cowering

that is what most people do.  when attacks come most people will choose not to fight & will try to get away.  they will try to lock themselves in the cooler while the thieves go through the cash register, gun to head of cashier held hostage.  it is company policy, if the company has one, to not resist nor to come to the aid of the hostage when faced with the threat or presence of violence.  our social rules formalize and train us to respond with submission which is what most of us want to do anyway, deep down inside.

back up.  the broken animal lying there, thrashing, gradually slowing, it will be delicious.  the cat knows what the victim is going through.  the cat has felt pain.  the pain of the victim is irrelevant.  the victim is a mouse, say, or a bird.  maybe it does not eat animals, maybe it does.  life of peace for the vegetarians, the only enemies are bigger/smarter predator animals (or parasites, etc.)  further, the pain of the victim is part of the overall pleasurable scenario that will culminate in a really nice meal.

it is possible for corticated animals to separate out that pain causing function and obsess on it.  the function is i perform an action (athletic, social, etc.) and it creates pain with or without physical damage to the victim.  for the pain giver there is the indrawn breath and the expiration on the hit, however the hit is delivered.  for the victim the (untrained) indrawn breath  occurs at the moment of contact (the gasp), followed by the expiration at the scream or the collapse if that is what happens.  i do something, the result is pain in you.  then the cat sometimes goes nuts, bites on the mouse, shakes it, growls, shakes some more, then the mouse is dead & the cat is pawing it around, maybe striking again, dammit, thinks the cat, stop being dead, i want to play some more.

so most of us humans would prefer not to deal with that aspect of our essential selves.  we don't want to be victims but we don't want to engage our kill-&-eat components.  we'd prefer to not do that.  people who do get into that, we think they're wierd, we don't want to hang with them.  or else they engage their violent in culturally standardized ways (authorized or criminal) and we classify them a little differently as heros or villains.

schoolyard fight.  crowd gathers.  if pulled into the fight most of the watchers will immediately cave and become victims.  in the baboon troop they will immediately grovel & display inferior status.  a lot of sympathetic chemical activity going on in the crowd.  echos of the agons going on in the visual field.  victor & victim releasing chemicals like melodies to give us internal shifts of emotion and we are secondarily joyed as those evoked chemicals flow through our bodies.

secrets in life

life seems to consist of a physical membrane surrounding a bunch of stuff that actively takes things from outside the memrane to keep the stuff inside going.  secrecy and selection are therefore essential elements of life.  life resists giving up and insists on taking and keeping.  it puts its personal interest before all other considerations.  environment is where the food comes from.

so where does compassion come from.  the personal body left to its natural tendencies will go on trying to acquire and burn food until it doesn't work anymore.  recognition by the living thing that there are others like it in the scene, a genetic rule not to automatically kill and eat some certain kind of life known as "us."  great chemical mystery, we preferentially don't eat "us."  baby spiders eating each other and all the other cannibalisms including the humans are special case oddities on the general rule.

inside the membrane the secret stuff goes on.  outsiders see the membrane, think that is what the life is but the secret stuff goes on inside.  otherwise it wouldn't be life.  it would lie there and break into pieces and blow away.

you know what we don't see?  we have a gundillion cooking shows but there is no hardcore foodnography which would have closeups of openmouthed chewing to arouse licentious phagic thoughts.  that kind of video is not happening.  chewed food is yucky.  why.  too real.

. 

different ways of getting excited

if it is indeed true that the root of all of the things that living things do is about getting food then everything else they do is a spare time activity.  all of those other exciting things that they do have the same essential "desire structure" as the food seeking.  symptoms of dissatisfaction variously in the system, rumble in stomach, wanting - something.  also, that these non-food avocational desires emerge out of food satiety or maybe out of surplus as in hey that was good, let's go out and do something.  burn off the food, hey, let's get some more food.  etc.

different things to get excited about.  tribes form: afficionados of this or that.  tribalism i guess comes from the bacterial level?  (are viruses evolutionarily "lower" or are they parasitic bacterial fragments?)  bacteria & viruses do not cannibalize do they?  anyway, not the norm.  tribalism - concept of us against them.  a recognition of the existence of a family.  things out "there" that are tasty but are not food.  you don't eat them even though you could.

