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Living in such a state taTestaTesTaTe etats a hcus ni gniviL
of mind in which time sTATEsTAtEsTaTeStA emit hcihw ni dnim of
does not pass, space STateSTaTeSTaTeStAtE ecaps ,ssap ton seod
does not exist, and sTATeSt oFOfOfo dna ,tsixe ton seod
idea is not there. STatEst ofoFOFo .ereht ton si aedi
Stuck in a place staTEsT OfOFofo ecalp a ni kcutS
where movements TATeSTa foFofoF stnemevom erehw
are impossible fOFoFOf elbissopmi era
in all forms, UsOFofO ,smrof lla ni
physical and nbEifof dna lacisyhp
or mental - uNBeInO - latnem ro
your mind is UNbeinG si dnim rouy
focusing on a unBEING a no gnisucof
lone thing, or NBeINgu ro ,gniht enol
a lone nothing. bEinGUn .gnihton enol a
You are numb and EiNguNB dna bmun era ouY
unaware to events stneve ot erawanu
taking place - not -iSSuE- ton - ecalp gnikat
knowing how or what FORTY tahw ro woh gniwonk
to think. You are in 10/15/97 ni era uoY .kniht ot
a state of unbeing.... ....gniebnu fo etats a
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
CONTENTS OF THiS iSSUE
=----------------------=
EDiTORiAL Crux Ansata
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
STAFF LiSTiNGS
[=- ARTiCLES -=]
CAPiTALiSM AND HUMAN NATURE Crux Ansata
THE REVOLUTION IS NOW Bobbi Sands
CONFESSiONS OF A MALE FEMiNiST Crux Ansata
PAGE FROM A DIARY Crux Ansata
[=- POETASTRiE -=]
UNNAMED BAD POEM Flying Rat's Nostril
PROMETHEUS MOURNS Nemo est Sanctus
[=- FiCTiON -=]
ALL POWER STEMS FROM... I Wish My Name Were Nathan
PREDATOR Howler in the Shadows
DANCE OF THE HEKURA Dark Crystal Sphere Floating Between Two Universes
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
EDiTORiAL
Crux Ansata
First of all, boys and girls, it's October. Remember to be wearing black
on the twenty-second for the National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality.
Tell your friends.
There's been a bit of a shake-up here at State of unBeing offices. Or,
rather, that isn't "here". The true successors to State of unBeing are
working from an undisclosed location, at least until we manage to drive the
usurpers from the complex.
In any case, here is the summary. After I Wish My Name Were Nathan had
Kilgore Trout killed, and then tried to cover it up, we had to have a meeting
of the Intertextual Workingman's Association. We would have been flexible,
and even would have allowed the people to vote on the multimedia idea, so long
as we could have been sure the people would have voted the right way. But it
wasn't working out.
I'm kidding, of course. The people kicked IWMNWN out for killing
Kilgore. Killing editors is wrong, even if he had it coming.
So, boys and girls, you know what State of unBeing looks like. If
anything drops into your mailbox that doesn't look right, it isn't right. And
see if I Wish My Name Were Nathan ever ends up on the contributors list now.
We have a pretty decent issue, anyway. Several articles, a couple of
pretty bad poems -- but they're short, and several short stories. Not bad
from working on a laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter of our old pick-up
truck, don't you think?
Until later, It Is Right to Resist.
* * *
News Updates:
The Congress has on the fast track a lovely bill called the Freedom from
Religious Persecution Act. This bill essentially sets up an organization
answerable only to the U.S. President, with the power to enact sanctions,
etc., against countries whose religious policies they don't approve of. It
also calls for this office to monitor religious organizations around the world
-- with no injunction against within our borders.
That means the U.S. government is going to be tracking and monitoring
people's religious affiliations.
I don't know about you, but I find that ominous.
*
Here in Texas, we continue to have prisoners of war in relation to the
Republic of Texas movement. Never thought I'd see it. The movement is
struggling now under legal fees, and has little chance of surviving.
Meanwhile, Texas also leads the country in state executions.
*
Earlier this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report on
militia organizations two years after the Oklahoma City bombing. The SPLC is
a familiar name to those following militia and similar organizations, or the
Oklahoma City bombing, and is an organization dedicated to smearing
organizations the One Worlders don't approve of. Because the average American
-- newspaper employee or otherwise -- has the political consciousness of a
carrot, if your organization has a sweet sounding name like "Southern Poverty
Law Center", you get believed. Among their targets this year was the United
States Taxpayer Party. Their crime? Openly opposing the New World Order.
(Believe it or not, the SPLC report listed opposing the New World Order as a
reason for being listed as an anti-government hate group.)
*
A member of the joint chiefs of staff recently told the Army Times
Americans are soon going to have to choose between decreased civil liberties
and decreased protection from domestic terrorist activity.
*
Across the country, large conglomerates are buying up radio stations and
television stations and bringing them into ever smaller ownership groups.
Particularly noticeable in this trend is that conservative talk radio is being
bought up -- and shut down -- decreasing the variety of views available in the
media. This has been made possible through the recent Telecommunications Act
of 1996. If anyone speaks legalese and can explain how and why these changes
were made, aside from economic censorship purposes, I'd appreciate hearing it.
*
A new study shows poverty among Texas children to be 24% -- 39% among
African American children in Texas. I know of only two places with a rate
higher than that latter. Poverty is 40% among some communities in New York
City, and Guatemala.
*
Michael New has entered the appeals phase of his trial for refusing to
wear the United Nations blue beret. (His struggle is far from over. There is
no doubt whichever side loses this appeal will bring it to the Supreme Court.)
In other news, the United Nations recently seized three Serbian radio stations
due to disapproving of their news broadcasts, and reports of UN blue helmet
atrocities from abuse of power to rape and child prostitution continue to
stack up.
The price we pay for "world peace".
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor:
I just thought I'd write in and voice my support for the one true State
of unBeing. Not too long ago ansat pulled up to my office, bleeding from
several wounds, in a gunshot-riddled beat up old pickup truck with the
Apocalypse Culture Publications seal on the door. After letting him stand in
the rain for a while and liberating him from society's demands that he stay
dry, I let him into my office, at that time still located in a cardboard box
in the turning lane of US 183, and we discussed the future of the zine after
the rise of the Young Pretender Nate. (I can call him Nate when we're at
war.) After hearing ansat's long, twisted, story of sex, money, and betrayal,
we set out to publish the truth, along with the help of a few loyal
contributors who had not been subverted by Nathan's -- I mean Nate's -- lies.
After several attempted firebombings on my office foiled by the rain and wet
cardboard, we moved my office and operations to an undisclosed location in a
street outside the University of Texas. Despite complaints about the road
narrowing, we've worked night and day to bring you the issue you now hold on
your computer. We will reclaim the ACP complex, and I urge you all to take up
arms and aide us in the fight against the tyrant IWMNWN. Of course, I will
join in the fighting as soon as they tell me where the complex is. So rally
around the true SoB and recognize ansat's claim to succession, at least until
I claim it for myself.
In Defense of the SoB We All Love,
Captain Moonlight
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
STAFF LiSTiNG
EDiTOR
Crux Ansata
CONTRiBUTORS
Bobbi Sands
Crux Ansata
Dark Crystal Sphere Floating Between Two Universes
Flying Rat's Nostril
Howler in the Shadows
I Wish My Name Were Nathan
Nemo est Sanctus
GUESSED STARS
Captain Moonlight
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
[=- ARTiCLES -=]
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
CAPiTALiSM AND HUMAN NATURE
Crux Ansata
I'm sure I've said this before, but there are few things that irritate me
so much as to be told something I have experienced is impossible. This often
comes up when discussing Capitalism with the bourgeois. Whether due to shame
-- an attempt to find an excuse for their self-centeredness -- or due to
actual, innocent inability to see reality, I don't know, and my usual answer
is more trite than thorough: I point out that it is one human's nature, but
not mine, and that their selfishness is no justification for a parasitic
worldview. They may consider it impossible, but I simply do not see the world
their way. I do not live for money, I do not feel a need to beat out my
neighbor, and I am not aware of feeling a desire to stockpile that particular
fetish.
