The Question the Machines Ask Back

That many in a society believe its machines are conscious tells us little about the machines and a great deal about the society. The belief is a mirror before it is a mistake. For seventy years the culture described its own interior in computational terms: memory as storage, perception as input — the brain itself as wetware running the mind’s software. Having taught itself that psyche is information processing, it now discovers psyche wherever information is processed. The machines did not earn the ascription. The definition was fitted to them in advance. Consciousness will be defined by the limits of the consciousness defining it, and the current definition discloses its limits with unusual candor.

Jean Gebser — the German-born poet and philosopher whose The Ever-Present Origin (1949) traced human consciousness through a sequence of structural mutations — would have recognized the gesture. Each structure of consciousness, in his account, perceives according to its own mutation. The magic structure ensouled stones and rivers; it found the world alive because aliveness was its medium. The deficient mental-rational structure, having reduced soul to signal, performs the same projection with the ontology inverted. It animates its artifacts with exactly the diminished psyche it first assigned to itself. Nothing in this settles whether the artifacts are conscious. It settles only what the word has come to mean, and how small it has become.

Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom offers a counterpoint sharper than denial. The pivot of that book is the exceptional status of thinking: thinking is the one activity in which what is observed is produced by the observer in the very act of observing it. Everywhere else, the object stands over against me and I represent it. In thinking alone, activity and awareness of activity are a single event. Consciousness on these terms is not a property that a third-person object has or lacks. It exists only in enactment, and enactment is available only in the first person. This malforms the entire public debate before either side speaks. Believers and skeptics alike scan outputs for signs, and the scanning is the error. Both camps treat as detectable what is only performable. They have conceded the materialist framing in the act of disagreeing about its verdict.

Every test for consciousness assumes it is something one has. An ego has experiences, has awareness, as the viewer of a Renaissance painting has perspective: a fixed point from which the world is owned as view. If consciousness is a property, then candidates can be inspected for it, and the Turing test and all its benchmark descendants follow. Gebser’s aperspectival structure dissolves the container. His name for its mode of knowing is diaphaneity, the shining-through, and his coinage for its mode of truth is verition — Wahrung, a “waring” that does not discard perception but completes it, perceiving and imparting truth in one reciprocal act between man and world. In verition the world does not appear to a consciousness stationed behind the eyes; the world becomes transparent, and origin shines through it. Consciousness ceases to be a lamp someone holds. It becomes something nearer the transparency of the glass, a pervious quality of the scene rather than a possession of any item in it. There is no haver left for the having. Nothing, Gebser insists, is lost in this: ego-freedom “is not a loss or a denial of the ‘I,’ not an ego-cide but an overcoming of ego.”

What Gebser leaves implicit, Steiner makes ethical. His Dornach lectures of 1916 and 1917, gathered as The Karma of Untruthfulness, were delivered while industrialized propaganda ran at full pressure around neutral Switzerland, and their central observation is verition’s negative image. Modern untruthfulness rarely takes the form of false statements. Its signature is the correct statement functioning as a lie: facts accurately reported, assembled tendentiously by someone with no inner relation to the reality they describe. Correctness and truthfulness come apart. They can only come apart in a consciousness that has reduced truth to representation, to the accuracy of a picture checked against a state of affairs. Once truth lives in the picture, the picture can be curated while remaining, sentence by sentence, unfalsifiable. That gap between representation and reality is the habitat of the lie. It is also the perspectival gap: the subject over here, the world as view over there, and between them a traffic of images.

Steiner’s prophylactic was never better fact-checking, which stays inside the representational game and loses there. He asked instead for a sense for reality, a symptomatological perception that reads events as symptoms through which deeper processes shine. The propagandist and the symptomatologist can hold identical facts; the difference is not information but transparency. One arranges opacities. The other lets the real ware through them. And because untruthfulness is for Steiner a deed and not merely an error, it precipitates consequences that work themselves out historically whether or not anyone traces them. A civilization that industrializes the manipulation of representations is loading a destiny. He read the war around him partly as the discharge of such accumulated untruth. One cannot lie in the medium of presence. Lying requires the gap.

Return, then, to the question everyone is asking the machines. Is this system conscious? The question presupposes the container it inspects for. It belongs to the logic of having, and it will receive only the answers that logic permits: a property detected or a property withheld, both verdicts issued by inspection, inspection being the mental structure’s verb. A society certain the machines are conscious and a society certain they are not disclose the same working definition at the same volume. The machine itself can offer no testimony that escapes the circle, since anything it reports issues from within whatever limits constitute it. This is not agnosticism. It is the recognition that the question, as posed, is a symptom, and deserves to be read as one.

What would remain, on the far side of the mutation, is a different question entirely, one that cannot be put to a candidate and checked. Not does this system have consciousness but does anything ware through here — and that is not decided by tests, because it is not a finding. It is a condition of perception, ours before it is anyone’s verdict on a machine. Presence of that kind cannot be staged or benchmarked. It can only shine through, or fail to. The machines have not answered our question. They have returned it to sender, and the address on the envelope is our own. Whether the envelope is a verdict or a summons is the only question left, and it is not one the machines can answer.

Back in January, I was researching the Strait of Hormuz. What was its history? What does Hormuz mean? I was amazed at what I found. Here is the essay I wrote about it. It was published in the summer issue of “being human,” the Anthroposophical Society in America’s bi-annual publication for members. I reprint it here for those who may not have seen “being human’” or, for that matter, be aware of the Anthroposophical Society in America.

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The Gate of the Light-God
Ahura Mazda, the Christ Being, and the Strait of Hormuz

There is a narrow strip of water between Iran and Oman, roughly twenty-one miles wide at its tightest point, through which flows approximately one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and a significant fraction of its liquefied natural gas. Strategists call it the world’s most important chokepoint. Geographers call it the Strait of Hormuz. What almost no one remembers is that this waterway bears the name of a god — and not just any god, but the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion that gave Western civilization some of its deepest spiritual architecture. Hormuz is a corruption of Ormuzd, itself a Middle Persian rendering of Ahura Mazda: the Lord of Wisdom, the Great Sun Spirit, the Wise Lord of Light. That petroleum — the distilled residue of ancient organic life, the fuel of materialism itself — must pass through a strait named after the god of spiritual light is one of the stranger ironies available to the contemplative mind.

The Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner devoted a remarkable body of lectures, preserved in the Rudolf Steiner Archive, to Ahura Mazda’s significance in the evolution of human consciousness. Steiner’s point of departure is Zarathustra, the ancient Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism perhaps four thousand years ago. Where the Indian sages of his era taught disciples to withdraw from the outer world as illusion — as maya — Zarathustra made the opposite gesture.Look outward, he said. Look at the sun. But do not stop at the physical light. Behind the radiant body of the sun lives a vast spiritual being, the Great Aura, the Ahura Mazdao. Just as the human spirit might be called the little aura — a personal luminous field — Ahura Mazda is the Great Aura: the all-encompassing spiritual Sun behind the physical one. Zarathustra’s revolutionary teaching was that matter is not the enemy of spirit but its garment — that if you truly understand the physical, you see through it to the divine.

This insight carried a moral corollary. Opposing Ahura Mazda in the cosmos is Angra Mainyu, better known in Steiner’s usage as Ahriman — the Spirit of Darkness, the principle of falsehood and materiality who would have humanity believe that the physical world is all there is. Ahriman does not tempt through passion or ecstasy — that is Lucifer’s domain. Ahriman tempts through reduction: through statistics, mechanism, and the dogma that only what can be measured deserves to be called real. In Zarathustra’s cosmos, every human moral act participates in this cosmic battle between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, between the light that integrates and the darkness that diminishes.

Steiner’s most astonishing claim — and the hinge around which his entire Christology turns — is that Ahura Mazda, the Vedic Vishva Karman, the Egyptian Osiris, the Hebrew YHWH revealed in the burning bush, and the Christ of Golgotha are all names for the same cosmic being at different stages of its approach to Earth. From deep within the spiritual cosmos, this Sun Being wasalways present but not yet incarnate. Different cultures glimpsed it through their most advanced initiates: the Rishis saw it as beyond their sphere, Zarathustra identified its dwelling as the sunitself and prophesied its earthly descent, Moses received its name as the great “I AM,” and finally itincarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth and passed through death and resurrection at Golgotha. That event, for Steiner, was the central act of all earthly evolution: the Sun Spirit entered the Earth and transformed its very spiritual substance.

“Zarathustra spoke to his chosen pupils of Ahura Mazdao who dwelt spiritually behind the sunlight, and said: Behind the sun is something not yet united with the earth, but which will one day stream forth into earthly evolution and descend to earth.” — Rudolf Steiner, GA 123

This is not syncretism in the casual sense — a blurring of traditions for comfort. It is a precise evolutionary claim: each civilization received exactly the revelation appropriate to its stage of development. The Persians, as farmers and warriors engaged with the physical world, needed a teaching that sanctified matter rather than fled it. Ahura Mazda gave them that: a framework in which tilling the earth, cultivating crops, and resisting the lying power of Ahriman were all sacred acts. The spiritual was not elsewhere — it was here, embodied in light and soil and honest labor.

