Claire-Bella Einsamhund
Divert Or Die
At The Crossroads Of Late-Stage Humanity
Prologue
In moments leading up to something important to us, before and during each renewal of what that is, the image appears so clear.
More likely than not, with such weight honed into them, you were realistic with yourself about what is required to bring your ideals to fruition as best as possible. You stood before what was in front of you, accepting its consequences and responsibilities for however long.
Just exactly what was so meaningful to us and how we were moved by it has little to do with the actual tumult; you knew exactly what you felt, and in those feelings, the best foresight, judgment and deduction you could muster was aimed at, if nothing else, being true to them.
Standing on the fulcrum of our remaining life developments, instinct bound on deeper levels would prove to move us more profoundly than words. And although deeds and statements would surely drive whichever point home, they would always come after to reinforce a decision already made.
Every nervous twitch from a sound or motion since has come from a multitude of these hidden impacts.
Maybe the content would change, but psychological conditioning remains. We would re-experience abandonment and total personal failure on innumerable levels that would influence the shape of entire courses around the damage.
The image was so clear...
The story of how we all became so smart yet so sad is not one of falls from grace. It is one of entire logical and psychological rides on different lines that were never to last forever, yet equally to resonate indefinitely. The lines run far and deep, with caution of Endings only whispered but none listed on the maps provided.
We have since been hallucinating these Endings every day, drowning out the gradual, sustained conclusion with manic pointing and declaring, ceasing and withdrawing — resuming ad nauseam.
What lesson we take from this story of ourselves has yet to be worked out. While once we had to step outside of our humanity to examine the problems and step back in with the magic answer — we now have to step outside our own intellectual transcendentalness to acknowledge an inkling of our real downfall. We can expect to come face-to-face with a different necessity in processing these ever-changing consequences. The million maps of failure we read after the fact are not there to stoke revelation. They are there for record, and only for record. Whatever the delusions their authors tout regarding the provocation of change by picking a point and merely demanding "no more!—" the fulfilling of this task directly sustains the crux of our historical demise. It is not broken so clearly into one side gaining over other, but a unitary human division of milquetoast turn-taking and jabbing between the rotting of life on the Earth it has staked ultimate dominion into.
The resonance which we feel in ourselves is trying to be developed into a digestible chronicle, a material object to be caressed— and it never can be. Only more logbooks of the institution, the inmates — living or dead — and the official statements on the brutality.
This is a time of desperate deliberations and manic reassessments. Everyone is clawing at the fabric of this reality in their own ways. No-names everywhere are grappling with things felt to be as important as they are difficult to relay. They are bursting them into the public as best they can relative to their feelings, and this existential free-for-all in the free market of best-effort artistic products is of little real benefit to the obvious shared desire for serenity without social domination.
The weary have spun a personal battle inside the lifelong war. If late-stage capitalism describes a point where capital assumes the whole of social energy, late-stage humanity should describe a point where both the definition(s) of "humanity" and its reactions to the former becomes not only superfluous to the question of change, but also instrumental in the distancing of raw resolve— consequently expanding state/capitalist enclosure of life.
How many inspiring ways can we demand more or less the same thing over and over again? Why does it feel like we're thrust to find out before either modest concessions from a new social order or total annihilation passes over us?
And how many times can we ask how much time we have or could have to think of better things to say until something decent comes along at the last second? With every person feeling compelled to dive headfirst into becoming another neighborhood philosopher, eventually people are going to come upon the same thing.
Subjects of humanity, i.e., those designated "human" and pushed into the human pool at birth, are shifted into a state of deep personal turmoil regarding their relations in crisis with fellow humans, any capacity to save oneself and each other along unitarian lines of "humanity" and the very ramifications of adhering to this humanness. After all, how do we really trust anyone when we all had something to do with each other's downfall? What should the reply be when the iconography of the suffering's source is again refurbished, beckoning to bring us out of it?
Let us entertain diversion for a moment. (This mortal climate deserves what incense it can get.)
Subversives go about our task in coming and going from the different rings of social and political stalemate. Circling and observing, levying agitation through displays of passion; the miserably tedious struggle only to confer some truth on misunderstood (or totally ignored) factors in the course of life is the meekest yet brightest battle to fight.
Stalemate renews our strife when its flames are pushed back down into the human cauldron, reaching for the toes of the highborn aristocracy — then quashed back to the low-dweller status by the King's Men. Lament and heroic tragedy are employed to keep a fire going.
What we find so compelling about the ruling idiocy may be related to what kept us from trying (or trying again) to end our own lives. We have yet to read the words that sufficiently illustrate what we feel: A dark crevice wherein the stalwart convictions of the powerful, their consequences and the uncertain gestures by those intimate to us intersect, splitting the strong arm of The Usual from those wanting something else left totally destitute. An impossibility forms. An invisible hiccup born from liberalism, its subjects' altruistic patience, which invades all fractured avenues of trying to live. From the perspective of a bodily unit within the whole — rather than the same collective perspective which thinks for everyone — exit becomes imperative.
The cyclical nature of normative psychology perpetuates its society's travel, while those on the circuit are driven more to destroy either themselves or the entire society however they will. When it's decided to merely say "no more" no more, the ones chin-deep in letters have interesting work before them. It is easy to embrace or eject "The Time For Talk." It has always been so cheap yet so piercing.
In diverting from the pawn or lure of any social modus, the roundup into formal sensibility is evaded entirely. People love attributing subversives as snotty or sordid because they know that the rules were always bullshit, and they don't pretend otherwise. In the lead-up to being spotted, flagged down and asked, they're already Gone. They've already declined being the subjects of people they never knew in their lives. The back-and-forth game could never commence.
"Subverting" in this instance means to attain a destination [away] and traverse to it by will. To divert is to nullify the passage through which the precious cargo of liberalism is carried in the realm of our passionate endurance. It is the act of committing to reality the phrase "we suffer it, we choose to kill it."
Life is a fragmented collection of interesting bullshit. Don’t forget to take notes where you feel necessary.
In the course of being a person, if you can stand it, we find that life's fragmentation and hitherto human collection are at an odds which is only defused and sat across from each other by the reigning bullshit. This tension lends itself to the interesting, the highest form of banal morbidity, maybe. And although it is difficult to make use of something’s quality of “interesting” amid duress of any sort, I'd like to make an intentionally imperfect case for one such interesting difficulty that intervenes, collapsing the escape tunnels behind it.
The subjects look upon humanity in its late stage: a mass without division, but equally built upon division everywhere. A gallery of promises and wilted flowers; old enticers of joy fade into a surreal stain on the holiest icons.
Agitation Via Art
At this familiar point, we take a drink or light a cigarette. We're annoyed, vaguely piqued.
