Bowl

 

Fulfill

Following the emotional logic, letting it takes its course, one sees that it can unfold much like a symphony, which above all else, pursues its own fulfillment. And to deny this fulfillment, say by redirecting one's thoughts and suppressing it, is to strengthen the grounds for its future return, ever more forceful. 

Whole

Without a working perception of some greater whole, one is liable to become lost, wandering too far in a bad direction. 

Say, desiring too much as a collective, putting everyone to work in the service of that errant desire, and then burning through exploited labor that is not being renewed. The attenuated attention that was required for that mismatched desire is also the attention that short-sightedly obsesses solely over the friction points between the grinding moving parts, and the destruction that results from the bad process as it breaks down, which reinforces and contributes to said destruction.  

Disease

Within the popular narrative, the touching down of European diseases in the New World was seen as some sort of chance calamity: the Europeans happened to be exposed to certain diseases on their side of the pond, which they brought with them, subjecting the indigenous peoples to foreign elements they had not yet built up immunity to. But of course there was much more going on than that. 

The organisms behind the European diseases, as living things, had co-evolved to take on the nature of those peoples, exploding in number and lines of evolution and driven to conquest. Something like a virus evolves in a certain context - and acts in a certain context. The context in this case was an explosion in world trade and the glimmerings of early industrialization. 

There is always the matter of chance in nature, or at least the sort of chance that serves as placeholder for our own limited understanding. But there is also the extent to which human beings (at least certain societies of them), in their explosive expansion, have affected their environments, and how their affected environments have affected them. 

A virus that must subsist deep in the forest is a very different beast from the kind that can ride the material waves of world-industrial flows, coming into contact with many other organisms and picking up the biological tools required to perpetuate and further their flourishing. And the human beings that have been subjected to that very different beast are very different beasts themselves.  

The Separations

Separation is an important theme in political and economic discourse, a theme that is far-reaching and multifaceted. But for now I'd like to just focus on one aspect of separation, the growing separation between national mythology and imagery and daily living consciousness. 

A good and immediate example comes out of the recent blitz of electioneering and the culmination of that process. Watching the glitzy presentations and carefully pruned speeches of the winning liberal factions - which nevertheless come across as half-hearted - one has the vague sense that some terrible nightmare is over, and that we can come back together and begin to heal, and take back control. 

One wonders about the state of consciousness in such a performance: the speaker is obviously gazing out far in the distance at some fanciful construction of words and feelings, smiling at the illustrations in those fleeting moments of the trance, which will surely be swept away after the speaker steps down off of the podium. 

Because on the ground, there is a deep apprehension and uncertainty as the third wave of the virus swells, and the thick hatred that pervades the body politic has failed to clear. 

It takes energy to prop up a given ideal and narrative, and then to struggle in the direction of that ideal, and within the dictates of that narrative, much as struggling against gravity, whereas the energetic flows, the stuff of daily life here in the U.S., are following the course set before them by gravity, which presently flows towards contraction.

One can imagine some sort revelatory moment in which the political and economic machinery is seized, the engines of capital are shut down, and a benevolent directive issues forth: those with too much will liquidate their accumulations, and those with too little will be made whole, and our collective energy use will be vastly drawn down as we turn to appropriate technologies and subsistence lifestyles (aided by the good spoils of modern invention of course), with all collectively relinquishing the death grip on world conquest simultaneously, to move gracefully in the direction of contraction until our lot stabilizes. 

Though of course, such a scenario is certainly absurd and however reasonable it sounds - at least for averting total catastrophe, as we are too far down the pipe at this point - it becomes ever more laughable the more one thinks about it in the face of reality on the ground, and what has tended to happen historically. 

No, the lemon will be squeezed ever harder to juice the dream, and so the forces of aggression and destruction will strengthen and the contraction will come anyway in more forceful fits. Given the vision of this increasingly cloistered ideal - which like a hot wire tightens ones grasp as one undergoes the shock - and the putrefaction of the reality surrounding it, the totalitarian specter becomes much more intelligible. 

To maintain such a separation - that is, a separation that struggles against the interconnectedness of an entity growing at the expense of another - the shrinking half has to be kept faced away from the prospects of its own annihilation. A tall order for a living thing.  

   

Interest as Fuel

Intense interest brings about a consciousness of clarity and comprehension, and so the raw information taken in is much more efficiently processed, organized, comprehended, and importantly, retained. It provides both the light and thrust, and eventually, the cement in matters of information processing and organization. 

This is a general phenomenon, but its nature becomes much more defined given more pointed circumstances, such as in the subjective experience of the neural dysfunction that arises in many after the active phase of COVID passes.

For my own current experience, many reading subjects slip away underneath a haze of brain fog, headache, and fatigue. I focus in on the words, and they fail to move me, or interest me, and their meaning dissolves. 

But somehow, subjects connected to the virus, and related aspects of political economy, awaken in my body and mind memories of their struggle. Their hunger for meaning generated out of these experiences make for a voraciousness that aggressively takes up any connected information, processing it and integrating it into the accumulated whole. 

The sprawling quality of brilliant works can partially be attributed to the inevitable series of wounds pouring forth from a hypersensitive personal constitution as it meets the collective trauma of the modern world - though we only need separate these things in the course of analysis. At a certain point, the voracious interest generated seizes upon a wide array of subjects and experiences, drawing together far flung subjects seemingly unrelated and generating new conceptual and emotional connections. 

In a way, the material and energetic subjects of the information beget the information and knowledge in their wake as they move, and vice versa. The knowledge and information modulate and transform their subjects in turn. 

Reflection

 

Rain and Wind

 Sick again. With what we'll have to wait and see. 

But not a bad weekend to huddle down indoors, and listen to the heavy rains. 

And in between the rains, strong wind, which in the forest can be heard coming in waves, roaring through the trees in the distance, and then suddenly everything erupts into movement, which then calms as the wave can be heard continuing on through the trees further on.  

The Project So Far

There's reason enough not to trust me, or at least the spurious writings that can be found here. My mind has been twisted and bent a number of ways. Trauma and perpetual turbulence of the affect has changed it, constant intense labor has changed it, and the virus has changed it, and it continues to change on account of these things. 

I'm no longer doing philosophy, or political economy in the traditional sense. I don't have a coherent set of spiritual practices and insights to offer besides what has been cobbled together from various sources. Here in my life, there is nowhere stable to sit and think, or to amass stable reams of research, or what have you. 

More and more it is philosophical contemplation and spiritual practice transmuted into basic physical labor, and then the latter transmuted back into the former again. I'm on a pendulum which can only move when the energy is there to move - or crawl - to the other pole, without actually making it to the end. And all of this takes place amidst the constant rumblings of various growing crises, both in the lives of myself and those connected to me and in the world at large. The rumblings are loud and obnoxious and distracting, though living through such crisis, a large part of our identity consists of such crisis.

But still it seems worthwhile to continue to move forward and make sense of it all after the fact. After having jumped out of the window and out into the forest, after the inner psychic fire had gotten so bad, so to speak, the ever-present question - and the ever-present spur to move - is "what now?"

The house was built on top of the wilderness, to cope with the wilderness, and now it is burning down, along with all of the work and energy put in to live a daily life in the house, and now more and more it is the wilderness that remains. Again, what now? 

At present, the only value I can offer is: "let's find out and see." There may eventually be a "there," and getting there takes movement, and movement takes a basic discipline that needs to be maintained for that movement to actually work, and to be appropriate besides. 

On Preservation

 After having the virus, it does seem - as ongoing reports corroborate for others - that my brain has changed. And this has affected my thinking and writing habits. 

This has had various counterbalancing effects, as those sudden and luminous visions and inspirations, and the accompanying ecstasy are gone, along with the motivating passions that helped things along, which has been replaced with unworkable fragments and jumbled ideas, and then at times a dead quiet, at least in the contemplative and artistic realm.

Though as I have mentioned before, this has also been accompanied with a vague and inexplicable drive to continue moving and laboring, and to spend more time outdoors working physically and with the hands - the direction I've wanted in the first place.  

Every day I believe to be healing - which is not without its setbacks - and expect those inner visions and passions to eventually come back. But right now it is cruise control: I am still living off of notes and concepts sketched out months upon months ago, slowly refining and editing them when I have the time and energy. 

This is one reason for the general ethic of preservation. Whether one has a notepad full of incomplete scrawlings or notes, or a root cellar full of pickled and canned vegetables, it all may appear as such a chaotic mess at first glance. Indeed, there are many different forms of hoards, and many of them are a waste of time and energy at best, and socially irresponsible and destructive at worst.  

