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.