Through art we stroll again. We are met with timely creations lined up in a particular series of struggles illustrating the archivist's agenda. The essence of the markings on closer inspection reveal no triumphant, self-evident engineering of progress. Only the same struggle against each imminent tendril of the existent, against the obstacles standing as dominant there and then as they do here and now. This struggle, stamped by its time and emerging new rule, is endowed with greater phantasmal properties by those warping it than those enduring.
We pace this road of images to affirm that our weariness has a place, finding instead a real lack of the straight line we are traversing on which we must do our logical utmost in its course leading home. We plant trust and determination into those around us who share our insights, but understand the path to be turbulent and costly. We reassess strengths and weaknesses, still plagued by some droning fault in the background of our hearts.
A bookended unit on a time line shimmers with a sense of "now" glistening in a still capture from that point. Reaching across, it caresses the troubled hearts of this moment now, the resonance leading them to the wistful uncertainty of creation. A mortal insurance is then taken out; "let the world know my voice before it knew me at all!"
Great labyrinths of experience are built for all of it to be surrendered. Tapestries of data are woven to be cast off to the wind, wanting it returned better and brighter: A passphrase tied to a dove's ankle— "when the time is right." This creation, emphatic for history's enrichment and reproduction, lays the enticing stones for hopelessness. The center basin is empty yet beautiful to its builders. Lacking all promised light, the stones only illuminate the sensibility of the makers, and they are content to do it over again and again— "until the time is right."
Art and history complete a reductive circle around a project of absorption: an accounting of all "good" and "bad" so life in its playing-out can be halted, measured and deducted— all necessarily under the whims of whoever's rule. If we must be subjects to this, we would at least want the judgments to weigh in our favor, perhaps to bolster whichever socially agreed "truth." We are faced instead with all the inertia of power's consequence, amid the affairs of the society and by its further encroachments on the land and our souls. Truth, once relegated to Divine Right, now becomes the central competition for every subject; an open endeavor for a society where everyone is an entrepreneur of sensibility— always wanting to unify by sharing their ardently gutless imaginations of unity.
Those not in the fields, not carrying banners or marching with rifles, whom crowd over their tools and mediums are elevated above the same group of tasks they merely contend with under guise of rebelling against them and their paradigms entirely. What they would truly rebel against is not any certain execution or interpretation of any certain concepts, but the conceptual generation and renewal of any materially unifying idea which is responsible for wholesale submission amid obvious divergent potential. Although, after all, a psychology of human affirmation and its desire directs every effort. It is rare for the townsfolk to be capable of rebelling against the king without only rerouting the feudal system they've learned. A contrary skill belongs to the pagans who never remained in love with a liberal world. Such heretical insights may help.
One pervasive misconception is that, while understood to be archaic, past methodologies in science and art yielded clearer theories on issues: "answers" which were as direct as they could be in their context.
Furthermore, after the difficult shifts in problems and endurance following the the Second World War, past intellectual rigors seemed nobler at the time of their asking and "answering." This active perspective has all but crippled the gaining of insight: the more fluid and less reductive ways of thought which offer more than we think. It cannot be neglected that this habit is found beyond right-wing conservatism. And while such insight would equally nullify the mindless obscurity that might plague portions of post-structuralist thought just as it would nullify monarchist dribble, it has already told us something important: "Answer" is not a means-to-an-ends solution which we're promised it is, but a development made from fleshing out the ephemeral in accordance with ruling and contending values.
My answer stands apart from mere opposition to this tyranny, that encroachment. Those answering only with the colorful adjectives of their defiance — either in the name of God or in the name of Communism — are answering with the height given to them by the feeble chairs they stand on, the beauty they imagine surging through them in coughing up their sermons onto me. The answer that charges either neutrally or positively with art and history is not mine. This answer cannot unify, i.e., it cannot bring people together under an admission or compromise. Tradition will tell you to turn back to god and sacrifice your body for him and his nation. Communism will tell you to rush towards the affirmative political channels which promise to facilitate well-being through a universal economy. I will tell you to get away from me, that all is lost— and thus, now more than ever, the world is yours and mine. Firstly, there remains a tangle of obstacles which need unbinding or tearing.
After so long in our minds, conquering the moon, deploying radio transmitting satellites, harnessing every spark and protein around us, wringing the spectrum of value dry, the loyalists of "tradition" yearn for a noble regression back to the heart of monarchy, family, god and country. At the same time, the loyalists of "progress" yearn for a deeper, wider and more colorful "revolution—" one which transforms yet obeys existing thresholds.
The decision [to try] to live and speak inside this putrid center of constant stalemate with an eye for propagation is not always itself merely a grab at any transformative task one can, as caricatures of fervor have made us quick to believe. We who have taken shelter and penned some unfolding events and reactions have a sordid kind of guilt. Eventually we come to accept that the myriad paths of the same gist, often shorter, can grant swifter beginnings and ends— which sometimes yield admittedly more forgettable results. Those toiling with concepts will invest energy where they will, inserting suggestion into the spaces which flourish in many different people, extending maybe not only through the message, but the very effect of saying anything. Any decision like this is a step in diverting.
Those moseying along their lives in a fretful nature of thoughtfulness are at least conducting some contrary force to what is hovering over them. Typically, they can't be the [immediate] significant forces they wish they were. Their answers are not conclusions, whether they seek to become ones notwithstanding. And even if they manage to contribute a single tatter to history, willing or not, they still evade its whole inclusion of them. Truer pieces of them tend to go unread.
Disconnect like this should benefit us. Stalemate, far from being life's default condition for us who create is— if not simply a reminder of specific lack and overcoming— the impotence emboldened by the situation. Situations are best abandoned than resolved. What I mean is, a particular game is imposed on us, let's say for this instance: political recognition. The potential of those who take this game to heart is ensnared by appeasing the dynamics necessary to have a game and a slim chance of "winning." Already, people are gaining a sense of this; they know we will find ourselves in countless situations but fewer than half of them will net any fruit to compensate us. These games dot the parallels of our stalemate, but only dictate that which we enable. Many hopes and decisions today are already dumped off at the peak of a new beginning. There should be a similar callousness which does better for us, a constructive negativity unfolding our desire for positivity out from a hostile utility.
There is no creativity without negativity: one inspires positivity through fulfilling and sharing a living substance, a substance totally null and valueless to capital. Lovely music will entice us to dance, the circumstances around the song will open a flash of glad levity. But the tune and subject matter only go so far in the need for record sales, the status/image of a creator. A music that exists outside these paradigms seems like a better medicine than more thoughtful enrichment of this eternal fucking nightmare which is also arbitrarily agreeable. A poetry that grips at acceptable sorrow with the intent of conscripting it into the service of refined coping is a poetry for the monks of the labyrinths.
In creating whatever might be considered artistic, what comes from our hands is trying to help develop insight for why we're compelled to do it. We are only possessed into developing the art of this society. The situations of dialog, progress over tradition/vice versa, national security, economic stability and social prosperity are all conspiring to herd us back to the center where we rot quietly in a reductive utility not of our own. Our quietly simmering fury, which animates the ligaments to crafting the testimonies of our pain and polemics of our rising, is revealing itself to us as much as we are giving it life.
