearly some of these estancias were far less surplus driven. And then this incredible phenomenon of the failed state--the estancia at which I stayed was huge but there was an enormous feeling of freedom there, meaning, not the taint of high-modernism, or traces of it so small that compared to western matrices it is barely detectable.

A smaller estancia may have fluctuations in sheep or other food supplies that could bring it close to hunter-gatherer balances. The difference would be that the hunter-gatherer seemed to roam to other areas to cycle hunting areas. This may well be the modern man's sense of freedom--following the natural contours of the earth in his pursuit of something to eat--a perfect correlation. It is basically man as animal or what man now calls animal. Perhaps then in that context man never thought of himself as special. Later on there would be other cultures that would be far bolder, perhaps driven by their building surpluses--bold enough to say they were god's chosen people, or codifying the names and stories of the gods and mixing it with institutionalized slavery and servitude such as with Egypt and Greece et al..

The paradox of this freedom is it really cannot happen now with the world's current population. It almost certainly cannot exist given the current state of man. The nature of the hunter gather 'society' (societies did not exist pre-surplus) kept populations in check as there was only a finite amount of animals and plants the earth can produce in any one region. Man's body was one with everything--physically as he made his way through the land (he did not 'conquer' anything, which is a very, very arrogant and emblematic way of looking at getting up a mountain or getting across a plain, etc.).

But the paradox gets even more perplexing. On the one hand you have Zamiatin who specifically calls out this thing with the Gods. This is why I bang my fist on the table because you guys would be shutting down ale houses (I say ale house in the context of protected social spaces in which subordinate classes could express their hidden transcripts, not dens of vice in which inebriation or licentiousness are the main focus) night after night in discussion. You cannot fault me also for using terms such as "hidden transcripts" or "subordinate classes" as they are from Scott and you are the one who told me to read Scott. It is permissible to use academic language so long as it is used for good and not evil.

Zamiatin claims that the world population will shrink considerably but be highly regulated like a computer, and the remaining people will be a fraction of the world's population but live like a computer (maybe people actually go away and only computer is left--the ultimate convergence) somehow serving a computer, but I need to get through the book.

What is very strange about this proposal is that it would mimic in an evil way what would have to happen for man to return to freedom--a huge reduction in the population. If men lived again, all of them, as hunter-gatheres, there would have to be enough space for each man (or each band) to roam and hunt and gather freely.

Surplus paradoxically leads to "more" yet then drastically leads to a lot less as it all falls apart. In man's attempt to be god or make freedom, he fails. God for man is the authentic feel of his planet each day as he moves about the earth following its contours and being affected by it in pursuit of food. Man wanders, not aimlessly as Western man would say, but that free spontaneous wander mimics the free spontaneous wander of the animals. Nothing in the world is like the grid of a suburb--clearly not even stock market or commodity prices. Which is the mental sickness of geometry, for example--whose fucking sick visions are those? Certainly not mine, and what megalomaniac arrogance for anyone to imply that geometry is a very good example of truth, e.g. a priori truth. Plato tried to say that such forms were windows into some god-like forces but they would have no relevance whatsoever to hunter-gatherer man.

Based on the nature of human matrices--how they grow, control, and dominate men, how they expand populations, harvest energy, and continue to grow-- the growth represents sickness--it is a mimicking of wandering that has been lost, of lost wandering and lost freedom. As you had written early, the hunt was the greatest thing for man (although balanced by the joy and return to woman and family), or so essentially a part of him and a part of his happiness that once he has lost it he will always try to find something to take its place. Yet matrices do two things: they hold men back socially (really the most important point in describing a matrix), and dominate land physically, significantly lessening his chances of ever getting away.

There is the tragic prospect that the reason that this is so suddenly and rapidly clear (as it was so suddenly and rapidly for Zamiatin) is that matrices are forcing man's hand by the dooming vision which means servitude for all, total loss of freedom without any respite, a world in which only autistics are happy with their green trains or images thereof.

Jesus, though, the million dollar question was what the hell got this surplus shit going? If this question can be answered, can man be saved? Or is the idea of saving man always going to involve some high modernist scheme that makes things worse, further entangling man in some idiotic scheme? At least your solution of the hunter-gatherer isn't some idiotic high modernist scheme.

