Monday, November 28, 2016

In a Dream State

Just now, Google is the State. Or Apple, or Microsoft, or Amazon. These are the players for my mind. If I click on terms of use they can revoke my cyberspace citizenship of an instant, and I would be bereft. Stateless and out of touch.

We are now so very attached to our State, still imagining ideals, so-called democracy. In my dream state sometimes still I fall in love. Sometimes still I mistake my dream other according to airbrushed machine love, but it is never the act which gets the dream going, it is always the upwelling of so-called love. I am distressed by youth and blond whiteness. What does this tell of my essential self?

Our state has now been hijacked by someone who will say what the Everyman wants to hear. He is white and apparently blond. He looks some part, but more angry than the Avatars we accepted once upon a time. These came across more benign. There is menace in the air, and it remains somewhat less than human. My essential self.

The state is meant to render up the best of us. Assiduous attempts to create a psychometric model for human behavior according to what we check out on screens renders up click bait without truth value. Now in place of the best of us, we render up lowest common denominator and call it leadership because our constitution says we must. And there is ever decreasing truth value to that which we click upward.

Believers in the Christ pray and take the Word before the fact, knowing that all men are sinners and to expect a good man to know the Word would be like expecting God to be Man, which happens only once in history. And then we're done.

And yet if they are black, we do not accept redemption as a possibility, no matter the grounds for their upbringing. Those others, those others. They still seem so much less than I do.

God is other to me, but no less real for that. There will be no more words, there will be simulated reality and it will render up the worst of us, redundantly and apparently, and this time for keeps. Done.

There is audacity in hope.

But radical hope is counter cultural and my cultural conditioning still gives me blond dreams and I would be done with these.

There is audacity in love.

Love is a cosmic value, no matter how many times we can improve on our physical approximations of universal and eternal. No matter how the maths evolve, they will not stand-in for some ideal world, perfectly formed and without love forevermore.

There is no universal constant but for love, fantasies of control recede, fantasies of domination overcome us so attached are we to universals but a reflection of our fallen selves.

Ideal was magnet to future as fantasy I know my future now as love which is never ideal and only real.

May we say Amen?

We shall reinvent the state and we shall prevail. There is good in them thar masses.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Click Here, ACLU

Well, the Leviathan has tripped. If Google can perform the moral equivalent of chopping off a hand for the offense of stealing a loaf of bread, on the force of a clicked user-agreement that the clicker no doubt did not or could not read, then it seems we have a case to invalidate the power of the click. In real life, one cannot sign one's rights away. In virtual life, if you cost the Leviathan perhaps $.50 in lost sales, you can lose your social identity of an instant.

Sounds fair to me!

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Rejoinder to Ursula K. Le Guin; Quibbling Gender

 . . . and with apologies to brain pickings, which is just gross. Noses and minds may be picked, but the brain is a figment of our imagination and should only ever be tweaked. Money cannot be love. I have a weakened stomach.

And I was a man once, once man was invented as accessory to woman, but by a man since only man invents. As a man I get my hands dirty with and on tools, although now it is only the old dirt as I search for lost or left behind or given away tools in an oddball collection, and find that bicycle wheels have not improved even a slight bit across the years of Chinese manufacture, which is only mildly disappointing.

There is not even any point to regenerative braking on a bike, which makes me oddly happy.

As a man I take hold of words and attribute them to unfailing and unforgiving for loss in loyalty engendered mangod, and now I flood the world with words and tiny levers, abstracted almost from the muck which is what my words become me. Inseminator only and tossed aside.

Body now all womanish, taken finally for granted, since it is of no interest to tweak the women, and I do recognize in our president-elect the same child-rapist my sister married, who could not and did not read either, but still appropriated the Word for his own petty purposes. Which mostly involved resentment at the women who would not be his robot, plural. Mostly involved the self. This is a trigger for me. It hurts bad and I wanted some warning.

Matrix body I dissolve that would be unutterably Tao and evermore. First person shot. Through and through, I fear the knife most for endings, obviously. I am Dick.

We are legion and we are moby. great white. Leviathan I am Ahab, Phillips head screw you, there were no man beside me. Would not have it. Trigger trumps the knife, paper scissors.

Pronouns were the least of it, retrofitted in Chinese to conform to nation-state expectations and these are all engendered aren't they Earnest, Henry, George the One Queen Beatrix. Was a child's tale. Stay off the farm. Blackened heads.

Always coming home into my own future now, there is so little time to make it right. Honor is my maiden Name, would I but know thee. I will not pummel any pronoun with my words.