There is a level of truth to it, though. Capitalism has deformed human
nature into a form that allows those benefiting from the inequalities of
capitalism -- and those who merely hope to -- to justify their predation.
Various Views of Human Nature
A number of views of human nature compete in our intellectual world, our
marketplace of ideas. Many or most people have some combination of these
views, although few examine why, or even what, they believe.
The Capitalistic view of human nature should seem familiar to most
people. After all, this is the concept we are brainwashed into believing. As
Marx said in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas." This is to say, the ideology of the ruling class is
the ideology of the nation, and our ruling class has its ducks in the
proverbial row on this one. Our schools, our courts, our advertising all
conspire to teach us this distorted perspective. Worse, the people want to
believe it, for reasons I will go into later. Suffice it now to say that this
conception provides a cover to allow people to think and do what they are made
to believe they want to, without bowing down to idols like "virtue",
"morality", "justice", or outdated systems of prescribed morality, like the
Bible, the Quran, or the Declaration of Independence. This view of human
nature frees the people to be the willing slaves of the ruling class. Heil
Progress!
The fundamental principle of the Capitalist view of human nature is the
assumption that humans exist in a "war of all against all". This draws from
the first prophet of Capitalism: Hobbes, in his book Leviathan. From the
time it was published Hobbes was persecuted by those who misinterpreted his
work. Many, for example, saw it as an atheistic work. This atheistic
distortion has continued into Capitalism in those who see the negative in man
to be inherent, somehow genetic, indeed "human nature", while Hobbes himself
would undoubtedly have traced it to the fall of man. Those who see the war of
all against all in the contemporary manner of Capitalism are also guilty of
another misinterpretation of which Hobbes would be quite sad.
This is not a critique of Hobbes, and I do not want to devote too much
time to philosophical disputes between he and I. (There are many.) Neither
do I intend to dwell on how the world-historical situation in which he was
writing influenced his beliefs. I mean only to point out his position as
prophet of the Capitalist order -- and that he probably intended no such
thing. He was quite clear in the beginning of his Leviathan that he was
discarding the concept of the summum bonum, the absolute good. He gave no
reason for this, and was probably well aware his work was not a self-contained
system of philosophy, but an intentional distortion of the world for the sake
of demonstrating a point.
This distortion has become enshrined into the dogma of the Capitalist
faith.
The second prophet of the Capitalist faith, and one who I suspect knew he
was distorting someone, was T.H. Huxley. (He was the grandfather of the
Aldous Huxley who wrote the books Brave New World and Brave New World
Revisited, et al.) Huxley generalized this distortion of the world of man as
a war of all against all into a world of all species against all species, and
into a concept where not only every species but every individual within every
species was in similar competition. Huxley was a Darwinian revisionist, and
some of his work on evolution as being less gradualistic than Darwin conceived
is without doubt of value, but intentionally or not, Huxley presented a
worldview heavily distorted against cooperation and towards competition, which
has yet to be rectified in the common mind. (I suspect most people still
believe the phrase "survival of the fittest" is from Darwin.)
The impact of this distortion was to make it justified as not only a
feature of fallen human society, but as an inherent rule of all nature for
humans to be willing to destroy each other. Indeed, it was made a relative
good for an individual human to destroy those around him. These features of
"social Darwinism" and eugenics were most pronounced in the earlier part of
this century. Hitler is often cited as one of them, although he was more
altruistic than our contemporary Capitalists. Hitler had an understanding of
cooperation as a factor in evolution, though he restricted it to those of an
individual's race. Contemporary Capitalists deny the value of cooperation
except where necessary for individual gain. Another celebrated early
proponent of social Darwinism and eugenics was Margaret Sanger, founder of
Planned Parenthood. This group proudly states it follows in her ideological
footsteps, and indeed does so. (See any research into birth control
activities in other nations, where Planned Parenthood is more drastic and so
more noticeable.) What Planned Parenthood tries to gloss over is Ms Sanger's
open intentions to exterminate undesirables, such as the poor and economically
nonproductive, as well as Catholics and members of racial minorities.
These features of the Capitalist worldview can thus be summarized
briefly: "The world," the Capitalist says, "is a battle of all against all.
As a zero sum game, in order for me to benefit, others must suffer. Even if I
understand this to be true I deny responsibility as I see it as an inevitable
feature of the natural laws of this world. After all, humans are the sum of
millennia of evolution which have programmed us to destroy everything weaker
than ourselves and to take what they have, merely to survive. If I didn't
destroy those around me, they would destroy me. We have a genetic
predisposition for this. It is human nature," the Capitalist concludes, "for
me to act in a way once considered evil. It is my nature, and if I don't I
shall be destroyed."
This distorted worldview, which is by all neutral definitions a
psychosis, leads to great amounts of fear, rage, hate, and shame, some of the
impacts of which I will get into in the section on how and why Capitalism
distorts the subjective world of those of us colonized by it. First, though,
let us look at some impacts of this worldview on Capitalist anthropology.
By anthropology here I mean its most basic meaning: the study of man.
Any worldview -- by humans, at least -- must include a set of beliefs
concerning what man is, where he comes from, where he is going, and so on.
(Some deny that an atheistic or skeptical society has such beliefs, but I hold
"indeterminate" to be a valid value.)
Capitalism's anthropology is particularly morbid. Capitalism, first,
presumes all humans to have only the value they have or can take. This
fundamental worthlessness of humans is often denied, but obviously true to
those who are not willfully blind. Each individual is taken to have value
relatively, not absolutely. (This is an obvious function of the Capitalist
concentration on the supply-demand relationship.)
This relative value takes its scale from a number of origins. Some judge
human worth by the amount of money they own, or the economic influence they
control, and so on. All of these are smoke screens. The fundamental
expression of the worthlessness with which the Capitalist views humans is the
fact that, in Capitalism, every human becomes nothing more than a commodity,
something manufactured, bought and sold not because it is considered valuable
in and of itself, but merely for the accumulation of more commodities. The
fundamental value -- in Capitalism -- of any human being is how much they can
produce, how much value they can receive for their labor time, a.k.a. their
life.
As an historical aside, it is relevant here to take a glance over our
collective shoulder at the Christian anthropology, at least briefly. The
Christian worldview forms the basis of the current Western worldview not
because the latter is built on the former, but due to historical happenstance.
The Capitalist worldview is absolutely distinct from Christianity, despite
claims occasionally made to the contrary.
There are two essential features of Christian anthropology that must be
contrasted against Capitalism to relatively see the systems. (These are, of
course, not exclusive to Christianity.) The first has to do with the value of
humans. In Christian philosophy, every human is of infinite intrinsic value.
This is value that is not put into the person, and cannot be taken away. It
holds for every person, whatever their condition. One historical way this
concept has been expressed is: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness." Obviously, this is anathema to Capitalism, which views humans
through exchange value, although some make lip service to humans as use value.
(In truth, a human of no use value to the ruling class also has no exchange
value, but the commodification of humans makes the dominant perspective the
exchange value. A simple proof of this: A poor child dying of leukemia has
no use value to the ruling class. Therefore, among the ruling class, she also
has no exchange value. To the child's mother, this child is of infinite value
in and of itself, that is to say infinite use value. However, this mother
cannot exchange anything for this child's life, and hence cannot interest the
ruling class in mere matters of morality. The exchange value, dominated by
the ruling class, shatters to insignificance the infinite value of a daughter
to her mother.)
Second, and perhaps more discussed, is the origin of evil in man. The
Capitalist considers evil to be inherent in man, and some claim this is an
outgrowth of -- or at least compatible with -- Christian philosophy. This is,
of course, wrong. Christian philosophy does not blame evil in the person as
being inherent "human nature", but rather the effect of an historical and
rectifiable event, i.e. the Fall in the Garden. To the Christian, every human
is inherently good. Evil actions are the result of man's unfortunate, fallen,
imperfect state.
These two -- Christianity and Capitalism -- do not, incidentally, exhaust
the possibilities. I will briefly run through some others.
