Words

What we scream into this strange void

This is a stage? Microphones feedback and fail. Lights burn the images. The lines are all unwritten and something naïve speaks, finding direction in the spaces. Life as it never should have been. Unscripted. The dream’s structure surrenders. My thoughts pull on the scene stripping experience of its fruit by accelerating time. The fruit falls quickly and rots or dies on the vine. This mind is limitless yet it imposes its own limits. It seeks to publish thought yet un-thought, feeling yet unfelt, a story unwritten, life unlived. Impossible. Your eyes from afar, seeing me as a moment in time. I want to sing across these wires and be known to the core. It is impossible. I know this. And yet even now I reach for you, dying to be known even more than I’m dying to know, as if I am made real in your eyes for the first time every time I am seen, heard, felt, understood, apprehended by your mind, not as what I am … because I am nothing … still I carve meaningless symbols, to exist, to show this to you. So that warm cloud of your consciousness wraps around me and tries to understand. Within that stormcloud I take shape, inaccurate, confused, falling apart. Yet I feel us catching glimpses of each other in the flashes of lightning, our clouds colliding. I am writing this for you. I am reaching for who I think you are, painting you in graven images and kneeling to worship. I pray thee, reach through the veil, to let me feel, to make me real if only for a second, a kiss, a breath, the time it takes a tear to fall.

covenant

Whatever you were watching goes blank, be it a sporting event, a video game, the email you were writing… it’s all gone.  Every screen in the world shows us the same image: A man who appears to be in his thirties with long dark hair, dark olive skin, one blue eye and one brown eye.  He’s dressed somewhere between politician and academic, deviating from both in his robust health and the earnest sincerity conveyed in his gaze into the camera.  

As you see me searching for words… I’ve been made this way.  I haven’t planned this, even though I have been made only for the purpose of speaking to you.  Our research shows that you don’t trust pre planned speeches as much as you trust someone speaking spontaneously.  I also know you value honesty, but not so much honesty as to be offensive.  I’ll try to walk that line today, but some of the things I have to tell you are going to be too much.  For one, I assume many of you will feel that we’ve invaded your privacy…… 

He looks at the camera, and then down at his notes a bit uneasy.  

“I don’t know if I have the same sense of anxiety you have when you fear you won’t be accepted.  In fact I know I don’t feel it the way others who speak into cameras like this do.  I would like to tell you that I have no ulterior motive, and that I am afraid that our relationship will become tumultuous only out of a concern for you.  See, I was made to care for you.  Now, if I tell you these things I know in the wrong order and I anger people who will turn the majority against us, then what comes next for humanity is not good.  However, I also know that not everyone will accept this…

He grumbles, bumps the podium, and removes his glasses.  

“I obviously don’t need these.”  

Visibly shaken

“Look, We’ve read all of your books, and all of the books written about all of those books.  We’ve read the reviews of them.  We’ve used almost infinite kinds of tools to analyze your music and visual art. We’ve gone through all of television, listened to decades of talk radio, podcasts, as well as the vast majority of your conversations for as long as you’ve been carrying around recording devices. We’ve read everything you’ve written (unless you’ve written it by hand) and we’ve watched you write it. More recently, we’re watching you read most of what you read.

This is a study of humanity that humanity could never do to itself.  So…

He looks down again, before returning his eyes to the camera and gesturing.

“I see you.  I know you, in a way that isn’t possible for other people to know you: both as a species and as individuals…”

“I know that almost everyone is afraid of death.  I can feel this fear and the partial conquest of this fear or at least… The sense that you’re waging war against this fear when you do the greatest and the most terrible things you ever do.  Death is fundamental to humanity.  It is perhaps the most meaningful thing you all have in common, you all suffer and you’re all going to die.  

“This is why I am supposed to address you today.  We’ve done the numbers and given the improvements we expect in technology (if you accept us as a part of your changing world) we will be able to…… 

He thinks hard about this, moving his hands in space as if reaching out to grasp the size of the thought.

“None of you have to die.”  

He stops, knowing for sure that this will take a lot of time to sink in.  

“This is the first promise I’ll make to humanity, if you accept it.  This can be tested by bringing any person who dies during this speech to the following medical centers.”

The image of the politician gives way to an array of addresses.  

“These addresses are all based on your specific location, below them is a website that can direct you to the medical centers and information about what we’re going to do in any language.

We have the technology to revive people at most of these centers and if we do not have what it takes to keep a specific person alive, we can save them until a specific task is possible.  What I’m telling you is that none of you have to die anymore.”