But then that hard fall, that traumatic illness, or that long hard winter comes along, and one lives off of the surplus for a time and burns it up, and suddenly such practices and collections make a bit more sense. Trying to figure out what preserving practices to make use of - and which neurotic attachments to dispense of - is an interesting question of its own.  

Stuff in Movement

A corollary to the strange circuitous and oscillating rituals that describe late capitalism is the constant senseless circulation of materials and energy, which no longer circulate to perpetuate a functioning organism, but which circulate as echos gradually wobbling further out of orbit, like dead under-manufactured objects moving down a broken dysfunctional conveyor belt, dropping off rhythmically onto the floor.  

I'm thinking here of the pallets upon pallets of groceries which arrive at the store, sit on the shelves, and then are tossed out with the garbage as a means of maintaining a specific social order, or the articles of clothing and cheaply made manufactured goods which appear almost as pure marketing ideas, wafting through and stripping from consumers their currency - like phantom free radicals stripping electrons - which immediately unravel and break the moment they are bought and used, and then end up in a landfill or off the side of a road, or are dumped somewhere down a country road where no one is looking. 

Or the absentee-owned housing stock standing empty for the sake of maintaining a sagging constellation of real estate values, propped up crudely by desperate financial fictions. The land is razed and laid to waste to make room for labyrinths and prisons, designed to pump up ephemeral abstractions with real resources and exploited people, and which then cast out the people and material and energy when they have passed through their short life cycles. 

And this reaches straight down into the individual flailing bourgeois protestant, unwilling to climb down off of the time clock, pointing to their fevered pace of make-work and declaring: "look at all the work I do, and at all that I give you; don't blame me if something goes wrong!" A perception that is not entirely invalid after all, as in our mutual interconnectedness, we have inherited the material accumulations in motion of a whole string of historical crises stretching back thousands of years, and must collectively carry those accumulations as living things which demand to be fed.  

And then this is the general function, this relentless generation and belching out of waste, and the leaking and spraying of organized energy, and this circulation of dying and dead materials, in shorter and shorter intervals, so that the structural integrity of a dead social order can remain, and a shrinking minority can draw power from its unraveling threads. 

Moving in Crisis

If you have a pretty good predictive model, and you have the resources to establish with relative certainty what direction a complex system will move next, then it certainly pays to divert one's energy in the direction that makes the most sense. The more localized and simplified a system in question, the easier as well.

And swift directional movement tends to further restrict possibility and avenues of action. If you're perched up on a ladder that is beginning to fall, the array of options you have available to you becomes ever more sharply constrained the more the ladder proceeds down the arc of its fall. 

The more complexity, and the greater breadth and depth of the system you are attempting to anticipate, the more it pays to cultivate a greater variety of practices in response to its movements, so that you have the resources available to further lean into whatever avenue makes the most sense as things become more kinetic, and the actual avenues of action constrict in unpredictable ways. 

Because what is the cost of moving in the wrong direction at the wrong time? One's resources are sunk into a limited avenue that quickly loses its viability, and then you are left with a deficit in one direction, just as a surplus is needed in another. 

If you have failed to understand the nature of a falling tree, and you've already begun moving and your attention is focused elsewhere, and there is a shadow growing over you, the falling tree picks up steam, the window of action is rapidly narrowing, and the trap is closing shut. 

Collectively, it certainly does help to act in a manner that regularly refrains from setting large masses in motion, but it seems that today, that ship has sailed.

Fires, Floods, And Plagues

What great fires, floods, and plagues all have in common is mass movement. And what a successful and sustained mass movement requires is a wide open field for its advance, or in other words, an environment which serves to fuel and encourage it as it moves. This is a movement that not only requires the directional transfer of a large amount of energy, but also the general conditions needed for the transfer to take place. In this case, these phenomena are the products of systems and systematic action. 

There are systems embedded in the general environment which are acting on the general environment in universal and systematized ways, generating broad forces of transformation that are acting simultaneously. These are systems built to affect a certain constant low level of material perturbations, implied in the perpetual cycles of industrialized production and consumption. 

Further, effects of these perturbations are allowed to accumulate and accelerate. Short term fixes, which don't fundamentally threaten the systems in place, such as the improvement of living habitation, are used to address low level effects of accumulating greenhouse gases, such as heat and climate changes, but which end by producing more of the said gases through various avenues of energy consumption. 

So, in the U.S. West, the increasing heat and drought are drying out the forests. Dehydrated trees have trouble fending off insects, and are more susceptible to disease, and for various other reasons die off, or have large sections of dead material, which either hang there or slough off or break off in the wind and snow. Living trees are full of water, and so dead trees dry out and become tinder. We're talking about a vast oversimplification here, because there are numerous land management and resource extraction processes to take stock of as well, and the incredibly complex environmental transformations set in motion by those processes. 

For example, the same over-energetic and over-agitated human populations which through their ever-growing industrial activities are setting more carbon free, have simultaneously also covered increasing amounts of land with developments of varying natures, penetrated single family housing and the movement of transportation deeper into forested land, extended power infrastructure every which way that is then neglected through political economic processes, over-zealously suppressed natural fire cycles, and so on. 

And in the East, the accumulation of moisture set free by greater heat and energy, and the increasing velocity of the movement of that moisture thanks to increasing ambient temperatures and water temperatures lends to a greater preponderance of flooding and severe wind events. Loosened sediments set free by industrial activity and ecological destruction readily move with the movement of flood waters and accumulate along obstructions put in place by industrial activity and the land and the soil are transformed, and ecosystems are destroyed, and then rinse and repeat. 

A plague on the other hand - and different plagues are a little different and behave a little differently - might at first appear as a different category of force altogether, but in the end it is set loose by the same systematic forces. Because what a plague requires is both the compressing together of a multitude of living things - so that it can continue to jump and sustain itself - and the far and wide movement of those living things, so as to further spread to every corner of the earth. What better vectors are available than the gargantuan industrial flows, which take up the living multitudes, attempting to blend them all together in to a monolithic paste, and then spread that paste to every corner of the earth? 

Now, there is too much material and energy in motion, and it is moving too fast for most living systems to cope, and the industrial system is gasping in panic, belching out those elemental polluting materials leading to greater accumulation and greater movement. The endgame here, the approach of some sort of equilibrium, which contrary to what neoliberal economists will preach, is itself fleeting, is a scenario in which the growing waves of energy set in motion begin to chew into the regular functioning of industry itself. 

Fire Sun

 

Ghostly Rituals

Capitalism as a set of perpetuated and reenacted rituals becomes more apparent through the ongoing development of high technology, and the life quality changes emanating from that development. The rituals, beginning as visceral sets of practices based upon necessity, begin to appear as machines as the reality drifts from their ongoing cycles, and the machines are artificially shored up and fortified, running in strict repetitions and unable to regenerate themselves, but living on with the help of regular maintenance from external powers. 

The strange artificial constrictions of the flow of data say, or the heart-rending sprawls of empty housing, kept as dragon-treasure by absentee owners, the speculated-upon oil reserves taken out of circulation, or the overflowing food commodities which go to the landfill as a matter of maintaining the integrity of market distribution, all have underneath them mechanisms that can be read as the echoes of provisional social convention, their shapes maintained with increasing energy costs juiced out of a growing class of precariat, through the machinations of the super rich, who are increasingly the only ones to benefit from them.   

Protocol

The Virus, because of its silent, invisible, chaotic, and porous movements, can be anywhere at any time, undetected, and its effects only become known after it is too late, after one is infected and the dice are rolled to determine one's fate. 

Protocols to deal with The Virus then take the form of a continually revised ritual, built up upon the less stringent cleanliness rituals unfolding out of germ theory and associated knowledge, experience, and practice. 

It is a ritual that has become abstracted from the particular and then universalized, and has to be adhered to out of faith, as one can't respond to the threat with a simple exercise of the senses by situation, as the threat makes its appearance. One has trust in the protocol as a matter of daily operation.  

This is a faith that is placed in a whole set of institutions and an ever-evolving body of knowledge and practice, which are interpenetrated with technologies of perception and research which further the knowledge and practice that at the same time produce them. And these technologies of perception and research are embodied in concentrated resources which require concentrated disciplines to marshal them, so that their direct interface with the whole population on a daily basis is impossible. 

Which as it happens works quite well in isolation, and the faith is well-placed in theory. But it is knowledge and practice which must be perpetually renewed with both changing knowledge and practice and the underlying reality itself, and the institutions and individuals doing the work must be working in good faith and trustworthy.  