Tradition and progress offer two paths of the same journey. Whereas progress acts as an antithesis to tradition's thesis, the synthesis tears itself apart in order to continue staging conflict between the two. The kernel of this entire effort is to exponentially heighten humanity's greatest efforts and renewals into the most inconclusive frenzy the ruling/contending values can sustain. It is the greatest humanist dialectic endeavor kept on life support. Without it, humanity has little justification in the shadow of all it has affected. Here, the whole reflects the reactions of generations of subjects, blossoming into a woeful garden. Beneath the banality of art's agitation is where art is left to a matter of taste.
Art has its message component as a medium applicable to statement and protest, but its modus remains a market commodity. The division between these two has scarcely been so blurred. A plea for well-being must still be striking if it should be given any consideration, let alone its permissibility in its full extent. There has been a subconscious obsession with iteration the entire time of humanity's quest, both an economic and existential matter. Ingenuity not only of comfort and profit but of reason, meaning and purpose. Liberal society gravitates meekly toward "change," but not to the most radical, genuine degree— only to the degree that sophistication may flourish in the diminishing of creativity beyond humanity.
In the faces of each work along the circuit, their icons dazzle with intention. Something beautiful is spoken in one bold, voiceless image. As industrial societies have mounted their development, these images have warped to the changes in their world, each iteration marking the upward-scaling mission as evident. Oracles sermoning on the impoverishment and bloodshed relative to these artistic pleas ran stale. That which remains vague is born from the obvious frenzy, for what is certain in desire becomes vague in the realization. One's taste for real change weighs on the image's quality of "striking" upon the ushering of a new iteration. Higher and higher, brighter and brighter. All to tumble so low at such costs.
Our fixation with vagueness pointing at something whole and true has woven something insidious and alien within our manifestation of resolve. The ways which we speak, sing and mourn into infinity— rather than building practically on whichever address to this or that problem— pull the entire nothingness closer to our self-torments. The hole, dug downward less, expands with inhalation to the sides. Vivacious joy and hideous despair converge. Feeling the resonance from each splice between these two, we are increasingly sobered by "nothing." Bitterly incapacitated by our intense mental dashes across its inert vacancy, we are desperate to take anything. Anything not so vague, anything that makes sense to our unease.
The urgent voyage to the root of it all, of meaning itself, is dotted with much sacrifice, much acceptance of worst case scenarios. The momentous endurance of each new philosopher or creator is the shared, sickening curiosity about an optimistic promise— of everyone who concludes on the same thing differently. The catharsis in momentarily accepting the black evacuation of life at the peak of iterations' failure and resulting sadness has permeated enough of our conscience as "humanity" to know where of the two places it will take us. Giving up or getting up, a sigh marks the familiar point. Smoke, drink. The aggravating sense of a strange, spinning world prevails.
****
So much enthusiastic intrigue in the show-and-tell of our insights. Indeed, their myriad expressions and further development are now the real passion of everyone on the Internet, in the conversations relevant to what has generated this sensation in all of us at once. Every possibility is seemingly ours, and yet each grab negates something effortless to share. Motions relating with The Battle For Tasteful Agitation drowns this out.
We anticipated truth and justice to break through with our accessible span of information technologies in the 2000/10s, but we failed to be foresighted in the manner these technologies would alter our lives in a truly metaphysical sense. How responses to horribly taxing events sparking need for justice, need for resolve would be atomized, because they have become self-canceling through their proliferation in all of us. By our vocal capability to rally toward resolve, we sink into the sea of agitational content. And because the most grueling effort to rally is now gone, the documentation of the rallying itself becomes the overarching objective. These cascading layers of happening and sharing would reduce our divergent audacity to the chatter of mice.
Insights will certainly devour themselves if not honed well enough. As with the monotonous rituals which bend the surrounding world into a satisfying rationale, insight has to reject all material demands and invent paths around or through them. Witness ardent subversives whom relax in the static banner of "no gods no masters" under the rent and bills: Insight might not simply explode without second thought, but it is the mortar of a divergent bulwark, and therefore the persistent starting point for choosing life over humanity.
It seems like a fitting summary could be the following: humans are the most profoundly gifted drama queens capable of bluntly committing acts of suffering and killing within seconds. To this same degree, we can— metaphorically speaking, with an artistic viciousness— drop a nuke onto god's entire dominion and see everything totally unaffected in the next minute. We can conjure storms of disavowal, always counting on the boundaries to guide us through the approved passage and somewhere on the outskirts of its feeble destination.
Moreover, in bursting through these confines, very little forethought tends to play out with its necessary kind of brute force. As media constructs the next bits of history from the images of us enduring our turmoil in real time, the honest words at those moments are sequestered to the front-facing summaries of atrocity. Like great victories or tragedies, all of the real life in those people are relegated to the wistful and mystical, of those who had been there; all the living matter becomes the most inaccessible in order to accommodate the valiant-seeming quips which are mere indentations in the dust compared to a whole life. We only wish to reproduce the actions and images of humanity. We can sacrifice all of our time alive to do it so long as humanity remains immortal somehow.
How upsetting it is to thoroughly know something's obstruction and fail at overcoming it. Our need for guidance in surrendering hope, getting a different grip — because I and everyone still have to do the same — this need is still relatively fresh. We sense an unprecedented growing pain in our human condition. When fighting beasts of our own making, we can retrace our steps, circle the perimeter, measure the distance between points A and M. We can deduct things in further contention with the ruling sciences in our factories of alternatives.
We cannot, however, confuse these for trials mandated by the universe. We are not being tested in order to transcend infinitely from our present complexity. We are bringing ourselves back down to the earth from which we came. In our minds, we have drifted some distance away from the places our lives have happened; our search for answers elsewhere has made it hard to see plainly. Our pain is not meaningful or beautiful. Our caste is to be broken and burned.
All agitation must shed; its sheddings must be public, without damage control for one's pride. Agitation is to become something necessary beyond challenging existing feelings or swaying the most powerful. Agitation itself will cease to be a demonstration of reasoning in favor of something. It is to become a notice of divergence from art/history, a final encouragement on the way out from continued utterances of merely encouraging artistic language.
The fretful thinkers who feel no urge to first establish themselves as artists, philosophers, academics or activists have more to offer beyond art and brave expressions than any collective capitalist soul-searching could peddle. Our creations will have to be aimed at discharging self-righteous situations, ending circuitous nonsense which is armored by brainless goons of tradition preoccupied with their gang wars with red-flag goons. Creations must plow straight through the assessments of subjectivity, the "best intentions" in even the meekest representation. It is in this subjective brutality that the entire radius of possibility is really open.
