knots, circles

the basic problem of governance whether social or unitary is to get the subject to do what it doesn't want to do.  for the unitary "self" the untrained "desire body" will do exactly what it wants to do without recourse to planning.  the restraint of the desire body is what makes possible activities other than the basic breathe, eat, seek fun, reproduce sequences.  otherwise the desire body will express in the normal organismic way, nothing will be built, we would only intend out of those basic needs, no civilization.

the objective conditions of the universe require that the basic needs be satisfied, it is correct that the body wants to keep itself alive, it is at this time necessary that the units eat other units, we attempt to deal with the basics and heroically try to make more of it than it is by romanticizing whatever it is that we romanticize, every one of us an artist in our particular field.

all day long for example, there is a small piece of the me that calls out from a childish bed of lassitude: hey, you just accomplished something, go take a nap.  me, if i lie down, i'm going to nod off.  i'll nod off in the chair it i'm not doing anything.  i'd rather do my sleeping at night, all at once.  so i avoid lying down mostly.

the various ways that an individual gets itself to do what it doesn't want to do, probably all opposed by the desire body which wants to do what it wants to do immediately and completely over the edge and into the mud puddle at full speed like a dog or a 2 year old.  as grownups we are lucky if we got us a paying gig that nicely engages the particularistic (; flavors of our desire bodies, but even then, where work is a delight, the desire body can only be allowed to express hemmed in by social ritual otherwise everything completely falls apart and we devolve to mostly helpless monads surrounded by enemies.  sub-primate at least, maybe sub-vertebrate, back in the worm brain.

i practice various ways of figuring out what i want to do, perhaps the expression of those desires can be more usefully/pleasurably turned in some different direction than had been previously the case, so the "will" can perhaps turn the desire just a little bit and everything works a little better in a slightly different social situation.

but i really need to talk about crime.  the desire bodies unrestrained by any social or personal "will," that motivating element of the basic needs undirected, the will bent to the satisfaction of the desires in all cases, the social machinery bent too, that asocial me-firstness brought past utility to propaganda so that body parts are used to "send a message."  that seems to happen everywhere in every culture: there is a violent element somewhere in it, certain various activities are "not tolerated."

so i need to talk about toleration and limits thereof.  later.  the next thing i'm going to write about will be things-that-are-yucky.  when i finish with food & death & aggression. 

now i have a question.  these libyan kids & grownups who were able to drive out their crazy dictator (with sufficient air cover by the capitalist overlords), there was all that horrible dying going on but a lot of them were having the time of their lives, now they've won, almost, they're war heroes, hope they can keep it together.  war - best thing that ever happened to the winners, sometimes, they think.  and us, here, on tv, we just lap it up, just like the romans did.  violence.  want to participate.  hungry.  want to eat.  hunt, kill, eat.

that's interesting too.  the romans had public spectacles of violence and death (and food).  they did not have public spectacles of sex, there were spectacles for rich pervs but not public.  outside of that cultural line there are some places that had high rituals involving sex, that's what they did for theatre back then, but there is essentially no human tradition i know that has its sex out in public, plenty where violence and death were and are.

well, might say scalia, there is this long history of us humans appreciating violence and death and repressing and making fun of sex, a conservative person would naturally want to continue along that path.  who's to say that's incorrect?

but the answers to the remaining questions is out there in the areas not yet charted, some will bend their will toward exploration because they are such slaves to their desire that they will go forward no matter what, can't help themselves, they have bent their will to their purpose, their desire has no choice but to follow.

educational pipe dreams, love poem

1. the shape of the deal with all deviants is that they will fulfil the basic duties of citizenship, however they are defined, and they will be otherwise left in peace to do their thing.  the definition of citizenship duties is never fully stated lest its administration become tyranical, but encompasses some kind of joint approach to basic functions: infrastructure, admin, defense.  whatever they do in their spare time their business.  the heroin user knows military service coming up, voluntarily kicks, not a problem, can get back to it afterwards: citizen junky.  an entire emergency response crew run as a nonprofit by the porn industry.  porn stars who are also birth coaches.