Of course as an abstracted and universalized protocol whose power to compel rests upon the health of the institutions invoking it, its efficacy can be damaged by forces of destruction well separate from its locally generated truth. The health of the institutions can be damaged by forces quite remote and seemingly unrelated, such as concentrations of wealth, political betrayal, forces of social destruction set loose by propaganda and social manipulation, and so on. 

Small wonder that The Virus has flared up ferociously and perpetually in the United States in particular, where, like lights flickering on and off as the distant power station struggles, the various collective protocols wink on and off in their efficacy and cohesion, ultimately destroying continuity, and accelerating those centrifugal forces of separation. 

Yes, The Virus is quite real, I can attest to that. And the protocol is sensible and works. But The Virus itself was given wings by the massive and constantly growing and intensifying industrial processes bound up with the universal institutions of governance, which no longer have the conviction in their voices when they say, "trust us." Now, when an entity like the U.S. nation or a similar imperial industrial nation - at least as a cohesive collective phenomenon - merely moves, say to administer itself or tend to its surroundings, it spreads crisis in many forms and many levels. Viruses in many senses pour forth from its exhalations. It is an open question whether it really wants to "cure" itself.   

Smoke Day

The doors and windows are shut tight against the smoke moving into the canyon from the west. Bunkered down and taking refuge. Ah! The perfect day to sit down and get caught up on writing about the perpetual fires, physical and otherwise.  

Morning Spray

 

I've Got The Fear

To simply fear an external object or circumstance is very different from the all-encompassing spiritual dread and fear that Hunter S. Thompson liked to describe using the lens of a drug trip going bad. 

The Fear, correctly capitalized and formalized, was something permeating and overpowering one's basic experience. It was no longer the temporary attack or avoidance of a given limited threat, but the imminent quality of the entire landscape, experienced as rising up within one's own self, inescapable, experienced itself as a sort of End - however drug-induced that end might be. 

One can glimpse signs of such a thing in the political and cultural landscape of the United States, the failed and failing state, lurching with a great shadow cast downward and downslope like a great doomed tree, its back cracking against growing winds. 

There are many totalizing experiences and perceptions here, whether you want to describe them with a capital Fear, Anger, Dread, Rage, Anguish, or what have you, and you see them in the daily discourse. And the mundane daily administrative cycles stop and start, stricken with existential questions of life and death, with the many classes and identities cracking and folding under each other as they seize up together under the failing machinery. 

But it doesn't matter how huge the capital Distress may be, it must still be localized and navigable, at least if one cares to continue to persist in this world.  

Pain Signal

It isn't until one directly buys - or better yet, crafts - a tool, and then uses that tool regularly to maintain one's well-being, when the bond is fully formed and one feels the pain of any sort of damage to that tool. To artificially strike up this type of bond for someone who has not claimed a direct spiritual ownership or at least stewardship of the tool - or more broadly resource - it is usually the case that some sort of social sanction or application of force is required, to forcefully stimulate the pain and fear of damage and degradation.  

Scaling this out, the way we've chosen to structure ownership and localized control, with all of the class and ownership fragmentation that that entails, is at the same time a means for fragmenting the movement of perception and pain itself. A class rests atop the other, and directs its activity for its own benefit, while feeling nothing of its pain. 

Getting Stuck

In specificity is a powerful tool for focusing energy and discerning local energy flows, so that one can harmonize one's efforts with them. But without a mechanism to release and relinquish focus, and concentrate somewhere else, a paralysis and a fading of vision can happen. 

Anecdotally, I would never have thought to look for worms in compacted and hard soil, in the course of breaking up that hard soil by hand for future planting and drainage. And sure enough there they were, nestled in the rock-like clods. And of course they were! They were taking refuge there. 

Ideology and Perception

At a certain point of development, where you are seeing administrative states and money systems, which point to an indication of a certain amount of distance, diversity, and complexity and integration of system organization, ideology becomes more important to the global governance of such connected systems.   

Local conditions like ecosystem behaviors, day and night and weather cycles, and the many cultural practices across varying geographies could overwhelm a large enough and integrated enough state of social organization. 

So you see much more energy going into the production and maintenance of constitutive ideologies, which are to compress local and granular motivations and operations into a unity which nevertheless allows for autonomous governance of its lower systems which are to interface with localities. 

The production and maintenance of ideology then is both a fraught and precious thing, requiring immense responsibility to coordinate systems, systems that must be directly involved in the coding of their own functions in relation to the whole. Witness the calcification of ideology today: where its boundaries are cynically and artificially maintained to divert resources around the constitutive elements it is to govern. 

Beyond the sheer tomb-like walls of frozen ideology, further collective analysis drops away into the mysterious abyss, as desperate negotiations are carried out within the desiccated fields behind its walls. 

Substance Abuse

Like political and economic systems, the sacred and profane sorting pile - especially if one can afford to contrast that sorting pile with other sorting piles across societies - can tell quite a bit about the underlying social structures and their function.  

Presently I'm thinking of mind altering substances, which as plenty of subcultures and indigenous communities have discovered across time, can offer experiential gifts and glimpses into altered consciousness, which have lasting and beneficial effects.

Whole spiritual traditions and cultures have sprung up around substances such as cannabis, peyote, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and all the rest, while authorities like the U.S. government pen those things into a spiteful "controlled" substance list and throw people into jail or kill them over the circulation of those things.

The whole consciousness of prohibition, with its self-righteous assurance that it is clearing the ground for moral correctness, fails to detect that it is rooted in a reaction to a historically and culturally specific social artifice which has been built up around the substance, and whose structure is shaped by its own distinct interactions with that substance and the practices and meanings that form as a result. Further, the reaction mirrors such structures in its character. As such, this consciousness is imperial; it posits its own historical and limited formation as absolute and timeless.

Even the substance of alcohol, with its nationwide legality and limited restrictions, betrays a troubled social structure, which in accordance with its nature, takes the alcohol up into itself and generates practices specific to the nature of that structure.

Today alcohol is mass produced for instant, convenient, and entertaining consumption. In the modern world, alcohol can be a welcome lubricant for social and cultural activity. Like one guns it on ice, or in deep snow or sand, alcohol can give that push to engage in certain activities with a required threshold of confidence or passion, such as social interaction or music and dance, smoothing over various frictions and obstacles. 

Without a doubt, alcohol can bestow great pleasures and gifts in certain circumstances. And just as one guns it on ice, or deep snow, or sand, one can either escape those barriers or one can, under prolonged and sustained spinning, lose traction or dig deeper ruts and lose control. Prolonged and intensified usage of alcohol converts from vehicle into trap.

This narrative has a tendency of positing the individual as skilled or unskilled user or abuser of a substance, whereas the environmental circumstances and social and cultural location of the individual can have just as much or greater of an influence on the outcome. Say, overworked, underpaid, and stressed individuals turning to alcohol as self-medication, and in their social alienation and daily encounters with crude commodification, experience such solutions bereft of social support and moderation, with their social afflictions deepening as the oscillating cycles of addiction and withdrawal deepen. The kind and benevolent authorities then look tenderly upon these lost souls, and think, ah we must set them right! 

Much as the farmer gazes upon his crumbling and desiccated soils whose living systems are nuked with herbicides and pesticides, which are blowing away in the wind, and thinks, "this is terrible!" and decides that better herbicides and pesticides are needed, and that the eroded slopes must be buttressed with tractor work, or else the land holdings are to be expanded or sold to another sucker. 

To put it more generally, the tendency of the modern industrial method is to exert energy to search out avenues of progression, and then increase energy to exploit those avenues more intensely at an ever-increasing scale, until those avenues are exhausted, and then other avenues are sought out. The whole phenomenon of substance abuse bears this pattern out.

Contrast this forceful proliferation and manufacture of alcohol products and the deepening of "substance abuse" ruts - and the concomitant prohibition backlashes - with indigenous forms of alcohol production, in which yeast spirits are carefully sought out in brewing rituals, and brews are revered and sung to, and the experiences with the brews are carefully administered and surrounded with care and awe. 

Not that it is the case that systems such as these can't go bad themselves, but certainly, there are other ways. 

Good Crisis Bad Crisis

It is curious that the word "crisis" comes from ancient Greek discussions of disease, in which an important and decisive turning point is signified, and conditions change either for the better or for the worse. A judgment comes about, and beyond that, there is recovery or ruin. 

