Richard Dawkins: Opiate of the Masses

Just what the world needs. Another pop pseudo-intellectual guru with a bone to pick championing a topic that is far larger in scope than his finite mind can handle. Has Dawkins read the Critique of Pure Reason recently? He clearly hasn’t because he overtly presupposes things about God as if he truly knows what God is. How does he know God as an essence, though? I wonder. He must cheat.

And Dawkins is a cheater.

Perhaps, Richard Dawkins should read some Dons Scotus or Occam, or Lucretius, or Longinus, or Augustine, or Aristotle, let alone Bruno, or the esoteric tradition, or the apocrypha, or even the well-known Perennial Philosophy as evidenced by Huxley and Blake and by every single human society since recorded history.

I wonder has Dawkins’s read about the Egyptians? He certainly rarely talkx about them. He is keen on assaulting one tradition alone: the Judeo-Christian one. Why? Because the Bible is brutal?

Okay. Close. But I will tell you why.

Dawkin’s arguments are old ones about the Bible; he has nothing new to say. He is simply regurgitating the great atheists who came before him so others can hear what they want to hear.

He has about as much original thought in his brain the standard deviation of its occurrence would border on its non-existence.

The existence of God is a ridiculous debate; one allotted to college stoners, poets who believe in mystical experiences and zealots on both sides alike.

The debate is not even important to our times and it usually ends up nowwhere.

So why this Dawkins now? Why do we need to know the good news that God does not exist?

Because we have real human problems to deal with—-and the existence of God is a false problem (that only appears important because it has been so in the past).

We have so many others problems to take care in the world rather than get off on some power trip by some secular humanist who feels compelled to share the great news that God is Dead again.

With all due respect, Richard Dawkins is an eloquent man, but he is about as interesting to observe as a carrot sitting in a glass of water. His reach exceeds his grasp; he bites more than he can chew and, quite frankly, defines God is very exoteric terms. I would go so far as call him a bigot. He has contempt prior to investigation and is often guilty of what he blames in his religious others.

Clearly, Dawkins has a beef with one particular kind of God, which does not surprise me. For every atheist, in fact, we may conjecture, has backstory and I trust Dawkins has his own.

Too bad Dawkins is not Carlyle and will be forgotten like the rest of the atheists who adhere to his school of thought; for the European Enlightenment and Crises of Religion of the 19th century is over; and it took place long ago; and here Dawkins is still at it, fighting battles that with ghost armies who have already been pushed forward and articulated more than a thousand times.

Subsequently, it amazes how many people think this guy actually constitutes the patina of an intelligent human being, when in reality it is clear: Dawkins is a bigot (who won’t budge for you or for anyone) and will not be open to any other argument except those ones that harmonize or are in congruence with his pathetic presuppostions, which are older than he, and for that matter, make him a lot of money because he can articulate a dumb-man’s atheism for the masses, who can’t think for themselves and need their atheism preached back to them, only so they can regurgitate those views back to others (who are their opponents). In short, I am of the school of thought that the mystique of faith in God (whatever it is) cannot be reduced to a simply thought-experiments alone, nor through argumentation alone, but can be, in some cases, far different than what Dawkins presupposes.

Moreover, Dawkins has no monopoly on atheism. He is another cog in the machine and his presence in our world in inconsquential. He is simply an indicator in how useless debates about the existence of God runs counter-productive to solve real human problems, like the war refugee crises all over the world, wars, rape-camps, corruption, women’s rights, the advent of New Science and the schism that it produces politically and ideologically for our species…..which runs the gambit, and sets up the prospect that we are heading for another dark age, all of which have nothing to with God and everything to do with people who are dividers and usurpers, wandering stars.

Stars that from their pulpits preach with passionate intensity about things that are ultimately inconsequential or at the very least, not up to Richard Dawkins at all, but up to the individual person who has a chance to choose to believe whether or not God exists rather than have the idea chosen for them by the likes of secular tyrant who really doesn’t have humanity’s best interest at heart, or at least only has it in appearance, which is travesty in and of itself and ultimately an indictment on how easy it is to follow the cult of personality.

No matter what the content of belief or lack of belief may be, drilling into the brain what seems like answers, but ultimately is nothing but a bunch of absurd rhetoric, should make us pause.

Kant himself explicated how we cannot know essences. And yet here Dawkins is claiming to know ultimate reality, that is, some essence, a things-in-itself, as if he has even access to that realm in any way, shape, or form. He must consider himself a realist. How quaint, but I dont’t buy it.

I think Richard Dawkins is full of shit.

He is feebl because his position in untenable, if not laughable, as he squanders through his books and notes, in an effort to retort to why he says what he says.

I assure you it’s not because Dawkins believes its for the higher good of humankind to not believe in God, rather it is something that helps him be somebody in this meritocracy, wherein every point of view is for sale, including Dawkins’ own atheism, which for lack of better of words is an old hat: for his lies are old, but he tells them well. There is price-tag to his atheism.

I’d like to see him argue against someone his own size, rather than pick on those “Christians” who are more vulnerable than he. Must he argue against pastors? Preachers? Sufis? Imams?

I remain unconvinced that secular gurus like Richard Dawkins is telling us anything of value, or anything we haven’t already heard before.

All he does is negate.

He is like a drug then: an opiate for the masses. He negates. He is liquid negation like dilaudid.

Let the masses take him in small quantities at first, then build up a tolerance. We already have.

In a matter of time, we wont’ feel a thing and Dawkin’s arguments will be lost in the world’s cultural metabolism as a fad, a fraud, and a harbinger of discord rather than of harmony.

There are far better atheists out there than Dawkins—-Kropotkin and Marx being two of them.

If he is going be an atheist at least be one within the frame of something far more larger project.

We don’t need another negator, another opiate of the masses, to tell us God is bad and man is good.

What we need is new kind of hero: a militant philosopher who gains traction by arguing for the sake of universality, that is, someone who resets the coordinates and starts asking new questions.

Dawkins is simply too closed off to offer something truly progressive. He is, in fact, regressive. He, in fact, regresses to places only an atheist can regress to.

It’s the problem of evil he is really arguing about: he has linked the existence of God debate with the problem of evil issue.

Wedding those issues, in that regard, I’d choose an progressive atheist over a zealous believer any day of the week.

But Dawkins is not extreme enough; he rests on his laurels. He does not take it to the end. He lets people believe in God (why I do not know), which is something that is peculiar.

For to let people disagree with you is one thing, but to devote your life on one idea is an impoverished angle at best.