A "human" language worth utilizing is in motion before describing its would-be directions. An energy vested in our words regarding deeds has all of its doings up front, chancing upon the words which jacket their intents with stoic poignancy. Until this contends substantially with humanism, unless this virulent chagrin rushes and splinters the barricades at the gates of our own, there can be no sincere engagement with the Arena Of Expression, the sordid "Marketplace Of Ideas." No glorious contention within for any right over beauty, but an ugly, passionate storm sweeping away the stones of its walls. No desperate interjection into the markets, but a vibrant defacing of their value.
These beautiful pictures haunt their human makers on their way out of the gallery, animal-hearted perusers trotting behind. Around the stark, colorless bend, trying to confer all the open space flooded with "duty," "love," "community" and "purpose—" all hath no promise but sub-strife.
Likeness Against Self
There is a lovely image in a 15th Century etching. Sappho lounges on a stoop by the shore of the Aegean with her dogs.
I often dream of myself in that same lax condition with seemingly everything and nothing on my mind. I have related very personally with the implications of that scene which is millennia older than I, their answers still being developed.
Every beautiful capture of difficult feelings seems to enlighten the viewer's emotional particulars with the image's cohesive differentials. The implications leading us on in confirmation bias— subtracting their presence from their standing effect— the image of looming in thought becomes the means and ends.
That sweet image I mention is not I, and it never will be. Its impression has merely swayed my utmost human sympathies; I cannot relate to its properties the way I can with that in front of me, beyond that motionless rendering. Our most loathsome, treasured sub-strife is not art's phony resonance, but the pervasive unification of being and presenting— most regretfully— human.
Art constructs necessary falsehoods to embolden truths in-the-making. The falsehood drives the likeness of some particular honesty which then succumbs to its vehicle. Upon the breakdown of its operation, a new image surfaces— either a mosaic from the cascading images above one another, or the clearing of the ruling cosmic mandala by tragedy, revolution, etc. Schools of thought spawn and decay as their remains are composted into the next iteration of conceptual idols, foes and bystanders.
When we step out from artistic construction and into the descending pavement of the in-person, the personal— especially for such matters that are shared between us but mutually unknown in our processing/handling— we feel the sting of this deceptive reality's cold. Perception is fierce; perception of oneself in accordance with the perception of an idea or a hope is a daily gamble with every spectrum of value and determination. Our tendency to reference a masterpiece in order to direct our newfangled intellectual vehicle is atomized into the gradual givings of in-person affirmations, affirmative contentions.
In the social realm, after the contentions have skirmished long enough, we are left with a predictable milquetoast consensus for anything. Consensus drives us right back into liberalism; consensus is the surrender to a normative stalemate dressed in new finery. Consensus is what establishes us all firstly as human, and [anything else] comes second. This always occurs after the onset of a ruler's boredom in accruing a body count or insisting on a blatant lie. The unease we all sense from liberalism's friendly, iterative intention is the passive ceding of agency for the consensus necessary to reproduce humanity, the beautiful idea we drag on our ankles. On the tips of all our tongues, we know the examples and origins of civil strife, property destruction, colorful calls for rebellion in a particular fashion. We consume a daily collaborative development of a remarkable point both within and regarding history, somber and Dionysian in perfect measure. A glowing ring of discord encircles a stale consensus: always under attack, always desperate for stability it doesn't deserve. The attackers: always falling out, always relocating, biding time, remodeling their capacity for their world's mounting ecological disincorporation from the unending circus of leaders, order, purpose.
In the personal realm, the refuge embedded within yet secluded from the social, there arises a contemplativeness we cannot directly confer. It overwhelms a determination to pull through, triumphant in no mere artistic sense over this squirming, pulsating bullshit.
Shyness may not be the best possible way to first broach likeness, and yet I do not know of another way. What I mean is not solely perception's points of tension, but being perceived. One's likeness is one's permanent color and motion. Perhaps different aspects can be altered, but you remain something recognizable. Those who have known you longest, for instance, can still pick out the hints of behavior unique to you. Everything about you changes but a few cornerstones. A sense of judgment (upon a sort of indirect offense) hushed under every "meaningful" presence or participation emboldens one artificial cornerstone: a fixed qualifier of humanity. A convention of shared blights and wishful interpretations. Your responses to affirmative contentions will only matter for the duration your face is seen, your convictions measured. They will affect your standing here or there, reflect your capacity for humanity, weigh on your good-bad ratio.
The personal rigors of piloting a living, breathing summation of your name and presence are only peripheral to the crux of appearing to be among others doing the same. No one can digest someone's feeling the way they can their appearance or impression. The deepest hardship we nevertheless share is in who we are operating in a suppressed fashion, detached from how we are discerned in the world thrust on us. Furthermore, that every person is a subject of gradual, interpersonal deconstruction and subsequent summarization over the course of mingling in the productive apparatuses of liberal society tells us that our apparent comprehensibility might do us more harm than good. It seems "anyone who is anyone" is getting on board the same aging idea of "raising awareness," or the like, making something beautiful for that. Being recognized at all as a person calcifies on top of the irreducible, unnameable substance of yourself, myself. That substance which reveals whole paths separate from the same tired journey, the same unified impotence of not only being artistic, but smiling and joining hands as a human artist, a good human.
When we stop and meditate on our profoundest frustration, we can set aside each relatively trivial turmoil to behold the brightest radiating situation: I am spliced into experience and appearance; the latter is totally recognizable, the former is only sourced for its reproduction of the latter.
Appearance dictates — we are thus subjects to our human recognition. That anyone is foremost compelled to make an image of a person as the means of fleshing the vibrant fibers of actually being one, that anyone is pressured to mend one’s honest form to the mold which disheartens in order to vaguely reiterate – this is the grotesque consequence of our ruling factors. People can only consider one another in regards to their image before they could know each other in the flesh. In being the prisoner-operators of our vehicles of comprehension, a lovely journey to a heartbreaking destination goes on.
What is the actual damage? You will grab me with your concern: "But what are these images without the people behind them who set their makings into motion? Do we not indulge in pictures to ease our lack-induced yearnings? Do we not streamline necessary brevities to make something accessible?"
You will notice a dreadful rift between utility and the social modus. Utility is the use of something (or use for something) imminent to you. The social modus is an engine within each subject of the existing social order. In all our pockets and neurological programming, there is a set of modules pinging back to the beloved source of our material sorrow: The Long Lineage of our redesigned static condition, its affect on our utility, the black hole amidst each of our every doings. Our likenesses are used to prove something special about why this power should encase individuals into operating their demise eternally. Our persistence— our possessive determination— in using images to prove our being-alive (or having been alive) is what gradually condenses us to pictures alone. Pictures do not disrupt suffering. Pictures affect nothing. I ask you: how does your utility in brevity and accessibility serve ultimately you and not drain back into the modus of this society? When your likeness pings to yourself and not to the interconnected liberal paradigm, how would your endorphin rushes of "I am seen!" defend against the databases closing in on you?