i am imagining that education is not only to teach kids to sit still & follow orders, few facts thrown in, but like every kid learns how to sew, cook, self-defense, military tactics, large object handling, how to build things, how to fall & not get hurt, how to bear pain, how to end fights, how to try to survive as a kid in a combat situation, how to try to deal with creepy grownups. how to brush teeth, how to grow food, how to kill & dismember animals, anatomy, massage, signs of various sickness, formal instruction in various ways of being nice, how to plan, how to study.  how to put up structures.  how to figure out problems.

when i was a kid we were all going to be drafted.  they would separate some gym classes into girls & boys: the girls taught to dance, boys taught to march.  that was military education.  in history we learned the dates of wars, what they were supposed to be about, who won.  i imagine military education: the military instruction team comes in and explains how the whole military machine works, analyzes engagements, everybody does some pretend combat & survival.  whole school: military week.  teach them how to handle weapons too.  that kind of stuff not for everyone but some like it, will go on with it in an organic manner. 

another week is cooking week.  how to handle fire, how to handle knives, how to clean & why, handling hot stuff, how to measure, how to time, how to clean up.  another is clothing week, how they fit, how to clean them, how to make them.  another is body week, how it works, signs of sickness, how to keep it clean..  another is you get the idea?  teach them useful stuff.  lots of it.  kids will like it.

2.
there is the messy aspect, it is definitely a chore
there is no question that i will be thinking thoughts
you would rather i wouldn't think
also that it is messy, and takes time

and i'm going to think those thoughts
while we do this and that with the bodies
until at a certain point you give up
and decide to go with it & you swoon down
into it, current carries us away,
bumping through the experience,
sometimes to end calmly in the bay,
bit of water in the boat,
other times smashed on the rocks,
you over there, i over here
sometimes one of us walking away on the beach
the other still in the water

that certain point, where you decide you'll allow
yourself to go toward melt,
like it.  like.  melting is nice.  wanting to melt.
nice

3.
you orthodox of all sects: you have only a single hope, all of you insisting that all the other hopes are false.  "i" see buckets of hope everywhere.  who loses?

food

1. there is social eating but it does not include much public interaction with the food after it has been chewed.  the food is there on the plate, or twitching on the ground, whatever.  it looks delicious, i'm going to tear it to pieces & chew it up into mush & swallow it, it will keep me alive.  i am so thankful for the victim, its death is my life.  we sort of honor this fundamental quality of food by trying to combine the eating with other fun stuff to make a fun feast, bonhomie, glass of wine in afternoon, nibbling at the delicious victims.

once the food gets in the mouth & starts to get slimed & chewed this love affair with the victim enters the flavor zone & moves out of the visual.  chewed food behavior involving taking it out of the mouth & playing with it, chewing it up & displaying it as it is deconstructed, sharing it dyadically or parentally, more or less odd in my culture, though i've heard of rugged cultures where the parents prechew the walrus blubber etc. for the kids.  on the cooking shows they eat the food but you don't get closeups of open mouths chewing.  that would be phagographic.  apparently there is no serious market for that kind of entertainment: no movies of people eating each other's chewed food, no closeups of the food as it turns into food.  we each eat too much or not by ourselves, sitting there at the table together, maybe sharing a dish, but each eating our own food.

2. the mighty worm crawling over the bacterial mat, devouring everything in its path, fearlessly processing lives into food, taking all the good stuff, leaving the junk behind.

3. the delicious joy of the mashed up and broken open body, slow drip of fluids

4. a rich subject, filled with pink tones & delicious flavors & textures.

tolerance

i heard my precise philosophy described on radio today as the "harlot movement."  all religions are one, peace & understanding, nonviolence, exploration, tolerance.  yup, that's me.  exactly what i want.  so that characterization of course from an end times paulian group that supposedly is trying to take over the world, involved in the uganda anti-gay bill & involved in the rick perry campaign.  harlot religion.  gotta figure out how to describe harlotry to little kids.  they are warning their followers against exactly what i'm trying to describe.  so there it is.  only political activity could possibly defeat them politically, historically the prohibitionists have made it very hard to be in any way deviant.  we have to define our social relations to encompass a broad range of deviant behavior.  why?  because we will encounter new situations for which the standard set of behaviors will not lead to success meaning continuation of the life.  the deviants will have somewhere the relevant behavior that will be adaptive in the new situation so that ability to catch animals to eat will not be required for survival but ability to handle machinery will be.  at one point everyone was a hunter & the farmer was the deviant, the weirdo, the guy doing girls' work.  now the geek is the pinnacle, the obligate hunter considered a pathetic endangered relic.  the people who go "hey, what if we try this?" 

