Tea

He threw the remains of his tea into the plants. What harm could it do them? It was only tea and they were only plants. Who knows, it might even nourish them. And anyway, it must have cooled down by now and could hardly scorch them.

Removal

There was a great hole in the ground all full up with soil, which is to say there wasn't a great hole in the ground, for what kind of hole is absent of the very void which is the very essence of a hole? A hole is absence after all. And so there wasn't a hole, but then all the soil was removed, and so, removed of that soil which presence of which had denied the hole- meant indeed there had been no hole to deny- there now was a hole.

Craving Art

Literature can be- and much else but literature in particular- if we lose our natural and proper place, horribly utilitarian. We are grasping towards some end; there is something missing is us, some aching void it is the task of the literature to fill; but the mind is infinitely subtle and if this mindset rules then the space into which truth can flow, truth into truth, is not there, covered by the very desire to fill the perceived emptiness. And actually this craving is both the means and the end of itself; this end being the continuation of the entity, the 'self,' the knot of consciousness, which craves, and this continuation of itself is achieved by craving. It must remain active or it is no more. It offers the illusion of having an end beyond itself, but in truth its purpose is its own existence, which is achieved by the state of craving.

Though perhaps, and perhaps there is no perhaps, given the nature of that grasping mind with its crude worlds of means and ends, its sham nature can quite easily convince itself of being satiated, of having been filled with the most wholesome of sham art. All it needs is to experience something 'external' as crude as itself, which again satisfies the certainty of its own existence, validates its own nature, asserts the truth of its being, and with much joy such art which fails to threaten the perpetuation of the knot of consciousness is triumphantly labeled great art.

Translations

Every work of literature is a translation- from life into words. Though the writer himself may be little more than just such a translation in the first place. An abstraction at source.

Wonderful

He had the most wonderful thought in his head and no matter how much filth and grime he for some reason would cover himself in, he could always think of this wonderful thought and how pure he would then think himself, or at least try and think himself. But for some malicious reason its power faded, perhaps through overuse, which left a quandary. Should he, to remain in bliss rather than in grime, try and keep this thought ever in mind- to ward off the grime- or should it be kept treasured in the dark, so to speak, purposely not thinking of it, not dirtying it with this overuse, but, and yet, ever dimly aware of its existence, its glowing secretly and gloriously in the dark, and then when most needed, when feeling I suppose most grimy, to produce it and vanquish all foes, however falsely great and powerful they had appeared!
But in time does even the idea, great and lofty, rather than glow triumphantly, sink into the muck also? And if it does, who knows, perhaps all the better. The muck is truth! Why try and overcome it? And maybe that's all the idea was all along- the muck and a lure into the muck.

One And

"You can't have one and the other."
"Why not?"
"That's just the way it works. It's one or the other, not one and the other."

Ideal

An ideal is simply an idea with an "l" attached, and what's so ideal about that?

Exposure

Rocks, soil and roots. All very peaceful, perhaps not quite beautiful, but still, there's plenty to be said for peaceful. But then some roots are cut away, a rock loosened, thrown in the heap, and insects innumerable are suddenly exposed, presumably just having been living in idyllic if crowded and swarming harmony, but now they're scurrying in every direction, each for itself, all in the frantic search for some dark nook to hide away in, for what kind of eyes might see one if exposed to this light for too long, and any length at all, after all, is too long.

The Polytheistic Religion of Nationalism

Nationalism is a polytheistic faith in invisible entities whose wills are purported to be performed by the numerous priests and high-priests of this faith in the various fields of politics, the military, education, etc. The deities worshipped are often mutually antagonistic and the greatest of these gods, ie those with the greatest number of believers or perhaps most virile or fundamentalist believers, desire the murder and annihilation of other gods whose followers can then, if they are sufficiently worthy, become converts to the greater god, whose greatness has been proven by his defeat, in the persons of his followers, of the other god's followers. If not worthy, they can become slaves to the nationalist god to whom they are now subject, or else simply killed as human sacrifices to the god. The gods of nationalism often desire such offerings of human sacrifice, and to this end wars are fought. The gods are also often placated by the lesser offerings such as subjection of sacrificial victims to torture and imprisonment.