We are only behooved to cooperate with this modus so that our sparse and sporadic utilities, personal and otherwise, can go on without assault or deprivation for whatever length of time. This worry keeps humanity together; a political, artistic promise for stability must always supersede a raw, direct effort for wellness and joy here and now. It must work seamlessly with our tired, aching desire to lie in bed with our smartphones a foot from our faces. It must work within the paradigm of getting shot, beaten or kidnapped at any moment when one affectively challenges the general modus. It must remain inclusive of state brutality, always dispensable if it means humanity is secure in its notion and property.
Whereas one may share a flash of her journey to relate its stutter in time to friends, they are not truly driven to exist in images the way liberalism insists more power in. She does not adorn their being-alive with best possible captures as the forward momentum of being anything. While the songs they adore soothe or entice her thoughts, momentarily placing them elsewhere, she knows that chasing tunes will not make everything outside of song better. Sharing seems to have become tangled with presenting an image. I at least would wish images could be invitations for sharing something better than the image, "sharing your thoughts" on what you have just digested. There is no real honesty being sought, only the ardent actions of engaging and making. An accessibility in of itself must serve as a utility to my own affair, but if it is to congeal outside of my consumption of it, it is most accessible to the humanity which would consume I. My sympathies grab hold of me, but only long enough to differentiate them from who I am, what I am dealing with.
Our image-desire is taught to be our mission. Our image-being is what so many have sacrificed themselves to have. It has consistently proved itself to be only a more transcendental masturbation in sync with the bleeding-edge of humanity's global interconnected society, all of its remade desires, all of its intricate lovely dramatics, all of its paltry outcomes. Everything you and I entertain in this society is only for an impression of a utility beyond it. Of course, the finite joys peddled everywhere on the scene ring out the way they do now by design, allegedly tapping into some meaning that one has longed for in this frustrating world. E.g., people who indulge in psychedelic drugs are now either mortified or overjoyed to find wacky sub-genres with their eccentricities in mind; the dissecting of amusing antics, sidestepping psychedelics' unraveling of industrial facades which the antics are edited for. "Pandering" seems like a concern of a distant past. But instead, people today seem to have adjusted rather well to what everything has laid itself out plainly to be.
Those who seclude within this malignant cultural array at a considerable remove, detesting their own being-seen, are less like malicious creeps in the purely interpersonal sense and more like dedicated archivists of depression, of their's and others'. Their shyness is brought on by a fundamental centering of likeness before living moments of wider possibility and more direct consideration. They would rather keep their distance than fight themselves and others to have a satisfactory presence pertaining to the social modus. I do not even expect those to be the sufficient words for what they are enduring. But in this broken daily endeavor, I feel strongly that many of these people whose lives are spent cutting across the meaningful byways are among the wisest, most insightful individuals to come to terms with themselves and their surroundings however they might have. There are still far too many "normal people," or people desperate to "be normal," who go about their lives like ants to this normative world, reinforcing the minute barricades around something so utterly direct.
We have paced the shorelines of every exodus from human-old con jobs to come full circle and do it all over again. We have wept for what was lost, endured— and wept for not being able to go back. This guttural aching is too tired to bear. For our likenesses to actually be our own, i.e., for what we are to shine through, we first need to discern and remove that which has ensnared us into subjectivity. ****
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The dualities I have taken up here (likeness/self, or image/being) are only utilized insofar that the weapons of the general issue aimed at us are more pronounced. The plight of self particularly entails a necessity in being accounted for as one involuntarily bearing a likeness parsed into a decision from society: to be, in a rather palpable duality, a potential honorary civil servant— or a scorned, "Wanted: dead or alive" fugitive of everything holy to humanity. Likeness is a thing to get far away from, self is hardly any different.
Self is a human invention. Self is posited by media and popular values as the living reflection of material momentum, i.e., putting it vice versa, the external material effects of some given momentum (and its modus) build on the living perspective reflected which commences it all. An entropy of "inner" and "outer" is established, an imminent extension with how life and death function in this same sense. When "man" first distinguished itself thus, the first storms of contention ensued: hypnotic schisms around what seemed like the same (yet strikingly unique) reflection pouring back into a filtered basin of cult-like interpretations. Pythagoreans, Stoics, Epicureans. The madness of the World Of Man beyond the World Of The Gods in a singular constant of indecision and heresy. Tribes of The Upright assume opposing colors within the quests for Truth. As Truth in bloom proved to be hollow, the colors became iterative rather than merely competitive. Descartes in the 17th Century began what Nietzsche would hope to conclude at the end of the 19th Century in respects to the subconscious strife in the middle, wherein Freud would also interject, laying some technical ground for the savants of thought & experience to come. Liquidation of an essential, unified man made up of disparate selves around the time of Derrida, Deleuze and Baudrillard would ultimately polish the woodwork of self. The strictly conceptual tradition of individuals as units of a wider formula, rather than disparate formulas themselves, at least held together a basic groundwork for diversion. Its collapse signaled an urgent opportunity for industrial societies to adapt, inject its roots deeper. In a gradual, calculated adjustment by academics, psychologists, social workers, military and police, the components ripe for social reproduction mutate into a spectrum of possibilities for individual assimilation. "Accommodation" for the whole possibility of self marks a desperation for volumes of applicable bodies. This simultaneous tabula rasa and possessor of fundamental essences malleable to anything would play out as a magnificent call to battle, as well as an ever-mutating engine of blame and encouragement. Between the figures named— reduced to likenesses, "great minds" of the past— the ongoing wars, upheaval and pompous non-sense in securing the self would only speak in a meta sense: the capabilities versus the outcomes, the special exceptions for the persistence of these outcomes.
People who now consider themselves philosopher-pundits going on their brave crusades against deconstruction, relativity, etc., will protest about out about how the self has never been in greater care; that recent unrest has no conception of one's potential self-determination in the existing bounds, that one could easily triumph over some particular aspect of material suffering — with enough ass-kissing of unwelcome institutions and contracts — and fulfill the "only realistic" solution to one's oppression. Self has wrung our selves dry. When approaching the inner sanctum of this subjugation, self becomes interchangeable with soul. In the midst of some individual crime against the holiness of human normalcy, a switch flips inside people's minds. Any desire for any sort of sovereignty evaporates; there is a special outrage levied against those who can't play nice with this mandated stupidity. For most bystander subjects, a personal injury is assumed from someone challenging the human divinity responsible for the beloved, cheap sensations of seriousness and meaning. In the way that we understand a still-intact notion of mortal souls at risk of missing out on everlasting life, The Church Of Self induces a human piety whose practice is continuing a dialog forever by sharing pieces of oneself. In this, it is obvious what the human afterlife is intended for, that all selves can forever build on what can never simply be done. That all are "re-gifted," "renewed" by the ability to produce more likenesses which are immediately usurped, absorbed into the tautological construct of human purpose with no conclusion whatsoever. The soul of the self is the ability to be reseeded, replaceable— because, at least, a likeness could remain as a kind of "Sorry, thanks" as another life takes it on again. It is projected as a beautifully mournful inheritance to be a human. A necessary suffering that nobody should dare think of renouncing.