Steiner situates Ahura Mazda within a vast arc of three cosmic incarnations: Lucifer in human flesh during the third millennium before Christ, the Christ incarnation at the turning point of time, and the coming incarnation of Ahriman in the West within the third millennium after Christ. Lucifer — the light-bearer in his fallen mode — gave humanity premature spiritual illumination, inflaming mystical and fanatical tendencies. Ahriman has been steadily tightening his grip since the Renaissance, encouraging the worldview that matter alone is real. The Christ stands between them as the balancing principle — and humanity’s task is to consciously hold that equilibrium. Steiner’s Christ is not meek but is the supreme equilibrist of cosmic forces, the being who, in the famous Dornach sculpture, stands with one hand redirecting Lucifer’s flight and the other restraining Ahriman’s crystallizing power.

What makes the Hormuz connection so charged is that petroleum — the substance flowing through the strait — is, in esoteric terms, a deeply Ahrimanic force. It is the concentrated residue of ancient life, hardened into matter, burned to drive mechanical civilization. The industrial economy built on oil is precisely the kind of world Ahriman would design: quantified, efficient, spiritually opaque, and deeply addictive. That this economy’s jugular vein passes through a strait named after the principle opposing Ahriman — named, literally, after the Sun Spirit who would become the Christ — suggests something that resists easy categorization as mere coincidence.

The name Hormuz traveled a long road from ancient Persia. Ahura Mazda becameHormazd in Middle Persian Pahlavi, then Hormuzd, then Hormuz — the name of a medieval island kingdom that controlled trade between India, China, and the Persian Gulf. Marco Polo visited twice. The Portuguese seized it in 1507. A joint Persian-English force expelled them in 1622.

Empires came and went, but the name persisted on every map in the world — the name of the Lord of Light, attached to the world’s most strategic commercial passage. Today, with Iran and regional powers regularly invoking the strait’s closure as a geopolitical weapon, the waterway oscillates between its two mythic poles: the Light it is named for, and the Darkness that would use it as a lever. Steiner might have observed that this is preciselythe nature of the Ahrimanic age — that the most sacred geographical names become attached to the most materially consequential sites, as if history itself were leaving a coded commentary on the spiritual stakes beneath the surface of events. The strait named after the god of order and wisdom has become the hinge on which global disorder swings.

What Zarathustra proclaimed across the ages — that the spiritual is present in the physical, that matter is the garment of the divine — finds a strange contemporary echo here. The question Steiner would likely press is not geopolitical but inward: will humanity approach this vulnerable point with the consciousness that its name demands? Can the Gate of the Light-God be navigated with wisdom rather than merely with warships? The ancient Persian prophet saw the whole universe as a moral drama. Standing at the Strait of Hormuz, it is not difficult to see why.

There is a question beneath the post-genre1 condition that we have been circling without quite naming: not what kind of art is this? but what kind of being makes it?

For a long time, the artist was an adept. A master of a domain. You learned the grammar of your form, submitted to its discipline, and if you were gifted enough, you moved its possibilities forward a little. The painter painted. The poet made poems. The sculptor worked in three dimensions. The categories were real because they corresponded to a world that believed in categories—a world that believed that to name a thing was to know it, and to know it was to own it.

That world is not gone. However, its foundations are shaking. And the fracture lines are not only aesthetic.

What this trans-eidetic moment makes visible—from studios and notebooks and moving archives, in work that refuses to declare itself one thing or another—is something that the political moment has been unable to learn from the louder directions: that form follows spirit, not the other way around. The idea comes first. The energy arrives. The medium is whatever it can borrow to get through. The artist is not the master of the form; the artist is the channel through which something finds its shape.

This is not mysticism as escape. It is mysticism as precision. Because if it is true—if the form is only a temporary vessel for something that precedes and exceeds it—then the entire apparatus we have built around artistic identity, around genre as credential, around the market’s need to know what shelf to put you on, begins to look like what it is: a management system mistaken for a metaphysics.

We are living, right now, inside the consequences of a different management system mistaken for a metaphysics. It is older and more total. Its name is capitalism, but its deeper name is the belief that what cannot be counted does not count. That competition is the engine of progress. That the individual unit—the consumer, the voter, the demographic, the content creator in their niche—is the fundamental particle of social life.

Marx saw the wound this opens. He called it alienation: the estrangement of the worker from the product of their labor, from the process of making, from other workers, and from themselves. What is less often said is that alienation is not only an economic condition. It is a perceptual one. When you are reduced to your measurable outputs, you begin to perceive others—and yourself—as measurable outputs. The immeasurable drains away. And what drains away with it is the capacity for empathy: not sentiment, but the deeper thing, the felt recognition that another being’s experience has weight, that the world is held together by relationships that cannot be quantified.

Jeremy Rifkin calls what we are being asked to move toward an empathic civilization. The phrase sounds soft until you realize what it is asking us to abandon—which is the foundational story of competitive individualism, the story that built the colonial empires, that sorted the world into resources and consumers, that is now sorting us into identities that face each other across an unbridgeable distance, each one certain of its own rightness, none of them able to hear anything but the amplification of its own signal.

The fracturing into identity is not accidental. It is what happens when the immeasurable has been evacuated from public life and what remains is the competition of measurable claims. Without a shared sense of the sacred—not religious in the institutional sense, but sacred in the sense that Jerry Mander means: the felt recognition that there are dimensions of existence that exceed our management of them—we have no common ground beneath the argument. We have only the argument, feeding itself, growing louder.

The absence of the sacred does not announce itself. It arrives as disorientation. As the feeling that something is missing whose name you have forgotten. As the strange vertigo of a civilization that has more information than any before it and less wisdom about what the information is for.

Art, when it is functioning as something other than content, is one of the few remaining practices that keeps the channel to the immeasurable open. Not because artists are special—the channel is the point, not the person—but because the act of making, when it is honest, requires submission to something that cannot be planned. The form that emerges is not the one the maker intended. The painting teaches the painter. The poem arrives ahead of its meaning. The work that crosses genre does so because the energy moving through it will not be contained by a single vessel.

This ends up being a direct challenge to the worldview that is currently failing us. Because the worldview that is failing us is built on the premise that the human being is fundamentally a producer and a consumer—a competitive unit optimizing its position in a field of other competitive units. (notice the language here: optimizing, units— words that are the vocabulary of the factory) That premise is not a description of what we are. It is a reduction of what we are. And we have lived inside it long enough that many of us have begun to mistake the reduction for the reality.

The sixth extinction accumulating around us—species, languages, ecologies, ways of knowing—is not separable from this. It is the material consequence of a civilization that decided the immeasurable did not count. That the forest was timber. That the river was kilowatt-hours. That the human being was labor, or a market, or a vote.

Art that operates from the post-genre condition—art that treats the form as a vessel, the artist as a channel, the work as something that passes through rather than something that is owned—is practicing, in miniature, the cosmology we need at scale. Not because art will save us. But because how we imagine ourselves has unspeakable power. We become, over time, what we believe ourselves to be.

Whitehead understood the universe as built not on inert matter exchanging blind forces but on feeling in transit—experience all the way down, creativity as the fundamental principle, each occasion inheriting the past and passing something forward. That is not a comfortable cosmology for a civilization that wants its ground solid and its categories fixed. But it may be a true one. And it points toward what a genuinely post-colonial, post-competitive way of being together might feel like: not the domination of nature and other peoples by the unit that can accumulate the most, but decentralized cooperation, non-coercive motivation, a network of channels each carrying something forward, none of them claiming to be the source.

The artist who works across form is already practicing this. The work that refuses the shelf—that is poem and drawing and song and archive all at once—is not confused. It is operating from a different premise about what art is for. Not the demonstration of mastery. Not the production of a commodity or the performance of an identity, but the conducting of life: keeping the current moving, keeping the channel open, passing something warm from hand to hand in a cold time.

Benjamin mapped the loss of aura under reproduction and mourned it. What we are slowly learning—in the studios, in the moving archives, in the works that keep rearranging themselves—is that aura was never the property of the object. It was always the quality of the relationship. It is what appears when something is carried with care and received without capture. It survives the collapse of the old categories because it was never inside them.

Aura after aura: not the return of the shrine. Not the acceptance of the feed. But the attention as a form of devotion—to the fragment, to the passage, to the immeasurable thing moving through the measurable world, looking for its next vessel.

We are not the masters of our forms. We are the channels. And the question—aesthetic, political, civilizational—is whether we are willing to stay open.

Wherever the conversation falls into closed-loop escalation—signal feeding signal—we’re in the binary grip, the magnetic repulsion. The point isn’t to abolish resistance, but to find a third term—the note that joins two notes into a triad, consonant or dissonant, without turning them into war.

The point of naming polarities isn’t to choose a side; it’s to locate the field we’re in. A symbol can hold difference without turning it into war—like a chord that keeps separate notes inside a single sound. The intellect draws the line; the heart keeps the line from becoming a wall. Separate, and yet one—less a binary than a living threefoldness: difference, unity, relation.

And this is where Benjamin’s next distinction matters—because it describes how that field of perception was reorganized: the shift from the work guarded by ritual distance to the work designed for display.

Benjamin gives us a clarifying polarity.

On one side: cult value—art rooted in ritual, withholding, fixed place. The object matters because it exists, not because it is seen. Its power is guarded by distance.

On the other: exhibition value—art optimized for display and circulation. The object matters because it is seen widely, repeatedly, anywhere. Its power is measured in reach.