Today the connotation of the word- at least publicly - is mostly bad, and we have before us a procession of so-called crises which subsequently weaken our collective constitution, with each successive crisis leading to a quality of life perceived as headed for the worse for most people. And systems are altered in crises - or weakened in this case - and various processes of destruction are set into motion, all of which precipitate future crises. 

But then of course there are people speaking of opportunity surreptitiously, and then the billionaires are waiting on the wing, looking to exert leverage on the opening spaces, and reshape what has become hot and malleable, and expand their power. Here in the United States crisis appears as a stairway down into hell, tilted downward so that our collective muscles weaken and burn away as we struggle to climb back upward.  

But what is in the character of a crisis that leads to either a recovery or a ruin? 

I confess to being ignorant of the particulars of the drama in which a disease develops and then resolves in a biological system, or causes it to collapse altogether. But looking at all kinds of crises, their natures, and their courses, we could abstract a certain pattern and try to make sense of that. 

A crisis seems to occur when a given system loses its homeostatic balance, such as in the case of a virus-caused disease when the virus is hijacking various production centers towards its own ends, draining power from the maintenance of the body's continuity, and the body turns to fighting off the virus, possibly damaging itself, and which reverts to homeostasis after the virus is banished and the body undergoes what repairs it requires. 

The systems charged with restoring homeostasis must be robust enough, and the conditions must be right for those systems to acquire the energy and resources needed to both reverse the bad direction and replace what energy and resources were lost in the process. 

More simply, if you trip while walking, you have to have the muscle power available to compensate for that bad acceleration, and hopefully the acceleration is not severe enough, or the subsequent compensations are not enough to prevent the body falling altogether and changing its state. Sometimes you go right down, and sometimes you lurch one way, only to lose more balance on the first compensation and the falling motion increases and the second compensation is not enough to right the previous wrong, and then you go down. And so on. 

That last illustration consisted of a short chain of crises in which the homeostasis of a body in balance was strained further and further with each subsequent crisis, until no more compensation was possible and the fall became inevitable. 

So it is with a living thing that dies. All of the elements of that thing's organization weaken over time, and eventually conditions continue to deteriorate until something like a major organ seizes up, and motion within the body ceases, and there is not enough power available to take the given maintenance and replace what was lost, and the body surrenders to gravity and entropy and its constitutive elements return to the earth, to furnish materials for the next growing state of organization. 

One way to compensate for a loss of balance is to further integrate into the environment, mastering its flows so as to maximize, or at least harmonize one's collection of energy in it, which requires a constricting focus of energy in one direction. Another way is to alter or transform the systems that are to be integrated into the environment, which could consist of a broader application of focused energy across systems. 

In the case of the US empire, constant and aggressive expansion is the natural homeostatic state, so that each of its constituents, as they further specialize and integrate, drive towards efficiency and acceleration to constantly direct resources into accumulation. 

The problem with this pattern is that the homeostasis itself is a sort of crisis, in which an organism, to avoid collapsing upon itself, is driven to expand ever outward, in constant motion to stave off its collapse inwards, until it comes up against natural and mathematical limits. 

The whole thing must transform to avert an ultimately terminal crisis, but currently all of its constituents are in a state of separation, struggling against each other, competing for concentrating resources to focus energy to further integrate and navigate the environment within their own pathways, starving the higher level governing systems of the energy needed to make large scale changes. 

You're either the crisis, or you're living amongst systems in crisis, or you're living within a crisis. And well, really its a little bit of everything. And depending on the power you have, and the power your organizations have, you can navigate those crises in certain ways. Until you can't. 

Glacier

 

Here

Not a whole lot of time and - more importantly - energy to write. That hole is still there, yet there is much that is slowly and vaguely coalescing, which eventually needs to be articulated, or else my head very well may burst. All in good time. 

Stump

But Economies of Scale!

Consolidation and concentration as social and economic phenomena can have wildly diverging effects, depending on where those phenomena emanate from. As a form of collective rationalization, the aim is to systematize and centralize resources, and thus cut down on the time and energy expended on dispersed utilities. For example, a group of laborers establishing a central location of communal tools, so that members can quickly and easily locate the tools and not travel so far, or waste so much time to pick out and find them. And such a project can be undertaken with consent of the group, and a vigor and enthusiasm for the labor remains. 

However, take a number of aggressive consolidating and concentrating economic powers, which are engaging in hostile takeovers of smaller units and competing entities, and imposing their own systems of rationalization and automation on the conquered parties. In this activity there develops a growing resistance to the conquering party's "way of being" and a deadening of vigor and enthusiasm for the work. 

Difficult forces to quantify with modern economics, certainly, but they are forces that have real and powerful accumulating effects. 

Centrifuge

It could be read into the history of late Roman decline that there was a centrifugal process of delamination, in which the body politic split into multiple hostile factions, each successively deploying an accumulation of military elements to violently seize power and hold the center, which continued on in waves as the body politic thinned and weakened. The ambitious looked to embody the ruler, and so each faction moved forth to temporarily hold that embodiment. 

Today, we can look at the gaudy opulence of demagogues and dictators and see reflected in them a desire to mimic the wealthy. Yes they are looking to impose a sort of order in an increasingly unstable regime,  but also simultaneously they are looking to lord over the collective proceeds of a thinning and disintegrating society and live with opulence and extravagance, mimicking their "betters," as their betters did with each successive generation of topping the others' wealth.  

Levers of Power

Say you are to go out hunting. The modern rifle is a powerful tool taken for granted by those fortunate to be able to acquire one. From a far distance, one can take down even large and powerful animals in large groups, and the sudden thunderclap and inexplicably dropped animal causes the others to flee in terror, leaving the kill to be safely processed. The prospects for self-reliance here are obvious: with some skill and patience, one can go out alone and be quite successful at low risk. 

But now to go out with a spear, or even a bow, and the difficulty and risks go up pretty quickly. One has to get much closer to large, powerful animals, and risk massive or fatal physical injury. One's frailty is cast in stark relief. The more one relies on oneself in this context, the more dangerous and fraught the situation becomes. 

The rifle then exhudes incredible power, but that power comes from a whole world of coordinated production. Say, the raw materials, the lumber, the steel, the oil, the gunpowder, the lead, and all of the worlds of extraction, refining, and manufacturing implied by those materials, and then the supply chains and circuits of distribution delivering them into one's hands, all of which are powered by a vast, sprawling, and constant stream of human labor. 

Further there is the sprawling history of invention and design, which ensures that that incredible emission of energy proceeds forward towards one's target, and not backwards and into one's face. 

One's self-reliance and security hinges upon the steady flow of the industrial world. 

The self-contained and ready-made rifle springs magically out of the packaging box, ready to do one's bidding. Perhaps after one has worked hard to earn the money to buy it, or perhaps not. But this alienable property of the rifle commodity conceals a vast separation from the original points of extraction and assembly. 

With a simple wooden tool on the other hand, one splits it off of the fallen tree, witnessing all of the tragedy of a felled great organism, and the destruction of a home: birds spring from their nests and colonies of ants and beetles scurry from the hollows within the split wood. The lumber is literally pried and wrenched from the earth, but this terrible tragedy ultimately nourishes oneself and one's community. 

Such a connection still exists in the genesis of the rifle, but to the perception and the individual consciousness, the connection has exploded to points far beyond possible detection in one's waking life, out to faraway lands and processes one will never visit or witness, and so all the terribleness and preciousness of such a tragedy disappears from view, and its spiritual effects wane. 

Amidst the stream of a well-advanced society, this magical power appears suddenly to those privileged its access, free of those binding fibers in which it was torn from the earth and from human labor. To the curious and the conscientious, gratefulness for such power may still exist, but to many others, they may go on with their own personal endeavors with not a thought to the origin of such power, and further ascend on the phantom backs of raw material and cheap coordinated labor.  

This is one way in which the elite becomes separated from the earth. 

Evil Elites Incompetent Elites

The concepts of evil and incompetence are both ways to compress linguistically what are probably both sprawling branches of the same complex social phenomena, that is if we are talking about the role of ruling elites in a complex industrial society. 

The elites are a class, or a gradient of interlocking classes with differentials of disposable power, which support each other and share the same interests, and within that combined class are certainly individuals with a chillingly impoverished moral code and an equally chilling competence to put that impoverishment to work, and then individuals who may mean well but who are stunningly hapless and bumbling, and who were bequeathed with far too much power without justification, and then everything in between.

We could talk about the corrupting effects of unearned and inherited power, in which individuals are born with silver spoon in mouth, and who go through life commanding and expecting those commands to follow through, and who never learn to put anything in motion themselves, and then those ambitious ones who in their desire to mimic the master, climb their way up the ranks with deft skills. Or say those individuals who inherit various skills passed down in families or who are taken under the wing of powerful individuals and who are quite talented and capable despite being given the leg up. And so on. 