Humanity confers a "self," the word as well, which is different from what I want to present. A sense of self typically refers to the relations we inhabit revolving around "my house, my car, my job," etc. These are personal responsibilities from the world we were born into. Typically, our levels of mental/emotional investment in them, or engagement with their logic, are only relative to our tenacities for self-debasement or self-reliance; some wear humiliating combinations of the two and think of themselves as "Masters of The Game." A self, then, is only a fluid trophy that consumes itself in order to stagnate the operator. The only goal there is to survive: "take care of yourself," so that things might remain sheltered and normal along your swaggering gait. After a time of enduring a necessarily insane way of life, of recognizing that this way of life is insane, this is capable of giving someone a divergent way of processing the things in this world— but only when a barrier between human-self and own-self is broken. One is the self instilled by strictly human factors, the other is the self cultivated gradually over the enduring & processing of human factors. By unraveling the former's material facade in oneself, the positive-negative paradigm nestled centerfold is laid bare: to promise a renewal of bondage and misery. The latter then assumes a more palpable conspiracy of living. The ruling modus becomes very interesting for subversion, a consumption by the own-self which has suffered so long under its boot. Our whole situation being the coercive assignment of subject at birth, the roots of own-self have always been taken from us, barred from being accessible or even thinkable.
To develop own-self is the genuine crime against humanity of which there is no ordinance or statute. It is a striking weak spot for liberalism that our brains are not yet totally captive; to form any terms or desires at all independent from liberal decree is the real beginning of the end for all manners of encroaching on your own, on my own. Dialogs can no longer suffice for the problems felt harshest outside of discussion— the "actual point" of the notions we tolerate with muted sneers (god, country, money, leadership, purpose) reveal their emptiness. In turn, a screaming, unrelenting critical thought is discovered; a grueling understanding of limitless untamable agency is slowly woven into something unique; a new power is examined cautiously— abandoned or wielded proudly. As Larry Law describes in a 1975 pamphlet Revolutionary Self-Theory, "It is the pleasure of making your mind your own."
Self is the component of likeness which could not get closer to who we are. Indeed, it puts the very security of our own at risk. An obscured essence peaks out from a facade's window blinking on the screen. It lures us in, that we might decorate it with different, complimentary [reductions of] empathetic properties. Self cannot live by itself alone, it requires a universality that insinuates and indicts every possible being. A subjective reality (a reality stemming from the subject) affects and confers the objective generations of how the next subjects are to fare. Yet the objective consequences are relegated to a merely "subjective," atomized means of making sense of them, making sense of normative, gradual changes— in the case of the social modus: only to record that changes were made, or perhaps attempted to some degree. It is then the subject's affair on how to be or not to be. Subjective consequences manifest in as many ways as there are subjects. They are the underlying responses that, e.g., in the social realm, we see under the surface of "rioting," "protesting," "looting," etc. There is obvious brutality, starvation, destitution, (use your imagination,) which inspire wrath upon this straitjacket of existence. The glaring reality of most becomes a choice between quiet deterioration by withstanding the holy normality, or striking without a word and charging straight into capture.
It is not a difficult thing to conceive of. It is the circular nature of the whole struggle, however, that is most disquieting.
Combative selves stiffen into a mortal bind as the sense of a passive decision [made for them] to lean into subjective consequences takes hold, conferred by the resulting likenesses. We stare straight into the half-living eyes of an objective foe, a self-established GOOD which bluntly diminishes my life and my loved ones' lives. But on paper, regardless of its cruelties, it is either permissible under law or totally negligible. An objective material insanity overwhelms the ability or the reason to sustain mental composure; the basic sense of "I just want to enjoy my life" distinguishes itself more as a completely sovereign struggle from liberal society's need to account everything and devise a center at which to reach a consensus.
To overcome our trembling in the invisible reflection of our own, it becomes clear that we need to pulverize— if not swiftly nullify— the functional, material logic of this world in such a way that even its retaliations would only build on its own downfall rather than ours. To find the cracks and crevices wherein either the weapons are hidden or the flowers are growing, we need a practical distinction between our own intentional struggle and that of liberalism: the project of eternal rule. We do not end our selves by death alone. It is only this malignant insanity that sometimes makes death synonymous with absolution. The death of the world of self should not be the death of me or you; fighting the battle at all entails a shifting of effort, a new methodical prowess employed.
To abolish its function in our thought, our expression, our decisions, our digestion of being alive— diversion of our human self grasps at the immediate necessities of living absent from liberalism: it no longer concerns itself with how to resonate after annihilation, how to join the labyrinth of meaning, because one's own-self would derive no lived satisfaction from this. It confers as plainly as possible what cannot be reduced to a beautiful rerun, a phony resonating concept with nothing alive at the center of it. It fears no disavowal from human leaders, because it shows plainly how all divergent revelers will be called "animals" regardless, i.e., "insubordination is inhuman." At the same time, it is not by recognizing these conditions alone that anything has changed. There are blatant obstructions along this straightforward-seeming path. To only match brutality will extend another paradigm of damages and ratios. It is not enough to punch harder because "fighting is wrong," but because it is the native language of states employed to protect the image/self paradigm.
The subversion of this Ouroboros is of course to "fight differently," but the total diversion is a self-abolition of liberal value in the conduct of our own. Only in the unique executions of this notion, diverting from humanity on a conceptual level, can more information be drawn.
Until this, it follows that we vanquish self in vanquishing the divisions between the most wordlessly intimate parcels of living in each individual. Our own aspirations are no longer surrendered. Each individual ceases recognizability with mere human suffering: engagements for revolution or overturning still cannot encapsulate what the content of this more direct struggle means. "Life," as one within whole, is no longer subjected to a rift between endured— enduring— or inflicting. An existence in accordance with the ground-up of breathing and hydrating envelopes [all] at once, ceasing the purpose of the daily struggle to Frankenstein together a single soothing, drawn-out mantra echoing through the infinity of bullshit. We would no longer be creatures of immense coping abilities, but unbridled propensity for life and creativity.
"Self" then completely dissolves into a concept alone, it no longer points to me, you or anyone. It only calls out from humanity to join in, amplified by all material prodding. I and you certainly exist on mutually alien ground, and by this alone we understand how there is no necessary relegation to selfhood. Our various features cease to comprise prescriptive roles in front of our names, faces and voices; they get behind them, blotted out by what a self-owned life is projecting, outlasting. In sermoning the name of Self with all of its humanistic aspects, we may only concur on our time wasted, our endurance manipulated, our hearts withered, our lives stolen. Nothing divergent from that is permitted within human subjectivity. We do not need to lean into these consequences, but we do need to move through them.