It's time, please.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Time is Short and This Will Be Very Very Difficult

Clearly, in the age of new media, one person one vote is not rendering up the best of us. Why are we surprised? Media has been honed to manipulate our affiliations - our brand identity - and to stoke our individualistic pride. In the marketplace that process can aggregate our individual desires to promote a pop star. The vectorialists - modern-day capitalists, the owners of the pathways - are enriched beyond any reasonable measure. Bob Dylan stands in for literature among the literati, and Leonard Cohen drops out from presumptive heart-break. Both were victims of the media machine.

The real victims are you and me, but not as individuals. Based largely on my skin color and social pedigree, and of course my gender, I am a winner, by and large. You may not be. But we both suffer the disappearance of tradition and culturally-based beauty. There is no competition against super-stars, no room for poetry rendered so fine and intelligent that it could open a crack in the cosmos through which light might stream.

Both Trump and Clinton felt that it was required of them to be individualistic winners, and they apologized or pounded chests as case may be for what their followers gained, or might have, upon their each ambitious personal bests. Long since we might have recognized that we have been cut out from the equation. Wanted only as penny fans, free for the price of our endorsement, and nothing worth having is on offer anymore.

I hurt, I really do, for the meaningless of blackened lives, without recompense for any kind of simple labor which would keep families intact by engagement with a wider community. Those engagements have been robbed by wealth aggrandizing mostly white men who offshore labor for pennies on the dollar. Real estate is out of reach now.

This is not about bottom line expense, clearly. This is only and always about disenfranchisement, about fracturing community which might otherwise become uppity in class consciousness. There is a kind of genius to the system, not embodied in its billionaire rock-stars who are nice enough individuals, really. The genius is transactional, and disembodied and artificial. Money is become a life-force, more powerful than you or me, but not more powerful than all of us together. Time is short.

Oil, black gold, free energy ultimately for robots to do your work, in human form or literal, is what the machine depends on. In Czech, a robot is an indentured servant, a wage slave, and technology did promise to rid our bodies of that burden. It clearly has, along with our dignity for being paid. We now throw out more food that we consume globally and still those who would work go hungry, or are fattened by single-strain corn, is it, for the slaughter.

Yes we could and should rejigger the electoral system so that we are asked values questions and not brand on-offs. We could proportionally render up ourselves unto some best of us collectively, but that would be a chump's game. It would only give us superstars and they would have beauty alone and without power, which is situated in the economy, stupid!

First, in any case, we must learn some common language that is not so abstruse that most of us don't care to follow it.

Let's start with God, shall we? It would seem that there are only two camps now, for or against, and cast your vote. Yes, of course there are sub-brands and some of them are WalMart, like say Islam, and some are Celine Dion although I think she might be Canadian like so many stars, outsized by population numbers, like Baptist, and some are Emily Dickinson, Episcopal maybe, but mostly it's just plain old God v. Science, and God or Science help us, if and when the votes are cast.

I wonder when Science left God behind? Well, I doubt it really did, collectively. Mostly scientists left the rhetoric of religion behind because it just seemed silly, and the young people buy it, the conviction that there is nothing "out there" beyond natural law which we will discover soon enough or it will be too late late already. Still a Western patriarchal imposition on matrix reality.

The great unwashed masses of mathematically illiterate folks who would work with their hands if only that work weren't robbed from them; those great masses still know God. The trouble is that they mistake the language of a mostly white male editorial board for God speaking directly. But it works at least as well as physics does. Same dispossession for resisting the rhetorical trap. Hell if you don't believe, irrelevance if you try outside the measurable tangible stuff of reality without us.

We are now madly running out the clock on science, still dazzled by the machinery it enables, the labor saving, the convenience, the absence of responsibility or even questioning as we engineer our futures. Or rather allow some cadre of rock stars to engineer it for us, and give us some choice, Republican/Democrat iOS/Android with nothing real left on offer anymore. The rest has been plowed under, as foundation for a brave new superstructure. Hail Chinese architecture!

We once did know, in the moment before orgiastic excursions into raw power, that we could not separate our mind from matter. And still we search for the grand unifying mathematical structure, perfectly described, because our technology keeps seducing us that it may still be possible. The increments shrink. The Calculus beckons, and yet those authors were true believers, before our fallen time.

Past time when we did realize that particles were mostly conceptual, measurable only by indirection, not directly perceived beyond a single photon, apparently, and we trust that machine and cannot check our math any more than Microsoft can clean its code, there is so much more than we can do in our rush to market. To stay alive and awake to fight another round.

Pause.

Was it not already long-since apparent that there is simultaneity to love? That no particles need propagate across time or space, and that God is already there  and ever shall be, world without end if you dissolve the borders. That God is perpetually other, because removed from touch, Leonard, that God is in the details.