Orthodox Marxism tends to consider human nature to be something quite
malleable. The orthodox Marxist tends to think that if the government was
good, and sufficiently strong, people could be forced, coerced, or trained
into being good. This is true to an extent, but is not absolutely true. No
matter what the upbringing, if someone were put into a Capitalist society they
would begin again to manifest the failings of Capitalist man, unless they were
particularly strong in will.
Anarchism is often presented as believing that humans are inherently
good, and this is often used as a critique against them. In actuality,
although some Anarchists hold this, by no means do all. Some, indeed, take
the Capitalist claim that man is inherently evil, and use that for the
explanation of why they accept no master, who by definition could not be a
"better" master than he himself. Anarchism is too broad a trend to exhaust
its anthropology here.
There is one Anarchist who must be made note of here, though, and that is
Prince Petr Kropotkin, who styled himself an Anarcho-Communist. He was a
scientist, and like Huxley was a Darwinian revisionist. Unlike Huxley,
though, Kropotkin focused on cooperation rather than competition.
In his work Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution, Kropotkin destroyed the
claim that there is some kind of scientific "proof" that competition is the be
all and end all of evolution, a position Darwin would never have conceded to.
Darwin held, and Kropotkin expanded upon this claim, that there are two trends
in a species, that to cooperate and that to compete, and that these trends
manifest themselves under various conditions. Some of these conditions have
been since examined even more thoroughly, though the tests are often framed so
as not to make clear all the results. (Frequently, they concentrate on
phenomena such as overcrowding, without using the results to form adequate
political conclusions.) More on some of these conditions will be said in the
section on Capitalism's deformation of man.
As an aside, there are some that don't bother with what man is qua man,
and instead hold that some individual men are simply superior, in one way or
another, than others. This sometimes takes the form of a superior group, such
as in National Socialism, or a vanguard who are simply more aware of the
truth, such as in Bolshevism. Some hold that some individual is simply
superior, as Nietzsche's superman. Some forms of Gnosticism apparently held
that some men were superior to others, although this is debated. If they did,
it would likely be along the lines of the feature in some forms of
Protestantism, holding that some are saved and some are not, and this
salvation makes the individual metaphysically better.
The worldview we are to examine here is Capitalism, and the question is
the nature of all men. Having set the terms of Capitalist anthropology, and
set them in the perspective of other worldviews, I now turn to the how and why
of the matter.
Capitalism's Deformation of Human Nature
Capitalism cannot be said to have directly caused the Capitalist view of
human nature. Someone had to have come up with the idea first; indeed, a
class of people did. Capitalism's beneficiaries, though, continue to teach
and indoctrinate so as to make sure this worldview remains dominant -- and
virtually uncontested.
The fundamental manner of teaching this is as explained above: the
devaluation of humanity into a commodity. As less and less people came to
have wealth and control, as political power concentrated into smaller and
smaller entities, people came to "owe" their labor -- their life -- to those
who controlled the flow of money. That is to say, people in general ceased to
be able to live without selling themselves into wage-slavery. This was not a
conspiracy, so far as I know, so much as a snowball effect. Some people had
the wealth, and they controlled more. For whatever reason, these first
Capitalists increased their holdings. They came to see that if they told the
people they were worthless, and if they forced these people to act as if they
were worthless, they would be able to increase their economic power.
People not being inherently evil, these early Capitalists needed to come
up with an excuse why they had more than others. We see this in the
prejudices against Blacks as being inherently inferior, and hence calling
poverty and slavery upon themselves. Similar claims were made regarding all
colonized people, such as the Irish and Native Americans, and continue to be
made. Otherwise intelligent people can with all conviction say that the poor
are universally lazy, that the beggars in the streets universally choose their
lifestyle, and not even realize the prejudice and hatred in such statements,
or wonder on what they base these beliefs. In the past, much of it was an
excuse for shame. Today, this shame is hardly conscious, as people go their
entire lives without having such prejudices challenged. People simply don't
realize it is wrong -- much like the segregation and slavery of the past.
These excuses work along with and perpetuate the economic development of
Capitalism. Once the Capitalist has deluded himself into believing he is
somehow doing the working class a favor by his parasitism, he can continue to
do what he wanted to in the first place -- drain away the last of the workers'
commodities. As he has "proven" to his satisfaction that the worker has no
value aside from his productivity -- which is to say the worker has no value
other than the worker's value to the Capitalist -- he can believe he is doing
the worker a favor by commodifing him.
(Keep in mind that this trend works along with the trend to decrease the
number of hands holding the money -- in other words monopolies are an
inevitable result of Capitalism unless it is restrained by another force. In
our country, this opposing force is pretended to be the government, despite
the fact that the government remains in the hands of the wealthy, and even if
it were placed in the hands of the people, would be worthless there as long as
the wealthy continue to blackmail the worker through his domination of the
factories, and brainwash the worker through his domination of the schools and
media.)
It is not enough for the Capitalist to control most of the money. He has
worked himself and those around him into a worldview of wanting more. This
feature of Capitalism makes it essentially a cancer on society. It can
survive only so long as it devours. When a market is saturated, a new market
must be created, so our cigarette companies use international trade
organizations to bully open Asian markets, and our companies invent "planned
obsolescence", which is why everything seems to break down so much faster.
"They don't make them like they used to" is a Capitalist necessity. But there
are more insidious ways that the Capitalist uses, and at least one of these
has to do with programming of the America psyche.
Capitalism commodifies everything, and one of the ways this is least
perceivable is that, now, Capitalism has actually managed to commodify money,
divorcing it from its traditional ground in silver and gold. Not only that,
but it has monopolized money, and found a way for a small group of Capitalists
to profit from the "manufacturing" of money. This is not the place for a
detailed analysis of the Federal Reserve, and such an analysis would probably
be beyond my capacity. These are only a couple of things that need be noted
here. (As an initial aside, on the subject of commodification, a few decades
ago American money was commodified. There is nothing backing the American
dollar except American guns. American money gets its value entirely
relativistically, like stocks on the stock market. If ever certain nations
lost their trust of or love for the American government, you and I would be
sitting through a horrible depression. Somehow, I doubt the ruling class
would find itself destitute.) Our money, when printed, is "loaned" to the
United States government, who distributes it to the people. As this is a
"loan", the government actually has to pay the people who loaned them the
money, and these people are a corporation, not a branch of the government
answerable to the people. Our government is democratic, and so has everything
divided up among the people. The ruling class has to do all the governing,
and you and I only have to pay the bills. This means we pay a fee for having
our American monetary system.
Twisted as this is, it gets better. The government has established a
monopoly on the publication of bills. Only one corporation may manufacture
bills. If I printed bills which, for all practical intents and purposes, were
dollar bills, I would be a criminal, and would go to jail. If these people
print the same bill, they are businessmen, and I pay a fee for not having to
bother with the freedom to manufacture the goods these people force me to use.
What this means practically -- aside from all the other things that economics
books talk about from the dangers of monopolies -- is that this corporation
controls the interest rate. This interest rate, through magickal powers I
don't quite understand, control "growth" in our market. In practical terms,
the government controls unemployment.
The ruling class does not want universal employment. The ruling class
wants all the economic power. By forcing unemployment to continue, they
create a shortage of jobs and a surplus of workers. This means workers are
forced into competition with each other, and so (1) have to accept lower wages
or die, and (2) will not organize, because they don't trust the other workers
and have to bow to the demands of the bosses not to organize. The ruling
class has created something of a safety net to prevent people starving to
death in the streets, at least to a degree: until the people are not quite at
the point of revolution. When the people's spirit has been sufficiently
crushed, you can be sure people will be starving to death again. Just looking
at the poverty figures or visiting a couple of families on welfare will show
you what it will look like, though on a smaller scale. The greatest
humiliation in our nation is this: The ruling class wants unemployment; the
people do not. The ruling class benefits from unemployment; the people
suffer. The ruling class creates unemployment; the people pay for it. The
ruling class has a demand for unemployment, and in all fairness they should
pay for it. In all callousness, the working class benefits from people
starving in the streets. That increases agitation, speeds revolution, and
shrinks the working pool, boosting wages. But the working class pays a
disproportionate amount of welfare. There was a time when noblesse oblige
made this concept laughable, but today we "know" human nature justifies the
ruling class's behaving like maggots and vultures.
