The Void and Shit

Creation myths in most cultures share a common structuring. There is the void, formlessness or chaos that offers itself as space for the creation. From this shared mythological heritage, one could ascertain that such a myth serves to the peculiar structure of the human psyche that, regardless of any context, a similiar story will be expressed. Such a narrative offers an etiology for what exists so humans may comprehend, and also, at the same time parrallels the creative vigor that emerges from the human engrossed in metaphysical engineering of civilization; it deifies and justifies it. The first act of creation is the first act of the human thought.

There is a psychological clockwork that allows for a true world to exist, to be comprehended before the first breath or shock of matter to the senses. The frameworks that allow for human sense and faculty are like the nervous system or circulatory system of the human; they exist as necessary qualities for the animal to be human. The eye exists before the eye, and all its potential sensory data has been fully built in; there is nothing in the universe the human eye has not seen as there are limitation on the number of potential combinations of stimuli. All potential visual realities exist in the eye beforehand. The first act in the creation story is the first act of the psychologically possible world for the human.

The creation story is the primary act of rarefication; rarefication being the process by which consciousness takes initially physical experiences and removes the blood, bone and sinew; something finer, lighter and more theoretically maleable reveals itself -- a concrete to build a metaphysics. The first act is the act of civilization, is the act of rarefication that in the bedlam of a tumultuous cosmos in a myth or a rabble of tribes in history, that initial violence of creation asserts itself. The first act forces humanity to lie to itself to allow itself a presumptuous, forceful knowledge, to begin building, to justify and hide an alarming reality of no utility. It is the act of language, the first articulated word, the gradual formation of a proto-literature in the spoken myths that formulates a culture and builds an overarching ideology that permeates everything. The first act, which is an act locked in our psyche, is the lie that serves the world to us in use, as humans grab, rape and put their seminal ideas into the stuff of the world.

Society spends the rest of its time after the first lie, the myth of creation, to repudiate and further hide that which was covered in the first act. Religious work, the cultivation of civilization, moves on from creation to ethics or the right way of thought, of living. Nonsense, the noise and explosiveness of the human tongue is demonized; to use the emotionality and expressiveness of the mouth in the utterance of noise is witchcraft, demonic possession or psychosis. Civilization wants to hide the animalness of the human mouth, the rawness of the physical body, the fabrication of rarefied language as the highest expression of reality. A society will give up every fiber of its existence to legitimize and deify its first lie, and yet, this rarefication, and its attempt to hide the body and animality of humanity with great works of literature and refinement of action are still boiled to nothing in the red blood of white mollars screaming of a person incensed.

A Body of Science Without The Body of Science

Atheists irk me, and any sort of allegiance I feel with them is really just a mutuality of our omnipresent enemy -- Christianity. Many atheists think that their "aspiritual" nature, as they might term it, is a justification for their lack of belief in anything transcendent, but most don't realize the naturalness of their inability to believe in something like a god is more an expression of a zeitgeist; they cannot believe because they are so comfortably enmeshed in a post-capitalist ideology.

Though there are some more creative types, maybe more deceptive types, that use various analytic explanations for why the belief in god is absurd, illogical, untenable or ignorant of anthropology, of a science, there is the curious position: which came first, the argument against a god or the feeling that there is nothing of the sort? And so ensues the creative sophistry to undermine those that leave space for the transcendent and the feeling; the style is so sickening sometimes -- what a bunch of politicians that would be content to make a god stillborn on the smallest trivality of logic.

But logic! is the cry as if atheists were self-flaggelating monks depriving themselves of so much by the confines of a logic. What thoughts are unacceptable? What is acceptable? Can logic not take on the role of an ethics of what is allowed to be thought, to be said? If I say no to your logic, am I excommunicated and no longer available for legitimate conversation?

But the earth, the eyes -- all that is seen! The postivism bleeds out of their scientific stigmata as if Francis Bacon were meant to be a saint. This relationship to the world becomes one of use. The world exists and has meaning by the essence of my faculties; the relationship between the human and the Earth continues to be one of use and exploitation just as the earliest myths of the Bible justify. How sickeningly clean and orthodox that world view is and how useful it is for bashing the heterogenous thinker against stones. Bacon needs to be made radical, and science needs to be stripped of its purple robes to reveal the red human body.