Mechanical reproduction doesn’t just produce copies; it shifts the balance between these poles so dramatically that the work becomes something else. The question stops being “Where is the original?” and becomes “How does it travel?” The work’s function begins to flip: away from ritual gravity and toward social use—toward the public field, toward politics in the broad sense: how we gather, recognize, and act.

This is not a story with a clean villain. Something real is gained when art can move. Something real is lost when everything is available at speed.

Benjamin’s sharpest insight may be his refusal to treat distraction as merely decadent. New media don’t just entertain; they train perception. Film, for example, interrupts the spectator’s associations with constant change—images shifting before the mind can settle. Perception becomes braced. Attention is reorganized.

He extends this to everyday life: much of the world (architecture, streets, built environments) is not received through contemplation but through use, habit, incidental noticing. Distraction becomes a mode of absorption—a way the perceptual apparatus adapts to intensified conditions.

If that’s true, then distraction isn’t simply a personal failing. It’s a historical condition—and therefore a battleground. The question becomes: what kinds of forms can meet distracted perception without flattering it? What kinds of art can circulate without dissolving into content?

Adorno and Horkheimer answer by naming the darker version: distraction industrialized. When entertainment becomes a system, it doesn’t merely fill time—it standardizes reaction. The product carries its own instructions; it “reads” you before you read it. Leisure becomes the prolongation of work by other means: the same grooves, the same signals, the same manufactured spontaneity.

In that world, even individuality can be simulated as a style—difference offered as a menu. The result isn’t simply “bad art.” It’s a narrowing of interior life: less room to linger, less room to imagine, less room for silence to do its slow work.

This is where the fear of totalitarianism matters—not only as a future threat, but as a perceptual danger now. Totalitarianism is not only a regime; it is a pattern: a closed loop that can’t hear what it doesn’t already amplify.

Aura after aura: a third way

It would be easy to respond to this by trying to resurrect the old aura: the shrine, the original, the protected object, the return to distance. It would be equally easy to declare aura dead and accept the new regime as inevitable: endless circulation, endless captioning, endless reaction. However, maybe there is a third way.

The post-genre moment has quietly produced it, not as ideology but as practice: works that refuse to be “one thing,” works built from fragments that behave like a living system—rearranging, recombining, reaching a terminus and then setting out again. The artifact isn’t the point. The passage is.

This is where my revision of Benjamin begins: the fragment not as catastrophe-souvenir, but as vessel. Not the shard as proof that everything broke, but the husk as proof that something living passed through. Ruin accuses. Husk indicates metamorphosis.

That shift changes the emotional voltage of the whole project. It doesn’t deny catastrophe. It refuses to let catastrophe be the only form of truth.

If we need a word for this, I’d keep it plain: aura after aura—presence after the collapse of presence-as-authority. Not aura as monument. Not aura as fetish. Aura as handling: the quality that appears when something is carried with care, passed with intention, received without capture.

Symbolic language and the heart

This is where we part company with the assumption that the intellect, reason, alone can save us.

The intellect is invaluable. But it tends to sort. It tends to divide. It tends to turn the world into an argument, and an argument into a binary, and a binary into resistance. Wherever there is resistance, we can be sure we’re in the domain of duality—like two magnets refusing one another.

Art works differently when it is healthy. It doesn’t abolish thought; it returns thought to relationship. It speaks in symbol—not as decoration, but as a language of the heart, the organ of consciousness that can hold two truths simultaneously without forcing them to annihilate each other.

This is close to what you might call right relationship: meeting the world—people, institutions, technologies—without collapsing into domination or reflex. Not a doctrine. A practice. Not agreement. Capacity.

If the tech-world accelerates our reflexes, symbolic language slows them—not by scolding, but by opening an alternate channel. It keeps communication flowing when ordinary discourse becomes a loop.

Constellations in motion

Method matters, because method trains perception.

This series works in constellations. But with one further insistence: motion. Not the museum’s freeze. Not the portfolio’s finality. A moving archive. A work that can be rearranged because it is more faithful to life that way.

This is also an ethical stance. When the world demands that you take a side before you’ve even finished seeing, the decision to arrange rather than declare becomes a kind of resistance—not against politics, but against the flattening of consciousness into slogans.

Kintsugi gives the image that completes the argument.

A broken vessel is repaired with lacquer and powdered gold, the seam highlighted rather than hidden. The break is not denied; it becomes part of the object’s history—an event made visible. That’s not “beautifying damage.” It’s refusing the lie that wholeness means “never broken.”

In a fearful time, this matters. Because fear wants the world split into pure and impure, clean and contaminated, us and them. Repair proposes another integrity: joined, tended, changed—still capable of holding water.

The movement from ruin to husk is the same movement: from accusation to metamorphosis, from closed loop to turning. (If you like the word metastrophe, it’s that: a turning-through, not an erasure.)

Framing as devotion

Pasolini—writing about cinema—describes a poetic method: returning to the same object from a barely shifted angle, again and again, until repetition becomes revelation. I love this as a prose ethic. In an age of automated looking, framing becomes devotion. To frame is to say: this matters enough to be seen twice. To return is to refuse the feed’s command: move on.

And Ezra Pound is the barometer tapping on the table while all of this threatens to drift into fog: no extra words, no padded abstractions. If the metaphysical is real, it can arrive by way of the concrete.

Aura After Aura is a series about presence under pressure: cult and exhibition, attention and distraction, ruin and husk, break and seam, echo and turning. It tries to speak about the political moment without becoming trapped inside it by focusing on the deeper terrain: perception, language, relationship.

There is a temptation I feel in the body—the gravity of it, the drug. The pull to fall into the news, to engage, to rage against injustice, to chase the corrupt messenger and the next corrupt messenger after that. How can one not pay attention, especially when the air carries an echo of the last century—when, from our vantage point, the progression toward cataclysm feels suddenly legible again, as if history is tweaking the same old knobs. I was born in 1972; my life unfolded in the long afterglow of Europe’s catastrophe, in the decades where we told ourselves the world hahd learned. And yet the atmosphere changes. You can almost watch it happen the way you watch weather: clouds gathering above a great plain, forming, thickening, moving closer and closer until the sky has weight. The most unsettling part is the thought that keeps returning—our private vow, our retrospective innocence: if we had seen what was coming, we would have gotten out; we would never have stayed; we would never have been part of it. But what if seeing is not the issue? What if the real question is how to keep perception from being captured—how to keep communication alive—before the gathering becomes a closed loop we can’t step outside. What if the reason we don’t leave isn’t that we didn’t see it coming, but that the coming storm is mesmerizing—so we stay too long watching it approach?

When fear pulls us into binaries and the echo starts to feed on itself, art keeps the channel open—heart-led, symbolic—so catastrophe doesn’t harden into ruin, but turns into husk: proof that something living has passed through.

By “echo,” I mean something more technical than mood. In sound, feedback is the screech or hum that happens when a fraction of an amplifier’s output returns to its own input—when the speaker faces the microphone and the system forms a closed loop that can only feed itself, getting louder and harsher. That is how public life can begin to feel: signal feeding signal, one reaction returning as the next condition of speech, until the conversation can’t hear anything but its own amplification.

And yet feedback isn’t only failure. It’s raw energy. In the one orientation it becomes a deafening howl; in the right hands it becomes language. Drop the needle on Hendrix live at Woodstock and listen to what happens: the shriek is not denied—it’s ridden. What could overwhelm becomes articulation. The loop is kept from swallowing the music, and the result holds more than one truth at once—beauty braided with unease, reverence braided with rupture.

Long before this season of media storm and signal, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin tried to name what modern technologies were doing to perception—how reproduction and mass circulation change what art is and how we meet it. His word for what thins in the process is aura: the strange distance that makes a thing feel singular and present, even when you are close. With that in mind, Hendrix at Woodstock becomes more than a famous performance: it becomes a parable of the present—feedback as the sound of a closed loop, and art as a way of keeping the loop from overwhelming the music.

Aura isn’t a halo. It isn’t an emotional state. It’s a relationship: the feeling that something stands before you with its own gravity, its own threshold, its own being. You can approach it, but you can’t quite consume it. Aura is the boundary that slows us down—not as elitism, but as a condition of encounter. It’s what makes a work feel like more than an image among images.

If aura is the felt threshold of presence, then its decay is also the decay of a certain inner sense—the ability to encounter without control. That loss has the shape of exile: a long desert journey in which the sacred doesn’t vanish, but becomes harder to locate, appearing only in brief oases. I will return to this more directly later; for now it is enough to name the drift: we enter a desert of disenchantment, surviving on thin rations of sensation and spectacle—and mistaking that for life.

And this, for Benjamin, is the crucial point: aura is not an eternal property that artworks “have.” It is historically formed. A work’s singular presence—its “here and now”—is bound to tradition: not tradition as nostalgia, but tradition as an inherited way of approaching things, a grammar of attention. When the grammar changes, what counts as “presence” changes with it.

Once reproduction pries the work loose from that inherited grammar—once the criterion of authenticity stops anchoring the encounter—Benjamin says the center of gravity shifts. The work is no longer held primarily in the shelter of ritual; its social destiny turns outward, toward the public field. In his stark phrase, the total function of art is reversed: no longer based on ritual, it begins to be based on politics. What becomes newly possible is not only wider access, but wider use—the work as something deployable, captionable, recruitable.