Let Dawkins see the error of his one-edged point and from there drown from not knowing where to stand up strait.

He slouches like a humanist without hope. He is the very alternative to nothing in particular.

And that is why he is must be avoided; for if his atheism had clout and if it was set within some larger political or socio-historical framework then and only then would his thought justify its means. But he is no philosopher and we should not expect him to be: he asks the wrong questions and for that it is unpardonable.

Dawkkins could save a life, rather than negate a god.
He could enlighten humankind, rather than negate it’s previous way of seeing the world.

He could try to help rather try to deconstruct, but he has nothing to build and nothing to create.

He could be a historian, if he tried.

But all he has is deconstruction, air quotes, and a sharp tongue with a spiteful attitude.

And that is why he sells books. No other reason. People love him for those attributes alone.

He is a rebel for the masses; he is a hero for the afraid.

But I want my atheists deep, but he does not go deep; he stays on the surface.
He does not know his own enemy; he does not know his own nemesis.

In that regard, he will never win anything in this world for this world is too much like Dawkins: Anglo-philic, proud, self-righteous and absent of self-critique.

The Trinity, Nikolo Tesla and the Anniversary of the Numbing of my Hand

I

I’m reading Jonathan Fetter-Vorms’ book “Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb,” which is a great feat of imaginative power, but this morning, after my walk now, I am brought back to Tesla, who is responsible for so many aspects of our lives. He gave us the top hat for us to gawk into, yet the magic rabbit was stolen from him. I don’t know why, but I pity that historical fact. Our world would be far better off if his research was unearthed. I intuit it exists; there is evidence it exists. Everyone’s looking for something or someone, right? Why not allot freedom from all this fucking confinement? Don’t look, don’t touch, don’t listen, yet do it all the same. I can’t tell if the Emancipation Proclamation or even the Magna Carta ever set anyone free or gave anyone rights. This fucking paradigm-shift is a crooked one; many people have died. I’m tired of reading about death. I want to affirm life. The Earth and the world can take care of themselves. If people can’t hang, I leave them be. And yet, silly me, still I believe in the power of human creation. I believe in words, which create realities, possible worlds, and in them, I find a great power not unlike the kind that Tesla harnessed in his laboratory in Colorado. For out of thin air, out of space, out of time, Being awakens. Energy. Open source it, already. Like us, it should be free.

II

Two years ago today, I woke up and my entire left hand was numb. It stayed like that for four months. 17 years of playing the guitar finished after slumber. In truth, I cried. I felt I was being punished. I felt I was condemned to play the fool, or was a magician without a cape. Now I prayed to a God that I didn’t understand, nor believed in: I kept saying: “Thy will be done. If this is how you want me, than this is how you want me.” I realize there are non-religious, non-spiritual people out there and I don’t mean to suggest here anything irrational or supernatural happened, but I prayed as a last resort, because I had no where else to turn; I was that devastated.

Sure enough, I re-taught myself how to play guitar with the gimpy hand. I re-taught myself by stretching my fingers, as if my guitar were a cello between my legs, just so I could reach the fret-board, until I could bend my fingers as far as I could, before the ordeal happened when my hand was no-longer animate.

Looking back, it doesn’t matter that I prayed or did not pray. What mattered is that I had an epiphany: I realized that that which makes us strong, can be taken away in an instant, that that which blesses me or others in any capacity can be left for dead and forgotten within a night, that things are way more than what they just seem.

So I got my hand back, but I’ll never looked at my hands in the same way again. I am grateful for these hands. I will weep over these hands. These hands are not joke; they are the harbingers of my creativity; the extended vessels of my hopes.
These hands, I see them. They have touched so many things.
Did I heal for me to forget them again?

I cannot forget.

And so we walk upon the beach barefoot in youth
And I hold your small hand, committed to truth.
Knowing the pain of the world is the pain of a dove
To flutter as Peace, forsaken by Love.
To hover above the chosen and silence the screamer.
Pronounce the conductor and rekindle the dreamer.

Yet to live, to die, to live for your love!
Such is the task now: my hand in a glove.

The Death of the Imagination

The imagination is the root of the possible.

It has been pushed to the side gently over the years and what we have received in its place is a narrative of personal suffering.

It is not a mistake, nor is it irony, however; paradoxically, why revolutionizing the imagination has done well for capitalism.

Consider what Marx once wrote in the 19th century: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”

The formulaic story is the opposite of the imaginative novel. It tries to hit you fast and hard; it tries to bludgeon you with its cleverness; it tries bring back to you sentiment or thing or theme that you yourself wish to exhibit or defend just so you can achieve some pleasure and/or jouissance.

The imaginative novel or film, however, is thought up for us by other people. It is not comprised of our imagination. It it comprised of their imagination; however crude and formulaic it is.

Why this culture machine? Why must we run like a hamster within it, replete with wine and forward fashion? Why must we let others imagine for us? Is it really so hard to imagine a different world?

The death of the imagination lives by an equation: the law of familiarity, the law of unseasoned identification. It makes you laugh because it is quaint, “bouncy”, and “quirky,”—it’s constantly receding—-its traits apparently are coveted by the common viewer in ways that can be dubbed “exotic,” “erotic” or “spellbinding, or “trailblazing.”

Yet there simply is no time to have an stable opinion on pop culture today. Atop intuitive thought and the imagination the entertainment industry attempts to bombard with its too fast for love style. It’s a sledge-hammer approach, with cranked up THX sound included, enough to form your tears for you in a span of five minutes (that is, during the length of a film’s preview).

You will shiver at the thought that someone can know something that well that they can write a book on it or a make movie of it. That’s the power of the imagination.

But today that’s virtually gone: it’s “crack that book open, haul through it, skip the narrative, search for dialogue, as if seeking out of gossip more so than having to concentrate.”

Moreover, supermarket novels (as I call them), have long given up on literature’s promise, which is to take you to a place that you already knew you knew, though didn’t recognize that you already knew, so much so that the particular moment when it is revealed to you that the reader knows that they are, indeed, encountering something wholly unique, one can sense the author taking the reader by the hand and saying: “look, dear friend, there is so much more for us to see.”

When the imagination dies, the mind slowly follows suit and dismisses its own apprehension of reality as just another phantasm: an unimportant event, gone forever, only to come again in the form of another phantasm gone forever.

And that is the pitfall of our generation: the death of imagination. The need to push the pleasure button over until there is no more pleasure provided by the imagination.