we harlots will tolerate the non-tolerators but they won't tolerate us.  if they come to power they will attempt to repress any of us that they can recognize.  there are a lot more of us than there are them.  they are organized we are not. 

we have to define ourselves beyond our specialty, whatever that happens to be.  what we all are is tolerant, people are allowed to be different.  think about this: criminal violence aside are you willing to let other people be different from you?  then you are tolerant, that is your approach, as opposed, say, to enforced conformity.  i submit this is the fundamental political/social divide.  organize around the principle of tolerance and we will find the approach that we can all agree on.

fun, food, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable

1. for every kind of deviant it is all discretion all the time
2. victim victual
3. pushing into the discomfort zone & making it comfortable

3 things: this, that, the rest of everything.  subject, object, field of play.

1. some small part of the human population bullies, the rest of us just wish they would stop but does not want usually to fight them by their rules because they would likely win & organisms want to live.  the bullies by and large are stupid just like the passives so it is possible within limits to continue one's heresies if one's normal mask is good enough & one is smart enough to find a corrupt safe zone as will always be found in human governance everywhere.  there are the deviant acts that the deviants like, one thing.  the desire to bring display versions of that life style into the normal public with its bully component creates flash points of emotion, is that what we wanted, deviants?  no.  gotta calm them with our mutual humanity & otherwise competent ordinariness.  opiate user with perfect work record.  porn actor picking up kids after school, take them to piano lesson.
   the importance of these various behaviors is obvious to the practitioners, prone to abuse & obsession though they may be as can also of course such perfectly ordinary "normal" activities as doing business and eating.  in most periods of human history they did what they did in deep private, everybody knew, if they tolerated the weirdness it was because of the practitioner's otherwise pure & useful character.
   most of human history: any response other than "yes sir" was treason punishable by immediate death.  whatever they said.  bullies.  that's all that governments used to be.

2. victim victual
   there it is in the language.  the victor victimizes the victual.  it dies in delicious agony, its blood dripping onto my tongue as i crunch down on its throat with my teeth, tail twitching, ears back, growling,waiting.  it kicks at me, us lying on the ground, i kick back, claws rake belly, more blood.  it twitches, shudders, relaxes, i get up, roar, bat its head, roll around, pee, eat the victim.  it is delicious.
   that is what victory means.  all of the solemn heartfelt stuff is sentimental landscaping.  the victim lying there has stopped being a problem and has become lunch.
   so when we conquer our sins & the sin lies there relaxed, torn & dead, it has turned into food of a sort, we could eat it ourselves or we could be induced to give it away to the poor or to the lord.  it is delicious, delicious the agony of its defeat & death.  ready to be recycled, building blocks of the victorious organism.

3. the essential element of self-direction is to find the edge of the comfort zone & to probe past it & try to colonize some of the discomfort zone.  to not actively do that is the essential element of "normal."  "normal" doesn't like something & all it wants to do is not deal with it.  self-directed will examine the situation, see what its like, maybe something can be done, a way to function in a new situation.  new parents for example drop their otherwise culturally normal behavior around poop during the kid's diaper years.  they get used to it.  they learn to like beer, learn to like sex, learn to like celibacy, learn to like danger, pain, parties.

4. normal
   in phone conversation with a friend of my wife.  we are going on, me in a slightly absurdist tendency as is my well known wont, having a good time.  i convey some aspect of the banter to my wife, purely factual, wife does an annoy: i know about that, people don't like you to talk to other people while you're on the phone.  she likes to do that particular annoy, will on occasion criticize my behavior in public if she gets sufficiently self-involved.  faced with that kind of totalitarian "because i said so & everyone else agrees with me" the independent organism recoils & wants to do the thing deemed offensive more to "show her."  but no, just to go on with the show, actors all, each the star of our own play.

clarifiers, accelerators

it is a "place" not a method.  subtances may be unavailable.  methods may be undiscovered.  the "place" is still "there."  not a place, a viewpoint (a place as it were).  a rock on the ground, observed by an organism.  a certain angle, a certain time, a glint: a brilliant point of light.  the organism responds, perhaps with the chemical cascade it may refer to as elation.

