Airport Chaos Pt. 1

When I left Colorado to head back to Long Beach, I had a very curious experience at the airport, which serves as a good starting point for a greater discussion on the state of things.

I had a layover in Salt Lake City, Utah, a very short one, where I was supposed to meet up with my unsuspecting brother (who was flying in from Montana). I ended up landing right as it began to snow. I got off the plane and sat down at the gate to wait for him. I was very excited, as it had been a year since I'd seen him, and he had no idea that I was going to meet him at the airport. I sat looking out at the snow and it seemed that it was taking a little longer than it should have for him to come by.

Turns out his flight was diverted to Las Vegas due to a storm. What a disappointment. So I boarded my plane to Los Angeles and sat down. We sat for a little while and an inordinate amount of time passed. The windows were increasingly becoming caked with snow and I was getting nervous:

Finally an attendant came on the line and announced flatly that the flight was cancelled, and that the runway was shut down. We all shuffled miserably back into the terminal to stand in line to refund our tickets. On top of that the cargo bay doors were frozen shut on the plane, so they couldn't get the baggage out immediately, so we had to wait for that.

OK. This wasn't so bad. I missed my brother but oh well I'll get a ticket for a later flight and get home in good time. I got my ticket for a flight at 3. It was around 9 or 10 by that time. With a sigh I let it go and sat down at a nearby pizza place and grabbed myself a pizza and some green tea. I relaxed and had my food and relayed the information to my family.

2 hours later I got my baggage and headed for the new gate. I got to the new gate and sat down with a book to wait. I ended up reading literally all day because there wasn't much else to do. Over time however I noticed the terminal beginning to fill up. It was getting crowded around me, so after being absorbed in my book I looked up and the terminal was filled with people. All sorts of flights had come in and more and more people were being grounded.

I overheard a rather sour old woman acidly complaining on the phone about some "stupid bitch" flight attendant who was late and who held up the plane, and that she was the reason this lady was stranded here because they could have taken off before the shut-down and everything would be fine. I guess the company was lying about certain details and keeping everyone in the dark about the flights, but she did manage to hear that they originally shut down the runway because one of the landing planes slipped a little so they were worried about safety. Plus, the snow wouldn't let up; it snowed literally all day and the plows couldn't keep up:

Around 2 one of the attendants at the gate got on the intercom and announced that they had a problem. A plane just got in to the gate, but there was now 3 planes that had to leave from that gate and they didn't know which one it was and that they'd get back to us. Great, let's roll the dice to see whether I get home. 

20 minutes later the man got back on, and announced that after a careful decision, they decided the plane would be heading to Los Angeles. Ha, what luck! I'd be heading home after all. 

The mood started to change as I stood in line with my ticket however. There was a line of nervous-looking people inching up to the desk. From the conversations I gathered that they were people on standby trying to get on the plane, but the plane was full and the attendant was inquiring for them. I watched the attendant and he seemed to be losing his grounding. He would walk off to the side and talk to someone and then walk back to the desk and stand there confusedly. The poor man didn't know what to do. Neither did anyone else. I looked out over the terminal and it was filled with people. Packed with them. I inched forward to get on the plane. 

They scanned my ticket and I was in. Relieved, I walked through the gate and to the plane. I took my seat and buckled up, but a feeling of unease was growing. I glanced nervously outside and the snow was still coming down. I thought about those standby people waiting forlornly at the gate, and that mass of distraught people I caught sight of as I took a last glance at the terminal. Outside the roads were piling up with snow, and the hotels and motels were no doubt filling up with people. Flights were backing up and these people barely knew what they were doing. 

We spent another inordinate amount of time sitting on this plane and the unease was rising. Finally the pilot got on the intercom and it went something like this: "Uh, good evening folks, as of now we are sitting at the gate because we don't know where our baggage guys are. It is hard to see out our windows and we haven't seen anybody come up to the plane yet. Also we don't know where our fuel guys are. We haven't heard from anyone and maybe they've been held up somewhere. We just don't know.We'll let you know when we hear from them, thanks." 

Then: "Still no word from the fuel guys, or the baggage guys folks. Keep hanging tight. The good news is we haven't been here too long and we probably won't have to de-ice the plane, so we'll be able to take off right away."

And then: "Okay we've got our fuel and we are still waiting for the baggage guys. We'll be able to get going any minute. The only thing is we've built up some ice sitting here so now we're going to have to wait in the de-icing line before we take off." 