This domination of the Federal Reserve is a single example of another
larger phenomenon. Capitalism depends on consumption. When a market does not
exist, Capitalism forces one. It is therefore in the interests of Capitalism
to create shortages where none exist. This is a well known phenomenon, and is
blatantly obvious in much of our advertising. A desire is created for a new
product, and then this desire is made into a "need", and then people can no
longer conceive of a life without the product.
In my opinion, one of the worst uses of this tactic is that addressed
above: creating an artificial shortage of jobs, to force people to struggle
against each other instead of acting in solidarity. There are other bad ways
too, though. The ruling class pretends there is a shortage of resources, so
people are unwilling to support welfare bills and the like, despite the fact
the people with the least to give are disproportionately charged. The ruling
class creates shortages of necessary supplies, such as food. While this
benefits economically the rich, the poor die, or at least go undernourished.
In Boston, a malnutrition clinic was recently opened, because malnutrition
exists in Boston at third world levels. That is not right in a country like
ours, where no shortage exists, where farmers are paid not to farm, and where
Capitalism artificially increases the prices. By a blind adherence to the
price curve above all else, the human factor is lost. Where there is no
shortage, where some can afford to waste, no one should die of want. That is
not a statement of economics; that is true human nature.
Psychology experiments have been done on humans and animals as to what
happens when shortages exist, and bear in mind that these shortages only need
to be perceived. When these shortages appear to the people -- shortages of
food, shortages of space, and so on -- some interesting habits arise. For one
thing, cooperation goes down, and competition goes up. Every species has the
habit of helping their own, unless there is a shortage preventing it. (Our
greatest men have been those who help their own even when they personally
suffer. The universal respect paid these people speaks volumes on human
nature.) For territorial animals, this "shortage" of space can be merely
perceived, etc. As Capitalism creates artificial shortages, so it increases
artificial competition and artificially stops cooperation.
Another behavior that increases with shortages is aggression. Murder
rates go up. Deviant sexuality goes up. In extreme cases, cannibalism -- a
physical version of the way people destroy each other to get ahead -- occurs.
Much of our society's ills "coincidentally" parallel what would be expected if
we had shortages. Sickeningly, these shortages are man made.
Like the cycles of alcoholism and child abuse, this cycle of fear and
lack of cooperation threatens to be intergenerational. There is some evidence
that humans are born incompletely developed -- as fetuses -- and there is no
doubt humans are influenced by their environment. Raise a child in constant
terror of shortages -- or merely in constant terror -- and he will be more
likely to be unable to see through the Capitalist lie. On a related note, see
The Plug-In Drug on the terror-inspiring effects of television on children.
A bit more abstractly, this treatment of people as commodities causes
them to be less interested in their work, less satisfied with their lives, and
so on. Capitalism causes people to be less interested in themselves as
humans, which perpetuates Capitalism just as does the use of this mythos for
assuaging the remnants of bourgeois conscience and provide the petit-bourgeois
with a worldview for getting ahead. People no longer see the value in
themselves and in their work. (This phenomenon is also known as alienation.)
This leads them to put less attention and effort, less care, into it. This is
a downward spiral.
Some Results of the Capitalist Deformation
Before ending this essay, I will take a moment to summarize some of the
most practical ways in which Capitalism, as described above, is in the process
of destroying our nation, and our people.
i. Devaluation Causes Death
The Capitalist worldview presents, as demonstrated above, humans as
valuable only through their exchange value. As this is hammered into the
heads of the people, they come to have a diminished view of themselves, and of
each other. The violent opposition to the value of human by virtue of being
human reflects itself in the perceived value of the people to each other.
In our society, we are seeing a massive level of murder. This is not
reflected in other nations, although they are moving in this direction. As
they continue to destroy their economic opposition and cooperative movements,
and "modernize" into Capitalist states, their murder rates will increase.
Capitalism drives the individual not only to lesser assessments of his own
value, but lesser assessments of his brothers' value. Hence, we see children
killing without any conception of the evil of their actions. They see
themselves as merely dispensing with something which no longer had exchange
value to them. In a healthy people, a human is of infinite value. In our
society, humans are sometimes of lesser value than shoes or cars.
On a more controversial note, Capitalism also has led to increases in
abortion. A child is no longer seen as infinitely valuable. (I would say the
child is not seen as a distinct human being, but this is only true in rhetoric
and self-deception. All scientific evidence speaks otherwise. People don't
like to admit it, but abortion is not a matter of human versus non-human. It
is an issue of human with exchange value versus human without exchange value.)
This child can be dispensed with because he is not seen as having intrinsic
value, an expression of Capitalism's Big Lie.
Finally, as previously explained, eugenics is made palatable by
Capitalism. Those who are not economically viable, those who no longer have
exchange value for the ruling class, can be "put to sleep". This is only
possible because Capitalism has destroyed the concept of human as
intrinsically valuable.
ii. Devaluation Causes Depression
Capitalism tells the worker, he who must sell his lifeforce in order to
physically survive, that he is worthless. Even those who have economic power
enough to survive are told they are without value in and of themselves. I
ought not to have, but when I began talking with members of socioeconomic
classes significantly higher than my own, I was surprised at the degree of
drug abuse, nihilism, and simple alienation present among them. As I say: I
ought not have been surprised. Capitalism tells everyone they are
intrinsically worthless.
This is more or less a definition of alienation, and it would be
redundant to say this leads to alienation. It does lead to depression,
though, with a constant feeling of despair and worthlessness. I suspect it
leads even to a number of mental disorders considered physical. The constant
stress and fear brought on by Capitalism likely lead to things such as
clinical depression and schizophrenia, both of which are known to increase
under stress. The current fad of drugging those who suffer from such maladies
merely bolsters the ruling class, and can only last temporarily, or until we
are all in a Huxlean soma-state. (Incidentally, recreational and escapist
drug use among the people voluntarily also helps the ruling class, for the
same reasons.)
On a related note, this leads to a degeneration in the schools. What
once were seen as ways to form valued individuals is now seen as a way to make
individuals "productive" or "employable". It sickens me how much people buy
into this. One would expect even children can see through the way that, if
schools are seen as ways to make them "employable" and agitate for "classes
that will help" them "in real life", schools become merely another way they
are dehumanized and devalued, but I know from experience this is not so. Even
the children buy the lie.
From elementary schools to colleges, schools are seen only as ways to
help people get jobs and make money, and this is a trend which must be battled
from the outside. Those in the institutions generally can't even see they way
they are being brainwashed.
iii. Devaluation Causes Degeneracy
Finally, and a bit more abstractly, the devaluation of humanity by
Capitalism leads to increased degeneracy in the nation. As everything is seen
only in its capacity to increase economic power, values of all kinds, and
especially the value of humans as individuals, go out the proverbial window.
As one facet of this, I will look at the commodification of sex, but this is
merely one way in which this takes place.
Capitalism commodifies everything. This is the only way the Capitalist
can measure how much he dominates his fellow man, if he has a scale for
measuring this domination. Sex does not escape this. Not only is sex
devalued and dehumanized, which helps the ruling class but is not my direct
focus here, sex becomes merely another thing to sell. Unfortunately, the
fundamentalist Capitalist, who has lost the ability to view the world
objectively, cannot see the evil in this, but those who can view the world
without the Capitalist distortion see the evil here.
In our society, sex is used in a number of ways. It is used to sell; not
only is advertising entirely divorced from reality, it is distorted from its
former use as a means of informing the consumer of a product to a brainwashing
tool whereby people react emotionally rather than intellectually, and consume
rather than choose. The defense of this advertising as "free speech" benefits
only the ruling class. Pornography is a similar matter. Most people, capable
only of parroting the lines fed them by the ruling class -- "Pornography is
free speech" -- cannot see reality. There is no comparison of free speech
between the ruling class and the ruled class. The ruling class rules the
presses, rules the television stations. They and they only benefit from our
current economic structure, and by making everything a commodity -- even sex,
even pornography -- they continue to dehumanize the worker and bleed us of
power and life. The worker has no such thing as "free speech", and the ruler
needs no governmental protection to express his.