certain substances taken into the organism may produce elation, perhaps temporary access to the "place" in question.  certain social situations as well, muscular exertion in certain circumstances.  the chemical processes brought about by "drugs," "crowd effect," exertion (the "zone") not the same as the "place."  the place not spatial, not mental, "feels" objective, is obviously not, but is not "conceptual" either. 

the "place" does nothing "by itself."  it is merely "there."  access to the "place" can produce various responses in the noticing organism including the range of emotional reactions from terror to joy.  some individual organisms hate "it," others love "it" obsessively, seek "it" to the detriment of the integrity of that organism. 

certain organisms find that action sequences of various kinds are more likely to produce the the viewpoint from which the "place" can be accessed.  certain substances, certain rituals.  crowd effects: coordinated activity of "many" organisms, will often mimic the effects of the "place," a few organisms may "truly" access it.  substances may similarly produce the viewpont, not necessarily reliably, there will always be the possibility that the "getting there" will be substituted as the object of desire rather than the actual "place."

if one is interested in the possibilities of the "place" one would want to find ways to extend the temporal duration of one's observation of it into a length of time sufficient to start noting its peculiar properties.  one can then decide to seek those properties rather than the method of getting "there."  perhaps something can then be done.

the controlled substances, the illegal or suppressed activities: special function agents that can in certain circumstances, properly used, to demonstrate the existence of other "states of mind" to the individual organism, perhaps some useful state will be demonstrated.  the various states not necessarily of equal utility.  that is why drugs are considered a different category than food.

it has become important to "me" to develop multiple access methods to the "place."  observation over decades has given "me" a perhaps more exact set of descriptors for it so that "i" can "know" it when it is present, rather than supposing that the ritual, or the feeling, or the sensory data set, etc. is the "place."  we may tend to think we "know it when we see it."  maybe that is true, or not, or sometimes.  most important for me has been to separate "happiness" from the "place."  happiness may accompany being in that presence but it is not essential to "being there."

for the society, the suppression of discussion of unpopular subjects is not helpful, means become confused with ends, all sorts of nonsense can become policy.  for the individual the safety factors are not to be ignored.  fear though is not a useful prime motivator: leads to paralysis in emergencies.

more specific than that i shall not at this time be.

the lunch is naked

1. there it is on the fork.  it was alive, maybe its still alive in the shell.  i'm going to eat it.  there it was out there in the sun doing its thing.  now it is stuck on the fork, in the shell, broken open, doused with acid, i'm going to put it in my mouth & kill it & eat it.  it tastes so good.  the plant seeds: i will steal their future & use it to make my own.  it is delicious, their future. 

2. to jump past the known limitations into the unknown limitations.  a guy on radio describing how he died: i felt my body shutting down then i died.  he did not explain.  they had brought him back.  there he was again.  as if he had switched off, not present yet not somewhere else.  a more comprehensive absence.

yesterday an associate was introduced to i think its called neural programming, i'll fix that apellation (skin, flagging data) later.  he was given a video game he had to control with his brain via applied electrodes.  there was of course no detailed instruction, he had to learn by himself, like riding a bike, only one way (unless of course one has learned how to examine & how to learn)  (how to learn how to examine?  examine examination.  learning?  find out what it is necessary to learn, learn it, make sure it is learned.)

the experience was described as "weird."  there were "funny feeling."  after the session there was fatigue but it was all "mental."  fassbinder said that peripheral vision takes more energy than central, brain activity uses a lot of our calories, the session involved use of previously not noticed mental "muscles" (pathways): extra energy use: fatigue.

weirdness said to have continued at low lever through afternoon until a nap.  upon awakening "disorientation" was reported along with "not nausea bit like it," not "anxiety" but like it, "not a headache but like it, etc."  and more.  we discussed the possibility of actual organismic illness: virus, etc.  then the possibility that "self-awareness" is the effect of a viral infection, the virus controlling our activities to further its viral genetic ends, a point of view not well received in a person who claims not to know what to do with the gift of life & carrying around guilt, etc. in attempt to balance the imbalance.  if however, the weirdness was actually related to the np session it could conceivably be likened to a serious physical workout session: various kinds of muscle soreness maybe some are never before experienced.  in that case it can be gotten used to, perhaps a new tool for doing things in life. 