For without the imagination there is almost nothing left to do but to follow what other magazines tell you: form a disposition that tells you that a newscast is fair, that some sty in the eye of child in Africa is normal; it encourages you regurgitate your own views about the world back to yourself, or actually hands you your own views, so that you don’t have to have any, or drives it home for you that you can might have a secret script ready (in your consciousness) in order to have a “a political moment” while engaging with the other people.

With our imagination, however, as revealed by its unfading flower (intuitive thought), makes life less more bearable, far more richer spiritually, existentially, wherein one can break on through to a new doorway that goes into another world, perhaps a better world, a world with justice—with a sense of possibly pending a revision for the old world—though letting one come to understand that one’s youth and old age are not that far apart, and that without an imagination, a life lived echoes, as if an empty can, wholly left unexamined.

On the Boston Bombings

I am currently learning all I can about the Boston bombings.

The truth of the matter is that some societies and make the value of vitality the crown jewel of their lives. Other societies march with Death invoking justifications and make due with the fact some other world is better than our own. The repetitions are not accidents. For when it comes to historical events—-like the bombings at the Boston Marathon—treacherous, acts as such these, must be conceded to have happened thousands of times before, in one form or another, upon this forlorn planet in some time before or another, for the sake of similar reasons, too, either through an expensive assassination (like the killing of Saddam in Iraq) or an attempt to thwart genocide, let alone the crusades, the worlds wars, the wars of intelligence, spiritual wars (wars among the cultures of any given country), personal wars, or wars ultimately invisible for the sake of obfuscation of their true causes.

If we moderns look back on ourselves within history with good intentions, even malicious eyes, though all too readily recognize who and what we are: fragile beyond disbelief, yet more powerful than we can even imagine. It is clear to me that 21st century subject, despite the world’s current socioeconomic situation—whether it’s heading for total economic collapse, or is en queue to flourish as a resource-based economy prescribed to us by necessity or by revolution—wavering as they do between good and evil, right and wrong, is couched within a permanent emergency state in which we all live.

Some people, however, will not believe they are even a part of the species, nor are do they fell they are remotely responsible for humanity’s fate. These persons place themselves within a personal world, a displaced world in which there is no such a thing as their own ignorance, only Pinot Noir. They cannot or will not look at human suffering or take the stand; instead, they say: “see, it’s always going to happen, so why care; these two boys did it; I have a life to live. Thank God I live on the West Coast.” These sardonic humorists might play the gratitude game, using Facebook status updates or their personal cellphone, to hide behind the quotations of America’s great thinkers, or they will posit conclusions about human nature that reveal little if anything, whereby they can eclipse the real existence of human desperation, deprivation, death and anxiety; they—either on the television or on the Internet do construct an “immediate ethics,” though one characterized as a blanket of escapism, as if that is all they can do to stay sane, therefore keep on living by “not letting the terrorists win.” This mask of “immediate ethics,” however, this veil or this covering can effectively force people to accept the current coordinates of the perpetrator’ positions, that is, those who are willing die for what they believe in; yet in such relativism, in such a quantification of death, they fail to see the unique nature of the Boston bombings and, instead, cry out: “what do you want me to do about it? Same old shit; different day; can’t you see, we’re fucked?”

But these puppets of doom, these quantifiers of human sorrow, these status-seekers, who are always-already ready to accept vainglorious ignorances and choose to watch only or cite statistics only, or do nothing, or rather take no stance, or choose to instead, allow entire governments to take life immediately, rather than preserve life immediately, these puppets should never be handled by the measure of their own terms. For they are already controlled by their own masters: their own desires.

But those wandering stars, I like to call them, those who scoff and say it’s all been done before and accept these boys as the perpetrators even before a trial has taken place, will even write entire books on the subject, photojournalistic essays, documentaries, and will go on walking tours amongst people to make their point viable: namely, that everything has gone wrong with the world begins with youth and there is no looking back; for it is now time to become a “realist” and “grow up” and accept these heinous crimes and become lukewarm and indifferent to them—if only finding solace in the few things in life that they consider pure (like their own children, should they have them).

And such people will fetishize that which is pure in their lives; they will not take a stance, or implicate themselves as part of the problem. They will feel they are beyond reproach, having nothing to do with the attacks, are above critique and above misgivings about being critiqued. They will puff themselves up not to enrich or reflect the higher core of our potential but will, instead dismiss, if not deconstruct the definition of human nature itself, as if it were a putrid nature and one in which they do not possess themselves.

And what about the post-human?

If the world is, indeed, bifurcated, then no violent act based on an ideological excuse—mobilizing either religion or politics—can exclude those who are defiant and choose to fight for their freedom to live. In this light, it clear to me the mourners in Boston must weep for those who have perished in the bombings, yet must not only endure but prevail, if not by God’s help, then by the help of humanity itself which, discerning what it needs to survive, propels itself into the future, so that it can be brave and can be a hero for itself and by itself for a higher good and no other reason.

It is one thing to say that evil abounds, but why then does good exist? Does it not seems peculiar that good should exist, if even for one second in the entire history of our species? In the wake of the Boston Bombings, let the same humanity be brave then and, in its own eyes, in its own way, make more seconds of the good, and live as the master of its own destiny—whether this destiny rests upon the lips of a redeemed liar, or whether the epiphany takes place while a person stares at a refrigerator, at a picture of someone who has long passed away, who is tacked up by a viewer who is unable to let go, but who is about to let go, at any given moment.

More will be revealed. Finding the culprits and learning they are kids is not the issue.

Most likely the authorities will search for any ties that the perpetrators have in order to underscore the claim that they are linked to other foreign organizations, therefore usher in an addendum to go to war again, punish the perpetrators, too.

Welcome to the 21st century, folks (a white-washed Obama term). All tactics, profane or sacred, are on the table for pomp and circumstance.

One cannot help but wonder, if perhaps, there is a some new nature to be sought in the dark penumbra of death: that is not our own nature and that we should, in fact, be cited as possessing an altogether different creature (homo sapiens sapiens) adapting to our life-world in a different way. For if the coordinates are to be reset—and search and seizure rights are now out the windows and habeaus corpus is gone and posse commitatus is in effect—for the sake of my nation and those cynics who have nothing to do but allocate, co-sign, enable the procession of doom to occur, let that not be the case. We need of a new kind of stance, beyond peace and war, beyond religion and beyond non-belief, beyond politics, beyond the silencing of science, and beyond our own self-centered thoughts, which force us to contend that our predicament is somehow special.

So what is stance that one should take? Should one just not believe in anything?