Having spent some paragraphs on this subjectivity, we will now endeavor to unbind it. The foremost question would be how to do diversion— how to divert. Diversion can often simply occur in a person who happens to embody a living null with any given logic anointed with some particular divinity. It is in how beings persist in themselves, in their own, that the seed of diversion is found: divergence is a negating factor introduced by our assigned human essences. Neither diversion nor divergence comes before the other; and yet each tumble in a synchronized withdrawal, a deviation from the normal.
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Allow me to share a very personal insight:—
Neurodivergent people, meaning we who have neurodevelopmental disorders (such as Autism Spectrum Disorders, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Tourette's Syndrome, Dyslexia, Developmental Coordination Disorder, to name only a few,) are living manifestations of how these sacred limitations are failures. We inhabit an outer material existence built on psychological systems which never corresponded with our own. Their exterior promises have only been "centers of being cured" to our families; while to ourselves, they have been sterile, hostile prisons of judgment and correction. We are immediately set inside a position where our ways of being are the issue needing the specialist range of retooling and assimilation.
As it is with other disabled individuals, our dissonance with the material operations of this daily life is a front and center reality. When we manage not to be directly assaulted by neurotypical behaviors or ingrained designs of society, we are left to rot in how useless and burdensome we sense ourselves to be to our fellow humans. Those of us who can conform just enough to be perceived out in this world as "one of us normal people (maybe with some quirks)" gain a sharper insight than most could care to think twice about.
Sparing how we are each infantilized by humanists and everyday people as a "lovable error" of physical/mental/emotional capacity in each moment we are picked out, we come to understand how and why the glaring brevities of human intention cannot bend around their quotas for us. How, instead, they will only integrate some enticingly taboo likeness of our humanity into their performative thoughtfulness as a company, institution, cause, non-profit, etc. (I ask forgiveness from neurotypical readers if I can only truly relate to those who have endured such malicious difficulties— but I also don't require it.)
We see that even accommodations for us with a humanistic air about them are only ever directed at commencing our utmost engagement with the economy, with the artistic avenues of impotent praise or disavowal. The core things that matter to this world, having been bound up in the survival of humanity's most needy, are thrust still onto those who can least entertain the insanity of states and capitalists. In our divergence from this too, life suggests itself to be more. Life, for us, is not merely heightened by more considerate modifications or inclusive representations on the part of society's rulers. Life becomes interesting and actually worth it for us when abuses are razed, dictates are nullified— when we can come to autonomous agreements with similar individuals interested in overcoming human misery.
Neurodivergence (or "neurodiversity" as activists push) is a living instance of divergence. It possesses a real diversion that— while very often mediated by medical and legal institutions— exceeds the structures which prop up humanity as a concept translated to reality. We differ with humanity down to a conceptual level: the awkwardness we are perceived to exhibit, even lumped in with the disparate variables that still make up human beings, is the explicit incongruity between us and industrial society coming to the front of our livedness. Divergence, in this, is passive— which does lend itself to society's mediation. It does not, however, disarm what the whole memory of psychological hell has given to us. How cruelty has long been systematized with minimal effort.
Speak not of "compassion," human gluttony for animated bodies is slavery!
Those who possess any life force, despite their unknowable trials, are crammed into a human product so that their positive charge is associated with humanity and not their own. In the case of us who fail in a few crucial departments of being shaped by public schools, mental hospitals, etc., our records flow through systems of deduction to aid in conscripting our remaining mental and physical will in accordance with monetary satisfaction and productive (or correctional) quotas.
Whatever glimmer of familiarity, of relation with a vulnerable humanness they imagine in our suffering imposed on us by that exact paradigm, they still find a core flaw, invariably discarding our dignity in the shadow of humanity's greater purpose. Those who have sadly been coerced into whichever "therapy" now have a staunchly physiological human-self methodically grafted on top of whatever frayed nerves of their own-self might remain.
By no means could I limit my meaning to this one perspective alone. At the vast intersections of experience, an imminent self-liberation coalesces shyly, and this shyness is to be worked through. A recognition comes to us: divergence as one's self can only extend to wider, external things diverted when that divergent self indicates open paths for collaborators. At this time, collaboration for subversion is nearly ubiquitous, and we see the radical standard made from this that attains many destinations with few manners of traversing to them. Meanwhile, passage remains wide open for everything useful to liberalism. Our endurance greatly suffers. It will continue to suffer unless we develop an ownness, unless passage is denied to liberal values, and we then refuse to enable their abuses.
Deviation from the normal is a snare of likeness as much as it is the crux of divergence. The key distinction is in how only liberalism's presentation, language— not its social modus— will divert from itself in order to lure all possibility back in when one iteration is exhausted. Something must remain while reforming itself.
We continue developing our own constant as the basic ends of a self-owned objective assumes many potential means, expressions, applications. The abnormal of our own in conflict with the normal of liberal continuity, up to and including its desperate self-deviations, is aimed at undoing the alleged receptiveness of subjects to governance and existential charge. Our creative propensity for life must swarm the politically resounding performances of saving humanity.
We— in our human aspects— have been our worst possible abusers. But our self-inflicted actions were not always entirely our own.
We ask ourselves, crying, "when does the pain go away?"
And we deserve to answer that for ourselves. We deserve to decide how to end our pain. And the options need to be widened far beyond: (1) make some pretty art, (2) ask your rulers nicely, (3) end your life.
Every day woken up to only to go to work for however long and spend the remaining hours trying to forget about it and get enough sleep to do it over again is a routine psychological abuse/rape that stiffens the joints of an artificial "life" and leaps near-suicidal into the conquest of everything remaining. These things are only ever whitewashed as anything else by the fodder or directors of a compliant, still normality, cultivated to tell a story but engage nothing.
When the guns are aimed at us, even by our own hands, the source can always be traced back to the liberal absorption of one's experience into its game of "self." The aperture which devoured us will halt and resume. In between each shutter, we need to move or accept death.
From The Shadow Of Generalities, Towards The Self-Abolition Of Subjectivity
The only constant resulting from our own should be the Death Of Bullshit. We can overcome the dormant wistfulness of "life" itself. We deserve to. This means far too many things to list off and elaborate, but it condenses down to a gradual divergent recognition: the worst atrocity committed passively by everyone during the last few centuries has been the wanton docility while under rule. Rule, having persisted scarcely through force alone, but by its subjects' docility lubricating its motions by threat of torture or deprivation, has wrung its own death knell in the churches it has made. We must heed this chime in the wind and rejoice.
The pitiless flock and the pompous disillusioned have relegated their respective times to someday, as if daily life itself was not always the warzone at which every moment is stalemate. As history shows, no one person can assuredly conclude whether more audacious acts and daring leaps of the status quo can effectively reduce or remove the longstanding injuries we correct our lives' courses around. The paradoxical absurdity bleeds into our considerable alternatives. The negation of alternative altogether follows:
whether lawfully, godly, creatively or conceptually, the relative lack in the dethroning and mutilating of authority itself has been the harshest injury dealt by everyone "given breath" by the nightmare called "humanity." The basic absence of authority's mutilation is a loud and booming death for "individual freedom" wherever it is really concerned. If you, as a singular head, are not concerned with authority dying in your lifetime, you are not concerned with life at all, and thus have nothing in common with my own affair.