the bacteria emit chemicals that others of their type recognize, i don't know what the viruses do to talk with each other.  chemicals?  electrical gradients?

the first thing living things do when there is plenty of food is reproduce.  

 no, i'm not done with the victor-victim thing.

different things to get excited about.  some of us hunt, shoot, birdwatch, people watch, tv watch, make things, drink alcohol, dress up, humiliate people, get angry, eat, make food, dance, build, scheme, collect, go fast, be alone, read, paint, exercise, preach, pray, shmooze, organize, write, joke, take care of animals, kill animals, etc.  something.  people who claim to have nothing, hey: that is a nothing-shaped something.  if you can read this you can recognize that empty what's-the-use mental place as a decorator style.  i watch myself watching my self in my lonely room.  it is a room, it is not me.  i can go out into another room.  i can.  frederick douglass woke up in jail.  all of his people: life sentence, every angle turned to keep them from waking up, he awoke anyway.  trying to stay awake, at any moment perhaps they will forget to lock the door.

a future of fully privatized water.  if you can't pay for good water you can get bootleg water, or maybe you can't afford any in texas and you can die.  a future of privatized oxygen.  the rich  live and the poor die.  too bad say the rich.  things are getting better now they will say.

the exact thing that's wrong with "education" is that it has the format of time-delimited failure.  something must be learned, that's fine.  there is a time-limit,  beyond the time limit there is "failure."  continued "failure" eventually results in abandonment of the effort, the student is rejected, good luck toots.

abandoning the time limit allows the student to learn at the student's natural speed whatever that is.  the pressure is off, the student can take as long as necessary to learn the thing.  lifetime learning as it were.  so everybody is always "in school," working on something someone thinks is necessary to know how to do.

sidebar: and in regard to things learned it is not the facts that are being learned, it is the developed structure in which those facts are deployed.

in a structure like that a third grade class could have adults & children taking the same "classes." 

invisibles

in some place and some time the carriers of alternative cultures live in deep hiding.  the cathari underground, the sufi underground, the thing that was goddess worship, the special use of special plants.  specialties of human behavior brought forward from parents to children, from teachers to students, invisible to the police.  outside they look & act like everyone else.  they create a safe zone in which they can do their thing.  through all kinds of despotism & war they bring forward their secret thing.  the responsible wine drinkers of islam, the sex positives of islam, freethinkers springing from the loins of the most rigorously enforced orthodoxy.  how dare they, say the squares, something must be done.  punishment does not deter them, they carry some kind of seed of liberation in them.  generations later perhaps it becomes possible once again to practice.

kids

it is not the fucked up stoner part that is the problem.  it is the don't give a shit part that bugs the squares.  if the fucked up stoners kept their shit neat and tidy and cleaned up after themselves and didn't cause any trouble they could find a place for themselves in society, some of them do.  so the habit that needs to be developed by the conscientious use of the drug is meticulous attention to detail rather then its opposite, which ranges from a learned augmentation of lack of focus, springing out of a deep aversion from reality as it is, through rituals of use that become eventually empty of all but consumption, all the way to static contemplation of the emptiness within, but even at that point discipline is demanded for proper relation with the outside world.  in other words, you need to train yourselves, soon as you get stoned, don't lie there & space out.  clean up.  immediately.  new ritual: stoned & clean.  you can continue to do the kinds of social interactions & stuff you like to do.  just clean & put away stuff & improve shit.  there is really no reason why stoners can't have the neatest gig out there.  neighbors start to imagine you're improving the tone of the community.  this can be done. 

2,
the night was full of smiles redux

something attracted to the commotion over there
things rubbed together something wants to investigate
wants to move from possibility to implantation
hanging around
pink carnation

membranes soften between things
something slips through
another me from a me and a you

a particular melting quality,
a particular angle of fall
gravity fold us in on our selves,
air wet with the breaths of the audience
hanging around, watching the opening
meeting of a here and a there

one in particular walks right in
holding the key, just the right
shape key, walks right in

9 months passed

obsession #4

anger as an addictive drug

threshhold rises

need more anger

like a sculpture can be seen from all sides

strange
the highest virtue always taught
obedience
practically speaking
shame

life lessens

to try to learn how to figure out if something is wrong.

