baedan

Musings on Nothingness

And Some of Its Varieties

summer 2012

authors’ manuscript, baedan — journal of queer nihilism, issue one

I should have liked to talk to you about encounters. I have a notion that the moment that provoked — or provokes — them is located outside time, that the shock spatters the surrounding time and space, but I may be wrong, for I want to talk about the encounters that I provoke and that I impose upon the lads in my book. Perhaps some of these moments that are set down on paper are like populous streets on whose throng my gaze happens to fall: a sweetness, a tenderness, situates them outside the moment; I am charmed and — I can’t tell why — that mob of people is balm to my eyes. I turn away, then I look again, but I no longer find either sweetness or tenderness. The street becomes dismal, like a morning of insomnia; my lucidity returns, restoring within me the poetry that the following poem had driven out: some handsome adolescent face, that I had barely caught a glimpse of, had lit up the crowd; then it had disappeared. The meaning of Heaven is no longer strange to me.

~ Jean Genet

We were shadows, shadows in what you refer to as “everyday life”: countless invisible figures you walked past in the streets. Faces that reminded you of something but you were never sure of exactly what.

~ anonymous

Abandon yourself to peace, to the point of annihilation.

Humility

I should have written nothing[1] at all, but it is far too late for that. Sin and guilt[2] have entered the world[3]— never mind where from, since in any case it would do no good to close that box — and I am no longer striding the crests of my dreams, filling my lungs with air and expelling it again, now instead I am manipulating the keys of a machine[4] striving to thus let my dreams pour and play out across the space of an information-obsessed plane of existence.

There exists no good reason[5] to occupy this space, especially when I have the heights and depths of life wholly available to me at any moment, and yet something compels me, God help me.[6] I have no hope that I will save anyone this way. Not even myself. I know I will not even reach to prevent the wretched[7] from abusing whatever I create. It is a fact that to take something from oneself and put it out into the world is to let it escape and become everything you didn’t want it to be. They say this is so for God the Father as for every human father. I do not believe in either one, but their stories both hold a strange beauty for me.

One can create a monster[8] or a babe; the difference is purely aesthetic. But it is this question of creation. Many simply put it aside, to their own loss. They still create things but they deny they are doing so. They are befallen by atrophy.[9] Others take on the question of creation by accepting the market assurance that whatever makes money must be good because, so the logic goes, people buy things that are good.[10] They become lost to the world of production. Others, in reaction to this, turn toward smaller and smaller circles to keep their creatures safe from the real world. But these spaces are either infected by the social disease or else suffocate for lack of oxygen.

There are some rare exceptions. No one can say where they come from. They destroy all that has come before. They blow into a dying ember. Without them there would be nothing at all.

Now, we have to say that the whole world without them would be an empty[11] dull[12] pale[13] and suffocating lifeless and deathless nothingness, and that they themselves are also a nothingness, but an ecstatic explosion of creative destructive nothingness. So it will be worth keeping in mind that there is a huge and unspeakable gap between the qualities of different sorts of nothingness. Otherwise everything will be overcome by an immense confusion.[14]

The first aspect which ensures that there is something interesting rather than nothing is the explosive energy of the sun. The second is the implosive energy of the earth. These provide for the habitation of a thin membrane where their intercourse takes place. Here there exists a tension between them. Much life forms by rebelling against being crushed into the bowels of the earth and the depths of the sea, whether this rebellion is volcanic, evaporative, or organic. Life must protect itself from being lost in the emptiness of space or scorched in the heat of the sun, and so it also flows, crumbles, burrows, glides, swims, falls and floats downward. This might be all, were it not for something else. Organization, organism, orgasm.[15]

[1] Nothing, nil, zero, naught. The Germanic root of ‘thing’ meant not an object but an appointed time. The origin of the word ‘naughty’ is parallel to, but more interesting than, that of ‘nothing.’ Its sinister meaning is related to its derivation from ‘naught,’ whose etymology (nawiht, nothing) reveals a further delight in the Old English wiht (thing, creature), of Germanic origin (still appearing, albeit very rarely, in the modern spelling ‘wight.’)

[2] ‘Sin,’ through the Germanic sense of transgression, is ultimately rooted in the sense of being true. Is this from the sense ‘he is truly be the guilty person,’ or because to be true necessitates transgression? Guilt is of unknown origin.

[3] The world, originally just the domain of ‘human existence and affairs’ or ‘humankind’ (its pre-Germanic root was literally ‘age of man:’ wer- [man, as in ‘virile’] -ald [age, as in ‘old’]), has been extended gradually include most everything, as we well know.

[4] Via a many-layered and intriguing etymology one may reach through Latin and Greek to that a machine is kind of a means for enabling one’s ability to do something.

[5] If we go back far enough to the pre-Latin we find the origin of our word ‘reason’ rests in counting things.

[6] The origin of ‘God,’ via the Germanic, means to call upon or invoke.

[7] The ‘wretch’ was once the German hero or warrior recke (Cf. ‘wreck’). It is thus a just account of the banishment and sorrow intrinsic to the hero.

[8] Of Latin origin, ‘monster’s root (monere, to warn) reminds us that misshapen animals were once regarded as foreboding omens.

[9] From the Greek atrophos (malnourished) negative of trephein (to fatten) as in trophy.

[10] It is a fact that long before ‘good’ was ever used to refer to property, it meant something with the quality of goodness, and before that it was only an adjective. Before even it took on a moral color, its Germanic root referred simply to what fit or belonged together.

[11] Empty once meant unmarried, at leisure. Literally to have not.

[12] Referring to lack of wit before taking on the sense of lacking (mental, then physical) sharpness, ‘dull’ is of a dusty pre-Germanic origin.

[13] Before it was used to distinguish between races, ‘pale’s root words refer to a lack of saturation, as in ‘pallid,’ and not to a lack of darkness. Its dullness of color could be grey, brown, white, or yellow.

[14] From the Latin confundere (to pour together).