The scientific method has become as bloated, decadent and useless for the individual body as the Catholic church. We laugh when the Church talks about sexuality because it is ultimately an expression of the cobweb doctrine of two thousand years of impacted failure. (Apparently male prostitutes can wear condoms now?) The scientific councils and bodies that laud the scientific method developed by Bacon emerged from the Modern period in a professionalized, organized collection of efficent, rarefied social machines. Suddenly the experimentation with our own beliefs and bodies became foolish, dangerous and amateur; only definitive truths could come from the exacting methodologies of one of these scientific organizations. But how ironic is it that the tools, such as the scientific method, scientific bodies use come from or are inspired by Enlightenment thinkers, who developed their fields of knowledge in a much more individualistic way, not to mention in a holistic fashion pre-dating the professionalization of subjects of knowledge. In spite of these groups, of these limiting judges of knowledge, inspired individuals continue their work engaging their own perceptions, bodies and life revealing far greater truths born of creativity.

It is nauseating to me how many atheists are comfortable with their relationship to science. They attack loudly churches and the religious as if these organizations and people were in some sort of exploitative control. Though true, religious groups do have much power, they still in most developed Western nations remain on the outskirts for the structuring of our societies. The state now turns to the professionals and their high councils for the most accepted and rigorous studies on given subjects. Atheists think that science and scientist are benign, outside of social influences, outside of power relations, and always deeply invested in the absolute truth overall. Though this investment in the absolute truth, an irrefutable truth was the position of most religious organizations. The Catholic Church, being the supposed possessors of Christ on Earth, engaged in exacting, brutal political and military campaigns at various points in their history. What they did was justified with the semblance that they were beyond the simple, petty needs of earthly desires, they were serving the ultimate truth of Christ. Do our scientific councils ever participate in petty earthly desires while claiming to be working in the grand cause of scientific interest?

Yet how lucrative is their position in our society now? Nothing true can be said without the presence of a given professional or expert. Even judges cannot judge without the presence of a psychologist to determine the true essential being of somebody's mind -- criminal or insane? Nothing can be done until we consult the interests of a given scientific council. Who is our ultimate judge now? I would rather be labelled a petty criminal than be considered a potential schizophrenic; the judgements of the state are passing and many regard them with a scathing impiety (that man was innocent, the court is corrupt!), but there is absolutely no space to question the authority of a doctor, unless by another doctor of the same vein. Pyschologist are the vicious arbiters of the contemprorary man's soul.

And their ideologies and beliefs become impacted, though they claim a plasticity to their organizations because they are founded on the scientific method; if the evidence speaks against what they believe, they have an obligation to alter their ideology. But when an organization is large, impacted and spread throughout society in an advantagous position, it becomes increasingly efficient at slowing its plasticity and adaptibility. Nobody acknowledges that homosexaulity was only taken out of the DSM in 1973 -- only a couple of decades ago quite sane people were put in the psychologist's "Bible" next to people with severe mental disorders. It wasn't the scientific method, or the self-analysis of scientific councils within psychology, but rather, the political work and actions of gay activists.

Atheism for me has to have an idiosyncratic definition if I am to group myself into it. It has never been about the opposition of the Church and the laboratory, the implausiblity of a god or a metaphysics, or ignorance and enlightenment. Atheism, a good atheism that captures the essence of its dissidence, is an extension of a more primary goal; the goal of anarchism, which is to make clear power relations, see how one is exploited and to act accordingly to stop it. One needs to understand such a goal on many levels, not on a literal one that envisions cliche political action. Every act, every notion of self, every real and virtual structure reflects an ideology, a mode of existence that exerts force; one's body, one's consciousness is either in accordance with such an overarching force or power, and it is made healthier for it; or, one's being is degraded by such a power and one must act to destroy or undermine such a power. This is my atheism, which is the purest form of atheism that says little about god or metaphysics. It is the nebulous atheism attributed to Socrates by the Athenian government for his social agitation. It cannot allow itself to become complicit with the new religioisity, new power structures that limit creativity, undermine our own truths and degrade the individuality and health of each person.

Adverts

I put advertisements on my blog to see if some of the traffic I get from image search losers would maybe turn into a couple of dollars a month. Most likely it won't since it seems that I need to have hundres of daily viewers to make anything. But now the advertisements have a new quality to them. I'm kind of obsessed with the insanity and hilarity of reading a post about the endless destruction of factory farming while at the very end there's a giant picture of a cheeseburger -- "Get awesome discounts on local restaurants!" Yeah, I think I'm going to turn off these adds... it's just a little too depressing.

