Bodies

When I walk around the marketplace, I find it to be the greatest call to have children. As this brain sharpens, my mind bears witness, the cloth of presence is torn open to reveal truly the unbearable. I look out into the marketplace, and I realize how tremendous the psychosis of humanity is. To have children would be the most selfish act, to force any being to live in the age of unspeakable spiritual decay where carcinogenic poison and idolatrous fetishism for buzzing plastics has replaced all sustenance and the exemplar of a god would be immoral.

But the birth of a child even in the asphyxiating web of pointless wires is one of the last acts of beauty humanity is capable of doing; there are moments where beauty must usurp morality, as we would allow thousands to die to save a beloved or kill ourselves in the name of an ideal. It is the last act, the last engagement with the transcendence of the uncovering of the other, the you; from such a baseness, such primordial energies something truly presuppositionless and wonderful can come -- you. And it shits on the Church of progression that is really a church of death that annihilates the vitality of the body while pointing to the specious grace of its omnipotence of rotten grain and omniscience of mass media.

I hear it. How can you throw it all out? Look at our ability to accumulate knowledge, to transmit such a knowledge, and from this knowledge, manipulate and construct reality toward a more ideal environment for humanity; is this not all progress and is it not good?

Knowledge serves the purpose of action in a world. All knowledge finds itself as a blueprint for power, for energy in a subject to unveil itself like a splintering lightning strike. True, the knowledge acquired through technological advancements has allowed for an unprecedented celerity in growth. Decade after decade computer capabilities explode with new potentials, the genetic structures of things are being mapped and beginning to be manipulated. The sciences root deeper than ever before and have seemingly near-atomistic structures to work with. But growth cannot be confused with progress; the growth witnessed in our time reflects the new body of humanity -- the polluted body.

Technology, fragmented scientific knowledge, the biologists, the physicists, the chemists, the psychiatrists are growing in numbers and societal significance at an astonishing rate, and many believe that this is reflective of their usefulness to humanity and the inevitability of the progress and success of Western thought. The growth is not progress, however, but rather, a cancerous tumor that is draining and exhausting the vital energies of society. Genetically modified food has the potential to cause significant damage to the human body, especially in the manipulation of food items natural formulation, depriving them of all necessary nutrients that sustains the human body. The modern body is tainted with the specter of sustenance. The exhaust, runoff and noise pollution of the carousel gears of modern industry increases the prevalence of asthma, destroys the immune system, causes you to ingest toxins and poisons in the drinking water and air. The modern body is alive, burning with the latent tumors ringing out to the carcinogens that float like an apocalyptic dander through everything. Consider the parallels of the limited notion of cancer in the biological view: a cancerous cell turns on the body, begins to grow off the resources of the host, and then sends out cancerous cells through the blood stream that can cause malignancy. Everywhere there is pollution, and this pollution is growing at an alarming rate. Our bodies are riddled with hundreds of man-made substances from the sole act of existing -- is that not metaphysically significant!?

The sinuous, knotty, gnarled mass of industry sits somehow inconspicuously as part of this world, breathing a death we know we are all connected to. Progress? Knowledge? A cancerous cell's genes are a form of information, and it is a basic type of knowledge from which like a lighting strike, a tumor can unveil itself.

If it were progress, we could say most definitely, as claimed earlier that a depth and breadth of knowledge is increasing. But, let us return to the idea that knowledge is only knowledge in its ability to allow a subject to act in a world. The knowledge that would be most vital to us is a knowledge that would allow us to act in this world, this given reality. One could have an extensive knowledge that allows them to act, but if this knowledge is divergent from the world one wishes to act in, that knowledge would be illusory. The question needs to be asked, is the knowledge that technology, the harbingers of a supposed progress, of the fragmented sciences and its new mass media, a knowledge that allows for true action in this world? It absolutely is not. These aspects of our society are cancerous growths that have leeched our strength to act in this reality. They contain knowledge, but a knowledge like the cancer cell's genes that allows for a dual world to be created that absorbs the first. What aspect of industrialized agriculture has allowed humanity to act beyond what they were originally capable of doing? Industry's endless pollution? The ever shrinking, broken worlds of rigorous science that can do nothing but obsesses over fabricated points in their cartography and can give the average man nothing from which to act upon, to move towards.

Humanity has never been fatter, weaker and more culturally insignificant than it is today. Morbid obesity is not just a societal issue, the failing of a State's health departments, individual laziness or some other provincial view of the matter at hand. Morbid obesity is an absolute metaphysical crisis. Humanity finds itself less and less in this world as its body is robbed of its physical meaning and capabilities it begins to crumble and disintegrate. More and more technology and science are becoming insular worlds where the knowledge derived from such tasks serves the purpose of the technology itself rather than action in the real world. News is more about news than reality, the internet becomes more about the internet than anything else. Reality television presents an artifice of the real world that is actually just the appropriation of the real world by television. For anything to claim knowledge and thus progress it has to give a subject an enhanced ability to act in the world; being that the human body is the original, primary and presuppositionless way for humanity to exist in the real, material world, anything that degrades the body and reduces the body's ability to act in the world is not a thing of knowledge and not a thing of progress.

And as the creatures who were once humans ontologically deconstruct with their bulbous, functionless bodies breathing in tune with their personalized pieces of industry, slowing melting into, being absorbed by and giving birth to the lecherous tumors of technology producing a culture of buffalo wings and ranch dressing, I will mediate upon the body. The real world waits in the form of knowledge only available to the body, the most primary mode of being in the world. Only by the most base acts of our body do we engage in the truest aspects of the purest world that birthed the ontology of the human body; for a little while, though our bodies are still polluted some form of health arrives to us when we are mindful in our breathing, our eating, our fucking and our shitting; we are in the world. And faintly the bleeding in of other bodies in touch and presence arrive to us, and we find the transcendence of the you -- the child, the lover, the friend -- that remains so far beyond the insular sciences and the dissecting technology of a cancerous growth.

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.