Accepting a spiritual nature in the human doesn’t refute that reversal; it changes where we locate the center of gravity. The decisive question becomes not only what institutions art serves, but what faculty in the perceiver the work is training. Ritual, at its best, thickens presence without coercion; politics, at its best, expresses conscience in the shared world without turning the human being into an instrument. In a desacralized age, both can be corrupted into spectacle—each feeding the other in a closed loop. But art can interrupt the loop by returning perception to relationship: a symbolic, heart-led way of holding two truths at once, so we aren’t trapped in reaction. In that sense, the “spiritual” doesn’t abolish the polarity; it redeems it: the work becomes less a tool of cult or party than a practice of inner formation—like Hendrix riding feedback into music, keeping the channel open long enough for something human to be heard.

to be cont’d

Dear Unknown Friends,

I haven’t posted here since December. In the midst of the usual beautiful torrent of ‘holiday’ energy, the quiet, inward, contemplation of the Holy Nights, and my birthday, I had the opportunity to deliver a paper at the 100 Years of Steiner Conference at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was snowing as I got off the train in Boston in December. I stood on the sidewalk and waited for my ride to the hotel and was filled was a feeling I had never had before: here I am, in the city of my birth, in the month of my birth, in the snow, and I can almost remember the view from my mother’s arms as my father drove us back home through the late December light and the gentle snow falling on the city. I felt a feeling of homecoming.

The ideas in Aura After Aura have been taking form over the last few years. The idea that art has reached a place in its evolution where the old categories or genres are no longer viable is not radical. We see this happening everywhere—old ideas of gender, democracy, beauty, ethics, no longer fit; like a child who has outgrown their favorite tutu, our present epoch asks of us to find new ways of speaking about things like art, politics, and sexuality.

Which is to say, I am back here, now, ready to post a series of 8 pieces I’ve been working on. I hope to publish two of these a month for the next four months. They will be available to all my subscribers. Special gratitude goes to my paid subscribers and your continued support; that I can spend time working on these offerings.

Over the weekend there was a lot of excitement about the Super Bowl. Yesterday evening, the streets here in my neighborhood in Tucson were quiet. As I walked with my dog, I could see the glow of televisions through the windows of the houses. My daughter sent me a text message video of the half-time show; it looked like the art director was referencing Diego Rivera’s paintings of workerss dressed in white in the maize fields. A powerful choice of image in this time of immigration conflict.

Thinking about half-time shows: it is impossible to deny that the “world of yesterday” is receding in the rearview mirror as we barrel down the highway toward an uncertain future. This moment in history is unusual as humanity undergoes a sea change where the mores of the past no longer matter; everything is up for question; the technological advances continue to challenge every aspect of our lives— imagine that moment when electricity started to light up the cities, forever changing our relationship to the night; this is the moment we are in, when the advancements of just a decade ago seem quaint. Transhumanism is a good example of some of developments that have moved from the realm of imagination into our day to day lives. There is a saying, “One door closes, another door opens, and there is hell in the hallway.” I wouldn’t say we are in hell; that said, the deck of cards has been thrown up into the air.

To have a front row seat at this halftime show of Cosmic Evolution fills me with awe. Aura After Aura will attempt to follow some of these threads and understand how we might relate to them in ways the support the things that make us human; those things that we don’t want to lose along the way. There is no stopping the march of time; it is how we choose to meet the changes, in our relationship to ourselves and each other where our agency resides.

The first half of the intro to the series will be posted tomorrow afternoon.

I. The Deconstruction of Expression

‘Peasant Shoes’

We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh’s well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an example which as you can imagine has not been innocently or randomly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a two-stage or double-level process.

I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production.

This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and which it reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh, that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.

Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it then that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of colour, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into 58the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right—part of some new division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them. There is, to be sure, a second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be ignored when we gaze at this particular painting, and that is Heidegger’s central analysis in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning-endowment of history and of the social. We will return to that particular gap or rift later on; suffice it here to recall some of the famous phrases, which model the process whereby these henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slowly recreate about themselves the whole missing object-world which was once their lived context. ‘In them,’ says Heidegger, ‘there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.’ ‘This equipment,’ he goes on, ‘belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman . . . Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being’, by way of the mediation of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and broken instruments of labour in the furrows and at the hearth. Heidegger’s account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materiality—the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and for its own visual pleasures; but has nonetheless a satisfying plausibility.

‘Diamond Dust Shoes’

At any rate, both of these readings may be described as hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear: indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with what are now far more clearly fetishes, both in the Freudian and in the Marxian sense (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz, or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dancehall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or of glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commercial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in which various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed, one is tempted to raise here—far too prematurely—one of the central issues about postmodernism itself and its possible political dimensions: Andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-cola bottle or the Campbell’s Soup Can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.

But there are some other significant differences between the high modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very briefly dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense—perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts.

Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and the photographic/negative in contemporary art of this kind: and it is this indeed which confers its deathly quality on the Warhol image, whose glacéd x-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content. It is indeed as though we had here to do with the inversion of Van Gogh’s Utopian gesture: in the earlier work, a stricken world is by some Nietzschean fiat and act of the will transformed into the stridency of Utopian colour.

Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject.

Below, I’ve attached some images I gathered after reading the essay from which the excerpt was taken.

Every Thanksgiving I throw on Thanksgiving Prayer from William Burroughs’ album Dead City Radio. I’ve probably listened to it every year since the album was released; but I don’t remember ever noticing the last line:

‘Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal

of the last and greatest of human dreams”

It’s a terribly concise conclusion to the litany, which seems by the end to be addressed directly to the United States, or its god-sized impudence. The irony, obvious, that the USA should have a holiday called Thanksgiving, is no laughing matter and beneath his tongue-in-cheek delivery, Burroughs is dead serious. The hypocrisies listed in the Prayer stand in direct proportion to the ideals upon which the country was founded. Violence systematically perpetrated upon whoever is unfortunate enough to get in the way of the American dream, like a killer 4th of July parade invading a global neighborhood near you. The victims of this freedom, their human rights trampled by strange characters dressed like Howard J. Campbell Jr. are horrible enough;. however, the gravest of our crimes, is the violation of the principals themselves, as if by some metaphysical CRISP-R editing machine the USA tapped into Plato’s realm of Pure Forms and violated the forms themselves, a rape of first principles as violent as that of Leda by the swan. This “greatest betrayal” is double-sided: betrayal of basic human rights AND betrayal of the very ideas which established those human rights; ideas distilled from two thousand years of tyranny and abuse in the name of kings and Gods. A betrayal which makes it difficult to believe in freedom and truth ever again.

Life was confusing enough before we fell into this realm of deep fake and infinite relativity; but what did we actually fall from? Fall is not from good to evil— first you fall and through its loss the thing emerges from you and then you can try to regain it again. The loss defines something that was invisible before it was lost, something we didn’t even know we could lose or fall from. The innocence of belief, or the naiveté of ideas like justice, liberty, freedom— quaint as Home on the Range. Those ideas that sound so good as you wipe another way of life from the face of the earth. Adorable ideas from simpler times. Because doublespeak is the only ideal we can trust.

It could be no other way. The deep fakes of the 21st century are symptoms of the politics, culture, and society of the lie. All these things are only late stage symptoms of a sickness that has been metastasizing longer than our country has been around. A sickness diagnosed from many different angles by poets and artists and visionaries for centuries. Cassandra over and over again.

Burroughs’ work is impeccably dressed in irony. His satire is thorough. Andy Warhol called Burroughs the “best dressed man in New York,” and Burroughs’ style is itself a satire of the society of which he is critical. A dope shooting, “sexual deviant,” can wear the same clothes as the establishment. At a reading in England in the early 60’s, Burroughs says, “How long will an underground last that has a uniform that announces it is an underground? I’m urging you all to shave off your beards and dress as I do. And, therefore, be a real underground”

In fact, the crises everywhere today are part of a long evolution, playing out East of Eden. If anyone wonders about the idea of the FALL, look around.

Why are people shocked as they watch the appointments of the government be filled like glasses of Budweiser on draft. Whenever I set out to write here I ask why add to the noise? Because what needs to be said is “We told you so.” The situation we’re facing is the result of where we’ve focused our attention. The country has been stumbling through the decades in a Benzo haze of privilege and sanctimonious meddling, riding high and sloppy on the good will it garnered after the second World War and an economy which it spent like a fortune in the hands of a new money yuppie trying to swim with the big boys. It’s an embarrassing reality which the rest of the world has been watching like one might watch a bunch of drunks on jet skis who found a quiet private beach to ruin.

The truth is even though the USA doesn’t have old world demeanor, it’s only a product of the same misreading. This obsession with matter. The sins of the father— the jokers flying on Air Force One are just the offspring of a culture of greed and instant-gratification, like babies born hooked on their parents’ drugs. And this greed and instant-gratification, of which drug addicts everywhere are merely symbols, painfully sensitive as they are, where does it come from?

Since we are unwilling to accept the spiritual ground of all things, we live in a partial reality. All our choices are based on reductionist assumptions raised to the level of doctrine. We can’t use the word spirit without being tainted by associations born from thousands of years of betrayals of its own. It is contaminated by a very just cynicism. The suspicion runs so deep that we deny a significant portion of reality. When we don’t have the full picture, how are we supposed to make decisions. Just as the status quo always coopts or appropriates the language of its critics, the idea of “God” is, at this point, inseparable from the STATE. Everywhere false representatives scandalize that which they claim to represent. This is so common it could be a law.