Conclusion
This essay only goes over the Capitalist deformation of humanity in broad
terms. As a way of explaining the world, and thereby excusing the excesses of
Capitalists, this has risen into the dominant worldview. No lie can survive
when the people are educated, but right now, at this stage in history, the
people are not only blind, the people seem to want to stay blind. Only by
opening their eyes can the people ever come to be free.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
[World Spirit:] Should I tell him that the value of life
lies precisely in this, that it teaches him not to want
it? For this supreme initiation life itself must prepare
him.
Arthur Schopenhauer
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
THE REVOLUTiON iS NOW
Bobbi Sands
The Revolution is now. Now and forever. The fundamental creed of
Anarchism, perhaps the only thing that holds together not only all true
Anarchists, but all lovers of Freedom everywhere, is that the Revolution is a
constant battle.
Not everyone uses those terms. Jefferson spoke on the need for the tree
of liberty's need to be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
Trotsky said: "The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the
revolution, but only opens it." (And we are not even to that point.) Here in
Ireland we have had a tradition of at least one rising a generation.
The most important thing in any battle is to identify the enemy. Those
who work for your objective are not your enemies, and any time you can live in
coexistence with them, do so. The enemies of freedom are enough, without
making the friends of freedom personal enemies. The enemies of freedom
understand this, as well, and they push the people into battles against each
other. Always look to see who benefits from any ideological split, and any
time you see a group supported or opposed in the media.
Who is the enemy?
The Cold War was expressed, strategically, in two terms: Containment,
and Rollback. Enemies of freedom will never cease to exist. They can't all
be put up against the wall. Neither can patriots, however, and that is why
the Revolution is permanent. Neither force can ever win.
Today, the nation state has taken institutionalized form. If anyone
knows a way of rollback from this, I will be more than happy to find out. It
seems to me that at this point in time that is not possible. Even if a state
is overthrown, the bourgeois ruling class will fill the vacuum with a new
state. (What is the UN, if it isn't a way of appointing who is and is not an
acceptable state, and divvying up the world among those accepted powers?) The
only way I can see of pushing back State powers is to divide up those states
further -- that is, by supporting every nationalist resistance group, every
separatist movement, anywhere.
Since rollback is not possible, that leaves containment, and that is
mostly what I want to talk about. For someone who supports freedom and
opposes State power, containment must take the form, at this time, of opposing
forms of internationalist government, and especially world government. This
is in every form -- the United Nations, the European Commonwealth, the World
Trade Organization, the World Court. They do not support the people; they
support the bourgeois nations that dominate them. When has Britain ever
followed the World Court, except when it served them? They have been found
guilty of killing Irish nationals by the World Court. What happened to them?
When has the United States, or its client state Israel, ever followed the
United Nations's commands? How many UN resolutions have opposed United
States's or Israeli action? Could Indonesia have gotten away with the
slaughter and occupation in East Timor if the bourgeois nations didn't want
East Timorese oil?
It is important for all lovers of freedom to look into groups, and
support those who oppose world government, opposing those who support world
government. The media knows that this is the only danger. "Safe"
alternatives are presented, so that people can think they are making a
decision, when really it is just between globalist number one or globalist
number two. Very few groups or individuals oppose world government, and those
are always vilified by the media.
But it is necessary that people not be fooled by the media. Use the
media's opposition to groups and individuals as signs they need to be
investigated. It is not necessary to agree with them on every point to know
that they are allies. Those battles can come after world government has been
contained. We can take back our nations; it would be hard to "take back" a
United Nations, for which not even show elections take place.
So that, in a nutshell, is what the Revolution is, now. Opposition to
globalism.
One battle at a time.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
Then, in the beginning of Kali-yuga, the Lord [Visnu] will
appear as Lord Buddha, the son of Anjana, in the province
of Gaya, just for the purpose of deluding those who are
envious of the faithful theist.
Srimad Bhagavatam 1.3.24
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
CONFESSiONS OF A MALE FEMiNiST
Crux Ansata
I was fortunate. I was raised in a family that did not deny differences
between people, but also did not play them up. I was taught from ground zero
that people are people, and after that they are Black or White, male or
female, smart or otherwise. I saw the differences in people, and because I
know the differences do not make people better or worse, I can celebrate these
differences.
In a way I did not understand at the time, I was raised a feminist. By
that I don't mean I thought women were better, or should try to be imitation
men, or any of the other things that have made "feminist" such a dirty word
even most girls disown it. I mean I saw women as people, deserving as much
respect as male people. Probably the biggest way I didn't realize I was a
feminist was that I always thought everyone else felt the same way, at least
every reasonably intelligent member of my generation. I didn't see myself as
a feminist. I saw myself as fair. For the most part I thought the women's
movement had won.
It was essentially not until high school that I finally realized I was
wrong.
I grew up in a kind of ivory tower. I dealt only with intelligent,
middle class overachievers in my classes in school, and had few friends even
in my middle class neighborhood. I was aware bad things happened, but it was
with what the French call savoir -- head-knowledge -- not connaitre --
heart-knowledge. I was not involved with the social lives of the mainstream,
and didn't want to be. I was having enough trouble trying to survive high
school, determine the flaw in Communism, choose between Gnosticism and
Catholicism, the things that were important to me. Again, in a way this was
fortunate, even if reality was a rude, late shock.
In my tenth grade year, a male friend and I, sitting in debate class,
were discussing the importance of forming friendships before relationships,
and about how a relationship cannot thrive if it is based solely on the
physical. We listened with what was for me at least genuine shock when an
otherwise intelligent, middle class girl of such strict Baptist upbringing she
fled weeping to the storage room when I pulled out my role playing game
handbooks explained to us about how one only gets to know someone after
forming a bond based on lust. She probably couched it in terms like
"attraction" and would have been shocked herself to hear herself rephrased
honestly, but that's the way it was. I don't make a habit out of euphemising
what disgusts me.
The girl thought of herself as a feminist, or at least a reasonably
liberated woman. And I don't mean one of the "do-me" feminists. She seemed
to have reasonable self-esteem. She simply had failed to grok the entire
anti-lookist trend in the feminist movement, or to understand that if women --
and men -- are to be treated as people, they have to be seen as more than
objects. For all her self-righteous rhetoric, she failed to judge by the
content of a man's character. I understand now she was a product of her
society. I was a product of ideals. I chose to see what was right, and
oppose what merely was.
But still I had hope. I assumed most girls were not like that, or that
this was simply bluster, mirroring what guys wanted to hear, for right or
wrong.
A more painful awakening came in late high school, when I fell in love.
I played the game the way I thought it should be played. I was there to
listen to her when she was hurt. I talked to her about her feelings, and
about her family. I encouraged her interests in art and music, and tried to
understand her world. I tried to avoid complimenting her on superficials,
like appearance, and was rather disheartened at the emphasis she placed on the
few times I did comment on them. I didn't have as much information on
teenaged girls' psychology back then, or the awareness that women in our
society are pathologically insecure about their appearance, and I was more
interested in the person than the packaging.
I also refused to go to bed with her. That, although not the only
factor, was the factor that ended our relationship. Treating her like a
person and not a thing, like a human being rather than a sex object torpedoed
our relationship.
My subsequent relationships, although I have learned a bit more how to
bolster a girl's esteem without making appearance the main factor in a
relationship, have not improved my opinions. I still feel traumatized that a
relationship cannot be sustained in this society if a guy wants to respect
those boundaries and his girlfriend's personhood. I am unhappy to see women's
magazines -- fashion magazines, Cosmopolitan, and the like -- scattered around
the bedroom floors of adolescent girls. I'm bothered by the emphasis guys put
on girls' appearance, and even more bothered by the emphasis girls do.