In the distance planes were waiting in line for trucks with large cranes that had cabins at the end of them. From these cabins their operators sprayed a sort of bright brown substance at the planes. I figured this was the de-icing process they spoke of. 

It was about this time I started to get a bad feeling. I thought again of the full terminals and the shocking haphazard quality of crew procedures. I started wondering if I was actually going to get out of there. The funny thing was, it was the night before when I almost got lost in the Colorado wilderness, and I had the same exact feeling. This was a human wilderness, a feeling of disorientation and impotence, an uncertainty about the proceeding chain of events. 

I noticed activity outside and there was the baggage crew. They were slipping and sliding around in their carts in the snow, having trouble with the baggage trains. One guy got stuck and spent 20 minutes trying to spin himself out of his ruts, and another guy in another cart kept ramming him from all sides to pop him out, to no avail. That's where they were. They've been getting stuck out in the snow and falling behind on their flight schedule. 

Finally the guy got loose and proceeded on with the bags. Then they started loading these weird boxes after they were finished with the bags. What the hell was this stuff? Mercifully, they stopped their loading and gave the go-ahead. 

Finally we made it out to the runway and got in line for the de-icing. We had to wait for a few planes to de-ice, which actually takes quite some time. Finally it was our turn and we all gazed out the fogged windows and watched the de-icer crane with bewilderment and exhaustion: 

The de-icing was done and we taxied out to the runway. Oh to just take off at this point! 

The plane stopped at a junction and the pilot got on the intercom: "Ladies and gentlemen I have for you the best news all night. They've shut down the runway and announced that they won't be able to re-open it for 40 minutes to an hour. The plows can't keep up with the snow." 

A vast majority of the plane's occupants let out a pathetic wail in unison. 

Bad vibes spread throughout the plane. Here we were, stuck out on the runway. People were getting up and talking in an agitated manner, while others got up and started pacing about the plane. We sat for a bit and then the pilot got on the intercom again: "Well folks, now some people want to get off the plane so we are going to see about heading back to another gate." 

People started to freak out. Now were weren't going to get out of here. After all that. 

The pilot got back on: "Ok, well there are no gates open at this time, so we are all going to have to keep calm and wait." 

Finally the pilot announced: "They've just reopened the runways. The plows did their work and now we can get out of here." The plane proceeded to the runway. Naturally everyone waited to cheer until we actually took off. 

As we rode down the runway and picked up speed, I thought I heard an odd mechanical groaning that I hadn't heard on a plane before. The only question was, what could go wrong next? 

Well, we ended up taking off, and there was the obligatory cheering and clapping in the plane. I imagine the crew felt good. They should. They got through a small bit of hell. I couldn't help thinking of that terminal full of people though, wondering who would get out and who would have to stay. 

And of course, during the cheering, I thought this was the moment where the plane spontaneously exploded. We didn't explode though, and I made it back to Los Angeles. 

Scrounchins Pt. 3

Scrounchins got hurt about two months ago and we had to figure out how to bag her and take her to the vet. We ended up putting a bunch of chicken in a carrier and she couldn't resist.

She was so insane that they couldn't even get her out of the carrier. As soon as they opened the zipper her claws came out and she started hissing and groaning. They ended up putting a plastic trash bag around her carrier and filling it with gas - which I guess is standard procedure for insane cats. Then they cleaned her up, got some antibiotics on her tail-wound, doped her up with some pain pills, and sent her on her way.

We kept her in my room from then on, and her personality changed radically, which is supposedly the case for outside cats becoming inside cats again. She was still volatile and her temper flared rather easily, but as the days passed she slowly calmed down. We put a little tranquilizer in her food occasionally, and plugged in a wall unit cat pheromone releaser which kept her calm.

Her old personality came back. Late at night she becomes very sweet and follows me around. She's especially affectionate if she's been alone for a while, or of course if she's hungry. She still hates the hell out of the dogs and takes every opportunity to hiss, even when their heads are turned and aren't paying any attention. And she gets me pretty good every once in a while. She took a little chunk out of my pinky yesterday.

She probably thinks she's pretty cute when she walks all over my keyboard, like all cats that walk on keyboards, which I think is many of them. Tonight she decided to sit down right on the middle of it:

Now she sits on her tower at the window, looking out. The window is open and outside the trees rustle under a light wind, whose welcome chill passes into the room with every wave. I remember what I like about the winter. The cold and the air give off a feeling of profundity and distance, opening up the imagination. Though the same thing can evoke pain and dread depending on mood. 