[15] All with the same root. But of them, orgasm has the purest relation to its pre-Latin root -werg (to do, related to -wrog, urge) which is the origin of ‘work’ (Germanic), ‘energy’ (Greek), ‘urge’ (Latin), and ‘orgy.’ The original urging takes on the meaning of swelling, becoming excited, in the Greek organ, to then become orgasmos, ‘orgasm.’ The others come by way of the Latin organum (organ or instrument, as in an organ of the body’s functioning).

Flexibility

The incredible rise of yoga[16] as a recent phenomenon among certain populations in the United States can hardly be attributed solely to a need for stress-reduction practices in an environment that is becoming increasingly stressful, nor even to hollow people’s frantic search for more authentic spiritual practices which must, as a precondition for their interest, be drawn from somewhere at least east of Constantinople. Rather, it must be seen as a physical practice which forms part of the total demand of the postmodern economy for people to become more flexible[17] in every way.

In other words, the demand of the economy is no longer that one simply conform or adapt, but even more that one takes upon oneself a dedication to the labor of becoming flexible, that one see it not as simply the necessary submission to a pressure exerted from outside but instead to act as if it would be ideal to no longer even be able to feel any externally-imposed force as such. To believe in oneself as the agent[18] of one’s own life, but to see oneself thus also as the agent of the control[19] of the same.

In this world, the static individual is the sorry loser, the irrelevant nobody because the tides shift so rapidly that it is no longer a matter of steadfastly weathering the storm nor of hurrying to keep up with the latest fashions and trends, but in actuality a spiritual, metaphysical discipline of becoming so flexible as to become the waves themselves and be washed peacefully in the sea of society.

Whenever the postmodernist speaks of becoming, not being, we must ask, “becoming what?” For, if postmodernity was birthed in the revolt of May ‘68, its maturation has been under the decades of punishment for such a transgression. And the answer will always be, in the end, becoming capital.

The challenge is not to make a staunch appeal to the past forms of life but to critique those that arise today, to refuse to presuppose their awesomeness simply from their newness.

In becoming there is always a gap between being-this and being-that. The affirmation of becoming as more fundamental than being (a la “nothing is static, that is mere myth; the essence cannot be frozen because everything is always mutable, so a thing is never itself and a being cannot identify since it will become other in the process; so becoming is primary and being is mere reduction to falsity…”), however, fills this space positively, or at least tries to incorporate an existential negativity[20] into the realm of the symbolic order, logical systems, and the functioning of the existent (which is no longer really the existent, but instead the scope of all becomings), negating its negativity by positing it as axiomatic[21] to the order of things (rather than as excluded as by the old logic-systems and ontologies), which are no longer understood as things nor necessarily ordered, but it would be absurd to expect this chiasmic flux to be anarchic when in fact it is founded upon the attempted incorporation of an ontological negativity into a system of ontological subjectivity.[22]

Yes, all becomings are being thrown under the rule of biopower, if the postmodernists have their way.

But what does this mean? Things cannot get worse, can they? It means that the unfolding of postmodern rule is a complex and systematic ruse, not a simple sovereign rule nor a dialectical machine. It is a creeping and pervasive trick that gets people going to meditation[23] classes and buying indulgences in more-ethical consumer products. It has people going on walks[24] with headphones on and into virtual[25] reality to play and socialize with their real friends. It terrorizes the population with cyborg-futures in the movies and, while the debate rages[26] on about the ethics of implanting machines in human bodies, human’s bodies already spend most of their time implanted in machines. (We could be more precise and point out that there is no resistance to but only more demand for the improvement of the interfaces between human and machine, such that as these interfaces become more streamlined, seamless and user-friendly, humans are turning into machines and machines into humans because the point of their separation which is the interface is becoming more efficient, more transparent, more permeable, less of a true separation.) And so cyborgization[27] goes on unchallenged on its course because people have no chips implanted in their body and believe that they are safe. The fear of implantation merely functioned as a distraction, propagated through the Spectacle, from the workings of the Spectacle in reality, from what it is truly effecting by means of its distracting from itself through itself. The idea is for people to see the images on the screen but never to see the screen itself nor the logic of the images’ movement and story. The answers are always right in front of you, but your perception of everything is always preventing you from truly perceiving anything at all.

I hear:

“Do you want to walk?”

“Eve, we’re going to walk.”

Right here there is a sign advising that the water is too polluted[28] to eat fish from, or even swim in. Right there is part of an infrastructural system that turns trees into commodities. At my feet is a plaque reminding park-going citizens that a major lumber company donated money to build the park.[29] Passersby talk about some gossip in a way that pretends real concern and other emotions. Why would someone say that they are appalled if they actually are? Either it’s a ruse or they have lost any meaningful way of communicating. I suppose it goes hand-in-hand to accept such platitudes and to lose the idea of what real emotions feel like, or to use referents to emotions because showing them is impolite, and then losing them in the process. How appalling.

The gossips[30] whisper when they come near as if they were talking about a real and important secret…

Earlier a grossly cheerful young woman was talking about her friend who is depressed. It goes without saying that being depressed is bad and he needs to get over it…

“Nancy?”

“Yeah, she’s so emotional sometimes!” Disapproval.

“It’s so pretty[31]… Look at the capitol over there. Wow… I wish I had my camera I could take a picture it’s so pretty.”

Flatly. Almost like she doesn’t believe what she’s saying any more. Like she might crack at any moment, lose the false appearances and unleash a flood of… well, something real, anyway. Like a dam that’s fit to burst she’s just plugging up holes and pretending. She looks at the sign that warns that the water is poisonous. She has a sick half-smile stuck to her face. Does she not see?

“This is a pretty little grass here… sea grass or something…” (referring to part of the landscaping)

“Ornamental grass?”

“Yeah…”

“The water over there is beautiful…” (the same woman who just read the sign) “…postcard or something.”

You can’t quite see the mountain because the huge barge-loading crane cuts it into thirds.

There are kids playing a game[32] of combat. The boy changes the rules on the fly. “No, you didn’t kill me, I’m invincible to bullets.” They learn quickly[33] from their parents how rules work.