This simple language has been obfuscated not only by erudite mathematicians but by those narcissists - rugged individualists all - who would profit from it madly.

All that we need do is to call the question. These are not our enemies, the true believers. They know beauty and truth and finality and interpersonal intercourse. They would not cheapen that by brushings up in market language, and why do we fear and loathe that, in particular?? Why?

We worship, finally, the orgasm, and it feels like a nuclear explosion, and it is coaxed by beauty so temporal that we must marry it serially across our combed-over airbrushed lives which will still not be eternal. This is not mystery. This is self-evident and obvious and clear, and yet we still deny it in favor of a very few manish Words.

Surely this can unite left and right and center, this awakening, and the alarm has sounded, this new constitution not founded on one body one vote, not premised on gold-shaving on revaluing on robbery of our dignity, which goes along with work.

Since we cannot wait for constitutional rewrite, so constipated is our so-called in Name alone, democracy, we shall and must enact it. The constitution emanates from our collective body, and mind will follow, taking credit as it always does, so say the neurologists. No, sorry, I'm speaking here only of brains. Mind transcends that and those.

Mind and body united en masse, on pain of Putin and Xi triumphal now on near-certain fall of these United States as Superpower. This is the good side of Trump-ettes to bring the Wall down. They will bring down the Empire which we so dearly wanted Hillary to preserve. We did, because it would leave our comfort intact one minute longer, Idiot winds. You want it darker? Davos.

Palin and climate-deniers for interior? Really? This is not a system which owns any fealty. This is as serious as the evening news. Viagra anyone? Who else is watching . . . . .?

I will not go easily, but certainly I have no opinions. These are far too dangerous, and only fan the flames. I have no self to aggrandize. I am legion.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

I Am So Unspeakably Ashamed of my Vote

I am not ashamed that I voted for Hillary. That was what we call a no-brainer. I am profoundly ashamed that I demonstrated even that modicum of faith in a system for democracy so clearly gone off the rails.

I knew better. I lived through Nixon on TV, and Kennedy. Various Howdy Doodys since that time as the nation self-divides among winners and losers, that distinction fluid according to who your neighbors are, where you live, and you don't even know them anymore, those neighbors.

I've watched this happen, as though I were helpless, as though there were nothing I could do, as though the fight was in the head and on the page, to save those others from the mediated manipulations that they were subject to and not I.

But it is my side which has been duped. The side of love, the side to believe that we are better together than apart even while we disavowed anything less than comely, less than the sweet lives we could live by virtue of established social capital. I am so ashamed.

Monday night I listened to Becca Stevens, founder of Thistle Farms, Magdalene House, love as a condition to help and not against those who need it. I remain chastened that I still do not have that faith.

We'd crossed paths three times on Sunday, and still I will remain anonymous to those who need my help. I am so ashamed.

On Sunday, blacked out from another Bill's loss because they would play on Monday night only for pay, I watched some PBS Video about how small Vermont communities responded to Irene. Trailer trash elevated to social standing and neighbors hugging away small grudges.

They felt then that they had discovered something missing before the storm. It has not lasted.

Those of us with love still remaining in our hearts and minds must work to blur those boundaries between winners and losers. We must cross those internal boundaries to make trump irrelevant forevermore. This is not a man, this is an Avatar, and I watched him on old Netflix video, Black Mirror, projected on the side of a truck, invested by the spirit of a hapless comic. A smiley face gone foul.

The feminine has already triumphed and those who control the word have put up their last huzzah, and we will not be silenced. Quiet gentle voices will welcome in the wayward as you need succor and rest to come away from our abuses and addictions.

We will not allow pot to be grown by the agribusiness nightmare which gives us only corn. We have lived that nightmare already to caricature the native sotweed that we factor now still against the planet. We will no longer deploy Rosie the Riveter against those true believers who recognize us for what we are become. We are so over oil, fractured, leaking from underneath our bankrupted system.

No more STEM to disable love as a core value and even a necessary skill. Our economy does not need us that way, you and me, we must be scholars and academics and wisdom coming down from our cloister to welcome those who cannot understand what we would say. They will teach us to say it better.

I feel a rebirth and it is Christ the eternal feminine who is my champion. Not the Man, not the Word, not the engendered God. The spirit which moves within, the Qi to put the lie to our divisions, manifest always, manifest.

We will not go easily into this dark night. Love will light the way. As it was and ever has been. World without end without the Man in charge. We invested too much faith in systems. Of control, of writing, of spinning tales with Heroes who were not like you and me. There are different stories to tell now, different ways of knowing. All that we need do is to listen and read for the intonation. Hate will not become us.