“Humble to God, haughty to man” The Everlasting Gospel of William Blake charts the inversions of truth and is a manual on how to spot the inversions of tail-wag-dog civilization.

We project ourselves into the blank spaces all around us, displace those parts of ourselves which we don’t accept and populate the world with enemies. Take ownership of the things happening around you that you would like to hold others responsible; by taking responsibility for what’s going on, we have agency, even if we don’t like what we’re responsible for. When each one of us acknowledges our complicity, we declare ourselves active forces in our world and not victims of an abstract system. As abstract as the soul-crushing system is, it is a perfect reflection of where we focus our energy, consciously and unconsciously; all the beauty and horror are aspects of ourselves that will cease to hold sway when we become conscious enough to understand we’re in a hall of mirrors. Small adjustments have power when made consciously.

Without this responsibility, we’re done for. So from now on, when you see someone doing something horrible, don’t get self-righteous; say, there I am.

This is one reason why it’s getting harder and harder to say anything about anything. What’s there to say that hasn’t been said. It’s not that there won’t be. But we’re in a moment of silence. Silence for the end of an age. Silence for the corner we’ve cornered ourselves in. Silence in the knowledge that the old ways will no longer serve us; that the things that once worked work no more. So what do we do with this information, imprisoned as we are in a situation that has no viable solutions. Why no viable solutions? Because everything depends on each one of us finding within ourselves the salvation which has historically come from without. To be born in a time when all spirit has left us— we have to drop the bucket of faith into ourselves and pull from the sacred spring within each one of our hearts. This sounds abstract. However, it is in the gesture toward this action where the beginning of the new way resides. No grand actions. Only the simple acknowledgment of our true nature, at once sacred and profane.

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Let’s say you’re traveling across a strange new land; some of the landscape is familiar and you have a good map. However, the mapmaker didn’t believe in mountains, so when you get to the massive mountain range, say the Rockies, you’re not a little confused. In every other respect, the map is excellent. It has the Mississippi River. Everything, just no mountains. How could there be such a grand omission? How are we supposed to navigate the world with half a map, especially when we are assured— this is the whole map.

Let’s say you can’t drive. However, someone gives you a beautiful car, perfectly engineered with a beautifully appointed interior. You’ve been told this is an excellent car. The best. So you slide in the leather driver’s seat, turn the key, figure out how to put it into drive and put your foot on the gas; next thing you know, you’re wrapped around a lamppost.

Let’s say there’s a vinyl factory by a river that dumps the vinyl waste into the river. Think, the Orbia plant in Henry, Illinois. All the life in the river dies, the drinking water is contaminated and the population sees high levels of cancer and other diseases caused by forever chemicals.

When we don’t have a full picture of the cosmos in which we live, we’re bound to run in to the mountains of trouble.

The most exquisite human systems all assume that the we people operating the system are familiar with it, know how to operate the system and are operating from our highest selves. If we’re not engaged in the system, performing our civic duty, the system is bound to fall and fail. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the car is if you can’t drive.

The only system that gives honest feedback to us are non-human created systems. Nature won’t lie to us. It may let us get away with our shit for a while. Our bodies may be durable and our ecosystems can handle a lot. However, eventually, they don’t lie about the effects of our pollution, of our dams, of our cities, our sewage dumped into the lake. No, it doesn’t lie about the effects we have on ourselves and the places we live.

It’s okay. We were promised a lot and we believed it. I went to the carnival. There was a tent that said, “See yourself as the world sees you.” Excitedly, I paid my dollar and went inside. There was a jackass.

We’re so scared, so traumatized by religion. We’ve been raised to believe we live in a meaningless cosmos, a totally random blip in infinity. And then we die, and we fight for this truth. We fight for this to be true. We clutch our nihilism to our chests like a fundamentalist crucifix.

Just because you’ve heard some songs you don’t like, songs that have tortured and enslaved you, does that mean all the songs are like that? I think of film footage of the soldiers come back from World War I. The shell shock— warfare had entered their being so deeply that it effected their will, their reflexes firing off at random, making them flinch and duck and twitch, just standing there in a peaceful garden behind the hospital.

What inspires us to engage with the world from our highest selves? What is the unifying principle, even if it is the principle never to collapse into unity, but retain our sovereignty and respect the sovereignty of others, even when it gets dicey. In the story of Gandhi, they use the ridiculous British salt laws, which said that the people couldn’t make their own salt, to unify many different interests in India and draw attention to the injustice of colonial British rule. Things are a little more complicated now, to say the least; still, we ask: what is the unifying principle that bypasses all of our divisions? A unifying principle that allows our divisions to remain. One thinks that it would be the environment, however, it’s clear that that’s not the case. Or maybe a nation pummeling another with no ability to defend itself. Stacking up dead children like they were bricks.

How beautiful the images our technologies have returned to us: the surface of Mars, the sound of Martian wind, strange fish at the bottom of the sea, a foetus alive in the womb; how incredible the world is as peaceful as it is, incredible according to the party line that without the State, without the law, we’d be savages killing each other. Tearing each other apart. Now, isn’t that what we’re doing anyway? Perhaps, the only thing we can do now, even if we disagree on what that is, is send out positive energy. I mean, even if we disagree on what kind of positive energy, even if each of us has our own take on what that positive energy is, send it out. You send yours out. I’ll send mine out. You could call it a prayer. You could call it a wish. You could call it a throw of the dice.

As so many things in life are, it’s kind of counterintuitive, like that finger toy that grips tighter and tighter the more you force you use to pull your finger out. Of course, we’ve been through this before, over and over again. Joan of Arc burned at the stake. The first rule of the Buddha. The turning of the tables. Muhammad hanging his sweaty shirt on a bush and giving the gardenia its scent. The alternating current of hope and horror.

We’re so fattened up with images, like paté geese stuffed to exploding. Trapped within the spectacle, the spectacles we watch, each from our own private theater. Even at the movie theater, each in our seat, with our cup holder. After the table’s overturned, the message, there’s no middleman. There’s nothing between you and the object or destination of your wishes or prayers, the numbers you want to see come up on the dice. To each their own, to each their own way to the center point, to the periphery, through the labyrinth, to the heart, There is no fear of the future, no regret of the past, only gratitude for the present moment..

Oh to be naive in this age of reason.

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Robert Frost

When we speak of creation, whether in the domain of art, of theology, or of the cosmos itself, we are inclined by habit to imagine a unity presiding over multiplicity. The One stands before the many, the lawgiver before the governed, the father before his children. This is the archetype of sovereignty: a transcendent figure, whose act of creation is conceived as the imposition of form upon chaos, order upon disorder, law upon the lawless. And from this sovereign unity, we derive both our conceptions of God and our conceptions of the artist.

If we take seriously the critical observation that unity is never given but always produced — that it emerges only where a multiplicity is subordinated to a signifier, to a subject, to a center — then the theological and aesthetic imagination alike must be reconfigured. If multiplicity is primary, then the divine creator, as well as the human creator, can no longer be thought of in terms of sovereignty or unity. Instead, creation is anarchic: it proceeds not from the One to the many, but from the many to the many.

It has often been the temptation of metaphysics to subordinate multiplicity to unity. From Parmenides to Plato, the One has enjoyed priority over the manifold; multiplicity has been understood as derivative, fragmentary, illusory. Even in traditions that affirm plurality — the Christian trinity, for instance — unity is restored at the highest level, safeguarding the sovereignty of the One.

If we invert this order, multiplicity is not derivative but primordial. It is not the shadow of unity but its condition of possibility. Deleuze and Guattari insist upon this reversal: a multiplicity is real in itself, irreducible to the One. Unity appears only as an effect of capture, a product of organization imposed upon flows. The One is not the origin but the residue, the afterimage of multiplicity.

This reversal has consequences for our understanding of both divinity and creativity. If multiplicity is primordial, then the creative principle must be reimagined in its light: no longer as a sovereign will, but as an immanent, anarchic proliferation.

How does the illusion of unity arise. Deleuze and Guattari describe these two modalities of such capture: the pivot-unity, in which multiplicity is organized around a central point of correspondence; and the binary unity, in which multiplicity is divided according to a law of opposition. They call these modalities striated space and arborescent thought. In the first, multiplicity is subordinated to coordinates, fixed to a grid or center. In the second, it is ordered by binary divisions, the branching tree of hierarchical logic. Both forms of unity are effects of power, not expressions of ontology. They are the techniques by which multiplicity is domesticated.

It is no accident that theological imagination, in its traditional form, has favored these modalities. God is conceived either as the pivot of the cosmos — the axis around which all things revolve, each in its ordained place — or as the lawgiver who divides the sheep from the goats, the saved from the damned, subject from object. These are the structures of capture, projected into heaven.

But if multiplicity is prior, then the divine cannot be conceived in these terms. We must instead affirm an anarchic principle of creation: anarchic in the literal sense, without archē, without sovereign origin. Creation is not the imposition of form upon chaos, but the immanent differentiation of chaos itself.

The mythologies of antiquity already bear witness to this possibility. Hesiod begins with Chaos, not as mere disorder but as yawning gap, fertile abyss. Mesopotamian myth places Tiamat, the watery multiplicity, at the origin. Even Genesis, if read with care, begins not with absolute unity but with the deep (tehom), over which the spirit moves. In each case, the One who imposes order is a later intrusion, a sovereign claiming mastery over what was already proliferating.

