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.