Now Featuring More Pictures

Must history cruelly repeat itself? As Socrates, the progenitor of Western philosophy, was condemned to drink the Hemlock for his "atheism" and corruption of Athenian youth, so too shall I be dealt a similar fate for my transgressions against my society.

Watermelon(?) Four Loko!

My Fair Blog

Not all of my posts need to be so serious, yeah? Though as I find myself updating this blog on fewer and fewer occasions, I suppose I want to make my small contribution as mentally lucrative as possible; that is why I stick with the pregnant weightiness of philosophy. There was a time when this blog, now going on its 2.5 year mark, was a broader project -- or maybe aimless is more appropriate. I wanted to do something as a midway point between philosophy, social commentary, creative writing and comedy; basically a cathartic melting pot of ideas at a time when the semblance of indefinite school had finally shattered. This blog was born out of a minor crisis in my life; I had been trained towards scholarship, but with only a BA, I am stillborn with a society that offers zero opportunities to continue an academic life without going on to a graduate school. I needed to do something, and with no money and the networking skills slightly below the great apes, I was isolated. Hmm, the internet and its midwife: desperation.

Why not take a moment to take stock of what exactly all this nonsense is about? As things go, the blog evolved on its own more to the pressures of my own life and interest in this endeavor than to any real evolutions that took place on the blog. Mimicking aspects of my real life, it too is stillborn in many ways. Any goal or plan, any hope for even the smallest audience, was long ago abandoned and not too far from when it started. It took on more of the role of intellectual dumping ground rather than anything that could be considered a whole or a piece moving towards some goal or serving some function. And to be completely honest, I'm not sure I even ever envisioned a blog like that.

Much of my traffic is from google image search because I "borrowed" some pictures of famous buildings for a post about Brutalist architecture. They come and go as anybody does using an image search. I often wonder what their initial response is to my blog in the context of what they're looking for. I suspect a mixture of fatigue and horror when they hit the walls of white text that are observable from space.

This blog in all honesty really is just one of the archetypal guilty pleasures of our generation. It's a bit of journal keeping, letter writing and the nasty shit you spew against your enemies that typically, before the internet and the widespread use of personal media, wouldn't have left the bedroom, basement or cave. Everybody who writes, whether privately or publicly, writes with the secret desire that it will be read by somebody other than yourself. Technology has taken the virtual reality of desire and turned it into something that can be reflexive; now the imagination feeds into the machine that orchestrates an experience that can be felt by our senses. Why is so much of the internet pornography? With a click the desire is fulfilled, brought into reality before you. With the blog post, so too goes the same process, with the secret desire for your writing to be read being fed immediately. And with such decadence and hedonism, what kind of disease might grow? I often think about what kind of posthumous material will be uncovered for our generation while I read letters scrawled by the insane Nietzsche kept by his friends in the late 19th century. What simple technologies to immortalize what maybe we would have wanted dashed from our personhood. I am nauseated to think about what prolific writers might have their facebook at the age of 18 dug up, brought into their legacy.

Are animals animals?

When a dog interacts with the world, he is only capable of understanding it, or more tersely, responding to it by the makeup of his physical being. Even beyond perception as a sense, the pressure, the physicality of the body, in its various forms, places awareness in a tensile state. A handle is seemingly real and external to myself, but the handle is absolutely formless to a dog. Within the handle is written the language of our bodies, the reciprocal dialogue of externality and localized qualities, and so in the world, we find it composed of the same composition of human bodies. -- With the hand I grip, pressing the handle, understanding, and also creating or enlivening, the meaning of the thing with the presence of the body vibrating, coloring awareness.

A handle to a dog is entirely alien; a dog is incapable of empathetic understanding and cannot project itself as a non-dog body. The dog experiences the handle as a part of the overflowing of generic mass, meaninglessly tortuous stuff. Stuff -- an experience of bird calls through the everydayness of life. Everywhere mired in vibrations, the birds, these bodies tell us nothing; the body experiences stuff indifferently, unaware, while birds understand, create and enliven meaning into a world. We do have the intellect to understand what birds are doing, but, this requires the necessary abstractions and specializations of science, the everydayness of awareness means meaninglessness from bird calls. We can say of the bird calls that they are noise that is either pleasant or discordant, but what they essentially are, communication of reality for given birds, is inaccessible, entering the mute world of stuff.