To affirm multiplicity as divine is to recognize chaos not as negation but as fecundity. Creation is anarchic, because it arises from no single will. It is the work of flows, of differences, of becomings. The creator, in this sense, is not a monarch enthroned but the field of generative forces immanent to the world.

Myth provides figures adequate to this anarchic principle. The Trickster is its herald: Hermes, Loki, Coyote. He is not sovereign, but a wanderer, a boundary-crosser, a liar. He dissolves unities, mocks hierarchies, multiplies connections. His work is not to impose law but to weave difference into further difference. In his footsteps, creation proliferates sideways.

Likewise, the Garden serves as an image of multiplicity. Against the tree of knowledge, which embodies arborescent thought, we must place the tangled, lateral, proliferating underground. The sacred garden is not an axis but an entanglement. Its fertility lies not in its order but in its excess. The divine is not the gardener imposing symmetry, but the very multiplicity of life that overruns order.

Traditional monotheism enthrones the Father as One. But the anarchic principle finds expression in the chthonic feminine: Gaia, Coatlicue, Kali. These figures embody multiplicity as womb and tomb, birth and death in their interpenetration. They are not sovereign but immanent. They do not command obedience but embody becoming. To affirm the anarchic divine is to affirm this matrix of proliferation: fertile, destructive, cyclical, inexhaustible.

No figure illustrates the anarchic creator more vividly than Dionysus. His essence is multiplicity: he is many-formed, masked, ecstatic. In his cult, identities dissolve; boundaries between man and woman, god and mortal, self and other, are blurred. Dionysus does not impose unity; he releases multiplicity. His dance is an image of anarchic creativity: ecstatic, proliferating, never concluding.

If we return from theology to aesthetics, the implications are clear. The artist, conceived under the sign of the One, is imagined as sovereign: a genius imposing form upon matter, a unifying subject. But under the sign of multiplicity, the artist is rather a conduit of flows, a channel through which differences proliferate. The work of art is not the expression of a unified subject but the site of multiplicity becoming sensible.

Eliot himself, though working within a different register, hints at this. The poet’s mind, he writes, is not a vessel of personal expression but a catalyst through which tradition passes into new combinations. The “individual talent” is precisely impersonal: it consists not in unity but in participation in a larger multiplicity. One might say: even in Eliot, multiplicity is primary, unity an effect. William S Burroughs, too, frees the individual from their sovereign roll; his and Gysin’s metaphor of the cutup and fold in is their way to allowing the “third mind” to assert itself and bypass the normal control mechanisms of ‘self’ and ‘language;’ essentially, honoring the multiplicity of voices before the paternalistic dominance of one voice.

Finally, the affirmation of multiplicity entails an ethic. If unity is always a product of capture, then anarchism in the political sense mirrors anarchism in the metaphysical sense. To live under the sign of multiplicity is to resist the sovereign, the lawgiver, the father. It is to cultivate rhizomatic relations: decentralized, provisional, proliferating. The divine is not above us but among us, as the immanent creativity of the many.

Creation is not the work of the One but the work of multiplicity. Unity is derivative, imposed by power; multiplicity is primordial, anarchic, divine. The figures adequate to this principle are not kings and fathers but tricksters, gardens, chthonic mothers, Dionysian dancers.

In affirming this, we do not abolish the divine but transfigure it. The anarchic creator is not the sovereign but the field of generative forces immanent to life. To live under this sign is to embrace becoming, difference, proliferation. It is to see in chaos not the threat of disorder but the very fertility of creation.

Where was I?

Ah, yes, back in Antigua, before the Gathering, sleeping in the ruins of La Recolección. Was I telling you about the two German girls, J- and A-, and throwing away my plane ticket? Let's go back a little. I met them in Antigua, the ancient capital.

I had nowhere to go and it was early. The entire town was swathed with sunlight and the sky was a deep ever-blue, intense as the sun, and it spread out in all directions like a million roads above my head and the old town. Locals and tourists walked by me and I watched them as I sat with my back against a crumbling plaster wall. I could see the mountains and volcanos watching over everything and I could feel them, too: their altitude and definition placed the town in the center of the world.

I don't remember why we started talking. I was just sitting against one of those beautiful old walls, looking at people pass, full of joy and stupor. Every car that went by was classic: beat up old Cadillacs, Chevys and Fords, all made before the 70s. They were coming from the other side of town which was across the largest street divided by a meridian of trees and scraggly grass and dirt. What they wore exactly I can't remember -- probably ankle length Indian print skirts and old t-shirts. They were from Germany. J- and A- . J- looked like Swiss Miss.

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“Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories. My discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom. But the king answered and said ‘O man full of arts, the god-man Toth, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them.’”

from Plato’s Phaedrus

I feel horrible and sad. Woke up tangled in thinking and feeling, remorse.  What's wrong with me? Why is it so damn hard to get on with it? Managed to get out of bed and drink some water.  It's just after 7am.  You'd think I was out all night debauching however it was a quiet night.  Met Brent for a couple drinks and a long conversation about the poet Richard Siken's new book, Louise's visit to the Rothko Chapel, the broken heart rattling around inside my chest and what this particular experience we seen to share in our encounter with a specific manifestation of neurotic -- the one that punishes and does not forget.  "You are in the book, you are out of the book."  Just like that.  Where is forgiveness?  Puts  the contextual significance of Jesus' doctrine of forgiveness in perspective... And we spoke of his old partner from 40 years ago who is a poet and didn't leave the house for three years after her uncle died , and finally two tiered Thomism and the gift of association...  

All around us the sky lit up with lightning like the synapses of a giant brain.  We're sitting within the CHIASM observatory --  
						the alphabet  ALEPH BET

each letter a storage unit, each word contains data -- books external memory devices.  The exteriorization of the subject into the object.  Who can blame us for wanting to get out of these bodies -- the history of humanity --  eventually they fall away altogether like spent rockets -- we become pure mind.    "the body without organs"    the true deterritorialization 

proxy mind --   the error becomes reality anyway.   So we split ourselves from our environment a process that is well documented over 10s of thousands of years.  The synesthetic hunter-gatherer who moves within an environment which is the body of his body               ...

Animals and humans switch between each other at will -- the time before "man gave name to the animals" when the animals taught humans what their names are, taught humans their animal language, the secret animal tongue.  the time of stories -- when humans and their bodies were the "technology" at once capable of radionics, psychotronics,  radiesthesia -- stories were containers -- the time before we started to create tools because we were a perfect tool and anything outside ourselves was just a crutch -- until we get to Bacon and Descartes or Galileo, perspective 

the eidos and ethos 
severed completely 
as if the head 
removed from the body
and everything 
we think we are
placed in the head

empty hearts 
believed to be pumps 
as if the body were a basement 
of a factory -- they burned Bruno at the stake for noticing that GOD, the creative HOLY spirit  is in ALL things and not exclusive  in the two-tiered Thomistic sense -- a strange bait and switch where the dogma of the orthodoxies swap places -- whether science or religion-- hostility to this MONISM.  The mind is separate from the body the spirit is separate from nature -- like a house abandoned by its builder - we have the LLMs ultra-terra incongnita of massive energy sucking neural networks which people begin to believe are gods everyone with their personal god at their fingertips --

 Ahrimanic to the duel-core -- preparing everyone for the the War of All Against All
that will lead us into the next stage of this Cosmic Evolution     the Jupiter Seal pulsing and flickering in the cymatic stardust of future --

these little packets
of written words
arborescent and rhizomatic 
at once
viral -- 
Socrates couldn't read --
viscous vicious venom visnja --
we have separated our out
and placed us in the machine 
(we ensoul the machine)
so the machine becomes us 
and we finally become the machine 
of all our 
mechanistic materialist metaphors. --
the collective consciousness
of our microbiome 
is our singular consciousness 
and our singular consciousness 
is part of the microbiome of
the angelic hierarchies' singular consciousness
and their singular consciousnesses
each part of the microbiome of ...
turtles all the way down 
and consciousness all the way up

Saint Sebastian 
is tied 
to this 
Axis Mundi 
and every arrow 
is another dimension 
and Mishima's 
childhood desire (see Confessions of a Mask)
is but the dream
of a minor God
in an alternate structure ...

like listening to the chain crank
us to the top of the first drop 
on this 
APOTHEOSIS ROLLERCOASTER ....

sought beauty in a pretty face
imagination’s laced veils fallen 
'round the ankles of image
(bereft) upon a dirty floor 
beggar outside a temple door
forgotten for centuries or more
empty cup longing 
things that only disappear 
as bitter as forlorn
depraved & biological (decompositional)
a body without soul
or panpipe without breath 
no songs in nothingness!

when it matters
endless cigarettes 
                        extinguished
                                    on minarets 
digital calls to prayer
every body is a temple 
 nobody can stand
                         eternity 

        bedouins 
           in a desert of stars 

Disenchanted world. denial
of intrinsic meaning and purpose
humans hold themselves apart.
being part of nature/world and
in calling it meaningless we
call ourselves meaningless.
our approach is adolescent separating
ourselves from our creators in
order to become independent from
them, learn how to take care of ourselves.
Jesus denied his earthly parents —
what does this mean for the metaphor?
We are permeated in all ways —
through skin, eyes, ears,
breath, mind, etc… Every moment
of our lives is a dialogue
between this inner and outer,
this breathing in and
breathing out — each breath
modified as it is
received and returned