It was more than two decades ago when Anais Nin wrote these words ("In
Favor of the Sensitive Man," Playgirl, September 1974):
The new type of young man I have met is exceptionally
fitted for the new woman, but she is not yet totally
appreciative of his tenderness, his growing proximity to
woman, his attitude of twinship rather than
differentiation.
She appears to have thought this was a temporary problem. Indeed, later
in the same essay she says:
This loss [of the ability to govern oneself] is a
transitional one: It may mean the beginning of a totally
new life and freedom. The man is there. He is an equal.
He treats you like an equal. In moments of uncertainty
you can still discuss problems with him you could not have
talked about twenty years ago. Do not, I say to today's
women, please do not mistake sensitivity for weakness.
This was the mistake which almost doomed our culture. ...
Let us start a new regime of honesty, of trust,
abolishment of false roles in our personal relationships,
and it will eventually affect the world's history as well
as women's development.
Perhaps I live in a cultural backwater. Perhaps I have been merely
unlucky. All I can say is she seems sadly optimistic from my perspective
twenty-three years later.
I have a lot of anger towards the young women, my contemporaries. I know
that this is not entirely justified. I have seen some of the trauma that
girls go through today, have been exposed to the same media. Nonetheless, I
feel this rage, and I feel this rage is an acceptable feeling. One of the
women's movement's most important advances was giving women back the right to
feel rage, and it is important men are not denied this same right, so long, of
course, as the rage is safely and sensitively expressed.
As a male feminist, I feel my contemporaries have betrayed me. I feel
that the new woman was not there to pick up the ball. It can't be done by
guys alone, and guys will have no real motivation as long as women put up with
the same situations as in the past. The way women allowed the women's
movement to be coopted, and the emotional advances to go unsolidified --
though understandable in the world-historical situation -- still hurts.
Our society is pathologically anti-girl, and anti-woman. Much needs to
be done to raise everyone's consciousness, and especially to clean up the
media. I don't have the answers. Nonetheless, more needs to be done by
today's girls. As Nin said, "The man is there." Twenty-three years later,
he's still looking for the truly feminist woman.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
[W]ith the help of a foundation of 6 pianos, 4 harps, 9
double-basses, 6 each of flutes, oboes, and trumpets as
well as 60 (!) percussion instruments -- some newly
constructed -- it was possible to come up with an entirely
new, unusual orchestral sonority.
liner notes for Antigone, by Orff
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
PAGE FROM A DiARY
Crux Ansata
0012 092497
About half an hour ago I finished Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick.
It was the most terrifying novel by him I have ever read, and I have read
close to a dozen. Even with the universe decaying in Ubik, there was not
nearly the horror of Martian Time-Slip. The descriptions of schizophrenia and
mental illness hit too close to home.
Reading it in school, I think I triggered a minor psychotic episode. It
was horrifying. Low grade hallucinations, such as color intensification;
confusion; anxiety; etc. I realized what was happening pretty quick, dropped
a ginseng, and rode it out, so it didn't get too intense. I could tell myself
that the guy in the business suit on the phone, while I could not entirely
rule out that he was watching me and calling in to my enemies, he probably
wasn't. I could tell that when a woman walked by and said, "It's a way of
control. Get our hopes up and then dash us. It's the way they brainwash us.
It's the way they brainwash us." it was probably coincidence. I could tell,
intellectually, it was not that everyone was out to get me, but just that this
was the way I was temporarily viewing the world. During the worst episode, in
1994, it took me some time to regain control. I had some part of me that
constantly knew it was in my head, but that part didn't gain control quickly.
I had myself under control when Jujube came by. I started to tell her
about it, but she didn't seem to understand or empathize. I don't suppose
most people can. Afterwards, it flared up again, but fairly minorly. I found
myself wandering the third floor of some building, not knowing where I was or
where I was going, wondering why room 308 looked like somewhere I had never
been before, until I realized that I had a class in another building. I
looked out a window -- down the hall and about twenty yards from me -- and got
totally depressed about how high up it was, to the point I was almost crying.
But levels of confusion like that are nothing compared to sitting against the
wall by the library, shaking all over and staring wide eyed, wondering about
all the people around me, like during the worst of it. It sounds like nothing
when I write it down. That kind of horror, I guess, can't be expressed.
The most amusing part, though, was when I got to class. It was a good
thing I decided to go to French class today, since it turns out we had an
exam. I got very anxious, understandably, but then I started hallucinating
all these black dots, and they were flying into the center of my vision, like
when you have oxygen deprivation or are too tired, giving me the weirdest kind
of tunnel vision and leaving me fascinated with one word at a time, which
temporarily made it impossible to make sense of anything. But I nipped that
in the bud, and at least answered every question.
Anyway, it was scary. I got to wondering if the reason I have never had
a physically satisfying sexual experience, and why M.'s explanations of why
coitus is more emotionally meaningful than foreplay because it somehow is more
intimate or draws people together or something, may be because I simply cannot
empathize like that. I can empathize with people, but I can't really
contemplate the bringing together. That makes no sense. I'm trying to say
that I understand a parasitic relationship, and I understand a symbiotic
relationship, and I understand a master-servant relationship, and all that. I
understand a relationship where two persons work for the same power -- be it
person or ideal. I don't understand bringing together. I guess that is what
makes sex matter, but I don't... It doesn't mean anything to me. I don't
know.
I wonder if people would tell me that I should be more willing to give up
control if they knew that it is only my control that stops time from slipping
and the earth from stopping to exist. If I lost control, I would be nothing
more than a weeping, trembling mess, wondering when I was going to literally
fall apart, on the atomic level.
I need to get past that. I'm going to move on.
The ordeal was so stressful that, when I got home, with a splitting
headache, disoriented (I had to keep reminding myself I was in a car, or I'd
have never made it home), and nauseous, I just went to bed. I have no idea
how long I slept. It must have been about two or three hours, I suppose. I
woke up and heard cartoons from the living room, with the sun shining in the
windows. I woke up terrified, unable to remember where I was, or what day it
was, or what time it was, or what. I came out into the living room, and asked
what day it was, whether I had slept until the next afternoon or something. I
wasn't even coherent to myself, but my mother told be it was later in the
afternoon, and my father had gone to pick Moonlight up, since they were
letting me rest.
I had a strange, homoerotic dream, but I feel relieved in one sense,
because I had heard that if one does not experience nocturnal erections it is
a serious physical problem, and I had no reason to believe I did. I have
never had a nocturnal emission, and generally don't experience erections when
I wake up, and have never had a coital dream, so I was beginning to think
there was something wrong there, but I was aware I was erect in my sleep,
though I can't be sure whether I became aware of this before or after I woke
up. In any case, this was the dream:
I was at the University, at the student union. It was some kind of
resort or hotel, though, and had been moved down to around 23rd street or
Martin Luther King boulevard. I don't know why I was in the resort. I was a
student, and knew I was a student, and that I was not very accepted there. I
think I lived in a nearby dorm or something. It was night, and there was some
kind of party there, and there I was. I was incredibly lonely, and somehow
had befriended this boy. I get the feeling he was in his mid to late teens,
and he liked me, too. I don't think there was ever any sexual activity
between us, but there was an undercurrent of homoerotic tension I can
recognize at least in retrospect. I can't recall if I recognized it then.
I know his parents didn't like me, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps it
was a social class thing, since I get the feeling they were of a significantly
higher socioeconomic class than me, but it could also have been a simply
social thing, if I, as a student, didn't belong in their resort. Whatever the
case, he and I spent some time together.
I remember looking for someplace to get something to eat. It was late.
There was a bar on the corner, which I went to frequently, but I couldn't
bring my friend there because he was underage. I kind of remembered a
convenience store down the street that would be open at that time, but I
decided to accept my friend's invitation and go back to the resort. They had
a kitchen downstairs, and he and I went in there. We were joined by two
teenaged girls, who I suppose to have been his sisters. I think they were
older than him, so if he was about fifteen they would be about seventeen or
so. Perhaps one was his sister and one was her friend. In any case, they
were not exceptionally attractive, but they were pleasant looking, and I took
a fancy to one of them. I was sexually aroused, and I figured I would push my
luck, and walked up behind one of them, and put my arms around her waist and
held her. As I recall, she said something sarcastic, or something. She did
not physically pull away, but she emotionally did, if that makes any sense.