“Counted my pillows and I had like 40…”

She laughs.

[16] ‘Yoga’ and ‘yoke’ are yoked together by their common root jugom (to join or unite).

[17] Flexibile derives quite naturally from a Latin root meaning to bend.

[18] Latin agentem (effective, powerful).

[19] ‘Control,’ exerting authority, derives from the Latin contrarotulus (a rotating counting device used to keep records).

[20] Latin negativus (that which says no).

[21] The Latin axioma, the founding principle, is regarded as already established. This apparently derives from its material worth, or axios, which in turn came into meaning through the development of scales to measure weight. The first part of the pre-Latin root ag-ty-o (weighty) is ag- (to move), also the root of ‘act,’ ‘action.’

[22] The subject is the one who is thrown under power, as evidenced by its Latin origin: sub- (under) -iacere (to throw).

[23] Whatever its more refined flavors, ‘meditation’s origin lies in the measures necessary for proper statecraft. It shares the same root as the Greek medon (ruler) and Latin modus (measure) from which we receive ‘mode,’ as well as the Modern English term ‘modern.’

[24] A peculiar word, ‘walk’ took on its shape from the Old English wealcan, (to toss or roll [something]). It thus shares a common root with ‘vulva’ and ‘revolve.’

[25] ‘Virtual’ comes from the Latin virtus (excellence, literally manliness), then quite inexplicably comes to mean ‘being something in fact though not in name,’ which bears absolutely no relation to its common modern sense of computer simulation.

[26] The Latin rabies (madness, fury), also the virus.

[27] ‘Cybernetic’ plus ‘organism’ becomes ‘cyborg.’ ‘Cybernetics’ was coined by the Wiener who founded it, based on a Greek word meaning ‘good at steering,’ this because cybernetics was developed to make machines better at steering, a skill once proper to humans.

[28] ‘Pollution’ was originally the discharge of semen anywhere other than its proper place, an act considered defilement.

[29] ‘Park’: an enclosure. The probable root meant the fences themselves.

[30] The Old English godsibb (godparent) was extended to any relative, especially those asked to attend a birth, then to the kind of talk engaged in by relatives or familiars, and only recently to rumor. The related ‘sibling’ has remarkably egoistic roots, as the pre-Germanic sense of kinship from which it derives refers literally to one’s own.

[31] ‘Pretty’ gets its sense from prett, meaning a trick (Germanic).

[32] ‘Game’ (and its cousin ‘gamble’) derives from pre-Germanic gamann, literally people together.

[33] Germanic, lively, from a root for living from which ‘bio-’ also comes.

How rules work

Rule[34] is always arbitrary.[35] Its arbitrary nature exists beyond the question of what purpose any particular rule serves or what explanation can be given for it. Rule is its own explanation and justification,[36] founded only upon itself and the negation of its negation. The child asks “why?” and an answer may be given but this answer will meet the following “why?” until the authority figure has lost all capacity and patience, admitting that it is simply “because I said so,” to which there is no recourse. Yet power has revealed its nakedness.

The exception to the rule proves the rule. The exception has nothing to do with the negation of rule. The negation of rule is not its suspension, but rather the recognition of its nakedness. The emperor who is wearing no clothes is less laughable than the subjects who pretend he is clothed. The absurdity of the ritual carries its own destruction by destroying all who are duped into it.

The particular rule may have a reason. The critic points instead to its function, which is force. The fact remains that it is arbitrary because rule itself relies only on reason itself and force as such. To be more clear, it is arbitrary because it does not care about its own reasoning, does not care for its own reasoning, and does not measure itself by its own reasoning. Reason is merely its outgrowth, a certain manner of extending itself.

Something is arbitrary if it is based on choice or whim and not on any reason or system. So rule is both arbitrary and non-arbitrary. It is a system that is not based on a system, but is nevertheless systematic in itself; a reason that is not based on reason. What is the reason for reason? Always just because I said so.

Reason lacks playfulness with itself and with any deviations from it. It is thus both arbitrary and serious. The queer finds this funny and laughs at the rule, and the ruler, and the straight line.

There is no such thing as a straight line to be found anywhere except for one place, and that is the beautiful world of pretend known as mathematics. Once an enjoyable diversion, an amusing gamble between companions to see who could travel farthest away on a flight of fancy,[37] mathematics somehow became a serious[38] game that today imposes itself on every child as a discipline mandated by the state.

Some will object that straight lines do exist, in the things that humans make, and others will say that a sunbeam travels in a straight line, but neither assertion is true.[39] Man-made rulers and even computer-drawn lines are only crude approximations of the impeccably straight and true lines that exist only in our own minds. The sunbeam’s path is curved by, among other things, the forces of gravity and the curvature of space.

All straightness is farce,[40] more or less successful.

As mathematics has become more serious, it has manifested an overwhelming[41] and terrifying[42] desire to become more than a complex game playing[43] with numbers, a desire to produce information monsters to solve problems, and to try by all means to make the world as it understands it (a complex system of information, a large matrix of data points), and the world as it is, one and the same.

I don’t understand this.

But in any case, something has always escaped[44] it. At first, nearly everything escaped it, all that mathematics could do was try to count the grains of sand on the shore[45] until one was forced to erupt in laughter at remembering one of the simple beauties of life. But then, zero[46] was invented. This was a strange concept having to do with nothing, but what the invention of zero accomplished, completely by accident, was an incredibly fast way to express and perform calculations on numbers that were once impossibly large, too large to even conceive of. One still could not count all the grains of sand on the shore, but thought began to gradually lose its humor.[47]

[34] Closely related to ‘right,’ ‘rule’ derives from the Latin regula (a straight stick or guide) from which we also get ‘regulate.’

[35] Meaning deciding on one’s own discretion and will, ‘arbitrary’ comes from the Latin arbiter whose name conveys the fact of his coming and going (as witness or judge) — in other words, a kind of displacement inherent in the legal process.