surrender.  final surrender as the victim becomes food.  it resists and tries to get away then it can't then it gives up and the disassembly can begin.  it swells & starts to drip, tears, proceeds towards liquidity.  surrender, the process proceeds to juice, which is absorbed by the victor.  reds and pinks for us vertebrates. 

the victor cannot avoid sympathy with the victim because everyone knows what happens.  it is just the luck of the moment that i am the victor and it is the victim.to go through with the activity of killing and eating is the normal triumph of the basic level of will.  the thing wants to live and will do whatever is necessary.  it is just sorry, that's the way it is, the victim is going to die.

the celebrated flavor of the dead entity, the delicate artistry of the preparation, the convivial scene of the consumption of the victim, the satisfied filled feeling as the life of the victors goes on.  the victims surrendered long moments ago, their paths to the future broken up and made into the future of the victors.  the victors are happy.  the victims are gone, memory of the exciting flavor recalled and cherished.  those victims sure did taste delicious.

i grew up in enforcer times.  human history had been long millennia of you'd better do exactly what you were told to do, if you didn't you'd get in trouble.  there was only one right way to do everything, whatever that way happened to be.  nonconformity was comprehensively repressed, nonconformists consistently ostracized.  since the culture was based on enforcement the kid culture was an enforcer culture as well.  bullies ruled.  law of jungle.

in 1960s the idea of non-coercive society became very big, called "counterculture."  there was essentially no model for such a society, therefore many experiments.  since ultimate coercion is the basic element of life - we kill to eat - it may not be possible to be completely non-coercive until we learn to live on raw chemicals rather than corpses.  matter of degree, various things can be tried to attempt to minimize the damage.  us counterculturals immediately found our "movement" parasitized by various sociopathic ripoff artists who eventually overwhelmed the original intent which was something like looking for better things to do than what was being done, better ways of doing them.  the serious questioning of standard methods brought forth a rally by the enforcer types who have been beating us back ever since.  they have held the power to do things for almost all of human history, know how to do what they do, which is use force to attain personal ends, they are always winning.  when they lose they do not go away.  their impulses are the basic ones that seek victims to victorize.  ours are secondary, reactive, the attempt of the victim to rise to power with the victor, to transcend the zero-sum game.

i am going to stay with this violence-eating process a while longer.  it seems like it will be rather repetitive.  it is after all something we do every day.

mercilessness

mercilessness is therefore the basis of our bodily being.  body's going to eat, someone's going to die.  two approaches to that basic principle: feeling good about it or feeling not good about it.  the ones that have mercy develop culture, the merciless like to kill and eat so that's what they do.  violence and death appreciated for their delicious connotations, most basic desire.  let me tell you about that wild pig someone killed last year.  taste of fear.  taste of blood.  taste of triumph.  taste of pain.  taste of death.  taste of regret.  taste of food unroll in the mouth & fill the entire head & then the body so that it all disappears into the moving of the jaw, the flavors & textures of the victuals banging like bells in the mouth.

once inside the big dumb slow low metabolism cell the scheming mitochondrion divided until there were a bunch of them.  cell's going nuts, grown to twice the size, zipping all over the place looking for phosphorus.  cell can't imagine life without those little juice baby mitochondria tickling its tubes from the inside. 

of course all over the place there are cells without mitochondria hanging around, getting old, grumbling about the hyped up new cells with their superchargers, kids these days.

mitochondria found an alternative to death by eating, a cooperative venture that bumped up resource use and expanded the scope of mercilessness.  gigantic cell with all those hungry mitochondria, has to all the time hunt up food to feed them, they make that juice, it feels so good, i don't mind going out and hunting up someone and killing and eating it, it feels so good when i'm not hungry.  mercilessness.  some love it and parade it around, others feel shame and want to hide or abolish it, everybody does it if they want their body to survive.  the married bliss of the cell & the mitochondria harem requires way more input, the cell has to go out and work all day every day.  they make it feel so good, its worth it.

the esthetic appreciation of mercilessness leads to the roman games & all sorts of other public killing rituals, to various half-measure practices in which punishment is inflicted rather than death, thefts of various kinds, all subjects of possible study, systematization, critique.  someone make a museum of meanness.  do anything to them you want, bad as you treat them they're still better off than if you ate them, right?  you can't make me stop treating you bad its your problem not mine, better still its your fault.  its your fault you can't stop me.  i'm going to do what i want to do.  you don't like it security will escort you off the premises.