Regarding this field of metaphysical deities and the human structures that serve them are some dangerous souls who believe that the gods of nationalism do not actually exist at all, but that they are purely mental fabrications used by the priests and high-priests of these supposed religions to justify their own egotistical interests and will to power. These atheists warn that nationalism is often a tool of manipulation of the masses by ruling elites, and the typically blood-thirsty deities they claim to serve are simply their own wills projected onto an imaginary divine entity which cloaks the true nature of their actions in a foggy, mystical aura.
The atheist would prefer a statement such as "America/The Soviet Union(tick where appropriate) has attacked Afghanistan" be rendered as "The cabals which run the humanly conceived entity of 'America'/'Soviet Union' have attacked Afghanistan."

Admittedly, we have entered a more complex issue here where The Soviet Union saw the apparent spiritual union of various nationalist deities into one far greater deity, but this evolutionary progression suffered an unexpected dissolution and the old deities reconvened into their separate selves. Victor Pelevin has an interesting and unusual hypothesis in his book Babylon regarding this where he says: "The USSR which they'd begun to renovate and improve...improved so much that it ceased to exist(if a state is capable of entering nirvana, that's what must have happened in this case)."

There are those who wish for a single all ruling god over all the Earth, and these monotheists are known as Globalists. These globalists, needless to say, intend to be be the high-priests of this all-powerful divine entity, should their aims be realised. It would be anathema to this priestly class' notion of reality but possibly they are to be the unwitting vehicle of Pelevin's idea where the One World State will be realised only to dissolve itself through an enlightenment experience where the individual ego sense of this deity is transcended, and an enlightened anarchy ensues. This mirroring St Francis' notion of organised Christianity's desired end being its own dissolution; religion being the means to a higher end in terms of individual life and consciousness rather than an end in itself- a dangerous notion which nearly cost him an unpleasant death at the hands of the Inquisition, a body of organised religion far more organised than religious. Though perhaps these committers of satanic acts were very religious; they just weren't quite being truthful about the nature of the religion they were serving...a tree shall be known by its fruit and all that. The idea that people clearly immersed in evil might lie seems a strangely undervalued notion.

Vessels

This is something of an offshoot of the Secondary Objectivity post, where Aldous Huxley describes certain places as possessed of a "numinous presence...the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place."

Similarly, words are psychic vessels or vortices which attain their significance through the focusing of human intelligence within these symbols, and which are nourished & deepened by the accumulated concentration of minds projected within these mental forms. In this is something of the sacredness of the Word, where the attuned mind isn't simply using a kind of utilitarian communication tool, but is immersing itself within a living network of psychic vortices which have attained a greater charge of significance through the inflowing of men's thoughts into these intellectual pathways. We are not talking about objective independent objects after all, but nodes within, and creations of, consciousness.

Similarly to an animal- though not to get too carried away with this similarity- a word or even language sickens & dies when life ceases to flow into its forms, though there is always the possibility of future resurrections when later minds renew these corpses of thought with the breath of consciousness.

This Kind of

"This kind of writing..."
"What about it?"
"It's ridiculous. Look at it. What's it about? Nothing! Abstracted from everything!"
"But maybe it's better that way. Look at all the stuff that's supposed to be about something that would be better off if it was about nothing. Or not even about nothing. Was nothing!"

Through a Glass

If you look through the microscope at the other end you will see a tiny, tiny man who has successfully narrowed his dimensions to roughly that of a pin-prick. And look at him, delighted with himself, bursting with pride at the achievement. "Look how vast I am!"

Child & Mirror

With such innocence, or maybe not quite such innocence, is a young child shown its reflection in a mirror- the world made strange, divided.

Bubble

There was, floating in the air, a bubble, within which was air, but then the bubble burst and there was only air.

The Last

This is the last and only remaining fragment of a vast and great but sadly otherwise lost work.

Greeks, Order & Oedipus

This is all a bit rough and ready, but anyway:

I'm afraid my knowledge of the Greeks and their literature is pitifully small but, and bravely ignoring the ramifications of this ignorants, it seems to me they, as in their leading intellectual lights, with the stress on intellect, were obsessed with enclosing life within cohesive, Euclidean, as it were, form; that the rationalising mind, which was coming to feel for such people to be human existence itself rather than an aspect of it, should be able to construct such a rational, spiritually legalistic form within which all the facts were contained and explained, and then with full ease and satisfaction of mind inhabit this perfect, seamless structure, and indeed bow down to it. Thus the Greeks' extreme disquiet over things like the Irrational Numbers of Pi and square root of 2, which thwarted such rational enclosures, instead leading back into the worlds of superstitious infinity the 'rationalists', then presumably as now, imagined they were moving away from.