but will it help to decide "what to do?"  one goes to one's pandora's box, tells oneself the thing i take out is what i'll be.  take the thing out: ew, yuck.  put it  back in, try again.  as opposed to other "mes" who just get up and go toward something, whatever it happens to be.  as opposed to happening to be born in a system that pre-assigned the unit before manufacture (or after treatment & inspection) & that was that none of that think-for-yourself stuff for us thankyou.  no, it won't.  still looking for the chemicals that will reliably produce raw volition.

multiple realities / multiple versions of same reality

in what world is it possible to completely do only what one wants to do & to not have to do what one doesn't want to do.  wake up in the whenever & it is just perfectly the way one wants it & that goes on all day long & at the end it is just perfect to lie down & nod off (the "me").  or to be always awake & it is all perfect nothing that's not perfect ever, constantly changing perfect because it has to change, keep us amused, otherwise we'd get bored, not perfect.

i'm going to write about sex eventually in this series.  it turns out that sex is like the raspberry on the top of the everything cake.  great simile: unmistakable flavor, some think its too much flavor, don't actually like it, can get seeds stuck between teeth, could be thought of as problem.  could neglect to clean it out, cavity develops, lose a tooth, get an abcess, go septic, die.  why never to eat raspberries.

so i'll continue poking around at the bottom of the experiential pile, the food layer, until it naturally evolves into a consideration of secondary activities. 

they are going to find chemicals that reliably turn off sexual attraction, or that change the pheromones to be repulsive rather than attractive.  women will be able to put on a perfume that will make men slightly nauseous when they walk by.  chemical niqab.  chemicals that reliably make people superbad & you just point them & they attack.  real aphrodisiacs of course, that the victim can prevent with a lotion or a pill.  chemical wars purchased at the chemical war store.  maybe cortical separators like the memory suppressants we have now.  take a pill, go to work, work all day or all year or the whole life, don't remember any of it, the self-aware "me" absent, the social me fully competent, an army of chemically compliant biobots. a nation.  chemicals in the water, everyone get up go to church sunday on knees and pray chemicals.  don't call them drugs.  medicine.  for antisocial tendency.

a cursory examination of yuckiness.  we did not shrink from poop when we were babies.  smells had to be damaging for us to try to get away.  ammonia.  the culturally determined set of smells & smell producing behaviors that we learn to go yuck to.  we did not start out yucking to poopy smells.  we learned how to want to upchuck in the presence of, say, shit on the floor, the smell as we are dutifully cleaning it up.  make me want to puke.  learned.  babies don't care.

i read that 95% of the mass of human poop is bacteria.  it is food for bugs, the bugs can be eaten by fish, we can eat the fish.  pigs would gladly eat it too, then the humans could eat them if they wanted to, or it could be composted, eat the peaches.  radio story today about how "the public" hasn't been able get its head around turning sewage into drinking water, it can't get the thought of the poop out of the thought of the water.  a set of people who will not consider the issue.  too yucky.  absolutely don't want to talk about it.

don't want to talk about it subjects.  how to deal with the other people & the self aspects of aversion.  that's what this blog is about.

a gambol in the garden of whimsy

because we don't talk about sex with our kids we convey no concepts of too much, not enough, etc.

because we don't talk about drugs with our kids we convey no concept of how much is too much, what they're good for, how to deal with problems in self/others, etc. 

a guy on the radio wrote a book, was a soldier, studied & practiced war, now a reporter.  he commented on how the libyan freedom fighters are untrained kids who don't know what to look for so they are ineffective and unsafe in battle.  study of war is a specialized discipline, but there is an organization that teaches it.  with sex and drugs there are only private mostly underground organizations and individuals that teach those things.  if one wants to discuss methods and ends with children, they being the ones who needs those data most, trouble proceeds, often to the point of legal issues.

war reporter described how the freelibs were retreating down a road & he observed how the mortar rounds were following them down the road, so he knew the kind & level of training of the mortar crew, but the freelibs hadn't had the training so they were making mistakes & some were getting killed.

never when i was in school did anyone ever come in & say: kids, i'm going to show you how the athenians beat the persians at marathon.  war was never discussed as such, they were part of history: there was this war & that war, the result was whatever it was, but the mechanics, tactics, strategy of war was never addressed.