Earlier I had a violent mood swing that filled me with an overwhelming grief and the world dropped away for a while and I was lost again. Been lost many times. Have plenty more times to go. Over something minuscule that I don't even remember, which happened to be connected to everything else and so minor distress was amplified into something great. And I sit here looking at sweet Scrounchins and I think sometimes I understand her. I think she understands too. She acts somewhat resigned. She knows she fucked up and maybe she's glad to be so comfortable now. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. Doesn't matter. 

Notes on Catfish

A fascinating documentary. And surprising. The beautiful thing about it is a thirst for understanding and reconciliation, and a rejection of exploitation and ridicule, the exploitative and ridiculing impulses which are all too quickly defaulted on in this culture.

It is about a young man that begins an online relationship, but upon coming across some questionable signs, investigates the nature of his contact, only to find something far different and stranger than he anticipated.

There is a tension here between an old sensibility and a new emerging one: the film was picked up by a major movie studio that marketed it to be sensationalist and exploitative, but the narrative and progression of events within betrayed a sensibility of empathy and a desire for knowledge.

The movie is very interesting, but just as interesting are the reactions surrounding it: many were skeptical and some even expected it to be a hoax. Several possible reasons. First, many people have had these online relationships and perhaps they refuse to acknowledge they could be false: so it makes sense to attack the movie as a hoax and dismantle the threat. Also, we are so used to a culture of illusion and PR that we come to assume that anything that seems strange or disconcerting, but is presented as truth is necessarily a product of deceit. The Universal Studios marketing message primes us for this conclusion.

I really don't think the movie was a hoax either. There were moments that were too authentic and earnest.

Now, it is entirely possible that this very thing happened to me. I still think my own experience was authentic, all things considered, but the possibilities opened up by this movie are more than enough to raise doubts, however plausible.

But one gets to thinking about possible reactions.

It is justified to become angry about being lied to in such a profound manner. One has what one thinks is an authentic, beautiful experience, but all of that is dashed away due to another's deceit. But from such anger comes wrath: one heaps scorn on, or blasts, or ridicules the deceiver. It resolves the current situation, but it does so by transferring the evil (or whatever it is that we call evil) back to the originator, perpetuating the evil.

Is there another way?

If one focuses on oneself, one finds one's own ego harmed, thus the pain. If one focuses on the other, however, one begins to think about the other as a human being, as opposed to a threatening object. What drives someone to do such a thing? What was done to this person to feel the need to do such a thing? What sort of society produces people that need to do these things? If one follows such lines of thought to their end, there can be a flood of compassion that can connect one to the transgressor. It is not always possible to do this, but it is always worth a shot.

So we go from becoming angry and wrathful from being told a lie, which simply perpetuates the evil, to breaking down and feeling the pain behind the genesis of such a lie, hopefully resulting in some sort of reconciliation.

We are conditioned by our culture to take the former action, which in turn reproduces a culture of cruelty unless we expend additional energy to attempt to change trajectory. Is it possible?

Musical Purpose

Most artists simply just create the music that they immediately feel they must express, while some do sit and think about what they want their music to do. Both approaches are completely valid and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

A classic pattern in art and music history observed by historians - and probably a general historic pattern - consists of the oscillation between cerebral and sensational forms of music. With cerebral music, the compositions are more complex and measured, and the audience sits and listens, while both thinking about the music and feeling it on an emotional level, but with more meditative and internally directed emotional processes. Then you have sensational music, which is simpler but has an increased emphasis on movement and sensation. The idea is for the audience to move and connect with each other: the music acts both as a stimulant and a social binding agent; it provides a venue for people to come together. The characteristics of these two types are not mutually exclusive, but the two types each place more emphasis on certain characteristics.

Both general forms of music enjoy certain periods of ascendancy when there is more energy and popularity behind a certain style. Cerebral music becomes exhausted when more and more convoluted works are made by increasingly egotistical and self-absorbed artists that fail to see the meaning behind their music, alienating their audiences, which allows sensational music to regain ascendancy by being refreshingly simple (and simplicity doesn't have to indicate a lack of thinking), direct, energetic, and binding. Sensational music is exhausted in turn as the simplicity degenerates to stupidity and the artists become egotistical and hedonistic, alienating their audiences, which in turn allows cerebral music to regain its ascendancy, celebrated for its triumph over the dumb and apathetic.