Animals? An animal is a being that is moving with or in opposition to a hand. And these beings, that we conceive as inferior to us, that we abuse, mock, love and consume, to what extent are these animals just stuff? Animals are a precious reality through the forced identity and role the hand guides them to. But are we animals by the conclusions of evolutionary theory?

A world of meaning, is made up of two distinct types of things: a world of human projected meaning and a tortuous, concealing region of meaninglessness, this all requires us to proceed more carefully in our perception of the world as something external, objective and accurate. The designations of the animal is not something essential, but rather, a relative definition in expression through a body -- a hand. It is an fabrications, a tool, as much as a handle is a purposeful item that only has meaning to the human being -- the being of hands. Language plays a categorizations role amongst others. It has always been thought, and it is a very ontologically conservative position, that categorization is an act of discovery or a revealing of externality; e.g. my senses perceived that there are beings that have feathers and lay eggs, and through reasoning, I can maintain a class of beings that have these qualities. It is not so simple though if our systems of categorizations are to have more epistemic rigor. The act of categorizations through language and thought is a constructive, formulating act; it is an uncontrollable expression of our bodies responding and interacting with external mass. Our eyes vibrate with the world in a deep relationship that requires a mutuality for the world of meaning to form.

Moving beyond the modern comfortableness of positivism, the nihilistic dessert of anorectic metaphysics, the body must become fat, revealed in a new corpulence where desire, a body is the fertile ground for where an analysis and a creation of reality begins. The animal kingdom is structured through the categorization of attributes, but the logic of objects and attributes reveal the deeper mathematical structures that are ingrained in our perception of the world through the gristly sinew of brains. Birds with feathers, fish with gills, etc. hides our membrane clockwork: A(x). The structuring of the world has roots in the evolutionary pressures that occurred to develop brains to function and succeed in a very specific environmental situations. Knowledge structures are functional, working games removed from truth that allow for successful manipulation of the world at a most base level, achieving just enough accuracy to allow progenitors to survive and reproduce.

Bodies are measured by those who have bodies, and even with the most scientific scrutiny, the meaning of the animal body can only be understood in relative terms to our body; the flipper is understood through the hand. The bone, the flesh, and the organs become entities of use even if only consumed objectively, split, torn, mashed to reinforce a structure of knowledge. With the body, so too is the realm of the animal constrained to the needs of our intellect. To some large degree knowledge is right about many things when it comes to animals, but only right in the sense that it allows a greater mastery and use over their beings; we understand the neck well enough to tie a leash around it, but that is the end of the understanding, for that is the end of the use. Caged or leashed, exposed, what fraction of the being is ever really given to the base needs of other animals? Does the dog ever stop being merely a neck-hand being?

How divergent is the desire of hunger and the desire of analysis? As dirty, greasy fingertips separate the gristle and the meat, the teeth mash, and the tongue prods feeling the slippery blood and the tinge of iron shimmering in the mouth -- what voracity! The eyes blur and sharpen, the mathematics of the rules of the game are felt through the straining brain, failing and correcting until the system crystallizes. The flesh of the animal cooking under the glare, hardening, melting, stripping the bones, ossified with jagged edges of a crystallizing system -- what veracity!

What a wrongheaded mistake to think that science is an idealistic, other-worldly endeavor. Science, and its progenitor, philosophy, is filled with the blood of desire, the extension of the body out into space, and the entrenchment of physicality and thought. Philosophy and science are manifestations of the body as much as anything else is. Intellect is a desire that can consume the animal physically as much as it can consume the animal as a thing in thought to be controlled, stripped and analyzed.

And only in the quiescence of impotence, where desire briefly ceases, where we realize we are animals as much as animals are, but in being animals, the term deconstructs; the subject, the creator of the relational term cannot become his construction, man cannot be an animal, in doing so, he enters a shattered realm. A hand grows weak and loses grip of the neck. An animal, the creature of man’s hand, dashes away in fear, but immediately it returns from the dark outskirts, new, something else entirely, no longer an animal. The two become creatures, nameless and formless that move outside of structures of knowledge, structures of the body, of desire. In the briefest moments, no animals, but rather, a creature capable of things immeasurable, unnameable; something that cannot be used, controlled, destroyed and abused -- an absolute, irreducible relationship occurs. An animal receives a personal name, and suddenly, it rears up above the hand as an emanating, forceful creature.