No.

We must adopt the stance of saying an emphatic “no” to that which is required of us to keep the machine alive.

Some are asking: What if we do fuse with the machines one day and embrace the process? How then will we love? How then will we live? What will it mean to die as a post-Oedipal mechanized subjectivity? What does it mean to be psychologically enhanced? Imagine one of the prosthetic limbs of the maimed. We can easily see that day approaching in the next twenty years: chips placed into us, internet transplanted into our cerebral cortexes and occipital lobes, the prosthetic limbs alleviating the empty space of what assemblage was there before—-thse, too, presuppose a set of ideological questions. They are not easy questions to answer, by any means, but they may be the most important questions to ask because they have to do with an “immediate ethics,” the ethics of the now, which can only be born from a schizoid-affective late capitalism, which hides our problems by compounding them into a set of new problems, where our ethical quandaries are the stuff that comprise what we are made of, yet do not remain within our grasp because we have chosen the “moral high ground” rather than an immediate ethics, that is, have chosen to condemn and retaliate, unable to transform our perceptions and recontextualize the cycle of violence as it spins even now.

Hence, now there are an elite few, usually born in the First World, though also those who came from the Second or Third worlds, to the First, who are nearly equivocal in attitude as the perpetrators of the Boston bombings, yet in thought alone, not in action, therefore living as hypocrites, haters of humanity, not simply because some government considers them terrorists, but because they do nothing by hating, mocking, cursing their own species until they cam render gross reactions from other people who might want to agree with them, and unlock some kind of criteria to the unfathomable, visceral, and primal hope unseen to us. These hypocrites are not craftless; they raise real questions of what we are truly made of; they just don’t buy an answer. They do not want to commit.

To not commit is to murder a man.

Such individuals have no consciences or would like to bury their consciences because they have put themselves in a corner. They kneel on a mound of salt. They have said no to the question: am I my brother keeper? wanted to say yes because, at point, they believed in “yes,” when they wanted to defend humanity on the condition that brotherhood or sisterhood was not a virus, but rather an imperative and not a relational activity, which came naturally to those who are always-already brothers and sisters in their humanity, who are in awe of the violence and power of the war pigs, knowing fully well what we are capable of, but walk in a murky state that can only be described a psycho-spiritual death, or rather a state betwixt heaven and hell, wherein their soul itself has become flesh. Wherein they walk in the shadows and become one with the shadows. The light is much too bright for them.

There is no going back back, no plan for escape.

One can easily just as well fall upon a sword or punctuate one’s end with a bullet.

But those who sense beauty in the world, these will filter through the matter that will solve their own hearts within their own lifetime; they will carry the torch of victory, having will have fought the good fight, having had done all they can to ensure that pain was less apparent than hope, despite how wrong it felt to the feeler: proving, in earnest, that life is more precious than death, despite how wrongfully right it feels to be one who is cast aside, living on the margins because they have no where to go, trying to die daily because they hate themselves for falling out of love with life.

We are all guilty of this: for not loving life enough.

Let us then consider one thing before jumping to conclusions as to who the enemy is; for if it is not ourselves as instantiated in these boys than who else could it be? Do we need a name? Names? A list? A hit list of names? A hit list of boys for some elite crew to take counter-measures and punish them or their superiors? Yes. But for those who hesitate and do not take a stand on life, who do call evil good and good evil, such are the cowards, the puppets of retreat, the jellyfish of murky, cloaked intestinal crystals, the spine-less ones that stand upright yet hunched over during death, dropping a drachma into the hand of Charon at the River Styx, as they are refused a ride upon the boat across Lethe, the river of forgetting, on account of them dying on uncertain terms, or worse too cleverly, not on par with a sense of well-reasoned justice.

Sweethearts – Berkeley, California 2004

“Let’s just sit here and listen.”

“Meditate?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.”

“1. 2. 3. 4….”

They both had shut their eyes.

They had been drinking pint after pint, sharing pitcher after pitcher, in the Bear’s Lair at Berkeley.

Vowels, consonants and diphthongs ceased. Words forfeited their airborne composition. One could make out one’s own heartbeat. The pit-patting strides of stiletto heels on ferroconcrete. The treble of chirruping sneakers drastically changing direction. Another heartbeat. Percussive slithers in French. Susurrations. Sniggering spaces. An Ethiopian mother’s Kambata admonishments and a cursing son’s Afroasiatic English. Heartbeat in the head. Between the temples. There were moments of peace, however, for nearing the end of their meditation, they heard an ambulance horn that with a bleak, crisp yelping fading, then through an echoing push, transformed into a baritone moan, a Doppler alto’d harmonic.

They were done.

“What did you hear?”

“Blood. My turning guts. Echoes. Memories, I guess. You?”

Mary turned a shade of rose and put her legs up in her chair, almost rolling into a ball.

“I heard poetry.”

“I would even venture to say that you are extremely brave.”

“How am I brave?”

“O, you know,” he said.

“No, continue. I want to hear this.”

“How you are brave?”

“Yes. How am I brave?”’

“Well. . .Hearing poetry, how are you brave?” He ashed his cigarette on the concrete. It was night. He swallowed a moment to speak, delved inside memories of sweet yesternights, then slipped the cigarette back into lips, continued to puff. “You are. . .let’s see…. brave. . .because you . . have come here by yourself . From one city to another. Because you have taken your past and made sense of it, or, at least, are attempting to make sense of it.” She nodded, watching him exhale a sweet noxious cloud of smoke. “You don’t rely on other people’s convictions to supplant your own, yet care about the world. You’re brave because you think about how you are brave.” She nodded. “What else? Ah yes. You let poetry fill your life. Which something most people do not care about. You care about those things which bind humanity to feelings.”

“That makes me brave? Explain.”

“Okay, let me clarify. You know you can just shop for a lifestyle and take it to be your own and think that you have found yourself. Or worse, think you are different. An exception. That you can do things by your own accord, always and absolutely. Or think you know it all and are too clever for the marvels of the world. But that is truly cowardly. Those are people Omega everything. Fuck them. Say that’s the end of this or that and that’s it. Fuck them again. But to you, everything is fresh. Fresh, not because you have mysteriously ‘become born again,’ but because you have remembered how to be born. And what’s more, you know about weakness. You know about weakness and do not attempt to destroy it. And that, that is why you’re brave. Because you listen to what people say and say only those things that are worth expressing. Your silence, even now, as you look at me with those eyes, makes you brave. How brave you are. . .I suppose that’s another matter. I only point out what I see and I see brave.”