There are times when the musical types can be combined. Nietzsche attempted to describe this with his early Birth of Tragedy, which didn't exactly address the music scene as we know it now (how could it?); it addressed the phenomenon of the Greek tragedy as an art form. For Nietzsche, there was a constant struggle for representation between the Apollonian and Dionysian art forms. The Apollonian form consisted of light and form: it concerned the construction of distinct, concrete forms out of chaos, while the Dionysian form consisted of darkness and chaos, of the ecstatic retreat into chaos and intoxication.

Statically, each form should detract from the other: as form is constructed out of chaos, order and understanding follows, but the stresses and overcomplexity generated from order and understanding beckons the return of chaos as a release - the chaos always exists outside of the form, ready for resurgence. Conversely, with darkness and chaos comes a tormenting uncertainty that has to be surmounted for life to continue, providing motivation for a new assemblage.

But for Nietzsche there is a time in which these two forces can be united, and that this was the highest form of art. It had to be for him because he saw himself as a whirling concoction of chaos and order, and saw such a marriage as necessary for the progression of humankind, which probably wasn't far off considering the increasingly unstable society he was part of, a society made all the more unstable from a conflicting tension of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses and their assumed incompatibility.

In Greek tragedy, Nietzsche saw the dialogue and logical narration as the Apollonian impulse, while the actual music in the chorus embodied the Dionysian impulse. I think the motivations behind music itself can be further broken down into the twin impulses, and that this too is a time to think about those motivations.

Everyone has a certain affinity for one of the two impulses, or both. If you create music that indulges both impulses, you are essentially absorbing as many people as you can into your project. If you get as many people of different dispositions communing together around art, or an idea, you get more connections, and more varied connections. And it is always about the people isn't it? About people connecting and belonging?

Besides, now is the time for a little chaos. But not too much! One should think carefully about one's chaos and how much one should indulge in it.

Language Can Be Slippery

My mind has been all over the place, mostly from the accumulated effects of repeated intoxication, sleep deprivation, hyperstimulation, and what have you. Taking a bit of a rest.

But a quick bit on language. Different forms of language have different characteristics. Some words - often visual and expressive words - have this expansionary capacity. They can mean different things to different people but that doesn't seriously hinder communication. They hint at vague feelings that can be agreed upon.

But then a lot of words, a lot of certain kinds of operators, have this binary characteristic. They are like switches, ons and offs. Stuff like "good" and "bad" and "all" and "none." "Some" is a little more squishy.

But the binary words flip a switch, depending on the emotion or level of certainty you are feeling as you say the word. When you try to communicate something in this way you are sort of building this shape, a definitive expression of meaning that the other person is either going to be receptive to, or reject.

So I guess it just helps to remember with this language that one is always constructing something transient. One is trying to grasp the edges of this baffling, complex reality as best as one can at a distinct point in time and space, which could look different to another person (or the same). Everything you attempt to express can be contradicted if someone wants to find a way to do it - this is the point at which someone raises their finger and says, "Ah ah but I don't think everything you attempt to express can be contradicted. More like nothing, or just some." It helps to allow for this in another person as well. One can attach to one's own proprietary lingual shapes and guard them like a monkey standing over a pile of bananas (I don't know), or one can locate truth in something greater than oneself.

That said, I'm going to rest my language for a bit. Yeah probably a day or two. Or a couple of hours, who knows.

Love and Fear

It would be useful to clarify a little these concepts; I use them pretty loosely and plenty of others do too, because it is exceptionally difficult getting to their essence conceptually (well unless supposedly you take a pretty sizable dose of LSD, which Huxley did and he claimed to have apprehended the concept of love very clearly), because they both entail very strong and powerful feelings.

Love feels good, warm, fuzzy. Fear feels bad, cold, icky.Well, that's a start.

But then some interesting things start to happen when you interrogate these concepts.

One can love someone or something that causes fear and pain in many others. Monsters have lovers. And no doubt there are portions of populations who love leaders that maim and kill others. I love my computer and my guitars, but I shudder to think of the forces responsible for such creations. I don't know exactly where the precise components are from, but I do know how iPods are made, and I know that many electronics, including the PS2 I had to have for Christmas when it came out, were made from conflict minerals that can be traced back to the horrific nightmare in the Congo, which is still going. Of course industries have changed their policies in response to these things, but the same basic power structure still exists in the world today. The means of extraction just get moved around.