Our guilt is present, but about as mundane as anything else out of our infantile reach. This would be of little help anyway. Instead of lashing ourselves, we pick each other up. We offer insights before going along our way. The desire for captivating adjectives during situations of absurd origins has stagnated the comprehensive ability to grow past humanity. The existence of these dramatics are themselves indicative of conceptual lunacy run a muck for what seems like the entire duration of humanity's need for meaning and purpose. Everything which would provide this has been pummeled to death in the name of a higher, divine purpose which is exercised by all the creative effort of happy liberal subjects. Now, "meaning" and "purpose" only point to waking up the next day and consuming another series of human products. Nothing more.
Blame should go to nobody in particular, but all our behaviors and positions indicate our senses of importance. Those with authority, those who "lead," who prosecute, they cannot abide a simpler contract: that no person should play any part in anyone's debasement of their own, which always goes both ways. Existential problems like these feel like public domain endeavors; political ones, while they encompass certain domains and contracts, remain a public occurrence with joint, selective involvement on outcome. And of course, social problems involve each subject of humanity to the degree that they embolden social phenomena. Yet few people will consciously scale the existential wall which encloses us in total. Doing so is of utmost criminality to our shared human condition. But then criminal and courageous begin to sound alike, especially when anyone expressing this can survive.
"Courage" has nothing to do with our expressions. Expression as a righteous act, or the trade of a specialist, has solidified the boundary shutting out expression as that which pummels through its own limitation, leaving itself as a unique mark on earth's surface. This profound utility is lost either by the author's limited tools, limited exposure or limited receptive individuals who could relay the would-be affect to others who are unsure of it. Artistic fervor only seeks to weaponize the endurance of the subjects. As the subjects shed the yolk of "self" as a distinction from "all," they wade for the first time in the judgmental air of their own raw consideration, weeping, laughing hysterically, possessing their own wordlessness that harks on Sappho's line, "I am weary of all your words and soft, strange ways."
Strife, definitely in regards to polemical engagement, is our share for feeling any distance between ourselves and humanity. It is not any curse or affliction, but the self-justifying belligerence of rule itself, that our mournful recognitions are dolled out in mere words. We who are this tired have caressed the faces of every beautiful anti-thesis of every anti-hope anti-manifesto in light of each hitherto renewal of global neoliberal economic endeavors. Of experience and conveyance, wanting to be done while only knowing one way about anything "being done," nothing is ever "done" until you really are.
It is a strength belonging to all. Knowing when and how to divert from a broken path is an intense breakthrough in becoming one's own. It is not easy, as it tends to bring the faults of many other aspects you wished to keep hidden directly to the front of your attention. Normality is many different things in tandem. Pickup trucks and gasoline, elections and pointless droning social media jabber. My existence as an autistic faggot who cannot tolerate any of this needs to divert in order to secure my own. Nothing can promise my well-being but my determination to outlast every blatant lie and every obtuse gesture of entrapping me.
Intermission: To Renounce Humanity
To renounce humanity is not to renounce the basic well-being of each other. It is to reject the malicious captivity of unique beings under the unitary label of "human," which has its lineage in the "meaningful" suffering of "god's people," i.e., "god's subjects."
To renounce humanity is to renounce a pompous humbleness in the face of being something capable of being ruled. It is to examine the factors plainly, past and present, regarding any being's capability for anything, deducing the course which makes sense to one's own.
To renounce humanity is to renounce the beautiful hopelessness which brings us to smile morosely at how absurd life has been made, increasingly expanding our acceptability for the worst shit imaginable.
To renounce humanity is to renounce the fullness of liberalism. Liberalism being that which secures a framework of "checks and balances" and a flimsy framework of "rights" which can eternally be challenged, reinterpreted and loopholed in order to achieve the ultimate desire of industrial capitalism. It is the actual lifeblood of Conservatism, more so than any other side of the same coin. The degree of "liberty" that liberalism affords is a negotiable rationale concerning protections for mutually opposing social forces. All social action under liberalism therefore convenes back at humanity— either to extend eternally over degrees of egalitarianism and opportunity, or to lash into humble duty for the according crises. Liberalism, to some dimwits being synonymous with "Communism," or "lenient" to communists, completes itself as the human ideology when some radical camp fails.
(end intermission)
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How exactly we venture to unplug from being led on this way is a malleable sort of game of our own to invent, reinvent, use, abuse, annihilate and respawn according to our individual whims in tandem with mutual endeavor. All I feel like I know in this regard is that in our carnival of self-deluded fantasies marching towards the slaughter, I must scream, pound my skull in with a ball-peen hammer, becoming exalted and freed. I must wail and expel in one go. Upon the shrill, gargling sadness ripping through the children's laughter and mindless animation, more are bound to harmonize. Our constructive negativity is what embraces disillusion and acts through the words everyone knows but dare not speak. In speaking, in the motion of speaking without a filtered "resistance—" meaningless word!— we rally anew by ancient channels, by tried and true ferocity spread out, ripping through our sorrow.
We pivot— divert— from the liberal approval of "doing" in relation to its unwelcome consequences. If any gains over our subjective subjugation are to be won, transgression of the pattern, the program, the poem, is necessary. But simultaneously, a specificity whose direct goal is stoic in its definite, informed obscurity must prevail over artistic surrenders to the universe. A snatching or manifesting which corresponds to no rigid perfectionism of thought, form or— especially— feeling, must be self-cultivated in the wretched soil of spent plastic assurances. Our feeling must overwhelm the universe. We must not lie supplicant to the milky way upon our defeat at the civilized threshold, but charge joyously and with agency into its womb from which we came.
The human self has taught us to be cunning and inventive in the worst ways; to dodge the blows of judgment or deprivation while also being quick to dispense them on each other; to harden our gigs and perform with passion drawn from the desperation to survive. That which strikes so magnanimous to our human veneers in being is, in consequence, the self-generating master over our inhuman ferocity and tenacity for becoming.
They will guarantee prosperity, or prudence in the eyes of the divine, but we who still live know to be guaranteed nothing. We know the summation: there is no life left here. "Here" might not mean "everywhere," and so that is at least half of the curiosity. I don't say this because I want to write a bold and daring statement. I say this because I need the pain which we are accepting every moment to cease. In terms of sheer quality of existence, the conceptual engines of this so-called life need to be murdered, or every life who endures it will have sorrier and sorrier lives in front of them.
Either we as individuals will perish after suffering one by one, or the modus of reproductive human society— after so long, so very long of hurt and confusion and powerlessness— will finally and truly be dead. It is only in this total conceptual collapse that we can perhaps take a deeper breath much different from what we are used to.