And from there to the one Greek play somewhat within my own framework of knowledge, however hazy, Oedipus Rex, with its obsession with the transgression of the natural order, which in truth is the human conceived rational map that asserts itself to be the natural order. Oedipus' crimes are, within the moral framework of the time, not crimes at all if treated as naked existential acts. He kills rather than is killed, and marries a woman; it turning out these were unknown to him his father and mother. His 'innocent violations' are of a cold intellectually conceived machine, which is sent into disorder until avenged and repaired. In a way, if looked at as a purely intellectual edifice, an attempt at such a rational structure itself, the play I mean, it's more comedy than tragedy, with an unsolvable riddle being set whose desired end for the author and audience is the satisfaction of the moral and intellectual system which nothing should or must contradict, in which dramatic structure the great man of Oedipus finds himself simultaneously guiltless and overwhelmingly guilty. The rationalising mind tries frienzedly every imaginable avenue to see what is the solution, how is the cohesive rational legalistic structure of life, or imagined life, maintained. This is what is really at stake, and all that is produced to maintain the integrity of the edifice of truth, the structure of reality, is Oedipus senselessly stabs his own eyes out! What good could that do anyone?! Ah, order is restored. Now the machine of truth is free to start running smoothly again. The dangerous 'contradiction' has been absorbed within the system, as absorbed it must, for what kind of rational structure contains contradictions within itself?

If...It

If you are not reading this feel free to ignore it.

Something Fell

Something fell from the sky, how it had got up there I have no idea - not to imply there must have been anything much mysterious about its being up there. Perhaps it had been propelled from below- admittedly unlikely- or fallen from above - also unlikely, but it had to be something and, mysterious or not, there it was falling. And so anyway, as said falling, and, inevitably, the closer it got to the earth on its earth bound journey, the more rapidly it approached its own earth-bound shadow. Perhaps if there was no sun shining there would be no inevitably here regarding the violent meeting of it and its shadow, but there was a shining sun, and so light and a shadow and also gravity, and so inevitably it was.

Wherever

Wherever the mind goes it will find a welcome.

Air

There was a room within which were people, and their numbers kept growing, not that it was a particularly big room; and while there was within this room two windows, these windows were never opened, and so, of course, this room became stuffy, unhealthy, gave off an ever viler odour, people got sick, choked on each other's fumes, fainted, lay about in useless heaps.
A stranger entered the room and without a word to anyone walked straight over and opened the windows- both of them! How did he dare? There was grumbling, even outrage, though not expressed with any great vigour. And anyway- no great surprise, inevitably- in flowed floods of fresh air. The colour started to return to their cheeks, a native hue one would have forgotten had been there in the first place. They even began to get up, move about, and, of all things, leave the room and go outside themselves.

There Was

There was a man- not that that's an observation much worth making. Of course there was a man. But a particular man, there was this man in particular. "Ah now, that's something else altogether! A particular man. This is the real stuff!"
There was this man, this man in particular...

Gesturing Man

I opened my notebook expecting to find a half-written piece on an idea I had, but unfortunately it turns out the piece was merely thought, not written; unfortunate as the idea of a piece, the mental image, is often or generally more amusing or enjoyable to me in the flash of its conception than the fleshing out in writing of the idea, which is more a matter of tedium, the realising, or attempt of realising, of something whose real pleasure has already been afforded me, and the writing a diluted expansion of this conceiving flash. Though not wishing to especially overstate the case, not that I am. Anyway, the idea...

A man, a creature, a madman, began appearing in the small park near the centre of the town. Who was he? Noone knew, noone cared. Why should they?
Anyway, he began appearing in the park, that is entering, and, somewhere near the fountain he would stand, and right arm crookedly raised, forefinger extended, completely self-absorbed, he would start making strange signs or squiggles in the air.
What was it- some kind of Tai Chi exercise? Admittedly it takes perhaps a degree of peculiarity of spirit to practice that in public with an easy mind, but 'madman, creature'? That's a bit excessive surely, a bit retrograde. But no, I don't think it was anything like Tai Chi.