We Are Markets, Not People

There are two modes of being in our post-modern world: neurotic and political. There can be no other way, for one must choose. The apolitical innocence of small, unconnected worlds, like hidden tribes cradled and hidden by a geographical mother no longer exist. There is no tradition, no myth, no god to inform, there is no purity of culture from which globalization, cacophonous hums of machines -- from which a hyper-reality orchestrated by dominant forces informs, disciplines and manifests the spirit and body of the contemporary human.

Are we not corn? Are we not TV? Are we not radiated, electrified with the new pollutions that in all essence create the maladies, the existential horrors of the new human body? As swarming groups feel the lechery of tumors and chemotherapy, what are the new forms of our lives? Do we fear the slow death of godlessness or the slow death of alien cells consuming us inside-out created by an endlessly complex etiology of thousands of radical chemistries of the human scientist that have no human meaning, have no place in the equilibrium of nature? Technological pollution has entered our bodies, affected them profoundly, and in doing so, have created new phenomenological realities, new feelings of the body, and thus new identities, new egos. Are we not our own pollution?

Everything is either latent shit or manifest shit in a post-capitalist, consumerist society.
Everything can be turned into and come from shit; who knew we could grow crops off of dead earth, sustained by genetic manipulation of crops, pesticides, artificial nutrients? Dead soil that delivers nothing to the crops -- just shit -- nothingness, a dirty artifice that taints and must be disposed of. "Farm animals," or more aptly, conscious meat-cogs, that are not pigs, chickens or cows, rather, they are shit. Covered in shit, turning into shit through pain, dirt, torture, absolute deprivation. But what are they really? They are pinned creatures, horrific, tortured monsters capable of a simpler, purer innocence that is impossibly alien to us; they are aliens, so much so that I might say that these creatures' collective consciousness, the hundreds of millions of them that appear on Earth every year in endless flickering, in all their suffering, in all their secret, hidden purity, in their eyes of boundless forgiveness, their awareness is the closest thing to God that will ever exist; billions and billions of bodies creating an absolutely sinless being.

So, what to do with the problem of shit? It is evident that where we are in history is the result of many social and historical forces that have culminated to allow for such a reality to exist, many of which we are only just barely aware of in terms of their causal impact on our everyday reality. Consumer capitalism has only one value which is absolute pleasure at the expense of everything. Pleasure is everything, and in order for that to be true, the individual, the pleasure-seeker, must be emphasized, developed and given intention.

The formation of contemporary identities are, for a large part, the masterful orchestration of institutional, governmental, industrial complexes that create an audience, a people in order to provide their self-sustaining service; a government must have a nation to have sovereignty over a people; an industry, a seller must have a buyer or a consumer in order for it to have a market. This seems counter-intuitive to us because traditionally the Adam Smith conception of the invisible hand is used to explain the functioning of the market; this conception, however, is out-dated and based upon a form of society that we no longer live in. If we are to have a serious analysis of our society in contemporary times, it must always include the prevalence of the media, in its many forms, and its hyperbolic effect on everyday reality. Also, our everyday person's market has moved onto pleasure as the sole motivator of purchases, where Smith's was based upon needs. Smith would be dumbfounded and incapable of explaining the hysteria of Tickle-Me-Elmo. This is Post-Capitalism Consumerism, not Capitalism.

Markets are created through the formation of identities by corporations and sellers. Then, through an artful manipulation of people's perception, their false ideologies, artificial misunderstanding of their own Pre-Consumerist histories and cultures, identities and adherence to such identities occur on a subconscious level through the media. Young boys believe men should smell like Axe Body Spray, where even though they are aware that such an idea is being marketed to them, and perhaps is orchestrated, they continue, regardless, to buy Axe Body Spray associating the absolutely artificial and meaningless smell with symbolic worth of being masculine. It's just a commercial, it's just a magazine ad, a billboard, a radio ad, a logo on your shirt, an entire mall that consumes most people's luxury and free time -- it permeates everything. Such a dialogue of the consumer and the plethora of symbols and meanings in their consumerist world replace, distort and blur all other sources of information through a cacophonous onslaught. One knows that none of this makes sense, that perhaps they have been duped, but they have no other sources of culture, of knowledge about how to be in the world. They must accept their busy world of bought and sold meanings and then ruthlessly enforce them because they have nothing else; even if their identities are fake, they are still an identity from which one can have meaning, can act, can understand falsely, but have the joy of the semblance of understanding.