There's another thing about love. Too much love and there is an eclipsing of the object of love. What do I mean by this? When we love, we tend to want to influence those we love, to make them more like ourselves, but then we come up against limits, a tension where another self exists at a point that is necessarily different from ours, so that, out of love, we back away, showing our respect.

Kant, in his ethical works, delineated love and respect in relationships partially for this reason. In love, one gravitates towards unity, but in pursuing unity, one finds limits in difference, or the fact that there are other feeling and thinking beings that have a different experience of the world. Out of true love, one seeks to reconcile difference by both appealing to a shared humanity and respecting difference in the other by maintaining whatever distance is required by the other. We have these attractive and repulsive forces; we're all held together in a certain way.

Love can also be extended to those persons and things which initially evoke fear. There are many things worthy of love that aren't loved by many. There are also many persons that need love and aren't getting it, which can result in all sorts of negative behaviors which evoke fear, but that can be overcome through love.

Love really does overcome many things, because everyone wants love and everyone wants to belong. Sometimes one can choose what to love and how to love, and sometimes one can't choose at all. Love ties everything together. It holds everything together so that everything sustains itself through its relations with each other. Relational love and the love of a unified idea holds a civilization together, for better or worse. An entity that loves will act to preserve its object of love, and with reciprocation you get life.

Fear on the other hand can be good. Fear can also bring people together (which can be bad), and force one to surmount the object of fear (which can also be bad too). Fear can cause one to preserve oneself and one's loved ones in times of actual danger. The fear of death is a common trait of humanity (and life) to be unified around. Fear too can hold a civilization together, for better or worse.

But too much fear and there is endless division. Fear, when directed towards a person or object, necessarily means an impulse to expulsion, or at least avoidance, which results in division. Fear can spread, meaning division can spread, just as the healing and binding effects of love can spread.

No surprise that love and fear are more complex. All of our concepts seem to branch out and divide the more we gaze into them: endless capillaries of positive and negative relations which extend far beyond our ability to comprehend them as they exist.

How to understand the endless complexities of how we attract and repulse. What is it that holds us together, and breaks us apart? How to understand the movements of energy that make such things possible?

Well, love and fear. The more I think about it the more slippery it gets. One can at least feel.

If one is able, one should carefully choose what one loves and fears. One can't choose what one feels, but one can at least choose whether what one feels is right.

Next

The call for a universal basic income used to be a radical idea, but is now gaining traction as a serious political demand, thanks to its coverage in places like Rolling Stone (along with some other good ideas) and many other political magazines.

As a concrete, commonsense social policy, it is a pretty good place to start, and can be used in tandem with other mechanisms to address some of our deeper problems.

There's reason to be skeptical about reformist efforts at this point. It is hard to imagine a Congress such as ours (which recently voted to curtail unemployment benefits) to seriously consider a universal basic income. But of course that is what struggle is for. Crazier things have been accomplished.

A social and intellectual revolution seems to be happening from the inside out, whose adherents propose everything from dramatic economic and political reform to new conceptions of the cosmos, rationality and intuition, our relations between each other and the environment, and much more. But then that was happening before the worldwide Enlightenment revolutions as well. History tells us that corrupt political and economic elites will do everything to hold onto their power until the metaphorical (and literal) floors come out from under them.

There is this traditional conception of revolution as this violent and sudden rupture in which dramatic change follows (which itself was precipitated by a long gradual chain of incremental changes, both material and ideological, that culminated in an explosion of energy after meeting resistance), but then there is also this emergence of a new conception of revolution in radical politics which envisions revolution as an internal process in which the new grows out of the shell of the old, gradually. This latter possibility is very appealing, as the energetic forces unleashed by a traditional revolution almost always lead to cascades of violence and political repression that can take a long time to dissipate.

The Soviet Union could be said to have taken this latter path (of course after decades of cold war and proxy wars), as the crumbling state lost legitimacy and its political actors were forced to enact dramatic economic reforms, but these were reforms in which a state socialist economy was transformed into a neoliberal capitalist society in which powerful, politically connected actors were able to snap up public utilities and land, and it all took place within the bosom of an already powerful global capitalist regime. What is different about this time is that we are talking about much more radical change taking place, radical change that requires a dramatic transformation of one of the most powerful and tenacious power structures in history, which is also global, and so there is nowhere else to go: no state apparatus to take control of which is geographically safe from the global hegemon, and no populated space to escape to. The global hegemon affects the entire global ecology.