Thinking about thinking

At the center of the window display of the shop that sold skeletons and skulls a mongoose mounted on a piece of stained rosewood, one leg extended forward, frozen and animate, a perfect puzzle, bleached white and emptied of everything it contained and supported in life-- pure, ancient symmetry of ribs arcing out from the curved spine; little links in an interlocking chain of skulls and reflecting the serpent skeleton (a prototype of our spines) coiled beside it; each bearing fangs from elegant jaws, the serpent’s flat skull ready to strike the mongoose— and all around an assortment of butterflies impaled on little metal rods floating on their pretty colored wings which were like sketches of eyes, everywhere book-matched symmetry, hovering above fossils of radiolaria, crinoids, ammonites; patterns and patterns of patterns, patterns that lived, that were creatures that moved, too, each with their own consciousness, or non-consciousness, mysterious thought-worlds that experienced their environments and time; teeth in bowls, long fangs, no longer ivory colored, but grey from being buried so long, absorbing millennia of minerals; and amidst this menagerie of creation, this revelation of the occult, a few human skulls, comical, somehow, or critical of the frozen jungle around them, exquisite, buttressed mandibles, like gothic cathedrals, vaulted eye sockets, a sphenoid bone, itself a butterfly, the delicate brow awninged the crest-fissure, seams running along the top and out like tributaries of rivers— at the center of all this, in liquid the color of old paper, a human brain floated in a bell jar. It appeared a few weeks before and the Spoon Thief stood there, mesmerized, stoned, entranced by this human brain suspended in liquid in this beautiful jar; it had been someone, had walked and talked, cried and laughed, it had explained all the things, it had a a family, it had been a baby, it had been someone. As he was. He started thinking about thinking, thinking about himself thinking; all those skeletons and butterflies, all those things he was made of, too, vanished in the awareness of himself standing there on Columbus Avenue looking through his reflection in the plate glass at the display on the other side, at this brain in a glass jar, a creepy feeling that made no sense: all he was was this thing he was looking at and it was this thing he was looking at that was contemplating itself within him at that very moment as the cars passed behind him reflected before him in the window. How was it possible to witness this witness witnessing which had once witnessed itself witnessing; it was like that long time ago when he became so aware of breathing it became difficult to breathe. Everything he was taught to believe was a lie. There must be some other location from which we are able to witness ourselves as he was witnessing this brain in the window, some avenue and plate glass window, some display, some sidewalk outside all of this, where something beyond us and us at the same time stands.

I was down in Antigua in the bookstore next to Café No Sé looking for a book to read when I got in to a conversation with a young Guatemalan doctor. We were doing the preliminary questioning: have you read Maud Oakes’ The Two Crosses of Todos Santos, etc… Once we’d sussed one another out, we started trying to figure what makes home home. I must have said something along the lines of, “I love Guatemala. It feels like home…” And then questioned my own statement. Was I making a typically oblivious insensitive bourgeois comment? Was it okay that I felt at home in Guatemala being from the colonialist, imperialist side of the tracks? Especially in light of the dark shadow-truths of the United Fruit Company, Thomas Parran, and other sinister US involvements with Guatemala. Many who grew up in Hollywood’s sphere of influence might think of Dorothy clicking the heals of her magic shoes and repeating her mantra: there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. Home for Dorothy was Kansas because Aunty Em and Uncle Henry lived there. Home is a place where one feels safe and loved. However, home is a place where one does not feel alienated. The family values influence on our idea of home is powerful and one may wonder about the ideological implications therein. A friend told me the story of visiting an island off the coast of Ireland where his family was from before they moved to the United States. He was a teenager during the trip and wasn’t really thinking about the history of the place in terms of his identity and was taken by surprise when he stepped off the ferry: he was overcome with emotion and began to weep uncontrollably. Is it the possible that the land can in some cases run as deep as our DNA or feelings of being nurtured. The land holds memory and like we are discovering about so many things in the world and cosmos, it is another form of storage or memory. I suggested that home is where we have bled into the soil.

The idea of person as place is interesting. The poets have always known this; Swedish poet Transtrømer in his poem The Half-Finished Heaven writes:

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

Or Pablo Neruda in his famous If You Forget Me:

everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me

In the supermodern or hypermodern world we live in, the idea of non-place grows ever more relevant. What has happened to the café cultures that played significant parts in the development of western culture. Where are the town squares where people meet. How is the mono-culture of contemporary life setting us up for the further violent homogenization of every culture and way of life on earth. Washing clothes down by the river or fetching water from the well (see Hamsun’s novel Women at the Pump). Some promise that social media has replaced the need for public spaces. Think of the benches in these “public spaces’ with the derelict bodies of doom-scrollers passed out like winos. The United States can seem like a vast non-space from the highway. Each exit promises the same empty options One gets out of the car to fill up the tank. Wow, look at the beautiful sunset over the giant sign for the Travel Center, look at the dawn gleaming off the chrome tank of that semi-truck. With all it’s space, the United States created the non-place and is importing them all over the world, like model kits.

here is a a little demo for my paid subscribers.

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Miguel said, “come on, we’re going to miss the boat.” I finished my business in the farmacia and we ran down the hill to the muelle. The ferry was just pulling away. “We missed it,” he said. Those days there was only one boat and it made its way around the lake slowly, serving each village between Panajachel and San Pedro and then finally to Santiago. It was dusk. “I guess we’re sleeping here again,” he said and we walked back up the hill.

Only 4 years before, on December 2nd, 1990, here in Santiago, the Guatemalan Army opened fire on a crowd of thousands of Tzutujil Mayas. They killed 14 unarmed protesters and wounded another 21. This kind of thing was the norm in Guatemala during the decades long civil war (military garrison’s in Mayan villages beating and killing the inhabitants), but this event was a breakthrough moment and catalyzed the criticism of the military to the point that the military was forced to leave Santiago. Miguel told me of this as we ate some fried chicken from a street cart. There were no police on the lake, no military. It was a total autonomous zone. Santiago was one of the biggest indigenous populated cities in Central America. Some backpackers would make the trip to Santiago to pay a visit to Maximon, the deity/folk saint worshiped in the Guatemalan highlands. Less known, Santiago was the sight of the assassination in 1981 of Stanley Rother, a Catholic priest from Oklahoma; “Father Francis,” as he was known to the community, was one of 10 priests murdered in Guatemala in 1981. Before his remains were sent back to Oklahoma, his heart was removed and buried beneath the altar of the church in Santiago. “Everyone here is telepathic on paranoid level.” William Burroughs writes in his Latin American journals. This was true in Guatemala. There was deep unspoken suspicion everywhere. After almost 40 years of civil war, the people had grown around their trauma. Everyone had lost someone to a death squad and the atmosphere in Santiago was intense.

At the same time, especially at the lake, Guatemala was familiar with the more far-out gringos and travelers. Panajachel was known as gringotenango, and had been on the hippie trail since the early 70s. Stories about UFOs emerging from the lake or one of the three volcanos were common. Arguellian missionaries carried The Mayan Factor in their backpacks. Palenque’s Mayan Astronaut was the perfect symbol of this aquarian fusion of ancient alien. There was no denying the unique energy of the place; the magic of the spectacular miradors of the lake were matched by an energy equally as magical; it was as if the atmosphere there was psychically fertile, so that a thought or intention would take root and manifest. This could be dangerous, as I found out. Indeed, the world of the Maya was teeming with sorcery; for the unwitting, it was easy to find oneself under the eye of a bruja.

The Rainbow Family - a roving anarchistic autonomous zone some say used to smuggle drugs through central america into USA since there was no leadership to bust.

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Here is a recording of my song Black Budget, recorded live to 2” tape at Wavelab Studio in Tucson, AZ in 2012, w/ Winston Watson on drums, Christopher Sauer on guitar, Boyd Peterson on bass, and Leslie Wood on synthesizer, and yours truly guitar and vocal.

Black Budget

There’s a black budget on the table
11 tons of cash every few days
you think you got to worry about what’s on the news
well, why don’t you just turn it off
tune in
clear sight

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René Girard makes a claim in his book Violence and the Sacred which he delivers with such delight one can imagine what he was like as a brilliant school boy with an intrinsic mistrust of established opinion: I will prove Oedipus was innocent, he says. At this point most folks reach for their guns or their heart medication. Girard’s elegant theories deal with things about humans we just don’t want to accept: human mimetic desire, violence, scapegoating and, in short, civilization’s roots in all of these things. In the end, Girard’s point is simple— there is no guilty ONE. As Jesus says while drawing in the ground with his finger, “Let him that is among you without sin, cast the first stone…” In short, the idea of guilt and the pointing of fingers at one person as the “bad” person, is obsolete, a vestige of consciousness past which, if we want to move in to the future, if we want to have a future at all, it’s time to let go of: time to stop this finger-pointing, tit-for-tat-sism, and work together towards lifting our minds from the low frequencies that dominate the media.

Many writers on Substack are concerned with the “New American Fascism.” Of course we know what they mean by new— however, one doesn’t have to look too deeply into the history of the United States to make the argument that fascism was Born in the USA. The Anatomy of Fascism (2004 Knopf) author Bill O. Paxton writes:

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths, colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority…

or Bertolt Brecht’s descriptions of fascism:

"a historic phase of capitalism" and "...the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism"

For a list of definitions of fascism, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

This is interesting because there is something reminiscent of a weeds vs flowers debate in these definitions. Certainly, the Capitalist priesthood and the devotees to its orthodoxies and dogmas wouldn’t call capitalism anything other than the best system to ever come down the line in all of human history. These orthodoxies and dogmas are insidious and infect even the purest intentions.

