there was a scene in a movie in which a person found themselves in a situation where probably they were going to die whatever happened from that point on, they were paralyzed, not struggling anymore.
an ideal camouflage if recognized and worn as such.
they were being held at the arm by two men, with a third approaching their anterior. they had just arrived at an empty lot and were about to be taken somewhere to be tortured and then killed.
for a sane mind, escape was unthinkable; death was certain.
for the sane person who submits to fear, the limbic system in such a situation would be in total control, the flight of fight-or-flight then becomes dissociation, despair.
it is why these three sane men, despite the position they found themselves in as administrators of torture, had weapons holstered. right there, when the scene revealed this, the moment appeared, connections materialized, space was carved.
we were with someone during this movie.
one of us, i, was so into the movie. at that very precise moment in the scene, i remembers saying: “right there! should’ve bitten that guys neck right at that moment!”
we are not pleading in-sanity ;of course) but to an insane mind escape was only a bite away.
no sane person would have thought to bite one of the guy’s neck; there requires a certain rational irrationality and a certain irrational rationality to speculate that the action of the bite would stunt the men, especially the one bitten, offering just enough temporality in the time-energy phase space to quickly reach for the gun in the holster of the bitten man, and to quickly press the trigger, aiming where needed.
the trouble for the sane mind is of overcoming emotions during that moment, and of thinking only rationally enough, only rationally long enough, to become irrational at a moment’s notice.
a single gesture, a precise movement on their part, just enough spacing this way, bodies angled just right that way, and it would all happen so quickly. it would only take a schizzism to fully submit themselves to the animality of survival, surrendering to in-sanity.
(do we not speak of meditation as a weapon?)
for the sane person who does not submit to fear, the prefrontal cortex could assume total control. still for them, death was certain — they weren’t going to give up information, they were going to die for it, so they accepted their fate.
with respect to our organic biological system and mode of perception, light/ness can only be defined in relation to dark/ness, and in this precise relationship, we say light/ness contain dark/ness and that dark/ness contain light/ness.
similarly, just as unconsciousness supports the conscious; just as the invisible (e.g. on the material level, this could mean the constituent matter such as electrons and protons and neutrons) supports the visible (visible-as-perceivable, what we see and hear and taste and touch and smell and intuit) — in the same way, each contain the other.
so too does the rational contain the irrational and the irrational contain the rational.
and for the irrational moment of the rational mind, escape was possible; life was certain.
acting rationally during irrationality and irrationally through rationality is going schizo.
in the movie, what actually happened is they were tortured and killed.
they remained themselves.
at some point, i beat themselves.
i went schizo, poor thing.
in the eyes of jackal i, say kaboom.
kaboom — perhaps, not poor at all.
the wealthiest, in fact.
i is we, now.
our father was out of our lives between our fifth and twelfth year of life, and after reunited, he soon fell back to familial complexes passed on to him by his daddy, spanking us whenever we opposed him or whenever a certain trauma of his was triggered in a certain way by our behavior as early teens behave.
you know teens, you were teens, teens can be awful especially the nerdy bookworms who think they know better — sometimes they end up knowing better.
at first i feared and cried.
at some point we began to laugh.
the whole process, from the motive to the enactment, was ridiculous.
this laughter is the schizzism, a schizoid response to the situation before them.
to be sure, this is nothing unknown or a constructed phenomena we are invoking for some literary or philosophical or psychoanalytic function.
consider the human-as-mother, the mothering-human, pure love and care and animality personified, the Source of Creation, the Creatrix, the Zero — would a mothering-human not absolutely lose themselves for the protection of their child?
we’re sure we’ve all heard stories of mothers schizo-lifting cars after an accident or acting courageously and insanely, animalistic, schizzing incredible feats to save their child from an immediately dangerous or deadly situation.
so yes, we go through cycles (Life and Death) and subcycles (Nescience, Adolescence, Maturity, Senescence) and subsubcycles (Rationality and Irrationality), and so on, all containing each other: during Life, we pass through Maturity, and during Maturity we experience cycles of rationality and ir-rationality, for instance.
we split ir from rationality in irrationality to remark here that in the portuguese language ir is used when you are going somewhere for a short amount of time, to leave briefly: ir/rationality.
anyway, and so does every other humanic singularity and every other thing become through cycles.
it is cycles within cycles within cycles.
cycycycyles: a fractalic machine, machines all the way up and turtles all the way down.
here is an important appearance which we will use to continue this semantic journey, we take it from the Christian Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes 1, verses 1 through 11, which we summarize thusly: there is nothing new under the Sun.