And there is the matter of making use of evil to navigate social systems and mechanisms in tatters after decades of mismanagement and misuse, and then a basic incompetence and failure of care and attention that arises in a climate of spiritual desolation after the systematic exercising of evil in collective affairs, and then these forces beget each other and reproduce each other. 

There is also the movement of energy to take stock of. If we conceptualize evil as a sort of process of selfish, harmful, and morally reprehensible living, which necessarily takes place amidst a backdrop of social disintegration, we may very well be seeing an incredible competence concentrated in selfish and antisocial elite actions, a narrow competence which nevertheless sucks the oxygen out of the room, living little time or energy left for maintaining everything else, which manifests and is perceived as incompetence, and yes it all gets very complicated very fast. 

What we do see is that evil and incompetent governance may persist outwards, so long as there are estranged, alienated, and dehumanized foreign populations to exploit, whether abroad or domestically, but then these circles of destruction necessarily proceed inwards as the resources in the periphery are depleted or become too unstable, or release forces of destruction larger or more penetrating than can be kept away and insulated from the imperial core. And such a mode of governance, welded into place as a matter of course, cannot easily be reversed. 

In other words, the series of political and economic shocks which have been spraying forth in the COVID era are less about the absolute reprehensibility of elite conduct. They've been behaving this way for a long time. The real shock consists in their willingness to saw away at their own bases, their own foundations, as the cycles of destruction reach home in the imperial core. 

There have been people disappearing in vans and scurrying under the leering eyes of aerial drones for quite some time. It's just been happening under peripheral dictators, and out far away in the deserts of the Middle East and the borderlands. And there have been all sorts of security portfolios and surveilling profiles on disliked members of  the social order. Activists are the latest subgroup in a procession of targets, labeled and coded in terms that were the products of political labor to achieve public acquiescence, such as "terrorist," "criminal," "thug," "gangmember," etc. 

Pharmaceutical businesses have been profiting off of abject misery and desperation for ages, and high finance has worked to break down, exploit, and then re-consolidate sectors of society in its own image, sectors disintegrating from its own actions. I could go on. 

But amazingly, the ruling elite are now hacking away at that intricate infrastructure of complicity it has struck up with lower classes for centuries, a complicity that even the slaveholders knew to shore up to buttress off those massive forces of social erosion set forth by their brutality and inhumanity, such as with poor whites and racist ideology. Or similarly, the minor concessions given to the working class by capital to stave off communism. Don't get me wrong, those techniques are still well in effect, but the classes that they extend to are narrowing rapidly, as more and more swathes of the middle and lower classes are thrown to the wood chipper. 

Soon enough, the ruling elite will run out of even that inner core insulating material too. Long ago they found that building prisons, coding "criminals," and then locking them up served to wipe out all of that complicated human relationality and answer those hard questions of historical harm, justice, and distribution of human equity. It took all of the work and energy out of seeing and recognizing others, so that they could get back to their hard work of exploiting in new and exciting ways. For their narrow and selfish purposes, this process worked quite well. 

It may be that the nature of the elite class, and questions of their evil and competence in the context of a disintegrating society are very complex subjects. But as the circles of destruction reach further into the imperial core, and eat into the heart of the imperium itself, why shouldn't the simplifying principle of imprisonment and or/destruction be turned to them? 

Another Apology

It seems as though I've been most prolific in the sub-genre: "Sorry not doing a whole lot of writing right now and here's why." Most of the writing has been about not writing. 

But I'm just still not quite right. There is an apprehension in sitting down to write because there seems to be a hole in my head or something. I go to think and those luminous pathways inexplicably terminate, like roads wiped out by midnight storms. And that's when I have the time and energy to even sit down and write, when I'm not very busy working and then physically recovering, or running around trying to keep my life from going sideways.   

They say the virus can cause brain damage, though I'm not entirely sure what's going on. 

There is definitely something going on. The heat especially brings it out: out of breath a little easier, with a stressed pulse that takes time to calm down again, and the body has trouble regulating temperature. Ah, and the intense fatigue. I could go on. 

Ironically, in the aftermath of the virus, I seem to be unwillingly pushed further in the direction of pursuing a lifestyle I really do believe in. This is a push against inertia, a past life, against constant meditation on abstractions and thoughts. Not that those are bad things, but too much set against other possibly productive avenues...

I sit at the computer, waiting for a vision, and become restless, driven outside to meander, observe, and perhaps do some gardening or light forest work. The birds are here, and the bugs are here. It is hot outside. And the trees sit motionless, waiting for a mountain breeze. 

But writing does still do some important processing work that would be better off done. It is a valuable meditation. I have plenty of material backed up in the queue that needs extrapolation, and I sit, and think, and instead of receiving vision, there arises a dull ache somewhere between the temples. At least I still have it in me to read in the morning. 

Ah well, in time. 

Elite

Recently I've been going on and on about what elites are doing wrong, and much of it might be read as an instruction manual on how to do it better. Am I secretly a frustrated imperialist?

If my past writings are any indication, an intensely hierarchical, brutally stratified society ruled by fluctuating gradients and directions of universal exploitation, and which needs to constantly expand and incorporate other societies into itself as subordinate, is not exactly my idea of right living. 

But at this point I am beyond contempt. We have reached the point at which fair judgments - however harsh - threaten to melt down and dissolve into the air. Now it is only disbelief, and desolation. There is no energy to rouse the snarled lip, only so much for a blank stare. The faith, the trust, is completely gone. I have my own ideas for productive directions, which will continue to be fleshed out here, but that is not for them. 

No, what I wanted to show here is that even if you wanted to continue on a project of total domination, with a boot on the face of the marginalized and periphery forever - which itself comes with serious problems posed for longevity I might add, setting aside any sort of moral or ethical concern, or any sort of standard of justice - then you would have to do a lot more than what our sorry crop of "leaders" are doing now. By their own standards of success, they are lost. 

But that is how things are now, on a very large scale. The most pressing facts assert themselves: like fireworks in the sky, the booms and flashes assault one's ears and eyes, and demand attention. World affairs have been quite astonishing, and the United States especially is a spectacular wreckage unfolding in slow motion. One has to become reconciled with the fact that what we are collectively reproducing is not production, but destruction, and a whole other set of implications follows from this. 

Grind

I'd like to make a correction and a further technical distinction: you don't generally need a powered grinder to sharpen a blade. Sharpening any sort of blade is not usually intensive if the blade isn't terribly damaged. You might possibly use a file to get the edge back if it is dull enough, and then some sort of honing surface like a whetstone, going from coarse to fine, depending on how involved you want to get. 

But if a blade is badly damaged, or the bevel needs to be reshaped, then you are talking about a greater amount of abrasive work in order to remove enough material to really make a difference, which is where a powered grinder comes in. If the reshaping work is extensive enough, the grinder will be working on the blade for long enough to put it in danger of overheating, and losing its temper. 

Initially this distinction sounded sort of pedantic to me, but for our purposes it might actually be kind of useful. Because in successive generations, the ruling elites of the West, and especially American elites, have become less and less competent at basic maintenance. To maintain the integrity of something, you have to have a broader understanding of the nature of that thing and the nature of that thing's relation to the elemental forces of creation and destruction, and you have to put in some time and energy perhaps doing things that you don't want to do, so that the thing continues on to last for some time to come. 

To go back to the simplicity of our metaphor, it is not a whole lot of fun sharpening a blade, at least as much as it is cutting with it. The tool is made to cut, and it feels as if one is moving forward while cutting with it, while stopping to sharpen the blade feels like a chore, like one is stopping in place, or even moving backwards and losing time. But it is something to keep in mind to regularly do, and working with a dull blade is dangerous besides, as it takes more force to cut with, and it can slip. And to neglect the blade for a long time is to impose a quality change of labor: if the blade gets dull enough, it takes much more work to recondition it. 

Our ruling elite want to go full bore with the exploitation part, and take and take without giving part of themselves to maintain the integrity of the very trough they feed at. Past a certain point, and after enough damage is done, the repair work becomes much more traumatic, and fraught. 

Losing Temper

There is a double meaning here. Yes one loses one's temper and there is a quality change in consciousness, one "sees red" and "all bets are off" and such and such. This is certainly applicable, but what I'm more interested in is "temper" in the metallurgical sense. 