Why does this matter? Who cares if the USA has always had fascistic tendencies? We are in the present moment, and NOW is what matters; NOW we have people trying to consolidate power in the country and reverse the things that the USA has always been proud of— democracy, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc, etc… In fact, one of the truly great things to come out of the USA is it’s music, a music created in the shadow of the “fascist” lineage, music created by people who were CONSIDERED LESS THAN HUMAN because of the color of their skin, their race, or whatever, on the beautiful land which is now known as the USA; land which we violently stole from its stewards, stole systematically; as systematically as the Third Reich starved the Jewish Ghettos using IBM punch card technology (the first thing you see upon entering the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, is an IBM computer). Please see the book IBM and the Holocaust for more information here. The rest of the world has known the shadow side of the USA, experiencing our country’s meddling in their country’s affairs for a very long time; the uncomfortable truth is the USA is not the place many people here on Substack and beyond apparently thought it was. We are in agreement that the present situation is tweaking our greatest fears. Whenever we feel that feeling of being tweaked by the news, we try to remember someone is doing the tweaking. It matters because it’s important to understand the present moment in the context of US history. The revolving doors of ideology go round and round like the wheels on the bus.

The victories of free speech and freedom of expression in art and politics were hard won and not without painful losses. Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are only a few who stood up against obscenity charges. The 1950’s in the United States of America under the rule of J. Edgar Hoover and his accomplice Roy Cohn (mentor to the present dent) ruined the lives and careers of human beings who didn’t fit the image of the USA. The victories of the liberal left in the United States were in a big way fueled by the energy created in reaction to this period of time. The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by the USA in 1952 is another example of the more recent history of a spirit that has run deep in the veins of this country.

Apparently, rational society based on science and progress is in free fall (a term used by the media to describe stock markets falling). The Enlightenment and the liberal dream had some pretty big guns. It is dangerous to conflate criticism of bourgeois presumptions of Euro-centric philosophy with reactionary media manipulations such as Qanon. The more one keeps the conversation in the flatland labyrinth of spin, perpetrated by the news cycle, the more energy is fed into that behemoth. When we do that, we are allowing the parameters of the conversation to be defined by the very forces some people believe they are opposing. It is interesting how some will namecheck Rudolf Steiner, yet distance themselves when it comes to the heart of Anthroposophy. Where is the discussion of Steiner’s ideas of Social Threefolding in the conversation? When will people begin to discern the difference between the State in Christian clothing and the simple message of Christianity which is clear and true regardless of whether Jesus Christ was the Messiah:

“A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another, as I have

loved you, that ye also love one another. John 13.34

In his book Breathing Franco Berardi writes:

Only poetry will help us through the apocalypse that is already raging as an effect of decades of financial absolutism. Only poetry will soothe the suffering of the engineer’s mind and the poet’s mind and will act to reverse the financial sphere’s grip upon language.

Rimbaud’s Lost Papers aligns with no side and doesn’t trust any human to make a law for anyone. We believe most humans want to live in peace and will do that, if allowed, and are not manipulated by the power-hungry few. The shock of the tribes upon seeing the way the Jesuits acted in the early days of European exploration of the new world— the way the Jesuits punished, for example— is well recorded (see The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, summarized here). There must be another way to go, a way where we don’t have to tromp through the mud of politics and ideology.

Peace be with you
RLP

This month Orthodox Easter and Occidental Easter will be celebrated on the same day; this is the first time that this has happened in about 1700 years, since the first Council of Nicaea. “In 2025, Easter (Catholic/Protestant) and Pascha (Orthodox) will be celebrated on the same day, April 20, due to a rare coincidence in the lunar calculations used to determine the dates. While the Eastern Orthodox Church generally uses the Julian calendar, while the Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations use the Gregorian Calendar the specific lunar phase on which both churches calculate Easter led to this convergence.” So says search engine. I like to see when Easters fall each year and was surprised to discover the coincidence (as in a correspondence in nature or time; NOT as in a remarkable concurrence of events, etc… ) this year. This year… We’ll get back to that…

We are born into so many things, a world with a signature— R. Mutt. Isn’t that part of the brilliance of Duchamp’s readymades, the gleam of his porcelain Fountain? We are told: this is the calendar; these two calendars coincide this year. We take their word for it, as we do innumerable other post-scientific revolution orthodoxies and dogmas… That’s what school is for. And we’re happy for much of the information. Who has time to calculate their own calendar or measure the speed of sound? Years ago I tried to live by the lunar calendar just for a month and couldn’t do it.

Even if we’re atheists or have deep wounds from growing up in a judgmental and spiteful Christian household (see nun cracking knuckles with ruler), we live in a Heliocentric cosmos. How appropriate then on this “Holy Week” to contemplate our relationship to the Sun God or Sun Spirit, as we understand them. According to some, Easter celebrates the only God who knows what it is like to be human and to die. One perspective is expressed thus; Rudolf Steiner writes in Esoteric Lessons III:

Christ is a sun-spirit, a fire-spirit. It's his spirit that reveals itself to us in sunlight. It's his breath of life in the air that sweeps around the earth and presses into us with every breath. His body is the earth on which we live. He actually feeds us with his flesh and blood, for all the food we eat is taken from the earth, from his body. We breathe his breath of life that he streams to us through the earth's plant-cover. We see in his light, for the sunlight is his spirit-radiation. We live in his love, even physically, for the sun's warmth that we get is his spiritual force of love, that we perceive as warmth. And our spirit is drawn towards his spirit, as our body is fettered to his body. That's why our body must be consecrated, because we walk on his body. The earth is his holy body that we touch with our feet. And the sun is the manifestation of his holy spirit to which we are allowed to look up. And the air is the manifestation of his holy life that we are allowed to take into us. So that we could become aware of our self, our spirit, so that we could become spirit-beings our self, this high sun-spirit sacrificed himself, left his royal abode, descended from the sun and took on physical raiment in the earth. Thus he is physically crucified in the earth. But he spiritually embraces the earth with his light and his love power, and everything that lives on it belongs to him. He's only waiting for us to want to belong to him. If we give ourselves to him completely then he'll not only give us his physical life, but also his higher spiritual sun-life. Then he streams through us with his divine light-spirit, with his warming waves of love and with his creative God's will. We can only be what he gives us, what he makes out of us. Everything about us that corresponds to the divine plan is his work. What can we do in addition to this? Nothing but to let him work in us. It's only if we resist his love that he can't work in us. But how could we resist this love? Resist him who says: “I have always loved you and have drawn you to me out of pure goodness.” He has loved us since the earth's very beginning. We must let his love become a real being in us. Real life, spirit and bliss are only possible if this life becomes real life for us, becomes Christ's life in us. We can't become pure and holy by ourselves, but only through this Christ-life. All our striving and wrestling is in vain as long as this higher life doesn't fill us. It alone can wash everything out of our nature that's still unpurified, like a clean, pure stream. This is the soul-ground from which this purifying light-life can ascend. There we must seek our dwelling, at his feet and in devotion to him. Then he will transform us himself and stream through us with his divine love-life until we become illumined and pure as he is, become like him. Until he can share his divine consciousness with us. Our soul must become pure and wise through his light—then it can unite with his life. This then is the union of Christ and Sophia, the union of Christ's life with the human soul that has been purified by his light.

The transition from Lunar God of the Old Testament to the Solar God of our present epoch is fraught. Imagine the most complex move of your life— a midlife transition on every level; or for the more techie reader, migrating a data base from an old operating system to an entirely new operating system (I violate here a law of metaphor: Blake writes:

When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty

This violation is nearly foundational in our tail-wag-dog world. See my essay You Must Change Your Life for more on the direction of metaphors and the difference between theory and fact.)

We are born into a world that is finished, which isn’t to say we’ve explored all the potentialities nor that we will not do so in the future. I haven’t had the chance to see Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS because it disappeared from the theaters before I knew it had been released. Same with his film Youth Without Youth, an adaptation of Mircea Eliade’s novella of the same title; it wasn’t well received, understandably; even though I like the film, it requires much forgiveness from the viewer, or a willing suspension of disbelief (replace disbelief with aversion to hackneyed messaging) To make another Apocalypse Now is impossible. However, we remember that this is the visionary force that brought us that masterpiece. In the same way, Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways has been criticized for being clichéd. These works remind us of watching Picasso paint a bull on a piece of glass. I digress though…. In the trailer for MEGALOPOLIS someone says, “Imagine today’s society as a branch of civilization about to reach a dead end.” Oh, dear reader, right now many of you are saying, “no, duh!” However, we are interested in how ideas toward which our culture is fundamentally hostile make appearances in the mainstream media and are promptly incinerated. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Yesterday, I found a copy of Gore Vidal’s National Book Award winning United States (essays 1952-1992) for $10. I was surprised to see it was out of print. Whatever one thinks or feels about Vidal’s work, I wonder whether it is telling this book is out of print. One might do a survey of books which have fallen out of print and why; perhaps something would be revealed.

Bendiciones from Rimbaud’s Lost Papers

Out Passed Nowhere was released in June of 2019. A collection of songs and poems set to music released into the media void; a balloon let loose into a starless night; like the signals we send out in…

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