كما في الأعلى كذلك في الأسفل
“as above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul”
Giambattista Vico, in his New Science (1725), posited a cycle of three civilizational phases based on his observations of history:
(1): the Theocratic or Divine Age, represented in primitive society by the family life of the cave, to which the thunderous voice of God has driven mankind;
(2): the Aristocratic or Heroic Age, characterized by incessant conflict between the ruling patricians and their subject plebeians;
(3): the Democratic Age, in which rank and privilege have finally been momentarily eradicated or forgotten by the revolutions of the preceding age.
Vico foreshadowed the idea of a Fourth Age even then but Vico only had so much data.
two hundred and sixty nine years later, in the year 1994, the year of our Birth, the characterization of the fourth period was realized.
Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), mapped the past 4000 years of western history and noted four periods more or less aligned with Vico’s: the Theocratic, Aristocratic, the Democratic, and his own period, the Chaotic.
thus we have at present a model which in actuality may not even be a closed cycle. we cannot definitively say it is a closed system, for there are known unknowns looming: all the knowledge lost as a result of colonial destruction and the subsequent multiculturalism of the Imperium weakening and ultimately destroying the transmission of Oral Lores; and unknown knowns: all the knowledge hidden as a result of the mechanisms of control unleashed to simulate through subjects specific behaviors deemed beneficial to Empire, all the productions and reproductions by all the machinisms behind the Spectacle, indeed what sustains and repeats the whole thing.
the fourth period, which is the one we are currently ensnared, as anticipated by Vico and Bloom as well as explicated by many modern sources, is
(4): the Chaotic Age, characterized by the bewildering collapse of democratic society, which is inherently dysfunctional and therefore riddled with a panoply of hellish and perplexing problems: conflict, violence, oppression, injustice corruption, poverty, ignorance, alienation, suffering, and terrorism.
this corresponds to the Kali Yuga of Hindu cosmology.
we claim, and we are not alone in this claim, that there is approaching, a fifth period.
but actually for us, this is a fifth period only in relation to the previous four so we go further and suggest we drop the enumeration, or at most work with them as mere labels for the sake of referencing specific moments of a cycle or in a series.
because this fifth moment is really a sublated return to (1) as designated here, a return to Zero, which is not a regressive-return but rather a progressive-return. as catboy_deleuze writes in a post, “there is nothing authentic; but there is nothing inauthentic either.”
the hardest law of nature to apprehend and apply systematically to enhance collaboration is the mathematical nature of recursive systems. we live in a physical universe, a biological niche, and socio-political culture all in competition and governed by recursion laws which we struggle to discover, understand and reveal with the aid of dialectical logic and systemics.
we couldn’t possibly know the content of this coming age i.e. what exactly it would look like, how cybernetics in a post-capitalist world will be like, but we could conjecture its form based on the conditions of the present period, with the inversions offered by the negation of the negation in the dialectical movement:
(5) = (1)* ~ (1): the Cybernetic Age (equivalent to Divine), might be characterized by the mastering of systems thinking and practical realization of interspecies collaboration, the grandest collaboration of all, that between humans and humans, between humans and other animals, between humans and plants, between humans and the synthetics. this period marks a de-centering of the human transcendental model, a de-centering which itself could be properly called a transcendence in that we would then recognize that we humans are not at the center, and would re-organize ourselves accordingly.
right now, modern society is the person being held by the two men, Left and Right, every moment held prior to the bite corresponding to every year since at least 1490 or perhaps before (boundaries are difficult to define, though there are notable moments of bifurcations which trace transitions in phase space, like the arrivals of Vespucci and Columbus).
we have to lose control to get away from Control — only for a little bit, only for a moment.