Mary cleared her throat, which, then, lanced into three tiny coughs. While Lev spoke, she wondered if he was going to burst into shambles. “Hmm. Thank you. But I’m not the only one,” she said, prying two young women, rushing down the steps, heading into the terminal. “There are many that are brave. Many who are even willing to die for what they believe in.”

Lev followed her stare, then spoke into the wide triangular cone inside it. “Yea, well, there’s nothing in martyrdom to be found but suspension. Suspension from a loud world that breaks us into a mosaic of pulp and circumstance. Suspension from sensation, from indoctrination, from wanting to die at all. Who wants to think about death? Right? But, see, killing intentions, or Easternizing yourself never did anybody any good. That is, intention is what people live for. Intentions are the secret life underneath the life we see. They are our real lives. The ones that compel us to believe our lives belong to us. The lives we live when we wake up and wonder. . .I feel this way, and from here I go. I don’t feel this anymore, and from here I go. Well, what’s the point? That intention is master? That it governs our every move? I don’t think so. I think intention is subordinate to something else. To becoming whole again, architecturally speaking, (the word mental in air-quotes) architecturally speaking, in other words, is to preserve the horrible idea that something became broken along the way and that we need an old foundation within all the new technology—that’s the point.

“It’s as if we have lost part of ourselves, or were never fully a “self” as we once knew it. Look at this rock we are floating on! Is there any reason to believe that one’s needs to be good? Why not just make it a free-for-all where we can plug in the word ‘agent’ to the word ‘subject’ and assume that we have become enlightened? Then we can all have our ‘responsible action’ and feng shui. Wells Fargo and transcendental meditation. Sex on the Beach cocktails and Kava Kava and acupuncture. The working class, us, the generation between X and Y, might as well think they became enlightened by reading something in a book, or a magazine article, or a tabloid, or the History Channel, to repeat back to their friends their pseudo-Niezcheanism. Why do we need to perpetually hear some jackanapes from the grave bathe us in his vainglorious aphorisms preoccupied with debunking ‘us, hypocrites.’ It’s the paradox of enlightenment. One has to accept their own hypocrisy inclusive of it, and then and only then enlighten everyone else to partake in it. The world is more than logic. Everything that is truly good in the world is either irrational, or nearly illogical. Broken? Us? Maybe. So what? I don’t buy into that view. And neither do you.”

“What about love?” said Mary Black. “Is it really rational to put someone else’s welfare on par with yours, or even entertain it as higher than yours? Being good might be an act of retardation, of idiocy. Seems like there is a compulsion to be good. What is that?”

“Because it makes people feel good that they are good.”

“Well, like we agreed on earlier: it’s this life that matters.”

The boredom went away. Mary Black’s gaze took on the heaviness of a dozen eggs. There she was with Lev Lazinin: swirling, buoyant, in a mixing bowl, sitting on the passenger seat of Mack truck, traveling at constant velocity on the Bay Bridge, heading for San Francisco.

“I haven’t spoken like this with someone in quite some time. Nice truck.”

“Don’t give me the credit. I stole it. If you think about it, you’d probably get it from some other girl.”

Mary blew out a breath. “I just want things to be simple, you know.” A moment of silence. She unlocked her mouth.

“What do you mean you stole it?”

“In L.A. Doesn’t matter. It’s ours now. Chitty-chitty-bang-bang.”

Mary pushed her back into the corner of the passenger seat, for she was facing him, with one leg crossed over another.

“I remember one of my ex’s,” she spoke loudly. “When I reading the back-cover of Don Quixote I picked off his bookshelf, he told me to put it down.”

“What?”

“He said ‘come on, now, that’s not for you. Fuck that! What does he know? I can read whatever I want! I mean did he think I was stupid? I had to start over. Come here on my own. My parents didn’t help me! I’m not some fucking trust fund baby like a lot of college girls in the city are, you know. I have roots. I’m half-French and half-Italian. I went to a French High School in the City. I became my own person. I didn’t know that Don Quixote was complicated. I just knew I wanted to read it. So I did. I read it. And I read it in fucking Spanish. Go me!”

“A grip of Cartesian twists in that story. You mind shutting the window? Evil genie, illusion reality stuff. That’s great.”

“Yeah, for sure.” She rolled it up, then turned to her left, hair whipping behind her. “What’s your story?”

“I’m convinced most stories are a mixture of Jack in the Beanstalk and Cinderella. First: The cries of one’s inner child, locked away in some small town. Asks himself the following question: ‘why doesn’t anything happen to me? I’m bored! (Then gets involved in something larger than his life. Has to, through trial and error, understand his capabilities, use the force, if you will, save a republic (his dignity) by overthrowing an empire (within some ideology), abandon his fallen father (the thing that makes him feel guilty), so that he can celebrate his freedom and then travel somewhere else to have, hopefully, grander adventures. But these are classical models. Curious journeys. Like The Golden Ass, The Oddysey or Apollonius of Rhodes.”

“And Cinderella? What about her? What’s up wit her?”

“She’s enslaved. With daydreams. Has the world against her because it sends her mixed signals. Tries to perpetually improve herself, but is left to menial tasks. Is bound to her current financial situation. Desires to fix herself. Finds a dashing, though rather simpler person than she, someone with a decent haircut and a car, and a shiny sword, who at the very least, can help put a roof over their head. The word ‘babe’ becomes employed. The lock is set. She’s transformed into the princess she always was. But as I said, I think both stories fade in and out of one another. However. These are found in the Western world. The other psyche’s. . .”

Mary could not help it. She let out a cackle. Warm air pushed out the cupid bow of her lips, then persisted in two heaves. Shoulders bounced. “It doesn’t matter.”

But he was sure he loathed it—that cackle.

“Then again, ideals are one thing, life’s another” said Mark Black, stretched her arms up and out, yawning. “Should they bump into one another. Life. . . ideals. . . you know—maybe there has to be a balance.”

“A balance?”

“Well, we can’t always get want we want. There is something that eludes our. . .”

“Don’t say that.”

“Say what?”

“Is the next word “grasp?’ Don’t speak for one moment.”

Lev placed both hands upon both cheeks, then dissolved the configuration.

“Are you alright?”

“Umm. . .” He sniffed in air as the lines on Mary Black’s forehead ruffled towards her hairline.

“No. It’s alright. Please. I haven’t met anyone here, since I’ve moved. I mean anyone who cared about the things that we’ve talking about. It means a lot to me”

“Mary, I am seducing you. I don’t think you understand.”