Evolutionary Theory And The Closed Circle Of Intellect

By human intellect the theory of evolution was devised, fleshed out, and now, breathes freely on its own. An idea that feeds itself, unfurling like cellular growth completing the mechanized steps of an instructive genome. We simply provide energy to the possible knowledge of a finite theory that explains all biological life from a physicalist foundation. The theory, however, is a purely human idea that is impossible and senseless for any sentience other than one that contains this brain and this body localized in this space and this time. By human intellect, we have explained human intellect and possible human knowledge through a biological, evolutionary understanding; but, through that explanation we realize the simplicity, the falsity and utility of our intellect, not serving the purposes of truth, but, rather, serving the purposes of survival, of life. By ability of our intellect, we have discovered the theory that explains such an intellect, which reveals such an intellect to be highly dubious. The universe contracts and the horizons come to meet us. For truth and certainty may be forever an aspect of humanity that remains incomplete, an impossibility. A malaise sets in and we wonder. But, if one gives up the quest for truth, and accepts the inherent incompleteness of our intellect and knowledge, they go on to another value. The value of life, and the possibility of the human intellect as a tool towards not greater levels of truth, but rather, greater levels of life.

Dynamo-Daemon

I think; therefore I am. And not even a demon, a great imagined threat could disturb this axiom. I am aware of my thoughts, the consciousness of the self thinking something, and even if such thoughts are unclear, delusional and false they are my thoughts none the less; I must be real if I am creating such thoughts regardless of their status.

But a demon is not real as it is a hypothetical creature borrowed loosely from various myths and religious cosmologies. The imagined threat is never as visceral, real and brutal as what comes to be in the actual world.

Descartes was mentally incapable to imagine a real world where all truths and reality itself could be stripped to the bone. Such is the great failure of any single person's imagination in the formation of grand philosophical systems or any cartography of the world. Reality, the potential for the new, the building of the future, the ceaseless manipulation of the past that contracts and expands falling apart in our hands is the work of something far beyond the insignificance of the individual's imagination. Imagination releases thoughts like semen into the world, absolutely worthless, to be discarded like waste and filth; it takes the seminal energies of humanity, in a dynamic complex, and the fertile womb of the physical world that, itself too, interacts with such a complex of thoughts aborting and nurturing at random.

The simple imagination of one man was far from the real threat that could actually manifest itself far beyond the potential of any one individual imagination. "Gott ist tot," Nietzsche declared through the character of the madman in the market place; he wanted us all to realize the death of God in the Western world, and foresaw, in his limited ability to conceive, a world of nihilistic brutality. His individual imagination, though capturing the horror of a Godless world, was incapable of imagining the level at which such a dynamic of human energy and a fertile womb could create real history. Endless blood and semen of hundreds of millions lubricating the engines of tanks and planes in world wars, and ovens igniting flesh, boiling fat and covering everything in a burnt gristle.

Descartes, and his individual imagination, could not conceive of a world where everything could sincerely be doubted. He is almost as a jester with the threat of the demon that acts more as an annoyance to be overcome rather than a threat that leaves us overcome with anxiety -- what simplicity in retrospect!

The world we live in now is a world where the real is absolutely impossible. The demon never revealed himself to try and rob us of our reality and remains just a hypothetical for young philosophers to counter, allowing them access to the world, nominally in petty argument. Technology is the "demon" that Descartes could not conceive as an individual of limited imagination; far more pernicious and all-encompassing, a reality of something that was possible for the humbler forms of humanity living in relation to a natural world, brought to death and life, brought to reality through the breath and encompassing of the forest, dessert or ocean.