She did not try to resist, but she made it known she wasn't interested. I
don't really remember anything after that.
I suppose that about covers today. I might write what I meant to write
yesterday in a while, but for now I'm going to take a break.
0106 092497
0127 092497
To me, it is simply irrational to deny that we live in an existence of
perpetual suffering and pain. That much is obvious to any but the willfully
blind. The horror I try to hide from is that the very body I live in is an
animate corpse that I watch die day by day. That is the horror of existence;
not to simply be imprisoned in a torture chamber of reality, but to know I
can't even trust my body, and to know that it could rot and die around me, and
not to know what will happen to me when it is destroyed. Will I be trapped in
this world of suffering without any ability to manipulate the world? That
would be horrifying to the point of insanity. Does death bring liberation,
back to the pleroma, or, if we fail to effect our salvation before our vehicle
rots, will we be trapped eternally?
No one would be one of those Buddhists or Hindus that believes that
reincarnation can be anything other than a more vicious evil than anything to
come out of any Christian tradition if they were not willfully blind. This
horror is the illumination of every path.
0132 092497
0328 092597
I can't sleep. I just dropped a ginseng. (Actually, it is dissolving in
my mouth now.) In about fifteen minutes to half an hour, I ought to be
relaxed enough to sleep, so I guess I'll write until then.
I'm not addicted, though. I took one on Tuesday, to get over the
episode, and now one tonight, to sleep, but it isn't like I'm taking it daily
or anything. These were just exceptions. If I start taking it to wake up in
the morning, and then to go to bed at night, on a daily basis, then I'll start
to get worried.
Then again, it took me a while to admit it when I was addicted, if I
remember right.
I wonder sometimes if I ought to tell my parents about my ginseng thing.
I don't really think I should. They don't need to worry about anything like
that, and such a conversation would just end up revealing my unstable
personality. (Maybe that's what I want.) I can't even bring myself to talk
to them about my psychotic episodes. No one I've talked to really seems to
understand what's up with them, and people just seem nervous when I bring it
up.
Anyway, new subject. It is a bad sign when you begin spending a lot of
time talking about drugs, just like one of the first signs of mental illness
is interest in the disease.
I finished Martian Time-Slip yesterday. I think I said that. Today I
finished Science, Politics and Gnosticism, which I started in New York, and
read The Hindu View of Life straight through. I keep forgetting how many days
have passed. I thought I had been reading it for about three days, but I keep
reminding myself it has been one. Now, I'm reading The Nameless, a seventies
horror novel Moonlight recommended to me some time ago. He recommended it to
me unsolicited. He hadn't even just finished it. He just came up to me one
day and offered it to me, saying I might like it. The feeling of the moment
was very uncommon. It really felt more like an offering than a loan. Not a
gift, an *offering*, and I don't mean he was offering to an idol or a god or
anything, I just mean that there was something emotional involved, not just
something rational. I really didn't know how to deal with it. I was touched,
but hesitant to read it, and so it has sat on my shelf for a long time. I'm
about fifty pages into it now.
I have something to say. I know this is an odd transition, and I usually
try to make my journal sound chatty. Even when I've planned it out, I try not
to let that be seen. But I don't know how I'm going to work this out, and it
is something I've been thinking about, and I'm not going to be able to express
it well, but the powder is coursing through my system and my keyboard feels
like a musical instrument and Sinead O'Connor is playing in the background and
I just want to make sure I say it.
I wish I could make a girl happy. I wish I could look into a girl's
smile, and know that it was because of me, that it was for me. In a way, I
think all my talk about changing the world, and getting published, and being
written about, and all that is just so much verbiage. The only thing that
really matters in this world is a girl's honest, innocent smile. I think that
manifests itself in bed. To me, there is little sexual about sex. Those that
can understand that, do. Those that don't understand... well, I don't think I
could explain it in words. To me, sex should be playful, the lila of Krsna
and the Gopis, if I understand the Sanskrit properly. (I never had doubts
until I read some odd translations in Ramakrishnan, but I don't know that lila
was one of the words I thought I misunderstood.) I was watching a video. I
think it was Sinead O'Connor's new video. I think Kenny Rogers was in it. In
it, they were in bed. It had nothing to do with sex, but it was intimate.
Erotic would carry the wrong weight, but I don't know that intimate even
pretends to say what I am pretending it says. I did not feel jealous, or
repulsed. There was no judgment going on, or analysis, or any real rational
thought at all. In an old set of terminology I used to use, it was an
instance of higher emotion. I just began to weep. She was smiling, and it
seemed a real smile. I could feel her when he held her, and it felt more... I
don't know. More happy, more comfortable, more joyful, than anything else. I
don't know. When I started this paragraph I knew I would gibber away and stop
making sense, but I had to say it. It is the truth. The only thing that
matters in this world is a girl's smile. Where did I read it? Something
like, "Is the truth any less true because it is temporary?" That isn't it at
all, at all. But it is what I mean. A girl's smile is temporary, and
fleeting. It has two defined endpoints in time, and a defined region in
space, but it is no less infinitely valuable for all the boundaries.
God, I've even lost myself! I have to move on, but to what?
The girl with the cane was not in class today. Have I written about her?
Or was that only in a notebook? Or only in imagination? I don't care. The
only thing the reader has to know is that she usually dominates my attention
in class, for no good reason, and that she was not there to do that domination
today. I amused myself most of the class period looking for wedding rings. I
don't know what got me started on that, and I don't know how to tell if a ring
is a wedding ring. I think a wedding ring is worn on the so-called ring
finger of the right hand, but I could be wrong. That is where I used to wear
my rings, but I was never married. I saw one girl who seemed married, and she
had a ring on the ring finger of each hand. Neither of them looked like a
wedding ring, though. They both looked too gaudy. But people have different
tastes. There was at least one other girl with a ring that looked much more
like a wedding ring, but then I got to thinking about how guys and girls
approach the text of Colette's The Vagabond from differing perspectives
because guys and girls have differing degrees of engulfment and abandonment
anxieties. I took some notes on it. Maybe I'll transcribe them someday.
Now, I feel tense in some places -- shoulders and a line right down the
spine -- but the flesh hanging off those places feels relaxed. It is a very
odd feeling. I think I will have a cigarette and go to bed.
Oh, by the way, so I don't lose this information: My anthropology
teacher told us a piece of information I had pored over the small medical
library we have, trying to find out. I wanted to know -- for the all but
abandoned tragedy -- what causes people suffering from malnutrition sometimes
to bloat and sometimes to become emaciated. He said that the bloating is
caused by water retention due to having a diet of sufficient calories but
insufficient protein. I'll have to remember that.
That professor has an interesting class. He distorts information, but
I'm sure it is honestly. I think he simply does not realize there is data out
there that is just as valid but contradicts his worldview. But he also has
fascinating trivia, and Moonlight and I, even though we both took the same
course from him, sit there and swap trivia in the evening sometimes. The
other day he explained why, if we drive with a pig strapped into the front
seat of a car, get into an automobile accident, and have an airbag, the pig's
neck will snap. It was quite interesting. (Though I don't plan on ever
driving a pig anywhere strapped into the front seat, but you never know when
data will come in handy.)
I suppose, finally, that is enough. As usual, my day was just classes
and reading, and the only person I talked to who is not family was Jujube,
into whom I ran on my way to class, so I really have no justification for
going on like this, but I felt I needed to talk. I guess what it comes down
to is that I didn't talk to anyone, and that is *why* I'm talking to myself.
Or future generations, or whatever the fuck excuse I give myself to get my
fingers moving so I don't go totally psycho and carry out that suicide fantasy
with a real gun this time.
Damn. Almost losing it there. Easy now ansat.