Perhaps this is also the origin of evil. Perhaps this is the original sin. But the original sin was not Cain killing Abel. It seems original sin is deception. Ah, I see it now, the Garden of Eden. This Side of Eden, Hugh Brody. Was it woman that started the matrix? Jesus, is that a possibility?

That then begs the question--if deception is the original sin (coercion of other men, one could say, not unlike law, not unlike all systems of domination), it could be argued that all this got bad for man with the first matrix. Abundance was always around. There always was surplus. Indeed there is nothing more today than there was a million years ago. Hence it isn't surplus qua surplus as the evil force which has changed man. Man chose to abuse the world. But the question is why. The question is whether surplus is a symptom or a cause. If it is true the earth has always been there for man, why did he suddenly strike at earth? Why did man strike at earth? Or why did man strike at man? Was it cowardice? Did men no longer have the courage to fight and slay one another? It has to be asked why man didn't hunt other men but hunted other 'animals.' Yet nearly no animals hunt each other--lions don't hunt lions. No animals do this (fish, perhaps?) So for man to hunt man represents sickness. Taking away a man's freedom (taking away his roaming, his hunt) is equivalent to killing a man. A matrix is by definition then a system of killing other men. The whole enterprise is built on the enslavement of other men--the killing of man's liberty or freedom, which began with preventing other men to hunt and roam through coercion.

I had a sketch of an idea that showed the balance of how a guy could make things useful for his hunt--carry enough food and water for example to get across a plain to get at more animals. Maybe he creates a wineskin or some sack for berries or dried meat. But just enough to get him to the next hunt. What if something bad happened though--although it seems unpopular or offensive to speak of anything bad in Eden. The man breaks his leg and suddenly has to survive in a cave to get through a winter, for example. He is alone and maybe no one will help him. No longer is his life of the wander and the hunt. Now it is to stay in the cave, limp around for berries or small animals, and try to make it. Maybe such a man survives and suddenly a whole different kind of man is born--the planner, the saver. He has to lure women to him to live with him in his cave (I am reaching here) and convince the woman that his stationary life is preferable. Perhaps he encounters other men. Who knows what happens when other men approach him, if they are friendly or not. I do not know what contexts men fought and killed one another (always?).

The point is that perhaps the scheming to survive in contrast to the spontaneous joy of the wander and hunt is what led to man's first attack on earth. Something went wrong with the hunt. Man lost his ability to hunt due to a natural accident. If he then survived and had a son or daughter, he would have to teach his children the only way he could teach them--for as a cripple he could not teach his son how to hunt. The original sin may well have been an original perversion--not some insanity of a man driven organically but due to a bad fall and a leg break. Man was hurt but never got better. He passed on his hurt or sick spirit. This then led to a degenerate attack on earth--a loss of faith in the hunt. Degeneracy bread degeneracy, until man was so unfit all he knew--his only and entire way--was an attack on the earth. He perfected and strengthened his perversion into what is now called *science* and his system to protect his perversion was called *government*. Remember when you told the man in the bar that you come from a culture of science and government? Western man is a man wandering in sickness--the blue pill men tell themselves each day they are well to continue on. The red pill men realize their sickness but some can never quite conduct the pathology.

I do not here see why it would be necessary to blame woman for the original sin. It makes no sense to pin it on her, especially if it can be demonstrated that man can fuck himself alone and on the hunt. Loss of freedom can be man's own doing--but the evil, if you want to call it that, or the original sin, is when man spreads his misfortune. Can he spread his misfortune to other healthy, hunting men, or must it be from father to son?

Man, alone with his broken leg in the cave--one hopes that he summons the great force of the gods, that he is always happy, that, as you say, he is never alone. Did the bad gods gang up on man and drive the lone injured man crazy in his cave? Why weren't the helping gods helping him? Maybe a man would have just come to rest in the cave and died in peace. He was always at peace. Perhaps this theory of the sick man was never even possible in a world of helping gods and man was always at peace and there was no torment, anxiety, or suffering.

"While traveling with Ohnainewk, I remarked, as best I could in Eskimo, "The wind is cold." He laughed. "How," he asked, "can the wind be cold? You're cold; you're unhappy. But the wind isn't cold or unhappy."" (Carpenter, Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me)