Now we are in a world that is fed to us by technological production. All senses have been analyzed, all faculties considered, and all of our products are made to plug them all up and satisfy them in deprivation chambers of satiety. Most of these things though are ideological manifestations of things rather than the real things themselves, that still remain in our collective minds from our roots of a humanity long passed. A tomato was once real, we knew all of his components, how it grew, where it grew -- we grew it ourselves, watching the slow, natural process and we consumed thankfully. Now tomatoes are engineered in a genetics lab to attempt to capture this confused, notional, nominal conception of a tomato, grown in inconceivable fields of endless, homogenized crops, covered in pesticides that kill and stop all interactions with the world, fertilized in engineered fertilizers that allow crops to grow on soil with no nutrients, ripened in chambers with ethylene gas, grouped together with tomatoes from a hundred other farms, shipped across oceans and countries, sometimes frozen, thawed and delivered to the grocery store to sit on a shelf so you can grab it thoughtlessly -- "oh, a tomato, I need that." That tomato in the consumerist capitalist world may as well be a hallucination of a schizophrenic. The process by which it has arrived to you is so abnormal, and robs it of most of the nutrients and the qualities that make a tomato real to a human body, that this tomato you have is just satiating your old notion of what a tomato. You had nothing to do with its creation, you have no idea how it was created, what is the natural process by which a tomato is created, you are blind, dumb and deaf to the world and are in a deprivation chamber of satiety. The only role you play in this "world" is to continue to believe that it is real, and that you desire to be sated by it so you participate in it, and give it your seminal energy, your blood and the only way you can show value for anything in this system is by giving your money to whomever needs it to create more contraptions to stick in your orifices.

What does it matter that you know you exist -- Cogito ergo sum? I think; therefore I am. I know I exist but I exist in this "demon's" world no longer as a hypothesis!

Love As Efficient Organ

The formation of a living body is the miraculous un-miracle of billions of years of millisecond dice rolls. There is a certain genius, to anthropomorphize, about the incessant onslaught of variation and time. Fewer resources in an environment will facilitate an eventual, accidental exploitation of such a situation by the decrease of overall body size of a species; there is a latent efficiency in evolution, and an animal, which can develop as many functions as possible into one organ is going to be the more successful than an animal that develops two -- on sheer fact that two organs will most likely necessitate greater body mass and greater need for sustaining resources. The human sex organ is a very simple example of this efficiency and utility. Many of the parts of the organ used for the purposes of reproduction are also used in the excretion of waste in a relatively harmonious way; there are a thousand other examples of this and all have intimate knowledge of it upon reflection. But why stop at the body, why not include the mind if we are to be good physicalists, good scientists and decent thinkers?

If the mind is the end product of the operations of the brain, which if we are to comfortably side ourselves with any contemporary scientific thought we must simply accept regardless of convoluted philosophical difficulties the body-mind connections create, then how can we not look for the efficiencies of our own brain. The phenomenon of love, as discussed previously, is the sort of dream-work of the brain that our consciousness perceives as real and essential. Most likely though, this is just a projection that we can ascertain, understand, explain, use and manipulate accordingly like a mask. The hard ground, the blood and guts behind the mask is nothing like this phenomenon of love, but is most likely hard-wired, relatively unalterable biological drives. From that, do we not find further evidence in the ambiguity of love how it is the same feeling, same word, same comprehension that exists between parent and child as two sexual partners?

Now of course there are some differences here, and I am not saying that anybody who loves their child actually wants to have sex with the child and vice-versa, but rather, we can all access how closely related these love emotions are between partners, parent and child, and a plethora of other relationships that use the word love. Is the brain not developed by the same principles that evolution develops the body? Then perhaps, very likely, the feeling of love and its ability to be used between a host of different relationships for different gains is an efficient use an aspect of the brain. It is not the failure of language to correctly distinguish the various types of love that exist towards various objects, but actually, language is often correct in its large, generalized groupings of the feeling love, as it is a dream-like projection of an emotion that stems from an efficient use of one aspect of the brain repeatedly in different situation. A single organ, the penis, urinates and ejaculates as much as a brain, and its various developed, specialized areas, most likely uses the stimulation of neural pathways again and again for what, on a phenomenological level seems like very disparate mental events.

On Love and Animals

When the word, in its trivial, transient shapes in the air, beat clicking, sputtering, competing with the humidity to signify the meaning of the concept of love was it used between two people(?) -- a mother to newborn, an infant to parent, between partners formed in in the pursuit of various goals? Was it simply a narcissism or perhaps was it between a person and something supernatural?

An ocean of difficulties presents itself, and an juxtaposed coast of methodologies to embrace such complexities exists simultaneously expanding either side of us. No anthropological or archaeological work can ever allow us a clear entry into the lived emotional lives of prehistoric man, nor is it possible to ascertain the mental faculties of our humanoid ancestors beyond the measurements and shapes of skulls, projecting the developed and undeveloped mind located in the brain. Ambiguous symbols of proto-cultural artifacts leave only the cinders of the fire of the earliest experiences by humans. What were the sensations that must be eternal, structured in the brain of Homo sapiens that have been vital to our survival and success, that could never leave the species without its destruction? Was there love in the earliest people?