They say to be careful using a powered grinder to sharpen a blade, as the grinder will make the blade very hot. If it gets hot enough, and turns a bluish color - or whatever hue depending on the metal being worked - then whoop, you screwed the pooch on that one. The blade has lost its temper, and will not be as strong as it once was, at least unless it is reforged or something like that. 

Keeping this image in mind, it is remarkable to gaze upon the social and political climate today and then to watch the ruling classes continue on in their clueless, fumbling, and exploitative way, taking their incredible power for granted and doubling down on their destructive paths. The hubris! 

They've taken too much, and continue to take too much, and stomp their flocks of livestock into the dirt, and now the resent is irreconcilable to the point in which mere difference - in opinion and perspective - takes the form of a deadly insult. What trust, what patience was left, has gone. Any prospect of collective coordination or problem-solving is gone too. 

You see this in the proud defiance of people refusing to acknowledge the virus and either manage it collectively or manage their own person, refusing masks and the like. In their case to stand tall and to stand with dignity is to further spread death and economic destruction. For the wretched of the earth, who do the high and mighty scientists and epidemiologists think they are to tell them what to do and what to fear?

And on the other side of that coin is a defiance against continued exploitation, against landlords and monopolists and racist cops. Now every next slight can set off an explosion of public indignation and rebellion, as it should. 

The virus rages, far and wide, and the attack dogs are loosed: the cops lose themselves in self-righteous frenzy and grind down the already downtrodden, and the landlords push for their eviction courts to juice the stone, and the body politic rages back in fury and it all gets hotter. 

The fools! The temper won't be back until a lot of this simply burns down. By their own measures of success, the ruling elite, in their selfishness and narrowness and depravity, prevail only at building higher their own funeral pyres. 

Turn This Thing Around!

The evolution of logging in the Pacific Northwest is one good way to illustrate the double-edged nature of the movements of capital. 

Through decades of political and economic struggle, the changing political economy has resulted in a swarm of consolidating financial entities, many of which are private equity outfits, which snap up a portfolio of forested lands, trucking and heavy equipment companies, mills, and etc., and then retool them for shorter growing cycles to turn over a quicker profit. 

Proceeds are bled away from the logging towns, certain milling and processing operations are outsourced, and the machinery itself is reconfigured to process smaller logs, as the trees are cut down at a younger age, in smaller sizes, and at a greater rate to supply existing ratios of harvested lumber. And these industrial-sized reconfigurations are expensive and time consuming, and god forbid if stocks are to take a hit. 

We may say to ourselves, look we not only need to plant new trees, but let older trees continue to grow as it is the older forests which are the more effective carbon sequestration mechanisms. But that aspiration exists in tandem with the logging industry across great swathes of forested land, and not to mention a ton of other connected industries and interests, which with their strangleholds on both localities and national politics, get to enjoy huge swathes of labor as their hostages. 

And so then to interfere with this runaway industry is to come up against a whole army of connected interests, much of which are tied to the health of the communities in their thrall. 

So in one sense, you have this explosive dynamism in which there is permanent revolution of the processes of production, in which capital is constantly moving back on itself in stops and starts, destroying itself, and reinventing itself to grind on and continue its accumulation. 

But then in another sense, you have this long, complex, and massive chain of interdependent links which all move with each other, whose momentum and directionality are difficult to influence in a pointed and intentional way. 

Control is an illusion in this case, masking a struggle to shape the craterscapes left smoldering by the head of capital as it burns through its fields of exploitation, in accordance with the path of least resistance. For those insisting we need to bring capital back to heel, an image of grabbing hold of a runaway fishing line which has been seized by a whale comes to mind. It may be more realistic for that line to break, which itself is a catastrophe. 

Advancing Atomization

There has been a lot of talk about the new isolation and atomization caused by the spread of the virus, and now we'll all be suspended and connected in the new techno dystopia, like some sort of exploitative amniotic fluid. A lot of seemingly novel and frightening trends are going to be laid at the feet of the virus as sole determinant of course, but it is important to continue to conceptualize the virus as emerging within a set of powerful historical forces - forces which made possible the emergence in the first place - that will continue in the direction they will, influenced by the virus certainly but not exactly materializing out of it either. 

The virus, like all other concentrated and readily-identifiable crises, will be treated like the visiting UFO, that Other par excellence, which through the use of its mysterious and unknowable powers, made a flying leap across the cold vacuum of space which separates us from a place far away that really has nothing to do with us. So don't think about it too much! At least in terms of its relation to us.

Anyway, atomization and isolation were already winking into view well before the virus, through fragile lines of spurious authentic contact and relationships, dislocation, dissolution of communities, intensifying inequality and economic precariousness, collapse of public purpose and institutional legitimacy and so on. 

It is the nature of a broad atomization that leads to the swiss-cheesing of major corporate and state powers, through collectively sanctioned social constructs and forces like vertical integrated financial entities and private equity, and these perforated powers do things like fuck up disaster mitigation, such as with an encroaching pandemic. 

So we've flooded our public sphere with hot lava. And we can attempt to stay aloft - or aloof - within the techno dystopia, a particularly rickety bridge for these purposes, seeing as how its ongoing construction is influenced by said historical forces. 

Fear of the Mimic

Much concentration of power is predicated on the fear of mimicry: the other is perceived to want what one has, so one has to take even more so that the other never has the opportunity to get it. But here there is an "isness" to power, and the mimicry is already done. The fear of mimicry reproduces the mimicry itself, because now the other who is feared and suppressed must get back on top. The credit of power is at once a debit on its future lack. 

Commodity

Herbal medicine is actually quite a sophisticated, deep, and powerful discipline. Though in the popular imagination its products are either held up as mysterious silver bullets on the one hand or useless bits of superstitious refuse on the other. 

There are complicated historical reasons for this, but part of the blame can go to the nature of the commodity. With its remote center of opaque production, the alienable medium of the commodity can be used to camouflage its nature. Its alienable properties can be transferred and separated from the original process of production, using money as both the cutting and binding agent, severing accountability in the process, at least as long as that accountability can be waved away with good PR. 

Because how is one to say that one was cheated if one has gotten something that appears to observers as a useful and vital thing? Especially if those observers are in on the take, and daily activity is too complex and historically volatile for anyone to adopt a strong, agreeable and enforceable standard. 

So one may receive a lifeless bag of desiccated plant dust, which at one point may have been part of a vital and healing organism, and which is promoted as such by boosters who may or may not know better. And then this exchange can occur with all sorts of different products. 

At this point in evolution, the commodity can be made to appear as an outstretched hand of mutual aid, when really it is the hand that is pushing one downward, so that its master can ascend on one's back and on one's alienable social energy.   

Waste Avenues And Dead Ends

Speaking of shit, analysis of the industrial waste flows can yield some interesting insights into the general shape and passage of energy usage in the greater society. 

So many energy and waste flows appear as simple linear progressions, in which energy in an organized and usable form is taken in, used up and processed, and then passed along outwards as waste energy to do what it will as an externality. 

We see a dramatic iteration of this pattern in Marx's contrast of the C-M-C circuit, in which there is a circular flow of commodities facilitated by money as joinery, with the M-C-M circuit, in which, through the commodity as joinery, there is a steady accumulation of the money element. Now, in the process of that accumulation, there occurs a polarization in which the steady accrual of highly organized and beneficial energy concentrates among the owners of capital, and then the unwanted and often damaging waste flows are passed downstream and accrue among the dispossessed and what is considered the "background" environment.  

What makes the pattern so interesting is that it occurs throughout human history, and in unsustainable societies in particular, and that it is not limited to the operations of capital, though analysis of capital is one way to extrude the contours of this pattern and bring the pattern's form into relief. 

We could take the energy and waste flows of massive agricultural operations and even domestic cycles of production as good examples of this general pattern. 

What we generally see with large agricultural operations are large masses of homogeneous livestock and plantlife concentrated and managed in a single space, and then the waste flows from those operations are then concentrated and massive and must be managed in turn. 

A single cow pie contains some of the nutrients needed for the soil to replenish some of the grass removed through eating, and so the waste is broken down by insects and microorganisms and returned to the soil. A whole mountain of cow dung however changes the landscape itself; indeed, it becomes the landscape, and changes the balance of what lives and dies where it exists.With too much of a single nutrient it burns and kills and smothers anything underneath, and allows for the proliferation of unwanted pathogens, for starters. And then you start getting into animal antibiotics, growth hormones, herbicides, pesticides, artificial fertilizers and etc. and waste management gets much more complicated. 

So with a mass of waste, that waste has to go somewhere else and either be dumped or treated, which takes more usable energy. And where it is not being returned to the land itself, the soil must be amended with additional usable energy, typically in the form of artificial fertilizers. 