Plus I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege. From my position I see a cultural stasis, but there are cascading changes being wrought throughout the world.  My own economic standing is precarious, but then sizable populations in certain Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and other regions are experiencing a daily hell on earth.

This is certainly a strange time. It is hard to say just what will happen. Just doing my best to observe very carefully and do my little part.

“Everything evolves to wisdom and peace—and stability—through big revolutionary events.”

A radically different conception of the cosmos is in the process of being born. It spreads throughout every discipline: a new schema, a new way of seeing things that illuminates phenomena that previously seemed mysterious. It finds its expression across disciplines, even in the study of the planets.

Not sure it is brand new, but from a Western perspective of history, it is definitely a dramatic shift from Enlightenment conceptions of a mechanistic, ordered universe that has been guiding our thought for centuries (probably more if you follow each thread).

Power and Creation

There is a great joy and ecstasy in the creative process. Countless possibilities branch out wildly from every action; one is filled with excitement and becomes absorbed to the extent of losing oneself. There is a deep satisfaction which resonates long after the act. This is one of several life experiences one can't forget.

There is an equally significant experience of agony that can befall the individual whose natural propensity for creative expansion is artificially curtailed, such as from the influence of an oppressive external authority, or even living in an environment that is creatively impoverished. Woe to the society that experiences the tragedy of universal creative oppression and impoverishment, whose participants experience a universal attenuation of their propensities for creative expansion.

To call this the winter phase of our civilization's life cycle is all too apt. It is a phase in which creative life increasingly approaches a frozen state. There is an end of creative expansion. Day to day life for the cultural mainstream involves getting from one pleasurable sensation to the next, devoid of context or long-term awareness. The cultural mainstream becomes frozen into a familiar pattern, stuck on repeat, while the underground continues to flourish underneath, though it runs on very low amounts of energy. Life continues on weakly under a ceiling, as if under a blanket of snow.

Life always finds a way however. Tupac noted this dynamic in one of his greatest lyrical moments when he imagined a rose growing up through cracked concrete, albeit with damaged petals. Concrete happened to be very apt: a frozen, dead state of matter laid over life, upon which greater material advancement is to be built further upon. Consider the impoverished populations capitalist societies are built on. Nevertheless, life manages to continue its creative path, up through concrete, up through snow, flourishing in cycles that ancients once charted on earth and in planet motions in the skies above. Creative winters give way to creative springs. Strange that life flourishes so vividly on landscapes of decay and disintegration; it seems life has some secret love of assembling structure from chaos.

It was once the case that we followed those most intense, most fierce, whose methods of survival and creative expansion were carved like grooves into our conceptions of what is possible, until there arose those who amassed enough power to freeze their favored state of affairs in place, amassing ever more power on a predictable landscape.

But it could be different. There is a great joy and freedom in limiting one's own creative power so that others may have room to expand, others that can be celebrated and loved, and stepping aside to let life do what it will.

A Foolproof Formula for Empire

Annex pleasure. Export pain.

Good Music

Good music is often produced as an act of healing. One is essentially licking one's wounds; one comes in from the cold seeking it desperately. One feels good producing it and one produces it to feel good. Of course it is going to sound good to someone else too.

Crimes

A totalitarian society seeks to substitute actual reality with its own limited, artificial conception of reality using asymmetrical top-down power and force, producing a population of ghosts.

The greatest crime of this society is to replace that organically generated self with a concocted collective self by force, in an inauthentic attempt to bypass the difficult road to spontaneous collective feeling, or the experience of self knowledge and outer reconciliation that has to occur in each individual to produce a true collective.

The ghosts arise through the mechanical administration of this society: the society still works; it proceeds fully functional through the administration of a rigid and precise code of operations, but underneath such operation sprawls the multitude of selves lying dormant on some ethereal dimension of social potentialities where they remain imprisoned, impotent, and unfulfilled.

Fights

Fights are twin projections that dance.

This dance consists of two intelligences in a dialectic with each other, whose character takes its shape from mutual feedback.

Though this fight imagines itself to be an act of communication, it is ultimately an entanglement of two insulated intelligences communicating with themselves.