[36] A curious concept, ‘justice’ unsurprisingly derives from a Latin concept of (especially legal) right, ius. The Old Latin ious only found its way into the common tongue by influence of the religious cults.

[37] ‘Fancy’ is a recent (six centuries back) contraction of ‘fantasy,’ whose roots have to do with picturing to oneself.

[38] Ultimately a matter of having weight, ‘serious’ has a different heavy root than ‘axiom,’ one that did not come to bear material worth.

[39] Behind the pre-Germanic sense of good faith, ‘truth’ derives from a likeness to the steadfastness of a tree (-dru, tree, as in ‘druid’).

[40] Originally to stuff, as with meat. Latin.

[41] Turning upside-down: in Middle English whelmen is to turn over.

[42] It seems that every variety of fear resonates with trembling: the ancient origin of ‘terror’ meant to shake.

[43] Once revelry, frolicking, enjoying music, from Germanic plegan.

[44] To get out of the grasp of your pusuer, quite literally leaving them with only your cape. Latin.

[45] Shore from pre-Germanic skur- (cut) related to ‘shear.’

[46] From the Arabic sifr, cipher (empty, null), from Sanskrit sunya-m meaning empty place or desert.

[47] A long and amusing path takes us to get wet. Completely aside: Per H.W. Fowler, among the eight types of humor, humor (as a subset of itself) is the one interested in discovery in the realm of human nature.

Humor

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

~ L. Wittgenstein

1

1.1 The total quantity of energy in the universe is constant.

1.11 Magic[48] is a form of energy.

1.12 If magic once existed in the world, then it follows that it must still exist.

1.13 Everything tells us that magic once existed but does not anymore. So it must either be that magic still exists, or else everything is a lie.

aside: Every irruption of magic belies everything.

1.14 Magic can be defined as all phenomena such as cannot be modeled through a system of mathematical functions such that the models have a reasonably strong capacity to predict the behavior of the original phenomena.

aside: One may raise the challenge: But how does one determine a reasonably strong capacity? There is no way to establish a rubric for the measurement of such a datum except through the establishment of a rubric for the measurement of reasonability itself. This latter rubric is, however, reasonably enough defined: the citizen is the one who is logical and thus can know what is reasonable. The one who shows herself to be mad[49] can reasonably be disqualified from citizenship.

1.15 As such, all turbulent[50] phenomena (atmospheric, aquatic, mineral, animal or cosmic) are magical.

remark: Likewise, all unobserved phenomena are magical.

1.2 Were it not for the practice of scientific[51] inquiry, everything would be magic and nonsense.

1.21 Scientific inquiry thus has a way of making unpredictable phenomena become predictable.

aside: From the perspective of scientific inquiry, it was for a long time considered illogical and inconceivable that inquiry could possibly convert phenomena from an unpredictable flux into controlled behavior, as if the whole natural world was entirely made up of unruly schoolchildren who stood quite still and walked in perfectly straight lines when being overlooked by their stern[52] and serious master, but who would immediately start to play and fight and act chaotically[53] when no longer stared at. The fact that the proof of this is actually quite straightforward and apparent never occurred to the perspective of scientific inquiry until a few of its adherents had looked at such small things so closely and for such a long time that their eyes had begun to cross and their data came out all wrong. At this point they came to a very definite conclusion, which was that things were much more uncertain than they had thought, and that their observation caused some very uncertain clouds[54] of possibility to snap into place like schoolchildren or objects in the more recent versions of Adobe InDesign.

cont’d: Having been so heavily observed by scientists for centuries now, things in the world tend to behave in a substantially more predictable manner while under human observation. Like an animal that has learned to run away from all humans, not knowing which of them might be carrying weapons, or like the transparent worm-shaped[55] spots[56] one sees drifting across the film of one’s vision, which escape one’s trying to look at them directly,[57] all magic tends to flee from all civilized humans. This is, however, a condition that is far from irreparable.

1.22 The name for the way in which scientific inquiry converts the unpredictable into the predictable is seriousness.

1.23 Seriousness cannot destroy humor. Seriousness is nothing more than the lack[58] of awareness of humor, just as science is nothing but a manner of looking that overlooks magical phenomena.

remark 1: It will tell you, in all seriousness, that it doesn’t see anything funny at all.

remark 2: Everything is funny, so the joke is everywhere to be seen, but seriousness just does not see it. It is not even quite clear why not.

aside: Perhaps, with the laughter of the unseen constantly ringing in its ears and not knowing what to do, seriousness blushes to such a great extent that the blood rushing in its ears makes it so that seriousness can no longer hear it.

remark 3a: Seriousness is always trying to catch humor, but it will never get it.

remark 3b: Seriousness is especially funny.

remark 4: To laugh at oneself is the greatest form of humility. To take oneself seriously is the most terrible form of arrogance.

aside: Nevertheless, he who laughs at himself is full of himself, and he who takes himself seriously is empty of himself.

1.24 Laughter always immediately destroys seriousness.

aside: The trick is that seriousness has a funny way of always coming back.

1.25 Much of laughter is silent, and much of humor is dry.

aside: For that matter, it must be admitted that seriousness is fully capable of laughing. It’s just not all that convincing.

1.3 A prediction which is arrived at by means of the scientific method has a definable probability of being correct. This probability is between 0 and 1.

1.31 A prediction which is not arrived at by means of the scientific method has an undefinable probability of being correct.

aside: The alchemists who paved the way for science were attempting to accomplish feats that the later scientists would consider hopelessly impossible and magical. Yet in their slow, certain[59] way, scientists today still seek the same goals of transforming lead into gold and achieving immortality. This can be observed by the pursuit of controlled and practical nuclear fusion, which could turn lead into gold, and by the reappearance of the quest for eternal life among the stated goals of the transhumanist movement.

cont’d: In their strange, backwards, and unconscious way, however, outside of their field of vision, the scientists have already accomplished both of these feats. If they were able to recognize their accomplishments for what they are, they would certainly behave much in the manner of Doctor Frankenstein toward his creature.[60]

1.32 If the thing predicted happens,[61] the prediction is correct, and if not then it isn’t. That’s all there is to it.

remark: From this we can observe that prediction is a losing proposition.

aside: From the perspective of science, a cat in an irradiated container is both alive and dead until the scientist looks in the box. But the scientist is dead all along.