Mary’s face became serious, sad like cancer. “Tell me what you need.”

“Need? Nothing. I’ve just opened a door and we both walked through it now.”

“What would you want me to do for you?” Her face glowed, still. “Tell me how you stole this truck.”

Lev slowed down the truck. “There is nothing you can do. I live in a world of words.” He sped up the truck. “I don’t think you understand. I live my day-to-day existence and this day-to-day existence consists of finding words. I. . .don’t have any money. . .and I . . just have words.”

“So you find women who love words.”

“No, I….”

“What then?”

“Speak.”

“Read?”

“Speak their life to them.”

“Speak life to them? What if they want to speak their own.”

“Then I let them. I speak their life to them after I go.”

Again, a cackle ruptured from Mary’s belly, up, up through her esophagus, out through the space between her held up fingers at her mouth.

“What do you try to gain by speaking, reading ‘life’ to these women?’”

“Love story. It gets to them. Some of them…not all of them, but some of them.”

“’A love story. It’s get to them. Some of them, not all of them, but some of them?’ Where that from? It sounds like a spell.”

“From me. It is a spell. A wild spell. Making love—spellbound.”

He put out his cigarette. He stared at Mary Black’s face. Her ovaline face, her sweet face.
He put literature in such ethical terms, she thought. As if it really mattered. But the terms were resounding like the ripples of stone dropped in a wishing well. Everyone was in on it. Even the vendor standing behind the counter by the stop sign in the City glanced up at them, attempting to discern what they were talking about. He reclined. She offered to buy him coffee. He was right. She was brave. They parked in the parking structure, barely making the it through. They had gotten out of the truck. They had walked. And he looked up at her. And he got on one knee. And he looked at her face to face. Her cherry-colored skirt accentuated the clean glass slopes of a lean medieval timepiece. She looked down at him. “Oh, my God.”

She said nothing. She turned hot pink. He glared up at her. She could not help it. “Are you proposing?” She began to walk away. She looked in her purse.

She glared back at him. With vigor she began to walk towards apartment; she stopped; then started shuffling through her purse; she thought she was just going to give him her number but in a half skip and half wistful stride, but two minutes passed and the rotating fleshiness of her skull, he noticed, when she accredited him with wink, was overlaid, hung below, with the fresh rose-colored cheeks and an even more abysmal shade of rose in her lips.

As she turned away, she was unable to see her own motile clavicles.

He tilted his head. There is more to a person than beauty. And Lev looked again. “Loosen up,” he said. “You’re with me now.”

He licked his lips. They were barren, doomed. He’d sip an espresso out of courtesy. She had offered him to come in.

He slept parked behind a dumpster.

“Do you have anywhere to be?” asked Mary.

Lev nodded. “Sure.”

Mary said she thought: “it’d be fun go to the beach and see the moon.” That she had to stop by her place so that she could feed Longinus.

“Longinus?”

“My parakeet.”

Lev’s face became serious. “You have a parakeet.”

Je t’aime. Always. Always. Always. He thought Mary Black was beautiful.

And then he said: “The Eastern Slavs were the nomadic Antes who inhabited Ukrainian Steppes.”

“But the Eastern Slavs were the nomadic Antes who inhabited Ukrainian Steppes,” Mary repeated it, though sounding more like a question.

For a moment Mary was terrified but then a thought entered her, about flesh and knowledge. She looked at his eyes. But his eyes were closed for a moment. He had been searching the city streets, full of beautiful people, beautiful clothing, beautiful stories, beautiful culture, beautiful lies. For random women who might take him in for the night. Who might feed him. But as Lev studied the perfect skin curved around green metallic columns of an advertisement, arm and arm with yet Mary Black a couple minutes later, as he ascended a humming escalator up to Market Street, he looked out onto the horizon, sensing how the air was cool and crisp and how the sun was then down completely, and how this filled his heart with infinite sorrow because he caught a glimpse what was usually mistaken for a star, Venus, burning in its faint blue fury, precede, proceed and penetrate another furtive moonrise.

He moved into her place after talking to her for 12 hours.

Another two months passed.

“Babe?”

“What?”

“Come here. I’m pregnant.”

She had a toothbrush in her mouth when she told him.

She stood in the same doorway, pining, two months later, showing.

“I will never forget our ride.”

“Yeah?”

They lay in the dark.

“Come here. I’m cold. Yeah, the very first one. When you stole the truck.”

“Not anymore, you’re not cold. Thank God, we sold it. Cinderella and Jack would never have met.”

They lay in the dark, thinking, thinking, thinking—then made love—then went to sleep—then woke up.

Twilight in the Park

He stood up in sandals, then flicked off the T.V. switch, cutting short the lofty minuet that played over the closing credits. Each week, the Incredible Hulk turned back into Doctor Banner, a lonely man with insolvent eyes–burdened by the crippled fruits of an evil curse–hitch-hiking, heading to another town.

Beads of sweat headed down Lyova’s back. It was summer; it was Sunday. Everyone he could play with was at church. He walked into the kitchen for piroshkis.

“Mama, what’s communism? Is it religion?”

“Communism is nonsense.” Galina wiped flour off of her hands with a wet wash cloth, which wept a bit onto the tile floor. “Go ask Papa.”

“But he’s sleeping. And there’s no one to play with.”

“Go to park, Lyova. Go color. You have a break since commercial.”

“But who’s coming?”

“Why are you asking me in English? Everyone is coming.” Galina patted her apron, which was edged in Byzantine patterns. “I’m cooking. You want?”

He looked at her. She held up the heart of a cabbage. She had chiseled it into a cone. He snatched it from her, then went into the living room where he lay down on his stomach near a record player and his Doctor Aibalit LP.

He plugged the player into the wall with one hand, put the needle on the record with the other–careful not to scratch it just like Papa showed him.

He knew the story on the record well. As with most of the other children’s stories his parents brought over from Minsk, the story hypnotized him. It was about a doctor who took care of animals and his adventures trying to track them down. There was anarchy in the ecosystem and Doctor Aibalit (pronounced Ai-bah-leet) was a know-it-all. He knew zoology, psychology, as well as medicine. He was a physician and a philosopher.

Lyova’s mother once told his father that the story, in a way, was a dumb-downed, kid’s version of Doctor Zhivago. There were parallels, she noticed–the chasing, in particular. Lyova listened to his mother’s remark, though did not know that Pasternak’s novel dealt with serious subject matter: the revolution, love, the end of an era and the shock in learning life could be summed up by the words ‘too much and never enough’.