So what was it then- some kind of performance art? Writing. At least this is what came to be generally agreed, particularly at first and then generally in the end. People were drawn to his 'performances', his finger even elegantly slicing the air in endless movement. Some found it hypnotic, calming- it quietened their minds. They made no attempt to decipher the movements, and to have done or tried to do so would have spoiled their pleasure. Others however did, one woman particularly. It became for her all-consuming, at least while engaged in the act, to gaze on and decipher, understand the gestures. To do so required the utmost absorption, hypnotic again but an intellectual consuming of self rather than a bypassing as in the more bovine viewers already mentioned, and through a halting progression she did seem to successfully lose herself in the writing, to understand its ever onwards flow of letters and words. Though this is all a little in the way of surmise for she refused outright, showed no interest, in speaking of the actual substance, the matter of the writing, and who knows, maybe it was all just inane gibberish, that is if it really was writing in the first place and not just gibberish in the absolute sense.

She was only the first of several, even many, who immersed themselves in this esoteric artform, if we could call it that- we have to call it something. They became almost a cult, but that's not really fair. Their ways seemed to part fully when the man would leave off and depart the park. They were merely joined in immersion in this one unusual activity. There were of course the occasional mockers of all this strangeness, usually either groups of lowly youths or alcoholic wrecks, but generally tolerance, even an almost fearful awed respect, in spite of the somewhat ridiculous nature of it all, was observed. Though jeering or no jeering, the man 'wrote' on oblivious.

I haven't been in the town for a while. I have no idea if it still goes on. I presume it does, not that my presumption has any real weight.

The Intellect and Slavery

Insofar as man exists as a slave, which if outside of truth must be his condition, the intellect serves its function in creating the edifices beneath which the self or slave bows down, and also furnishing, if and when the need arises, the justifications for the bowing down. Given the slave structure itself, such mental edifices and their justifications don't need to be of a high quality, and indeed it would be worse if they were, for then the slave would be in danger of moving beyond his condition.

Truth & Relativity

Truth is not relative. But what about relativity then? Insofar as any aspect of life, or point within its totality, is treated as distinct, isolated, as if it exists in separation- then enter relativity, these isolated points existing in relation to each other. But insofar as the distinct reality of the points is illusory, that they do not exist in isolation, in some imaginary self-contained realm apart from the whole within which they have their inseparable being- then, no, relativity is not truth. Truth and life, or the truth of life, aren't relative; truth's being isn't in relation to anything else. It isn't set against falseness, for example, compared and contrasted with an unreality which doesn't truly exist. Relativity is 'true' in the sense of the illusion of the reality of the points within life as distinct, but this distinctness is illusory. The points are inseparable from life and life inseparable from them.

Consider there being only one point and this as the whole. Would it be relative? No, because there would be nothing for it to be relative to. And so with life. And no, life isn't relative to death, for death is non-existence and non-existence doesn't exist, so how could life be in relation to something which doesn't exist?

Real Words

How do I know the language I am using is real, meaningful?
To ask the question in the first place necessitates the acceptance that it is. Otherwise one could not meaningfully ask it. And, needless to say, to expect an answer to the question is also predicated on the reality of the language used in the answering.

Marx and the Slave Mentality

Is there any clearer expression of the slave mentality than the systems of Marx and Engels? Well, perhaps there is, but anyway.

Man exists as a digit within a great mathematical equation, the equation being apparently life, and the entirety of the individual life or digit is his movement within the equation. The individual is an individual in his essence, a single point, an ego; transcendence, God are asserted to be non-existent, and yet for this individual to act as the digit within the economic-historical equation that is existence and to achieve 'success' within it, according to its values, to ascend towards its upper echelons, is apparently proof that he must be removed from the equation, annihilated. But why? Didn't he satisfy the nature of reality- the equation and its digits? He did, and that is precisely his 'sin': the ego behaved as an ego. Though how, in the absence of an intrinsic moral order, one might wonder, can it be a sin for an ego to behave any way it likes? What's there to transgress? But leaving that aside.