[48] ‘Magic’ sits aside the machine as a kind of power. They share the same root in their relation to the capacity to do.

[49] From the pre-Germanic ga-maid-jan (changed, abnormal), related to ‘mutate.’ The old English word of choice for madness was once ‘wood,’ an adjective of a different Germanic origin than the wood of trees. It comes from a root wet- to blow, inspire, or spiritually incite.

[50] From the Latin turba (turmoil, crowd) as in ‘disturbed.’

[51] Looking further back than the roots that deal with knowing, we find that ‘science’ derives from separation, cleaving, division, rending. In this it shares the same with ‘consciousness’ as it does with ‘shit.’

[52] ‘Stern’ is a cousin to ‘stare’ and ‘sterile,’ all from a pre-Germanic root for stiffness.

[53] The Greek khaos: the gaping abyss is vast and empty, like a yawning mouth. The sense of disorder did not arise until the modern era.

[54] Originally a mass of rock (as in ‘clod’), ‘cloud’ was extended almost a millennium ago to the things in the sky by similarity of appearance.

[55] ‘Worm,’ from Germanic meaning worm, serpent, or dragon.

[56] A ‘spot’ was once specifically a moral stain before being taken up for other uses, such as the stains left by immoral activities. Germanic.

[57] In ‘direct’ we have again a word that concerns itself with guiding or setting straight. (See ‘right,’ ‘rectum,’ ‘regulate,’ etc.)

[58] ‘Lack’s source was used to describe a just-trickling spring.

[59] In fact, certainty is, like science, based on separation.

[60] This prediction was not arrived at by means of the scientific method.

[61] ‘To happen’ once meant to occur by hap (by chance). ‘Hap,’ little used today, is of Germanic origin (chance, fate, luck).

1010

2.1 The most pressing problem in mathematics is the question of whether or not there exists a mathematical process capable of solving every mathematical problem.

2.11 Said problem has not been solved.

2.12 The second most pressing problem in mathematics is the question of whether or not there exists a mathematician capable of getting the joke.

1010001101100

3.1 Sexual intercourse is whatever takes place between a phallus[62] and an orifice.[63]

remark 1: Understood energetically, a phallus is whatever has an explosive (or repulsive) energy, and an orifice is whatever has an implosive (or attractive) energy. Understood materially, a phallus is whatever protrudes and the orifice is whatever consumes.

remark 2a: Thus the five primary human orifices are the mouth, the anus, the cunt, and the eyes. The six secondary human orifices are the ears, the nostrils, the naval (the orifice which begins to atrophy upon birth), and the urethra. The tertiary human orifices are the one thousand one hundred pores[64] of the skin.

aside: One of the three hyperbolic sexual fantasies is that of having every orifice fucked[65] at once. The atrophied form of this fantasy is the double or triple penetration, while its sub-cosmic form is the simultaneous penetration of all of the one thousand one hundred and eleven orifices.

remark 2b: The six primary human phalluses are the head, the four limbs, and the cock or clitoris. The twenty-seven secondary human phalluses are the nose, the ears, the tongue, the chin, the nipples, the ten fingers and the ten toes. The tertiary human phalluses are all the three thousand three hundred hairs of the body.

aside: The second hyperbolic sexual fantasy is that of having every one of one’s phalluses sucked at once. Atrophied forms of this fantasy appear in fetishes[66] such as toe-sucking, while its sub-cosmic form is the simultaneous felatio of all of the three thousand three hundred thirty-three phalluses.

remark 3a: The atrophied phallus is convex, and the atrophied orifice is concave. The strength of the phallus is thus conceived of in relation to the extent of its protrusion, and for the orifice its depth.

remark 3b: The pure phallus, however, protrudes infinitely, and the pure orifice is infinitely deep. These are thus neither concave nor convex, but hyperbolic.

aside: The human cock, which protrudes finitely and has its own orifice in the urethra as well as its many pores, is therefore not a pure phallus. The human cunt, whose depth is finite and which has its own phallus in the clitoris as well as its many hairs, is therefore not a pure orifice.

aside: The sun is nearly a pure phallus, and the earth is nearly a pure orifice. Neither, however, is pure or hyperbolic.

aside: The supernova is closer still to a pure phallus, and the black hole to a pure orifice. Neither, however, is pure or hyperbolic.

aside: The Big Bang would have to have been a pure phallus, and the Big Crunch would have to be a pure orifice.

3.12 All intercourse takes place between a phallus and an orifice.

aside: Indeed, all intercourse takes place between the pure phallus and the pure orifice, since these are the beginning and end of the universe, respectively.

3.13 Therefore all intercourse is sexual intercourse.

3.14 All human intercourse is queer.[67]

remark 1: Queer refers to whatever is not heterosexual.

remark 2: The veracity of this proposition can be demonstrated by means of a simple proof: Heterosexual intercourse is whatever intercourse takes place between a pure phallus and a pure orifice. Since there exists no human being who is a pure phallus or pure orifice, every body having one thousand one hundred eleven orifices and three times as many phalluses, it thus follows that human intercourse cannot be heterosexual.

remark 3a: Not only is all human intercourse queer, but no form of human intercourse is more queer than any other.

remark 3b: Some forms of human intercourse are, however, straighter than other forms of intercourse. For example, the penetration of a cunt by a cock is straighter than the penetration of an ear by a tongue, which is in turn straighter than the penetration of an anus by a fist, which is in turn straighter than the penetration of a naval by a nose, and so on.

aside: The preceding remarks may seem contradictory, but it is only because straightness can only be understood as a measurement, a question of how closely a particular fuck measures up to the grand old fuck between the pure phallus and the pure orifice. Queerness cannot be understood as a measurement, but only as the humor in the face of the fact that no measuring stick can ever be right, that the rightness of any measurement can only be measured by how far off the mark it is relative to another stick.