Still though, while he listened to the adventures of Doctor Aibalit, Lyova knew he was in for his own kind of serious. He noted, after finishing his mother’s cabbage-heart, that the stories on the record were about being among animals who flaunted their individuality all the time and got into trouble. He sat up, thinking there was a discrete kind of responsibility one needed in caring for the various types of species. He inferred the snake needed sun, though needed to be less paranoid. The bear needed berries to eat, though needed to get out more (even though wasps bit him). The parrot needed to learn new words, stop repeating what he already knew and fly away.

“The phone!”

Galina peeked from the kitchen corridor. The phone rang again. She smiled at her son, anticipating fetching it. “Don’t forget we have an audition tomorrow.” She plucked up the receiver. “A—loh?. . . This is Galina Lazinin.”

“Aww. Another one? What’s it for? Or that one character?”

Lyova got up, onto his knees, unplugged the record player from the wall, stood up spryly, then strolled into the kitchen. Two days prior, he received
several pages of script from his agent—for the role of a writer-kid in a film called “Stand By Me.” As he reached down then scratched the mosquito bite on his ankle, he was reminded how much he hated Mama’s stupid sandals—more so on the tetherball court. Don’t give the ball to a stupid commie. I’m not a commie. You and your parents are communists, liar. So? So my dad says you want to destroy America.

“Thanks very much. Thank you. We will.” Galina hung up the phone, grinning.

“I memorized the lines. Who was it? Stalin?”

Galina glared at him intently. “Did you read and memorize all of the script?” She checked back on her cooking. “In the mirror like they taught you?”

“Yes, Mama.” He spoke to his mother’s profile. “Can I go to the park? Is it okay?”

Galina snatched up a spatula, flipped over two piroshkis, transferred them to an empty plate, then turned to him. “Yes, but do not wear sneakers. It’s still hot. Let your feet breathe. And don’t stay too late. You need rest. Come here—give me kiss.”

Galina leaned down, presented him her cheek—Lyova kissed it, then pivoted on the ball of one foot, then headed for the front door.

#

Lyova shut the door behind him. Because the park wasn’t too far away and he liked the tire swing, especially when he wound it up to spin really fast, he heeded his mother’s advice: to not care what other people think. He was a member of the Screen Actors Guild; yet, that afternoon, despite having no one to play with, despite Hollywood’s steady rejections, he anticipated better worlds, better guilds: guilds of lady-bugs and earthworms; guilds of initials forged into tree trunks; worlds of sand.

He ascended a short brick pathway, slapped his palm against a painted yellow bike post, then looked up at the sky. Fuzz-smoke drifted, the bride trails of long-gone planes. He caught a whiff of lemon-grass and aloe planted along the perimeter of a community pool. listened as a cannonball, crumbled into a belly-flop in a splash, followed by giggled-shrieks of pleasure. He lowered his gaze. Niki, the neighbor’s daughter, who lived across the street from him, swung on the tire swing on her stomach. His sandals sifted through the pixilated kasha of refined sand as he approached.

“Hi,” she said, suspicious of him. “What?”

“Are you going to be on the swing long?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s your name? I’m Lyova.”

“Niki. Why?”

“Why?” He recalled her doing cartwheels and somersaults: on her front lawn, near some lily bushes, near a sprinkler waving water mist upon a Slip-and-Slide, while her family toiled about with moving trucks and furniture. They had a German Shepherd-wolf-like dog of which he was afraid; and, one of the kids in the neighborhood, (who ollied up on curbs and knew how to do kick-flips on his skateboard), when watching Lyova staring at her, chided him: “Look a girl is moving across from you, Lev. Yeah. Are you going to make her your girlfriend?” “No. . . .”

“Are you an acrobat? Do you do art?” he asked her.

“No. . . ”

“Are you in the circus?”

“No . . .”

“What are you then? A communist?”

“No, I do gymnastics. I do front flips, somersaults, cartwheels, umm—rolls, different kinds of ones. And I’m learning back flips. And my mom says I’ll do them next year.”

“Back flips? For reals? You can do front-flips?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Niki glared at him, nodded, then turned to face the field. A kid, on the lawn grass, on his knees, scratched the backs of two puppies at once.

“That’s radical. Your Mom—she takes you to practice?”

“Uh-huh. Wanna see?” Niki got up off the tire swing, then walked to the open grass area where the older kids would sometimes play touch-football. Lyova followed her– first with his eyes, then with his body–positioning himself against a ring-shaped flower garden made of bricks, which stood adjacent to the field. Niki began with a few cartwheels, several in a row, picked herself up, then ran over to where he was leaning. “Watch me. Here I go!” Facing the open field, she took in a deep breath, then began running towards the tennis courts at full speed, trying for a flip.

Lyova thought she was kind of brave to do twirls in her yard–yet to already try a flip like that? He’d never seen anything like it up close. He got up off the planter, curving both hands together into fists, then released them.

She was okay with the cartwheels, but her first attempt at a flip in front of someone she just officially met, resulted in her slipping. She walked back to him

“Wait! Wait! Let me do it again. I messed up.”

“Are you all right?” said Lyova. “Is it the grass?”

“No, let me go again.”

Distractedly, a rolling snare drum and the thumps of a bass drum came from a drum kit in someone’s garage. Back into her initial starting position, getting ready for another attempt, Niki nodded curtly. Her champagne-colored shorts reflected the setting summer sun. She blew out a breath, while pushing locks of her hair behind her ears.

Lyova turned his head to the side. He blanked. His head echoed. He noticed something about Niki he had not noticed before.

She only had one hand.

Taking a step back, he bit his lower lip as Niki started her second attempt. Her right hand was nothing—nothing but a few folds of flesh coming out of her wrist. What one usually assumed to be there wasn’t there. It was strange. He furrowed his eyebrows, wondering if it was because of an accident, or if she was born that way. Probably she was born that way—that’s what Mama’d say. Never had he seen a girl as pretty as Niki, as good of a gymnast as Niki, with a bologna flower for a hand.

Sure enough, Niki nailed the flip. She had to bend one arm a bit, even it out with the other, and got it on her second try.

“That was awesome!” Lyova rushed towards her. “You can go in the Olympics.”

“Thanks.” Niki blushed, walked back briskly, then propped herself next to him along the bricks. “It was really easy. I knew I’d get it.”

“I don’t know anyone that does flips. Do you see the world upside down?”

“Yes, but really fast.”