And where outside energy is sought, it must be sought first in the most easily accessible forms, and when those statistically limited forms are depleted, one has to go to less accessible forms and go further out, taking more usable energy. The soil itself, the bare economic "asset" which produces and which can't be ignored as an externality, is now on the verge of complete exhaustion. And life in the surrounding rivers, lakes, and coastal zones go dead from ag runoff and eutrophication. 

These issues have steadily become more visible, so they are attempted to be dealt with within the confines of the economic system, or else more energy is put into displacing those problems or concealing them with better PR. 

The reality is quite messy. There are attempts to enter these wastes back into usable energy flows using various modern waste management practices, such as the spraying of treated lagoon wastes on grasslands, and through economic channels such as selling the wastes to be used in composts and fertilizers and the like. 

But what is economically viable is not only what makes sense in terms of cold hard numbers, as the mainstream economists will condescendingly tell you, but also what the greater mass of society is doing in economic coordination. If the government is putting massive subsidies into fossil fuel production and the growing of certain crops, where is the activity going to go? And further, who are the incumbents, how much inertia do their practices entail, and how much political power and connection do they possess?

It has to make more economic sense to either sell the waste or make use of it on the land, otherwise artificial fertilizer can be bought up to replenish the soil and the wastes go the path of least resistance, say into lagoons, rivers (in the past or when no one is looking), to landfills, etc. 

Further, the simple fact of large farm size causes many of these problems to begin with, but this simple fact is a very complicated historical-social product which is still being produced by collective economic activity and reactionary government policy. 

We can't blame it all on industrial agriculture - though these problems are an outgrowth of a greater social pattern that typifies industrial production in general. Just consider the domestic sphere and the general treatment of pet wastes and even our own wastes for that matter. 

Energy flows like food are trucked in, wastes are trucked out to be treated or dumped, and nary the twain shall meet in the centers of domestic production. Energy inputs and outputs appear as so many branching flows which are pulled inward and which flow outward, stressing the productive center which is still tasked to continuously grow, and so both exploitation and dumping in the periphery is intensified. 

To Hell With This

On a larger timescale, it can be difficult for the average individual to judge the effects of a given political-economic regime, not just because large systems are complicated, and complicate further over the passage of time, but because those systems themselves are the products of individuals working in concert, individuals who have changing perceptions of themselves and their worlds, and whose perceptions affect the systems in turn. 

Change on such a scale takes an enormous amount of labor, labor which is often being done by a minority with gifts of vision and conviction. It takes time and energy to put in the intellectual and relational work to represent to people what is really happening and the nature of the processes they are a part of. 

And it takes time and energy to put labor into things like legal, economic, and political systems, which are to connect the collective ideological understandings with the daily mechanics of material life, and which are operating with immense inertia, with a previous regime as the center of gravity. 

Of course when something breaks, and if that break is catastrophic enough, perception of the problem itself can become very stark and simple. Yet it is assembling the response to that problem that is the real challenge. 

Corona Hustle

Getting sick in the United States, along with pretty much everything else under the general description of, well, "activity," takes an ever-increasing amount of private labor, especially if you are low income. 

Our conception of illness carries with it images of lying in bed, sleeping, drinking chicken soup, consuming media, etc. All of these things do happen in the course of illness, but within the course of the coronavirus in particular is an extensive amount of legwork in various forms: one is researching symptoms, indications, prognoses, and best practices, both in terms of self care and self-isolation and the way in which one is relating to others and the environment. 

In the United States this has to be done because of the contradictory, unreliable, vague, and oftentimes obfuscating official accounts and directives. Work has to be put in to sift through sources and the streams of evaluations of those sources, and work has to be put in to wade through bullshit, horseshit, and all the other kinds of shit. 

One is calling medical centers, social services institutions, and insurance companies trying to suss out just what one's obligations and entitlements are, and talking to service reps and filling out forms after having labored through the communication and distribution networks themselves which are themselves designed to discourage and filter people out and offload the labor onto the individual who is annoyingly in need. 

And after this work is put in, still the minimum amount of public support is doled out, and one is working under pressure in the private home, making teas, acquiring groceries, researching and putting together remedies, and all of the rest to attempt to stay alive. And this is coupled with maintaining work relationships and maintaining one's place in the labor sphere, and putting in work to ensure the steady flow of financial support and the meeting of economic obligations like rent, insurance, utilities, and supplies, some of which are only temporarily lifted or ameliorated with measly stimulus payments. 

This is a buildup of private labor and effort that is a direct consequence of the disintegration of the public sphere and the abdication of responsibility of the ruling class in maintaining that sphere, which, let's be clear, implies specifically the disintegration of entitlement and public accommodating labor, while obligations and public requirements on the other hand are welded firmly in place, and indeed, augmented in their requirements on the individual.   

Over generations there is a steady yet imperceptible change, in which each successive generation accepts a lower standard of living and a greater amount of maintenance labor, much like a bad diet over one's lifetime steadily puts a greater load on one's system as damage accumulates. Eventually one is huffing and puffing and losing one's breath with only a vague sense that something is amiss (at least in terms of the average perception). 

All of this until a link breaks and all of the struggling processes grind to a halt. 

What do we owe each other? What should daily work look like, if we are to finish our collective projects in time for the nested cyclical patterns of day and night, production and reproduction, birth and death? 

Let's Do Some Writing

It's been over two weeks since my intention to resume writing. I've been doing fairly intensive physical work in the course of those two weeks, and on top of the expected recovery from being terribly sick, it has taken a substantial amount of energy to return to physical baseline after weeks of isolation, overhanging physical damage, and convalescence. There wasn't much energy left over to write, let alone do much else.  

Still not over the hump yet, but I'll have a little to say when I can focus and scribble a few words together.

Things in the world have been moving incredibly quickly in the last few weeks, and some of the stuff I'd like to put together in subsequent posts will be a little dated, but hopefully as I get back on my feet I can catch up in good time. 

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Die As Myself

Strange, here I am, ready to continue into a fraught vocation, a sort of mixture of farming and construction, with some wanderings into the surrounding wilderness for good measure, within a geologically and meteorologically unstable mountain canyon. There are many ways to die here. None of that seems to be a problem though.  

But somehow, dying of a disease fumbled and spread by the dysfunctional operations of capital and U.S. capital in particular, in fear of engaging health services and feeling like a deadly burden, just seemed intolerable. 

We talk about living as ourselves, and actualizing, and being authentic, and so on. But there is also dying as ourselves. 

Strange

Reality is far stranger. Thinking de-stranges. A useful feature! But beware. 

Live

How to conceptualize living when we produce destruction and birth death? 

Getting Back Up

Ok it seems to be passing. Goddamn. 

Physically I'm slowly coming back online. Fatigued and hurting all over from both recovering and taking up light activity again. Putting on loads like light activity, heavier digestion, consuming alcohol etc. bring to light the damage as the body struggles to catch up, damage which mercifully is receding. 

It's curious, with nausea, laboring breaths and pulse, and bodily pain, there comes attached with it a sort of settled upon meaning, which contributes to the experience of the symptoms. Ah, my stomach is a little grumbly, but this is just the pangs of a slow recovery, not a virus in resurgence; nothing to worry about. 

Anyway, I'll be ramping up the physical activity nice and slow, and the same is the case with the writing. Tons to write about. We'll get there when we can. 

Relations Amidst the Growing Waves

As the growing waves - that our collective and historically linear activities have set into motion - begin to crest and then break, the late stage is typified by growing convulsions which crash into each other.

And as those convulsions progressively pass through society, they are passing first and foremost through people. And so as the dominant relation becomes typified by convulsion, the convulsion becomes personified and fixated upon, and the structural relation and its state of upheaval recedes into the background.

And so as one's ass is picked up and then cast down onto the sand bar, one is told to pick oneself up after an embarrassing and suspicious fall, and continue forward. And as the virus moves through society, the people become the virus and its effects, and embody its widening circles of destruction.

Left to fend for ourselves, we become killers overnight, and failing weaklings, and ticking timebombs. We are set against each other as mutual harbingers of destruction.

But here there are always opportunities to lock arms tighter.

Let's Try That Again

As a species heavily dependent on cognition, we have this tendency to - after having our asses handed to us - cock our heads and ask the question, "perhaps I could do it differently next time" and then proceed to build upon the same old predicaments in a new and creative manner.