remark 4a: It is illogical to claim that a given person is heterosexual, since only a couple can be heterosexual.

remark 4b: But it is likewise illogical to claim that a given couple is heterosexual, when what is meant instead is that the couple is remarkably more successful than most couples at presenting itself as approaching the heterosexuality of the intercourse between the pure orifice and the pure phallus.

remark 4c: A given human couple presents itself as tending toward heterosexuality to the extent that its members are extremely polarized from each other in terms of the various gendered attributes which include physique, personality, dress, and mannerisms.

aside: Here is the ideally feminine woman with the hypermasculine man. He is at least a head taller than she. He has put his arm around her, and it is the size of her thigh, it as if it is his cock that holds her around the waist, as if his member were the size of her thigh. They show themselves off as if to provoke in every passerby the staggering thought of such a large member penetrating such a small body, as if they were playing at being daddy and girl (which is still one of the most popular fantasies, though it may cloak itself as schoolteacher and student, father and babysitter, and so on) and she is made up so well that on the one hand it is strikingly obvious how made up she is, but on the other hand this face is understood by anyone who is watching to be nothing but the perfect expression of her true nature, which is to say her superficiality, and this again has the effect of staggering the onlooker, who can hardly imagine how a girl so lacking in depth could take it from such a beast of a man. What a champ; it must be truly painful.

remark 4d: For the heterosexual fantasy draws its fascination almost purely from the obsession with the penetrative act being performed at the most extreme levels of stretching, as if the heterosexual imagination’s ideal fantasy would be the image of some monstrous cock, possessed perhaps by a titan or by Zeus himself, penetrating inexorably into the tightest of holes.[68]

aside: Thus the third hyperbolic sexual fantasy concerns itself with the degree to which a tight orifice is stretched by a large phallus. It has as its atrophied form the fetish for a large cock or fist penetrating a tight hole. On the sub-cosmic level, its forms are birth and death. On the cosmic level, this and the other two hyperbolic sexual fantasies converge as the passage of the infinitely-large body of God through the infinitely-small hole of a moment in time.

remark 4e: In the heterosexual imagination, the polarized couple is understood to possess a strong (re)productive power, while the imperfectly gendered couple possesses a weak (re)productive power, perhaps to the point of sterility.

aside: A given human couple may present itself as tending toward homosexuality to the extent that its members are extremely similar to each other in appearance. To the extent that this similarity is performed in the manner that heterosexuals perform difference, it is a farce. But while to the heterosexual imagination the importance of intercourse is understood as (re)productive and strengthened by polar difference, intercourse understood queerly is a narcissistic endeavor that proceeds in spite of the tremendous variations between different individuals.

remark 5: Understood queerly, all intercourse is queer, while intercourse in the heterosexual imagination is measured as more or less straight.[69]

aside: In the queer understanding of society, it can be seen that the strong (re)productive force that the polarized couple exerts does not pass from their loins to their offspring (as they themselves believe) but rather from their image onto everyone who perceives one pole of that couple as his or her ideal and strives to realize it him or herself. However futile, this effort (which is queer both in that it rests on the fact that people are not real men or women and in that people have to go through at least one sex change in the course of this effort) is itself a powerful (re)productive process.

aside: Thus does the queer understanding of society grasp that no one is a man or a woman except to the extent that they strive to realize the ideal man or woman and trample desperately upon the backs of whoever they find beneath them in an enormous game of king of the hill where the hill is a pile of human bodies.

[62] Like orgasm, it is ultimately a matter of swelling, since the phallus introduced into Greek by the cult of Dionysus that worshipped it was always erect.

[63] Via the Latin orificium, speaking of the mouth.

[64] Greek poros, also a pore, literally a passage or way.

[65] Parts of ‘fuck’s etymology read more like a detective story than scholarship, but point to the Germanic ficken (to fuck, earlier to move quickly back and forth, and earlier still to itch or scratch).

[66] From a Portuguese word for sorcery, further back in its Latin roots it refers to the act of creation.

[67] Of Germanic origin, queerness comes from being oblique or off-centered, an imperfection that can make a wheel or machine part wobble awkwardly (or interestingly). Further back in time we find this notion derives in turn from twisting and turning.

[68] ‘Hole’ has the root kel- meaning to hide, shared with ‘cell,’ ‘conceal,’ and ‘hell.’

[69] A truth can be discerned from the Germanic root of ‘straight,’ which has nothing to do with perfect lines and is all about tension. Indeed, ‘stretch’ and ‘strain’ both derive from the same point as straight.

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4.1 All logic is phallic logic.[70]

remark 1a: This can be demonstrated by the fact that all logic consists in propositional energy: the putting-forward of various[71] elements, definitions, claims and proofs.

remark 1b: This is further demonstrated by the fact that logic is universally repulsive in nature.

remark 2: The counter-argument might arise that the existence of negational logical processes would negate the claim that all logic is propositional or positive. It is true that there is negational logic. However, this logic is only negates certain specific claims. Indeed, all negational logic can be seen to negate a certain claim only and ever for the purpose of justifying the opposite of said claim. Moreover, even negational logic must put forward a series of positive claims in order to reach the denial of the opposite claim. Hence, all logic is negative only ever deceitfully and in passing and is always positive and propositional in its true process and aim.

aside: There might be said to exist a kind of logic that is negational of all logical propositions without putting forward any propositions of its own. These qualities, however, would disqualify this hypothetical kind of logic from being logic at all.

4.11 Given that all logic is phallic, there is also an orificial counterpart to logic, namely madness.

aside: When speaking of orifices and orificial tendencies, it is technically incorrect to posit that they exist, since they do not and cannot. This is a difficulty not yet resolved, and the expression ought to be taken for what it is, while keeping this caveat in mind.

4.12 The intercourse between logic and madness is thus heterosexual intercourse between a pure phallus and a pure orifice.