and of course fighting was not addressed either, in gym for example.  not even from the standpoint of how to break up fights.  even we were never explicitly advised to go get a grownup whenever a fight happened.  the subject was completely ignored.  bullying was everywhere when i was in school, grownups only interfered if it got really bad.

anyway, all of this information could be freely available, and is more or less unfreely available, depending on one's location.  want to know something go to the experts.

a tweeter who is a legal sex worker & activist for sex worker rights i follow barfed all over about the presence of a nursing baby in what was described as an otherwise lesbian porn movie.  didn't see it.  don't know if a DA could make something of it child abuse-wise.  probably not useful.

i can imagine a society of sex without social consequences though i do not see a way to create such a culture with what we have.  the parental dyad becomes a parental level, every kid becomes the beloved child of all adults.  parents, kids, all circulate freely in their levels, bullshit & ripoff don't happen, everyone is safe & free.  people can have sex any way they want because everyone is smart about hygiene & conception & psychology & knows themselves.  no jealousy, no violence.

in that culture the mother & the lover make love while the baby nurses, the lover was part of the birth team, the guy in the kitchen cooking the food is the dad & knows both of them well.  his friend over for a couple of days, they all know him too.  kids come in from playing, see the mom thing happening in the corner, no interest.  If they did mom might hand them the baby to take care of.  there is a religion there that mandates intelligence & universal love.  they have figured out what to do with their predator tendencies.  they do not abuse each other.  they don't do jealousy.  they don't have rich & poor.  everybody helps everybody. 

the ethical progress is that something comes up with, you know, life that has to be dealt with & you put down the sex & deal with it (baby, etc.)   obsession is the problem: loss of balance, the not taking care of the business of life & rolling around in one's obsession to the neglect of that business.  not the object of obsession.  the obsession is innocent.  the gun just sits there, the drug, the sacred text, the ritual dance.

the loudest voices are those trying to sweep subjects under rugs.  the core issue is coercion.  we have two methods of coercion: violent & symbolic aka financial.  if coercion is not a factor then we are free to explore a lot more possibilities in life.  we do not live in such a world, so we have to be careful.  it is not actually possible to talk about some of those possibilities.  we don't have the words, the languages we use do not allow certain possibilities.

i think that there is actually a gradient between "me" & "us" & "them" & "it."

i'm going to experiment with a linguistic construct.  perhaps it will be useful to use the word "cortex" instead of "the me" to indicate that thing that "knows" itself as separate from everything else.  these past x months i've been using "the me" like that, the two words, to refer to that self-reflective function, the thing that knows itself.  my colonoscopy experience with the sedation that put "the me" out of commission while allowing the rest of the organism to respond to the staff in a socially standard manner sufficiently demonstrated that the self-reflective function is only a part of the package and mostly apparently not necessary.  The dream of dictators everywhere: a nation of talented but non-self aware slaves.  Interfering busibodies everywhere always trying to own other peoples' "mes."

the part that wants and the other part that notices that it wants.  the part that notices i'm going to call "the cortex," see if that approach clarifies anything.  because a fully functional socially interactive thing lay there and responded during that procedure when "the me" was shut down.  they told me when they asked that thing-that-was-not-the-me how it was doing it answered "fine."  probably it thought it was "me."  but when "i" came back i didn't have that sequence in the memory, so how was that "me"?  obviously it comes in pieces, the pieces don't all recognize each other.  "cortex" disengaged.  another level competent in social levels but separate from "cortex."  next time i should ask them to engage that thing in philosophical discussions or to characterize its emotional state, see what its good for. 

alternatively, is it possible to separate the cortex completely and go through life without that continuity of consciousness thing: "me."

i have a client in norway with whom relations exist in areas other than strictly business.  we briefly discussed the crazy shooter incident.  of course here in usa we have many such incidents, mostly much smaller, actually single murders by crazies, lots of them, essentially.  i was making my point about humans essentially never mobbing a dangerous human, reverting to absolute individuality, most submitting or running, very rarely an individual going against the danger.  he agreed, then he said that sometimes a leader comes forward, other people will join in.  that is true too, but relatively rare.  most of us engage in aversive behavior in the face of violence.  we shrink away, do not want to deal with it directly, wish we were somewhere else, what can I do?