We must change the nature of the equation, as given man's nature as an ego he will behave as an ego, and this is undesirable for the lesser egos. So we must have a new equation, an imposed form of life- and what is life but the form we make of it- so we need an equation in which he doesn't get to behave as an ego.
"But isn't an ego is all there is, so how can he not behave as an ego?"
As already said, by changing the nature of the equation. We will make the equation so watertight that he can't but behave unnaturally, not as the ego that is his nature. We will create the perfect, unnatural, artificial conditions in which he cannot but behave in the perfect, artificial manner unnatural to his natural egotistical being.
"Oh what a beautiful ideal! But wait, who are they who control the equation, change its nature, or rather impose the new one? Surely they can only be more egos, and why won't they behave as egos, now that there's nothing to stop them? They are now the foremost digits in the equation after all, and isn't it the nature of these digits to wish to remain the foremost digits? This being the nature of the digit and the reason the previous equation was unsatisfactory- digits within the equation behaving as digits within the equation. Surely the digit will now behave in the manner natural to the digit, and so woe to the lesser digits."
"You forget about self-sacrifice."
"But how can the digit sacrifice itself? Didn't you say the digit is all there is? All this infamous transcendence illusory- the digit is all."
"We take on the burden of knowledge. Let that be enough for you."
"And what if a digit or person refuses to exist within the new equation?"
"The equation is life, and so naturally a digit that doesn't exist within the equation doesn't exist. An equation only contains that which it contains. It is stupid to treat as real, within an equation, digits that don't exist within that equation."
"But what happens to it so?"
"You're insisting on treating this non-existent digit as real. It may have existed within the old equation, but it doesn't exist within the new one. If you must, consider the digit to have been erased."

Symbiosis

The servility of a people and the 'greatness' of the State grow fat on each other.

Sitting

"I've taken to sitting in the dark."
"Why's that?"
"Because my eyes are sore."

Spinoza, Exile

I bought a book Ethics by the philosopher Spinoza a while back, having seen him described him as "a philosopher's philosopher", not that this particularly induced grand expectations, though perhaps I was missing out on something vital, and so in homage to fair-mindedness the book was bought. Having dipped a little into said book, it seems clear that what "a philosopher's philosopher" signifies is is "an accountant's accountant"; everything neatly cross-referenced, a great tidy self-made structure within which the conceiver of the structure apparently finds much desired security. The 'self' as a point within a mental structure of its own devising. Where would he be otherwise if he couldn't bow down to something? Even the bowing down is an act of existence after all, and if one enacts acts of existence, then one must, naturally, exist.

All merely adding to the thought that inevitably arose in my head at some time that the normal condition of man almost seems to be to be a slave; a condition so deeply ingrained as to be almost, or even more than almost, a biological condition; a mental software in perpetual self-creation, whose innate sense, because it is so innate or has been subtly conditioned to become so, is utterly invisible to the subject of the condition. An example being the recent look into Beckett's line about being an "inorganic singleness": in other words that to be alive is to be not free, not alive even. He declares himself the worst kind of slave: that there isn't even anything but enslavement- and this 'realisation' of this damned, hopeless condition is applauded and welcomed by other slaves. "This is realism!" They used to think they were in exile from truth, now they think exile is all there is, that what you're in exile from doesn't even exist. The slave furnishes thoughts proper to his condition.

Meaning

We were wandering the corridors of a large building; a hotel, and a grand one at that, even if its grandness appeared to be fading. We were looking for a room, trying doors but most seemed to be locked and the ones that weren't revealed themselves, monotonously, not to be the desired one. We knocked on another door, there was no response from inside, so I opened it and just inside in semi-darkness was a man bent low tying his shoelace. He looks up, without any great expression of interest. We apologise and leave.
After a minute my friend asked what it all meant.
"But why would it mean anything?"
But he was insistent, was convinced. It had to mean something. I didn't and still don't understand.

Triumph

There is a certain kind of person, and he seems to be invariably English, whose moments of greatest life-affirming triumph culminate in the literary ejaculation, "Thank God for America!" This ejaculation appears to have one of two contexts. Firstly, that of personal and absolute support- at least within the confines of the mental domain- for some war the US has embarked on, with, of course, its ally in intrinsic goodness, Britain; which intrinsically good acts- given the intrinsic goodness of the British and American perpetrators of the acts, the rest of the worldly inhabitants sometimes fail to recognise, such, of course, being the unfortunate but inevitable result of their lack of intrinsic goodness. The full and joyous recognition of the intrinsic goodness of all this is most purely expressed within the mentioned ejaculation of our hero; an ejaculation of full and unfeigned ecstasy, a moment of perfect distillation. The tears nearly fall from his eyes. O brotherhood!

The other context is in relation to some American television programme that makes him feel really good. Again brotherhood. In both cases the ideal in whose bosom he lives and sleeps is glorified, and so, of course, he with it.

Oh, I nearly forgot. A "literary" ejaculation as, joyous though the thought is, it is unlikely he will be quite able to experience such a letting-go of himself in the flesh, so to speak. The joyous self-transcending ejaculation can only be accomplished before a page, or more likely, a computer screen.