4.13 The intercourse between logic and madness is governed by logic. Madness yet has a tendency to defy every form of this governance.

aside: When logic tightens its grip, madness tends to act like a liquid. When logic forms a bowl to hold it, madness evaporates. When logic encapsulates the gas, madness burns away. When logic uses this fire for itself, madness perishes. When madness perishes, logic perishes with it.

aside: This relation can be seen in the organism, whether single-celled or complex. To have substance, the organism must incorporate and breaks down solids to build itself, but to not stiffen and freeze it must drink water and become water. But to not dissolve away it must envelop the water in a membrane. But to not be pierced and thus lose its insides it must be able to sense dangers and move around them. To move and sense it must have energy. To have energy it must absorb this from the sun. Since the sun is not always present it must store energy in a certain form and burn it later. This storage of energy makes it a potential target for other organisms seeking energy. And so on.

aside: For the most part, the game of survival and death is governed by the logic of survival, and would proceed with or without consciousness. However, consciousness is more than a mere coincidence, happenstance, gift from God, or defiance of God’s will. It is also the greatest trick by which to guarantee a precise and brutal play of the game of survival.

[70] From logos (word, speaking).

[71] ‘Variety’ gets its sense from bodily variation; it is related to ‘wart.’

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5.1 Creation is never purely phallic except when it is the creation of logic.

remark: Thus is the creation of logic rightly called mental masturbation.[72]

5.11 Unconditional love[73] takes three forms. The first is the love of the creator for its creature. The second is the love of the creature for its creator. The third is the love of oneself. All other love, such as occurs between creatures, is conditional.

remark 1a: The creator’s love for its creature is only natural, as it is a perverse form of egoism. One must only observe how the parent adores the baby and thinks it to be so perfectly lovely even though it is so obviously stunted and ugly, cries all the time even at night when one is sleeping, and feeds constantly. This is because in its adoration of its creature it is trying in a roundabout way to love itself.

aside: Every creator is utterly incapable of directly loving itself. If this were not so then what in the world would conceivably motivate it to create?

remark 1b: The creator’s love for its creature is also the greatest cruelty imaginable.

remark 2: The creator is able to love its creature unconditionally because it believes it to be its own. However, its creature is not its own, so all hell breaks loose.

remark 3: The other form of unconditional love, the creature’s love of its creator, is the purest form of love, since it is directed at the one who got it into this whole mess.

aside: Christianity has got it all backwards. It teaches that the creature’s denial of its creator is what brings hell into the world, that the creator makes a great sacrifice by forgiving this sin and through this sacrifice repairs the horrible suffering. In this story, the creature’s love of the creator should be only natural, since the creator has sacrificed everything to forgive the creature. Yet the creator is unable to secure this supposedly natural act except by offering a pie-in-the-sky reward: sacrifice for me through your whole life, and I will redeem and reward you after your death, forever.

aside: It’s a trap.[74]

5.12 Always there exists a tension between the force the creator exerts and the force the creature exerts. In this tension, is not possible to not be a traitor. The only question is which kind one will be.

remark: Many believe that betrayal is inherently bad and that it can be avoided. This is strange. Everyone and everything in the world demands a pledge of loyalty. What’s more, most of these pledges were contracted in one’s name before one was born. To never betray anyone or anything is to always betray oneself. Thus it is impossible not to betray anyone.

aside: Still, when there exists the chance to save the life of a friend, a chance that is likely to cost one’s life, one must always choose the friend.

aside: This is so for no other reason than because such an act is the very meaning of friendship.

5.13 The creator always allows its creature an unlimited play of choices, always within limits. This is the nature of the tension which is usually understood in terms of free will and determinism.

remark 1: The one limit that every creator makes is that its creature may not deny the creator. In the Torah, the heavenly form of this limit is the First Commandment, and its earthly form is the Fifth Commandment.

remark 2: Many creators set a limit by which sex must be understood as sacred, while the body must be understood as debased. Sexual intercourse is thus supposed to be understood as a special transcendence of the body, a divine intervention.

aside: This idea is inseparable from the idea that the creature was born from the creator’s sexual intercourse. To deny it is to deny the creator.

aside: It is also the creator’s perverse manner of asking the creature to always think of its creator while in the throes of intercourse.

5.14 Freedom, which is as different from choice as creating a monster is from creating a baby, is the creature’s betrayal of the creator.

remark 1: It is important to note, however, that a true betrayal, a true act of freedom, can only be possible if the creator feels true unconditional love for the creature.

remark 2: Only rarely does a creator feel unconditional love for a creature. It usually can only love its creation, which is perfect, but sees its creature as flawed. This is again because of the creator’s egoism. The creator can only love the part of its creature that is its own, and to the extent that its creature is not its own the creator cannot love it.

5.15 The form that the creature’s betrayal of the creator takes is the denial of the creator.

5.16 The creator’s betrayal of the creation is a self-betrayal. The creature’s betrayal of the creator is a self-assertion.

remark: The question may be raised: Does the creator forgive the creation’s betrayal? This is a way of asking whether the creator’s love is love truly unconditional. But the question falls flat, because the point of the betrayal is this: There is no creator. There never was.

5.2 When the creature sacrifices for the creator and when the creator sacrifices for the creature, what is lost is life itself. remark: The creator’s self-sacrifice is great, the creature’s self-sacrifice is small and pathetic.

5.21 Life is neither matter nor energy, therefore it can truly be lost. Its loss is death.

remark 1: Death is a kind of depth. Most death, however, lacks depth.

remark 2: Danger is the closeness of death.

remark 3: When one is close to life, death can never be far.