because we said so

the basic element of all interactions between all organisms is forebearance.  we forebear to kill and eat that one.  various reasons.  ways of life built to accomodate the presence of other autonomous units.

oh, but let me go back to the cellular times when parts of us were free swimming in the soup, happily eating the algae, bumping into each other from time to time, occasionally exchanging genetic bits, sometimes by eating, sometimes by being eaten, encapsulated bits put through someone else's membrane, it thinks its getting a bonbon, i think im infecting her with me.

viruses like mosquitos carry around bits of sometimes useful stuff, the canny and aware cell might catch a favorable genetic bit as it passes by.  back to the time the mitochondia showed up and we made a deal with them, we won't eat them, we'll let them live inside us.  cause it makes me feel so good.  so much more alive, so much more me, now i've got mitochondia, now i can really get something done.

the mitochondria gets an excellent environment with nice protective membranes.  it creates the stuff that we organisms use to burn the food we eat.  before mitochondria we only got to sip the energy of the food we ate.  mitochondria allowed us to be more efficient in our food use, we grew, got bigger, made more of us.

composite organisms, way down at the cellular level.  the "me" imagines its a single thing.  the basic premise of unique selfhood is a joke.  look ma, says the pile of stuff, i'm me. 

still, everything in behavior is things that are done instead of killing and eating.  we argue and fight about which alternatives alternatives to killing and eating are accepted in society, but all of them are in a sense creative endeavors compared with killing and eating.

we tell ourselves that killing and eating is creative too because it allows us to continue to live and that's good, right?  otherwise why are we here?  food preparation exalted.  but the killing of the food designated polluting by the purist religions, professional food killers considered low caste.  because we all know the score, the food wanted to live, we don't care, we're more important, because we said so.

the mighty cell bears down on the mitochondrion which pleads: don't dissolve me, i'll show you a real good time.  what's better than eating "you" ask the cell.  let me in, i'll show you says the mitochondrion.  few moments later the cell goes wow, can you do that again.  mitochondria settles into the cytoplasm.  yes, but first you have to feed me.  ok says the cell, whatever you say, just give me some more of that sugar.

i love you says the cell.  love you too says the mitochonrdrion.

embroidery on the doily of original sin

so our fundamental state of being here in the body is to use force to kill other living things so we can eat them and keep ourselves alive.  somewhere out there someone is thinking about how to expensively grow meat in a vat so that we don't have to kill something, the dream of tissue without consciousness but that is not a solution to the basic situation, we avert our eyes from the cells as they rupture, we have killed it, now we are eating it, it is delicious.

somewhere along the line we developed an idea that making distinctions between what we killed and why is important to the killer, the killee officially no longer cares.  the killer knows what it has done, it just can't help itself.  it is hungry, everyone knows what that is.  some degree of sentiment in the lives of the vertebrates.  they notice things, they form opinions, their grownups are smarter than their children.  reflective conscience, tip of the grateful hat to the nutritious dead.  a quick dispatch, a reverent prayer.  delicious.

licit & illicit violence then.  there have been times & places where if you captured someone in a raid you could do anything you wanted with it, your own business, the neighbors would not interfere, cut them up & hang the parts from a tree, your business, feed them to your dogs (like the Spanish in Cuba, 16th century).  we, with our culture, apply manners to violence, obscure sense of guilt.  we can't acknowledge that guilt though because we would have to stop eating then we ("we") would die.  so we avert our eyes & agree not to comment.  if challenged we bluster & display to cover our fear.  we know how it is.  what can we do?

violence.  guilt.  aversion.  justification.  moving right along.

comedy of terrors

you better behave or else
i'll smash your face
i'll kill you
i'll take away your food
or someone else will do that to you
you won't go to heaven
you'll go to hell
you won't be happy
it'll get worse

fate will smash your face
god will smash your face
your mom will smash your face
you only win if you smash it yourself

you better behave or else
people will talk, won't be good
people are mean, they like to pass it along
burn down your house cause they don't like your friends

ooh paranoia
all the time paranoia
can't be free always watching me
paranoia