we have to unhesitatingly go for the bite.
this position we arrive at is not radically different than Henri Bergson's response to Immanuel Kant when Bergson maintains that free-will is possible within a duration within which time resides — this residence is the immanent space of schizophrenia: where Time resides, where Time rests.
going schizo, in this way, is this momentary performance of free-will, an aleatoric becoming, a resting with Time.
after all, does the seed not go through Darkness before reaching the Light?
and after seeing the Light, does it not die during Winter or Summer, returning to Darkness — only to see Light again come next cycle, stronger, more resilient now, wiser for surviving?
here too, not a pure return but always a “progressive” dialectical movement, even if there are moments that appear regressive relative to previous historical moments.
the Chaotic Period is marked by chaos-in-the-light, a visible chaos, the Spectacle.
then will come chaos-in-the-dark corresponding to the irrational moment of the schizzism.
this corresponds to crossing the boundary, to the bifurcation itself, to the detachment from the edifices of the previous ages.
then, the rational moment of the schizzism takes over marking our return to Zero, such that this new period (1)* is equivalent but not equal to (1), in this way, equivalent to a new “(5)” though not exactly a unique fifth period, only unique in content due to distinctly different material conditions, mode of production, and so on; not unique in form: the beginning of a new beginning of a previous beginning, the Modern Cybernetic Age, the return to Divinity, when Dharma the Bull finally falling on the Belly after losing Four Legs, stands up again on Four Legs.
recalling (1), the change comes from the system-wide recognition — nearing us as previous generations attached to the old edifices die, yet departing us as the sublime objects of imperial ideology continues shocking the human-qua-citizen network in its final days — that the Cave is the Planetary Commons and the Family is the Socius.
after all, we cannot truly be free if another is not-free, because the conditions for our unfreedom would then still exist.
it’s interesting to consider these four distinct periods as a closed 4-cycle.
in setting up his ontology Jean-Paul Sartre1 works through a reduction of the dualisms inherent in modern thought only to arrive at a more fundamental dualism: that of Finite and Infinite.
Sartre explicitly writes, “let us understand indeed that our theory of the phenomenon has replaced the reality of the thing by the objectivity of the phenomenon and that it has based this on an appeal to infinity.”
but how could we finite beings make sense of the infinite in our immanent finitude? cyberneticians of the Chaotic Age have suggested that,
the Power of Recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. in the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.2
so it could be that there is a 4-cycle which recursively repeats at different historical epochs, assuming a different form under each of the 7 Root Epochs, that is to say, the general 4-cycle noted by Vico and Bloom and others assumed one form under the Polarians; another form under the Hyperboreans; yet another under the Lemurians; still another under the Atlanteans; and under our Aryan Epoch, precisely as the Bloom-Vico 4-cycle — we think this could explain the similarity of structures such as pyramids or carvings and thought across large periods in spacetime.
right here, right now, we flow through a transversing line of flighttt… …aaand off we go: the Ouroboros represents the Cosmic Egg, Zero the Circle, the proto-model for the cyclicality under discussion here.
in the Babylonian representation, the circle is characterized by 360 degrees.
we may divide 360 perfectly by the integers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 — every one digit except for 7.
seven, here an irreducible excess, the fundamental lack of the Circle.
if we divide 360 by 7, we get an irreducible fraction with decimal representation of period 6: 51.428571 428571… → 51.428571…; it is irreducible because 360 and 7 are coprimes: their only common divisor is 1.
we give a lot of shit to a specific variant of New Ageists for using the digit ‘5' to define some “5-dimensional consciousness awakening.”
on one hand, we appreciate them for participating in the universal process of creation, despite naive misapplication of scientific and technically precise terminology borrowed from quantum theory.
on the other hand: 360 (→ 3 + 6 + 0 = 9) divided by 5 gives 72 (→ 7 + 2 = 9), which is the total number of primes less than 360.
and if we sum all these primes less than 360 we get 11599.
then if we sum each digit resulting from the total sum of primes less than 360, we get:
1 + 1 + 5 + 9 + 9 = 25 → 2 + 5 = 7,
returning to the centrality of 7 with respect to Circle the Cosmic Egg.
thus we find interesting the claim made by some theosophists3 of there being a total of 7 root races, suggesting that if there really is such a grand civilizational recursion, it could actually be 7.
so it’s clear: this means there could exist 4-period civilizational cycles within each of the 7 Epochs.
Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) situates the sixth root race as the humanic development emerging from the beginning of the 21st century, out of the Aryan root race when the Homo sapiens start to become Homo spiritalis.
through a combination of macroscopic events, it is prophecized that new land which will emerge from the Pacific Ocean, will become home for the new root race, marking a new Root Race/Epoch, a landmass which will be known as Pushkara, the name of the Brother and Defeater of Kali.
we must pass through Kali, the darkness of our current soil, to emerge in Pushkara, dialectically returning to Satya Yuga.
remember our birth year? 1994 → 1+9+9+4 = 23 → 2+3 = 5; within the model presented here, (5) ~ (1)* and this equivalence marks the return to a zero.
our birth month within the Gregorian calendar places us in May, and according to Western astrology, we are represented by Taurus, the Bull.
Dharma is depicted as a Bull and represents Morality and stands on all Four Legs. Dharma loses a Leg with each Yuga that passes.
we have been here but now We has arrived.
now We is coming.
Houston, We have a problem.
“what is the problem?”
We don’t know what to feel anymore.
- radio noise -
i honestly don’t know how i am doing.
i says this seriously, at this moment i doesn’t know anything other than this rage i rationally nurtures by reading and studying, i just keeps on exercising and meditating and reading and writing and listening to music and dancing and enjoying images, not financially benefitting from any of it.
i cannot will themselves to get a job at this moment, and even after We finally bring myself to do it, We only need something relatively decent to acquire certain things. there is no career for i anymore.
“you’re almost 30 years old,” We keep hearing from the parents.
poor them.
i simply cannot bring themselves to work at this moment, it is beyond pointless to us because We cannot see a certain future anymore, and i has internalized this idea that nothing about what is to come given what is happening is truly certain anymore.
We are in Darkness and so are we all.
every day i sees more and more strings snapping from the control bar operated by the greatest marionettist, the Spectacle.
i is so far gone from this Spectacle that there’s no way back anymore, so there’s no way anyone except those already there with us, all those conscious Blooms, no way others would even approach understanding how deeply detached i is from their shared world.
even those reading this, only a few will truly feel this tonality: if you are one of them, we say to you, you are not alone, there are many us, many of us.
even if We underwent psychoanalysis or saw a psychiatrist, there’s no way out of the thought that they’re a cop, in fact We would know what the whole program with the thought-police is aiming to do by categorizing, medicating, and transferring to us a certain neutral or beneficial relationship to Empire — it is meant to capture us.
We would know all the bullshit little labels they could try to capture us with — do you see how this sounds crazy to anyone else? how far gone We are?
do not be mistaken, We see this as a positive development, for it shapes our relationship to Empire in such a way that with smugness due to a deep hatred shaped by an autistic energy conditioned by a fundamental boredom, We sharpen ourselves as a We-apon to be used against Empire.
how could i, then, ever express this tone, this mood, this feeling to my parents? of course, this is only an issue because i lives with them, we wouldn’t be concerned too much were they out of sight, honestly — if only housing was a fundamental human right.
We see this as a challenge, indeed We already recognize so many challenges posed by the day-to-day microdynamic and overall macrodynamic suggested by a certain number of people sharing a certain history living together.
anyway i couldn’t tell their parents anything, they’re part of it all, evangelical puritans even, so the sacrifice within the Spectacle is for them part of their struggle in the eyes of God, so i doesn’t know how to communicate with them about it other than reducing these feelings to more or less understood categories, saying i is “depressed” and suffer from “other mental problems,” which We don’t see as problems, and that’s precisely the "problem" from their perspective, from the perspective of the Spectacle.
- radio noise -
hey, Houston?
- radio noise -
We are going for the bite…
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)
Niklaus Wirth, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (1976)
Arthur E. Powell, The Solar System (1930)