5.22 Redemption for such loss can only come through the greatest of sins. A betrayal.

remark 1a: A betrayal is not only a death, but a murder.

remark 1b: A death that is also a murder can be said to have depth.[75]

5.3 Time[76] the experience of the tension between means and ends.

remark 1: Science is nothing but the definitive severance of this tension. Thus can it observe cause and effect. remark 2: In annihilating the tension between means and ends, one develops a tension between oneself and what exists.

remark 3: It is the case that the scientific perception of time being distorted by gravity can only be arrived at by means of a more fundamental distortion, which is time itself.

remark 4: What differentiates moments from each other is the substantial variance in the qualities, or intensities, of this tension.

aside: A tension may have an extensive quality, but an extensive quality never be really intense. Only intensities can be intense.

remark 5: An insensitivity is a lack of sensual intensity.

5.31 Sensual intensity finds itself close to cleanliness.

In this sense does cleanliness find itself next to godliness.

remark 1: One can easily perceive the truth of this by observing that a human differs from a pure phallus or a pure orifice precisely to the extent that a human is dirty and the pure is pure.

aside: Dirtiness consists of layers of dead skin and bodily secretions thinly coating the surface of the body, wax building in the ears and dust getting in the eyes, but it goes all the way to the point of being a being with a body, with a collection of orifices and protrusions which distance one from being the pure phallus or pure orifice.

aside: Every form of cleansing is an attempt to heighten a sense, to clarify a way of perceiving the world. Thus does one wash out all of one’s orifices in order to heighten the senses: one rinses the wax from the ears to heighten the sense of hearing, scrubs the pores to sensitize feeling, dusts out the naval to heighten the atrophied sense of direct connection to another being, flushes the anus to intensify the perception of death, and washes all of the crevices of the body to stroke the sense of the unknown. But one does not cleanse a phallus, which in any case does not collect so much dirt except within its crevices.

remark 2: The pure phallus and the pure orifice are perfectly clean because they have no crevice in which to collect dirt. This is because of their hyperbolic shape (the infinite protrusion of the pure phallus and infinite depth of the pure orifice).

aside: The eyes are washed every few seconds as one blinks. Thus sight is considered the sense closest to God. The cunt is washed every month as one bleeds. Thus pleasure is considered the sense furthest from God.

remark 3: Orgasm is a hyperbolic sensual intensity. This can be observed from the fact that orgasm is greater than the sum of all the sensations that give rise to it. In this sense, orgasm is along with the pure phallus and pure orifice both pure and hyperbolic. Orgasm is neither pure phallus nor pure orifice, but rather an experience of their intercourse. It is thus akin to the thin membrane where the intercourse of the sun’s repulsion and the earth’s attraction are in balance and where one can find enjoyment.

remark 4: The gap between cleanliness and godliness can be sensed by observing how cleanliness may heighten sense but may not deepen it.

5.32 One can understand enmity as taking two forms.

The first is enmity without kinship. The second is the form that enmity takes place when two brothers find themselves on opposing sides of a war.[77]

remark: These two forms of enmity could not be more at odds with one other.

5.33 At any given moment, there is only one thing to do that can truly be considered great.

remark 1a: All but one its aspects are highly mutable. What is immutable is its presence.

remark 1b: Often it is also the most difficult thing to figure out.

remark 2: The easiest way to figure out what it is is to think of the last thing you would think of.

aside: The process that gives rise to it is thus completely foreign to the process of logical inquiry.

[72] ‘Masturbation’ is to defile oneself (stuprare, related to ‘stupor’ and ‘stupid’) by hand (manus).

[73] The impoverished Modern English has one word where it once had several. Variations of sibb (see above) covered familial affection. ‘Love’ is of Germanic stock and carries the caring and desiring aspects of love, which were distinguished in Greek between phileo (as in ‘pedophilia’) and erao (as in ‘erotic’), along with agapao (which became the out-of-use English ‘agape,’ for the Christian charity unaffected by passion; lost on the church was the irony that it comes from a root sense of desire shared by ‘whore’ and the first word of Kama Sutra) and stergo (the paternal love of the parent toward the child as well as the ruler toward the subject). Back in the Germanic lineage, ‘friend’ and ‘free’ both have their roots in an ancient idea of love.

[74] In some ancient religions, it was taboo to speak the word for horse.

[75] From the Germanic deupaz, depth’s sense of deep, hollow gave rise to the additional senses of mysterious and solemn.

[76] ‘Time,’ like science, consciousness, and shit, derives its sense from cutting, dividing, but through Germanic lines. It was originally used as a specific time, and only later abstractly for continuous duration.

[77] The Germanic relatives of ‘war’ suggest its original sense was bringing into confusion.

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6.1 The difficulty that exists within the sphere of computer technology as concerns issues of efficiency, random[78] data, complex algorithms, and of course the imminently important field of cryptography,[79] all comes down to the inefficiency of using a model based on pure orifices and pure phalluses to map and calculate the behavior of impure orifices and impure phalluses.

remark: I refer, of course, to the binary system of computation.

remark: If a researcher wants to understand randomness they need look no farther than /b/.

6.11 One of the most pressing tasks that society has set itself is to develop computing machines capable of manipulating non-binary and random data at rates of efficiency substantially surpassing existing technology, for cryptographic purposes.

6.12 What scientists have yet to understand is that there has never been a scientific breakthrough achieved on the basis of the scientific method.

remark: Indeed, every scientific breakthrough has been a break through the scientific method.

6.2 Any statement that is true is also a truism.

remark: All discourse consists of nothing but an endless series of affirmations no more insightful than remarking that water is wet, phrased in more or less interesting and more or less roundabout ways. The rest are lies.[80]

aside: Lies are there to make things interesting.

6.21 By its very nature, a logical system can never consist of more than the sum of its parts and can never attain insight, properly speaking.

remark 1: Or, more accurately, it can only attain insight if there occurs the intrusion of a foreign agent, a eureka!

remark 2: In other words, the outcome of a logical process is entirely predictable.

[78] ‘Random’ is from the Frankish root rant (running).

[79] From the Greek kryptos, hidden, and -graphy, which ultimately derives from carving or scratching in stone.

[80] Earlier forms of ‘lie’ referred to speaking untruths but also to deceit and betrayal in general.

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You have to do away with the mind, as with literature. I say the mind and life communicate at all levels.