“Can you see heaven?”

“Mmm—wanna go on the tire swing? We can get it to go real fast. . . .”

Lyova nodded. He realized right then he could count on girls: they never called him communist. Soft and squishy, just like Mama, they painted better pictures than the boys. On the dodge-ball court, on the four-square court, boys were the ones that told him what was right and what was wrong, what was in and what was out. Yet one girl, who smelled like orange peels and biscuits, once gave him her granola bar at lunch, assuring him he would not get cooties by eating it. He was shocked, for he dwelled on cooties often– obsessing about what kinds there were, whether or not he could try them all out–then concluded to his innermost self that he wanted as many cooties as possible.

The sun had almost set. They walked to where the tire-swing was and they got into the tire, sat in it, with dangling feet—sitting in it, face to face. An old woman in a fisherman’s hat seemingly rowed along the winding path behind them with an aluminum cane. She smiled at a curly-haired boy hopping out of a tire swing, trying to wind it.

Lyova turned to Niki. He wanted to kiss her; he wanted to touch her. And as his sandaled foot slid down into the shadowy sand pit underneath the tire, he regained his balance, then wound the chains. Niki grinned at him. He shook his head, embarrassed. He stared at her lips, her cheeks, her ears, her nose. He hopped back in: knowing that no matter what was cherished by nightfall, a-washed by even-handed prayers, the love he had for Niki was different than the kind he had for Mama. He felt American and free. Giggling, Niki clung to his neck and arms, moist as a godly butterscotch, hitching a ride on his released tire, spinning in the twilight.

Welcome to Wonderland

Ideas do not merely operate within the realm of abstraction alone, of thought, but, too, in the realm of non-thought, that is, in those intermittent moments of “blankness” when the onslaught of own subconscious abstraction are so bewitching to the human ear, one does not one want to deal with kind of those thoughts, out of the difficulty in thinking them too deeply thinking, i.e. to see ourselves through the scanner clearly and not darkly.

The inane reasons to not engage in the realm of abstraction is status quo: people would rather talk about other people then cast aside that which binds us. We differentiate ourselves from one another to make ourselves appear more on point. We find in our Wonderland a sexual libido as the penultimate distraction for thought, thinking, as expressed through our languages, by which we intercede on the side of “taking a stance,” that is, make sense of the conflations, the nuances, and the troubles of our time. In short, flesh is more interesting to us than that which we cannot see; and that which we cannot see makes us suffer.

For truly, our consciousness finds its own libidinal expression as displacement for the actual reorganization of our modern society. Thought is frowned upon. It is too much. We have established a wide-range of institutions that demarcate or set up the conditions for our needs and/or ideals. And we have prevailed.

One only need to take a look around which nation-states rely on conveniences and which do not. A convenience itself is not the problem (admire the simplicity of a bucket of water). A convenience is a displacement of thought of the human consciousness, a tool to be sure, and as a coercive movement or example of a human being acting out the will of the coercer, is subconscious and wholly institutional. In this bourgeois epoch, in its simplest form: the mitigated agreed upon conveniences that we have acquired make us choose to accept human slavery, even as it exists now.

The very institutions that bombard our social reality in the affluent world—transpose into our consciousness—whether they be political agendas, talk of education, discussion about religious controversies disguised a “culture wars,” social welfare issues, the pharmaceutical-medical complex, new science, human trafficking, the arms race, the prospect of world war itself and our subsequent annihilation )—and our attitudes towards these institutions are features of what can be called, in the crudest sense possible, cultural exchange. We exchange news for news. WE exchange art for information. And get information from art.

One single woman, in this living breathing patriarchy, is the third most sold commodity in the world. Why one may ask? Because women are weak? Because what we what we doing is somehow “natural.”—that is, innate in men? This commodity-slavery exchange is only produced in a cultural industry that itself has turned the world into a massive shopping mall, where there is no right or wrong whatsoever, only amoral-like profit and deceit, covering over centuries and centuries of rape, murder, and genocide. It is the way of our species, as far as we know, and the way that we truly see ourselves. We hate ourselves. We only love ourselves when we want to be worshiped. As Stalin once said: “When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics’”.

Hence, although the earth is truly a material thing, the world, in fact, is a far different place. For I make a distinction world and earth because certain modes of power in the world right now, through a lattice of smirks and sponsored dinners, have made this bourgeois epoch the most vicious and murderous in all of human history. Why? Because the grievances of our planet, are not only from natural disasters, nor from the result of plagues; they are a result from the acceptance of human slavery as the status quo. All of us are slave-holders by condoning the system that runs on it.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of African-Americans (began by John Hawkins of the Renaissance and the rise of the nation-state and the Genocide of Native Americans, the Armenian Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, demonstrates that we, as uncaring jouissance-seekers ask no correct questions and get no correct answers, and can, instead adapt ourselves to death, and moreover to slavery, which his probably a more worse fate. It compels us then to, forget about justice, live out our happy lives and to apply arbitrary value to the material world through a myriad of products and services, even if it includse slavery to get that special produce or exotic service that pleases the bourgeois appetite (Exotic clothing, etc). Even as these products and services can be gruesome, sexist and fundamentally imperialistic, it is a the fact that we are desiring machines that set us up for these kind of exchanges and assemblages.

We have not will of our own, rather we have choices of how to function even better on the market.

Our world is now governed by a hive mind, a subjective void, an excess. To manage this excess, this void, we would literally have to have to re-invent our species that might include a resource-based economy, for one, and the ability to let the scientists have more power (whom we worship as experts, but whom we are never are in tune with) to have more say in what our predicament is. For if our planet needs to survive, it would be in our interest for us to survive as long as we can. Cultural exchange of human institutions become part of a larger nexus, a fortress—either in the procurement of products and services which govern social relations—so that we can sublimate the shifting values inherent to any consciousness that is always-already moving through time.

The world of ideas is bound up with the material world. It is immanent in the world, but now there is time for militant attitudes that piece us to the marrow, cut soul from spirit and release of of the freedom we so seek. Instead of philosophy, however, we have magazines to read. No questions to truly ask.

We cannot escape this fact. We have become lazy researchers.

If we choose not to care: not to take a militant stance against injustice, we will pleasure ourselves to death. The prisons will become overcrowded. The homeless man, who holds the sign at L.A.’s Skid Row, will be further and further gawked at; for his held-up sign says: THE END IS NIGH. He is wearing this sign for all of us. And it is he that is the most powerful person on Skid Row. Why? Because everyone’s staring at him.