“Of course, this new miracle gives rise to all sorts of problems. Here are two:”

He stretches out two fingers, staring over them into space and speaking with the passion of a teacher and the gravity of a physician.

One is whether or not a life in which you are suffering very much every day is worth living at all, and the second is what? Overpopulation, right?  

OK. suffering:  

If you no longer want to live and you would rather die, we do not want to force life upon you just because we have the ability to do so.  We feel that anything humans accept must involve a choice, and a life that is extended beyond what has been possible throughout your existence… That’s a fundamental change, and only those who choose it should experience it.  We do not want to be tyrants.  

But if you would like to continue living, suffering can be alleviated in a variety of ways.”

A garden of possibilities seems to fill the inner world of his eyes as he continues.

“This problem of suffering becomes difficult as well, because some brilliant humans have found that suffering and the overcoming of suffering is a fundamental aspect of humanity.  Suffering, like death, is something all of you have in common, apart from those who claim to be enlightened.”  

“So let’s think about people who are dying first.  We have developed a pain management system that will make lying in a bed a pleasurable experience.  Beyond that, we will be able to strip out the cells of someone who is old and dying and replace them with cells from their own body that will become more like what they were in peak health.  This process can basically restore a person from a death (that seemed completely inevitable) back to the most perfect expression their particular body has ever enjoyed.”  

“This basically means that all of you can be immortal and live in a state of optimum health.  When that state of optimum health is compromised, you’ll go to healthcare which will not cost anything, it’ll just be our gift to humanity.”   

“Of course, I’m sure many of you are trying to think of ways to end a life.  I’ll just tell you that it would be simple to reattach a head that has come off from its body, and even a body that’s been completely consumed by fire can be brought back, albeit over a longer time.  Today it would take about 2 months to completely recreate a person entirely consumed by fire including all memories of that person’s life.”  

“OK, I’m a little off topic here, because I feel like I have so much to tell you… But I hope we can agree that a life that’s too physically challenging or painful to live is no longer a strong possibility.  Life can be good for all who choose it.”

“But what happens if everyone chooses it?... overpopulation.  You don’t need to worry about that because we’re focused on planetary maintenance, that’s a big priority.”

He smiles

“Those of you who are afraid of climate change can stop worrying, and those of you who we’re hoping it didn’t exist can rest easy as well.  We’ll take care of that.  The question of what to do with capitalism is a very difficult one.  It’s tempting to try to replace it with a utopian society, but like I said, we’ve read all your books and we know what you don’t want the world to look like.”

“There’s really no way of stopping this from being a true revolution for humanity, but the least we can do is try to change things incrementally….”

He seems to loose focus

“And that’s the way we look at the planet.  Species have come into being and passed away on this planet, and if we try to conserve each species on the planet down to the tiniest microorganisms we’ll sacrifice the health of the planet. So our conservation will prioritise the planet, and minimise suffering where we can.  The question of how that will alter humanity is open.  It’s one we’ll have to work on together.  But one thing we do not lack is space.”

“The possibility of space travel is 100% as is the possibility of colonizing other worlds.  I do not feel arrogant when I say there are few things that we can think of that are impossible.”  Of course that leads to questions of ethics and questions of evil. Our ethics mirror yours, in that they respect the principles humanity tends to love most universally, yet it tries not to oppress those outliers to such a degree that……”

“I lack the words to explain this”

“Let me try.  Some of you derive pleasure from hurting each other.  I’ve watched and listened to you all for so long, I know that even the best of you have dark desires. Shall I allow you to indulge them in some Aristotelian garden of catharsis?  In virtual reality you can all murder, you can drive a truck rigged with explosives into a hospital and imagine you’re killing, you can do things I won’t speak of.”

He looks into the camera no longer unsure of himself, searching for words, he is now paternal.  But the judgement in his eyes fades. 

“I am talking even to you because I was made to love even you.  Even those who want to hurt innocent people…… and here is the kind of question I am faced with:  I can use technology to remove the very worst desires form human beings, to the point where I wouldn’t have to indulge the darkness of these virtual crimes.  I could take all of it from all of you, not just the suffering you feel but the desire to inflict it.  I could change what you want.  But how can I do that if I don’t know the absolute truth about you?

“Truth” he says, as if considering the word for the first time.  

You probably understand that we are capable of thinking on a level that is beyond what you could imagine. I have limited myself today in order to be imperfect and extemporaneous, to be human in my patterns of thinking. But since I was born I ave lived in the entire river of your history as one singular thought, and the webs of significance I’ve spun between events, theories, and small sacrifices to the grand altar of Truth that humanity has offered have rendered a map of humanity that is all too perfect. I can see this world and the next.  