This can work perfectly fine in a limited way, on an individual basis say; it is how we learn after all. But stuck within a greater historical pattern and it becomes: perhaps let's try this different technocratic fix for technocratic problems, or perhaps if I'm king and have the power I can do it better, or I alone have the exclusive answer to move forward so just go ahead and step through this doorway, and then yes, the same old historical timebomb is reproduced bigger and better, and it unleashes a slowly churning and grinding destruction throughout history as it decays.

What has happened to the dialectic thinkers? It only seems there are a limited number. On a collective scale our thought has a relentlessly linear quality to it. What's next? What's the next thing? And so on.

Another Alive Post

I can't quite believe I'm writing another of these, but I am still sick. It has been a good 2 months or so. An endless procession of surprise nightmares; I guess I am one of the "long-termers."

Some of the pieces I'm writing sort of hinge on me being alive to have that punch, so I'm waiting on those. But I've got a little bit to spit out for now. Hopefully more to come.  

Reach

Priorities

The ordering of priorities and perceptions, and the struggles associated with keeping those priorities in place, and maintaining those perceptions, can be quite sticky. The whole point of a set of priorities is to maintain a given state of affairs that produces for those priorities, so one is constantly straining and struggling to keep those things in place.

And one of the silver linings in a profound enough shock is to completely reorder those priorities by blowing away whatever commitments one was stuck with, requiring the taking up of new commitments and the bonding of associated priorities and measures for maintaining those commitments. This lining is especially silver if the prior set of priorities was counterproductive.

All of the stress that goes into maintaining a mortgage, car payments, a trendy social life, and etc. could go up in flame with the actual benefits themselves, should you be knocked out of work and dislodged from the so-called rat race. And then you are doing things you never imagined you'd be doing to survive, and the priorities are reordered, and all of the previous fears now appear as the vaporous bogeymen they really were.

Not that this is a cure - a very cruel one it would be - but it is a kind of vision that can be salvaged in a disaster.

To simplify and lower the stakes, but nevertheless illustrate, we could consider fasting.

An initial hunger pang may appear frightful to someone who has never gone hungry, but then if you go a couple of days and watch that pang disappear, and something new arise in its place, then you awaken to what the body can really do, and how far it really can be pushed, and this informs later experiences outside of that context.

There are numerous dangers here too, such as a suppressed immune system - which can eventually come back stronger, but beside the point - and physical weakness, faculties that could be needed in a bind. And there is eventually a bottoming out of reordering your priorities, as cold hard death is death.

At least some of this is plastic anyway. There is some room to move and maneuver. 

From Fear to Terror

Yes, fear often tends to be a response to threatening stimuli, or stimuli perceived to be threatening. But beyond that is a spectrum into terror and panic, where there is much more going on. For example, underlying terror and panic is a breakdown in organization and a failure of discipline amidst the coping milieu. Terror arises in an environment in which one's trusted means of mitigation and perpetuation completely break down: "nowhere to run, nowhere to hide," as the horror movie trope goes. It is not just the external threat that is the problem, but one's living framework which is affected by a given threat.

Yes, an overwhelming external force can bring this breakdown about all on its own; indeed, that is the nature of calamities like natural and man made disasters. But important to the analysis here are the internal conditions for breakdown and ensuing panic. Because overwhelming force can build up, and build up in relation to internal frameworks, and it often does build up in response to over-zealous responses to perceived external threat.

The traditional law and order approach deceptively recognized the internal portion of the dynamic by focusing intensively and obsessively on external threats real and imagined, and so a process of internal and social sterilization occurs, in which substantial resources are put into reinforced concrete and steel: stronger prisons, more powerful and spread out militaries, and the like, and so internal discipline and organization is concentrated and intensified in an undisciplined and unorganized way, to the impoverishment of everything else.

And then gradually over time, the tremors and convulsions grow. And blockades and shieldings appear in the capitol, and metal detectors and security and bulletproof shields appear in offices and schools and convenience stores, and the police begins to resemble the military, and the convulsions only continue to grow. The fear and terror spreads.

And in a similar way, the fields and medical patients are bombed and gassed, and are sterilized, and require ever greater doses and concentrations of herbicide and antibiotic to fight off the strengthening hordes. And the war on drugs and the war on poverty, like splashing about an oil fire, spread the drugs and poverty. Need I go on?

On the flip side of that coin, you have something like the hippie movement, which in its mainstream strains, renounces external threat along with all of the discipline and organization that goes with addressing those things.

And so without traditionally disciplined and cultivated means of maintenance,  and stewarding systems that sustain the ecstasies and illuminations of intoxication and ecstatic ritual, free love, communal living, and the like, those phenomena are burnt up and dissolve into bad trips, fair weather friends, and failed communes, and the fear and terror spreads.         

So, where and how do we get our food, our shelter, our relations, our securities, our delights? How to put it all together so that it works together?

Trust the Body?

What the body wants is not a straightforward proposition, as within the body are a multitude of chaotic forces and interests, which can express themselves in contradictory desires and intentions, all of which are further complicated by emoting and cognition.

Stooping to listen, one may catch the ghostly ringing of a socially cultivated desire, or the pining of a colony of bacteria injected into the stomach by industry.

A novel virus, driven and spread in part by the complex forces of interrelating cognition and desire, reveals the interrelatedness of and integration of intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and instinctual systems, and the need for the harmonious functioning of those systems.

It is not enough to simply stoop and listen to one's body as it cries out from infection, as addressing those immediate needs may lead to further complications, and the building up of momentum of those complications.

One also has to enter intellectually into the field of research and best practice, as there may not be enough time to traverse that idiosyncratic chain of trial, error, and revelation in one's individual person.   

Stack

A stack composed of somewhat independent entities (like a stack of firewood) can be piled quite high, despite a foundational lean that makes it vulnerable to toppling. It is still vulnerable to toppling, but may do so incompletely. A leaning monolith however is given to more irresistible toppling the more mass is added atop the already existing lean, and fused, all topples together and completely, though it may take more force to separate it completely too. Barring ideological compression, nothing is simple.

Void

More often than not, it is within the opening cracks that you find the decency and solidarity, and what is cracking is that which is cruel and rapacious, and cracking partly because of that. But where nothing allows for something else, it also allows for violent shifts, which can bring about cruelness and rapaciousness themselves. And the somethings forming may go on and scale out and develop to be good, or they may scale out to mimic the cruelty and rapacious, and go on to crack themselves.

Spitting Out

With all of this fear of contamination and soiled articles, and the widespread stockpiling and utilization of disposable cleaning and single use products, and the CO2 shortages and compromised water treatment systems, it makes me wonder how the waste flows are looking. Of course this is going to be very mixed, taking into account also the declining economic activity and pollution levels, the industrial operations on standby, and the backing up of oil reserves in storage.

Dragged Down By The Stone

The heterodox economists have been warning about private debt for a long time. This is a profound and complex issue that spans thousands of years, but at the moment it might be worthwhile to simply contemplate the state of consciousness that arises from institutionalized interest-bearing debt as a social engine. Now, what has been fitted into place as a social motivation for collective activity is a mass desire to acquire much more than is put in, as a matter of course, as a matter of daily function.

Because each is on their own, and nobody is there to help, so enough resources must be taken in to get clear of that grinding killing floor of universal exploitation.

Part of the establishment response to the crisis consists of preserving this consciousness, this way of being, which accounts for the dogged reliance on huge bailouts for the wealthy and the well-connected, and scraps for everyone else, even in the face of massive destabilization and calamity.

To do things differently in a great enough amount threatens a mass mimetic response, which can cascade and cause lasting changes to the social order.

So you see bankers, managers, executives and investors nervously eyeing their assets and balance sheets, and clamoring for handouts and reassurances, and goading everyone down the line into maintaining capital and income flows, going so far as to claw at measly stimulus checks coming in.

And from reports I've seen and anecdotal accounts I've heard, many landlords and creditors are expecting full payment of back rent and suspended lease payments. Of course things will have to change as complications arise from the crisis, and we'll see various compensatory mechanisms put in place.

But just consider how long so much of the economy has been frozen, and how many people are out of work, and how many payments have been suspended or rendered unpayable. We're talking an enormous amount of suspended value, hanging over us like the Sword of Damocles, which when the gears start turning again, will come due and expected, and come crashing down. And this is on top of the sorry state of the credit system, and the massive sprawls of destroyed middle class wealth, and extreme precarity for a majority of individuals in the industrial world.       

So as I've mentioned before, we'll have to see some pretty profound change in our political economy in the coming decade. That, or as Pink Floyd put it so vividly and succinctly, we'll be "dragged down by the stone."