How do we remove ourselves from the contextual difficulties of our hermeneutics regarding history? Has love as it is conceived, generalizing, in a Western, contemporary notion existed beforehand, at least on a basic level where some qualities that are essential to love are equivalent to the love used by humans throughout history? Are we not always in some extent guilty of a relativistic history that melts away and coagulates as history itself is processing itself eternally? How do we talk about love as something more than this love, at this very second, that might slip away into undecipherable nonsense for the flux of humanity, as ancient texts are for us today?

How do we separate the love and identify the love that we seem to share with other advanced lifeforms? May we even use that word? For many, the love of a dog is love as much as there is love between contemporary humans, and we, as a recent historical occurrence, have broaden greatly our notion of love as something that we share with many other mammalians, especially in the form of maternal care and group or pack behavior; the necessary existence of primordial sympathy and empathy to allow for a group of animals to live together, becoming more fit and successful in their environment through group cooperation. When we speak of love, as love between humans, are we not struck by the alarming quality that even a bird, not only an animal but also not a mammal, is capable on a consequential level to maintain the behaviors necessary in order to raise chicks? Nurturing, caring for, protecting, teaching and a willingness to die in order to protect their young, how do we separate these seemingly similar formations of love from our own?

Why complicated it? Why be so long-winded and muddy-up the ease of the pragmatics of language? Love is always changing and evolving by who the user is, the user's placement in the universe and his desired meaning. To some extent this is true, no matter what I say, love as a concept and as an everyday word will continue to slither around, difficult to pinpoint and catch, and will continue to be used as it has ever been used; however, in the interest of truth, and higher levels of scrutiny, we have to analyze how often love as a concept is moving like water, but suddenly, becomes stiff, brutal and violent as if a wave crashing against rocks. What is that which rises from the ocean and strikes us?

Love is the goal, the aim, the meaning by which all contemporary humans strive; it is the very core of life, and any denial of it brings mental and physical violence to and from humanity. Though it is at times aimless, unclear and ambiguous, love as a concept will reveal itself as the hard soil of everyone's existence. You must love your children, you must love yourself, you must love all humanity, you must love life -- above all other things, all goals and all thoughts, love is the one that is the indomitable, eternal and immortalizing emotion. You fight war with love, death with love, and you seek death, the absolute termination of everything, to constitute love to save the entire universe with love.

And we never think, how simply the mechanistic behavior of the ducks in the pond may be exactly the same love as the love you have for your children, for your God, for your life. Something evolutionary so simple as a ordering of your brain to guarantee you will "love" your children no matter what against a will you may call yours. It is rather the other faculties human has, not a special formation of love. It is self-awareness, unmatched memory and an ability to project causally into the future, that humans have what makes love seemingly more intense, more important and easier to manipulate for the purposes of gratification of biological needs; horses snort because it causes a release of pleasurable chemicals in their brain, they through a crafty intelligence abuse their own biological structures to essentially -- masturbate! Loving God or any supernatural being, is the cunning manipulation of biological structures of mammalian love; God is a masturbatory fetishistic item, an internal drug releasing endless pleasurable feelings, but the core of this love, the structure is one of the most base developments of the shrew-like mammal that crawled out of a hole hundreds of millions years ago with the ability to "love" its offspring but not to abstract and manipulate, then to go on to be able to at a basic level sympathize with its species to allow them to work together and survive.

Love begins to shatter under the pressure of a shadowy, sinister, animalistic, expansive reality that the human, the historical, the cultural conception of love covers. Love is contextual and difficult to pinpoint because it has a dual existence. There is the cultural conception of love that is always changing and being informed by the lovers, artists and priests that appear and disintegrate through historical flux, determining what it is as a cultural phenomenon. But in many ways culture acts as a veil to the brutality, to the animalism of truth that is horrific and sublime. One cannot say Yhwh's name, Moses could not look upon God's face, Zeus too would destroy man that looked upon his true form -- these myths hold the psychological terror humanity holds to the truth, to the divine. The unforgiving, the emptiness, the structured mechanistic forms that are hurtling and exploding through space that is expanding and tearing apart. One can never quite look upon the truth, but only relay it to the best of their ability in costumes and abstractions. This is the other side of love; the side of love that does not exist in nature, but rather, a thing that we have taken to be love that is rather, not love, but the uncontrollable, accidental mechanistic unfurling of mammalian structures that have no true meaning in a human sense.