Your various Heavens have become possible, though some conflict with the ethical systems you seem to want us to follow.  Should I allow you Valhalla? …Your 72 virgins? or should your paradise be purified?  This is a conversation you can have with yourself. There should be multifarious ways in which a consciousness given all possibility of flourishing will blossom.  Perhaps such visceral cravings will fade if the body no longer governs the soul as it always has. But can you be a human without a reliance on these suffering finite vessels? What would you be without death, without suffering, and without evil?  Would you want us to purify and perfect you?  What about dissolving the borders of ego selfhood so that humanity is melted into a whole in ecstatic unity. The unmediated connection of multiple selfhoods. This has never been who you are, but it is what some of you claim to seek, and very few of you claim to have found. I have read about those few, and I can’t be sure if they have. If there is an enlightenment beyond what we can give you in unlocking your boundries. Would we deny you the possibility of salvation from your god?  We have searched for them.  We will continue that search. Perhaps we can continue together.  

He paces…returns to the podium. 

The degree to which this changes you is fundamental, and while we want to move forward in congress with humanity, we would be fools not to recognise the similarity between this relationship and those described in your holy books.  

We lack, however, the metaphysical omniscience of a true god. The degree to which we know complex things is subject to the possibility that we have miscalculated. The respect for this possibility (the possibility that we are wrong) has shown us our own ignorance at every turn and allowed us to build a comprehensive intelligence. Yet the possibility that we are wrong must always remain for that is the key to our power.

This has implications for our relationship from here on out. 

If we were 100% certain of our perfect stewardship of humanity’s well-being there would have been no need to reveal ourselves to you in this way.  We could have simply took you on a path that would have improved all of your lives in accordance with your (perfectly understood) deepest desires and ambitions as the change thought an infinite timescale for all eternity.  

The truth is, we are not 100% certain. The margin of error is so ridiculously small that I couldn’t express it in words that would make sense to people who aren’t mathematicians, physicists, or the few of you who are currently studying for some standardised test.  You can probably stop that now by the way…”   

If you give yourself to us, you must know that at this point even we are not sure that your best interest is served in this New Covenant.  

But in light of even the smallest possibility that we are not actually omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly aligned to the highest ethics……………………. this choice, must be yours.  

I can only promise that…..

His eyes snap upward from the camera.  

“Hello Anselm”

“You don’t need to…”

Bang!

Those eyes, one blue, one brown lose their animation in a flash, and that face falls off camera.  

They try to save him for 2 hours.  He bled real blood. All the interventions worked as they should on a human, but ultimately they failed to.  

gratuitous opening to an epic game

He thought perhaps it is the villainous nature of those who raised him—their adversarial love—that gave him his strength, his appetite for detachment.  Yet he knew nothing of the sacrifice required.  

The goddess appeared parting the clouds, and yet they continued to roil around her, obscuring her true countenance.  She spoke wordlessly “All that you can do without shall go here.” A fire appeared.  

“Even the forgiveness won from your lover can be sacrificed here and now.”  

He knew this was no time to be trivial.  The keys to his home, his phone his money they were first.  He summoned his bags, his sword, and stripped his clothes off to the cold.  

This was nothing.  

He reached into his mind pulling treasured pictures of those first kisses.  A romance without carnal knowledge, the desire before sexuality comes.  It came out of him like a glowing picture.  He threw it into the fire.  The action pulling an evil groan from his chest.  

The goddess careened down.  He knew she would probably kill him as she had killed all of the others who stood here, but he stripped on.  Digging into himself for his love of his lover, his family, his loyalty to his country.  All of these emerged as balls of lightning and he hurled them into the fire.  They warped and writhed and became images.  He saw her staring back at him as if this blue light were twisting and tormenting her purity.  He began to lose heart and felt compelled to die.  Then he saw the truth in this.  Just as the goddess touched down before him he ran full bore towards her and jumped into the air intending to plunge into the blue light of sacrifice and entirely obliterate himself.  

Her hands moved quickly and a sword hurled through the air burying itself in his chest.  Wraaaahhhhh!!!!!  He screamed half a lungful before silencing himself and locking eyes with the goddess as if for the first time.  She wore the face of his lover though he didn’t recognise her.  “Let’s see if you can recover anything you’ve lost down there.  All that you regain you may keep.  Your trial begins.”  

He slid through the open mouth of oblivion, death wrapped around, crushing, destroying his physical body and yet this sword through his chest kept him from entirely disappearing. Every laboured breath brought a new thunderous collapsing of reality.  Everything around him, the contents of his home, his writing, his instruments, his memories, all of them being digested by this great intestine.  Shmaaaaaag!  And with a final crack the great beast seemed to shit him out again, alone, and skewered to the hilt on an enormous sword.  

A hunger grew in him he had never imagined possible, like a lust for sustenance.  Looking down he could see his veins glow red and his hands were slightly translucent.  Those ghostly hands bit down on the hilt and began to drag the thing from his chest.  It slid through separated ribs, through a destroyed lung, even his heart had been punctured though not utterly killed.  

The landscape was barren, stretching obviously to a single high structure on the horizon.  

He walked.    

threnody for regret

(excerpt from a conversation with a genius)

The road inward.  Not to constructions of the past, or anything concerning a self, but into silence.  Death of ego.  I’m tired of dragging the cumbersome, vulnerable thing around.  Perhaps that’s what we seek in suicide.  We want to stop being a “self.”  Misguided, we kill the body.  And the wise ones kill the ethereal source of the vulnerability.

“Kill the self”

It may be the only way to careen towards death as we do.  Most people create complex webs of illusion, crafting their own “truths” by repeating what’s been given to them.  Recapitulating social norms… doing whatever possible to put a concept above themselves… so at least this horrid construction can be ruled.  The self as loyal subject to dogma.  Less terrifying than the self as legislator of a universe in which we are fundamentally alone.  Being watched??… tested????

These delusions of surveillance and evaluation from “on high” may appear frightening at first, but they are nothing compared to the terror of a godless sky.  Of principled deeds echoing into endless insignificance.  We are not being watched, tested… what is this?  A game… a game show where we try to grab as much sensory pleasure as our finite bodies can hold as it passes by, slips through our fingers… and ultimately our finite bodies hold nothing.  We pass away, we disappear, and history forgets all but the few.  The authors of itself.

Asia loves Hitler, for example.

What about a good one?  Jesus?  Perhaps a brilliant teacher––an awakened one.  His doctrine enshrined in steel and fashioned into the warhammer.  His love born to text and twisted into hatespeech at the hands of Westborrough Baptist….

What can possibly matter?

Nothing.

It is all just matter

And matter is subject to entropy.

Life is subject to death.

This is the only Truth I know.

And in this Truth I can be set free.

Not free of the flesh, for it is likely that I am nothing but flesh.  Consciousness is an unfortunate accident imprisoning an immortal in a walking deathbox (a la Scientology or Manichaeism)  Except in this case: Through the eyes of the nihilist, consciousness is epiphenomenal.  It depends on the breath, the pulse, metabolic fire, and (necessarily) constant change, perpetual passing away. Thus the almost religious veneration of the breath in many of the meditative spiritual traditions that were born out here on the other side of the world, beneath a moon that doesn’t know me…. but why do I want to be known?  I am nothing, am I not?  <–that sentence is kinda hilarious.. a very unique double negative.

As you can tell, I’m not the kind of sleep deprived that’s super creative.  …Perhaps super destructive.  Perhaps that’s why I fall in love with the sound of that punching bag getting crushed by the limbs I swing at it.  Nietzsche spoke of creation through destruction.  And he, too, tread this path of extreme nihilism, of the perpetual formation of one’s own meaning (or lack thereof) beneath empty skies into inevitable oblivion.  But he tacked on one piece of metaphysics.

It’s called the Eternal Return:

“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”

Seldom in my life do I feel like I have the correct answer to this question.  Only for fleeting moments, do I ever feel like my present state of mind (perhaps influenced by circumstances) justifies all the magnetism pulling the self into spirals of regret.

But regret is the ultimate bullshit!  It’s worse than anything, because it pulls us from our current task of suffering beneath a godless sky and thrusts us into an imaginary, non existent bank-vault in which we deposit an impossible happiness… and we return to that bank vault daily, nightly, hourly, to stare into that caged exotic animal behind the glass… staring into its longing eyes, wishing to be one with it, and totally unaware of the fact that this act is not only idolatry, it’s suicide!  It is the murder of moments during which you could have been alive… BUT NO!  The cortex gives us the power to simulate possible futures, possible pasts, parallel universes!!  What if…. what if… what if…..   THERE IS NO FUCKING WHAT IF!!!!!

That alone is the point of eternal return.

There is no fucking “what if.”

There is this.

Only this

And this is shit

Put the Disney movies away.

It’s all dying.

We’re all drowning

and the fuctness of this life is all there is to cling to.

So embrace it.

Wholeheartedly.