I used to be able to talk to A. Sometimes. Even though we had some
awful times together, I suspect that for the rest of my life -- and for the
rest of eternity is eternal life is true -- I will remember her also as being
the best times of my life. No one can ever replace or supersede what we had
together. Maybe someone could give me experiences that would approach what we
experienced, or that would be different but equally pleasing, but I could
never regret my time with A. I tell people I don't know what happiness is, I
don't know what makes me happy, crap like that. E. and I were telling each
other that just the other day. It isn't entirely true, though. Laying in bed
beside A., just holding her. Smelling her hair, and the incense she used to
burn, the peach scent she wore, feeling the slick chill of the white nightgown
she looked so beautiful in, I just stopped being me, and I think at that point
I felt what people call happy. The only other times I remember experiencing
anything like that is in religious ecstasy.
Two hideous drawbacks: I know perfectly well I may never have
experienced that happiness, and have just invented it in retrospect. In a way
that doesn't matter, since I can revisit in memory whatever I believe
happened, and the facts don't matter. In another way, it is miserable,
because I know I can never go back. The other drawback: The comedown's a
bitch. I remember times in bed with A. when I'd go into convulsions, full
body convulsions of such violence that she would get scared. I would cry
about every time we had sex, laying there. I would hallucinate sometimes. I
had visions of wars in the desert and things like that. In essence, the whole
religious ecstasy thing, but it is a lot more horrible than people realize.
Sometimes I envy the people who have never experienced a high, because
they never experience the real lows. They never even realize they live a low.
Like animals. Not in real happiness, but blissfully unaware of the pain of
reality. Like little lambs. If there was only less hostility and guile in
people's eyes, I could almost look at them and see lambs. But, instead, I
suppose I see whipped dogs, who haven't learned to trust, not quite knowing
why they are being beaten, but knowing they don't like it.
God! I'm losing myself again. But everything is so pleasantly real
right now. I'm having trouble hitting the right keys. A couple of times I
have thought one word and typed something utterly different. But the colors
are real, the light is playing so crisply, I suppose that means the ginseng is
now well into my system, and I am feeling physically happy.
It's experiences like this that lend credence to my idea that there is no
such thing as happiness, essentially, and that all people experience is an
animal high, a strictly hormonal phenomenon that they pretend is an emotion.
But I don't want to dwell on that. I'd rather believe my previously referred
to old theory of two types of emotion. And now I believe I'll go have a
smoke.
0407 092597
2211 092597
I had a couple of dreams. The latest one, I was going to a party at
Harlequin's house. I don't remember too much from it now, and I think I had
to walk through a city -- maybe not New York, but some city -- to his house.
I remember getting there, and we were sitting smoking, with the lights out and
the shades drawn, in the semidarkness. I had to go get something, but that's
about all I remember. I wish I could remember the earlier dream. I did
remember it, but I didn't write it down. Maybe I'll remember it in a bit.
2214 092597
2239 092597
I remember in a recent dream I had a bottle of beer to drink. The only
thing I remember was being in my bedroom with the empty bottle, going to throw
it away, and seeing the trashcan was too full and wondering what to do with
it. I'm reasonably certain it was a dream, because I have had nothing to
drink in some time, and nothing at all at home since the night I went out with
Moonlight's friends. I'm not sure the dream is significant, though, as my
trashcan is indeed overflowing, as usual, and the only concern it may
represent is that of needing to empty the can. (This is, incidentally, a real
problem for me, as it involves remembering what day the trash people come, and
throwing everything away the night before. I suppose that would not be a
concern for most people, but I have trouble with the time thing.)
I have read that paranoia presupposes megalomania. I don't know if, on
this point, there is a distinction between paranoid schizophrenia and paranoia
as an independent phenomenon. I have been thinking about that, and I can only
come up readily with two ways this could not be true. Or could be not true,
to be more accurate. Moonlight suggested that someone would feel people were
out to get him because he felt worthless, and that was why they were after
him. I suggested this was just an inverted form of megalomania, a kind of
pride at being worthless, while a truly worthless person would be simply
ignored. The first way I can think of this would be inaccurate is if the
people who were out to get the individual were out to get everyone, or most
everyone. This would be, I suppose, a general delusion, and perhaps not
purely paranoia, but it does seem to me to be a counterexample to the
statement paranoia presupposes megalomania. I came up last night, though,
with what I think is a better counterexample. Every person needs a measure of
attention. That is normal. An individual that did not feel he got enough
attention, and who was incapable of conceiving of a way people would take
interest in him without a critical or punishing motive could obviously create
an entity to pay attention to him in a paranoid fashion. To me, megalomania
implies the individual conceives of himself as better or more valuable than
people in general, and this would not be a case of that at all, but would
rather be an individual who felt he had as much value as anyone else and
simply lacked the tools for conceiving of someone who cared about him in any
other way.
In short, this individual presupposes hostility from people, and is
incapable of conceiving of love, or at least of being loved. In this
conception-poor mindset, he creates what his subconscious thinks it needs --
"caring" as attention -- and creates an insanity by failing to generate what
he really needs -- "caring" as attention motivated by love.
2240 092597
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
[=- POETASTRiE -=]
"The poets? They stink. They write badly. They're idiots you see, because
the strong people don't write poetry.... They become hitmen for the Mafia.
The good people do the serious jobs."
--Charles Bukowski
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
UNNAMED BAD POEM
Flying Rat's Nostril
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I kill children,
and....my what a lovely daughter you have ma'am.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
Simeon Strunsky
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
PROMETHEUS MOURNS
Nemo est Sanctus
Prometheus mourns, but does not weep
As he gazes across the wastes.
With tears in check, he surveys the deep
Destruction that man tastes.
On the peak of man's potential he stands.
He gazes deep into the chasm,
Ironically anticlimax beside the grand
Dreams he had for them.
A measureless grave, now dark
For man chose to ignore
When Prometheus brought the spark.
Man dubbed him Lucifer.
Man faltered and fled before the Light
And, by emotion, was scared to flight.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
[=- FiCTiON -=]
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
ALL POWER STEMS FROM...
I Wish My Name Were Nathan
I was riding my bike home from school today when I glanced over into
someone's garage and saw a man in his teeshirt and boxer shorts fire a gun
at me -- and miss.
Immediately I wrenched my brakes and squealed to a stop, jerked the
handlebars to the right, and bore down on that asshole, pedaling right
toward him. He wouldn't forget his mistake.
(Let it be noted that this will not knock someone down if he is tall
enough; rather, the pedalist and the pistolist shall soon be face to face
straddling said bicycle.)
"Hey, asshole!" I screamed, so doing. "If you're gonna fire a gun at
me, you're gonna HIT ME! Try again!"
He merely appeared shocked, bumbling towards apology but failing
foolishly.
"Look, buddy! This isn't the kind of shit I want to put up with!
I've got done here reading Henry David Thoreau, asshole; this is the man
who'll show you where to put that gun! What kind of a man is playing with
a gun in his underwear in the middle of the afternoon except a stupid fuck
like you who has no clue why he's alive at all? Do you even know why you're
doing this?
"(Go ahead, buddy, lift that gun again! I'm waiting for my final
release!)
"It's a damn shame, the state society's in nowadays. What even sucks
worse is the fact that it's been this sucky for centuries! If not one kinda
suckiness, another! And why? I think it's shits like you who brandish
weapons! Small arms, machine guns, cannons, military airplanes, nuclear
bombs -- one story. Deception, wrath, greed, envy, selfishness, prejudice,
outwardly projected self-disgust -- another! It all makes me sick! My nose
is running, you asshole, and all I want is inner peace!
"For some reason, I thought I should be comfortable in detesting and
fearing the big stinging arms of our out-of-control fat-ass federal
government -- the FBI, CIA, ATF, IRS, and the W.T.F. -- all insane fuckin'
unsupervised masses of bent people out to fuck over their neighbors.
There's no pretty word for it, buddy, that's what they're out to do -- to
sidestep every law and bill of right we think protects us so they can
forward their wacked-out agenda of death, fear-mongering, war-propagation,
thought-crime, and all-out rudeness!
"But now, looky here. Like the local shock-jock media has been
telling me for years, I really DO have to fear the jerks who live up the
street, because they COULD be murderers- and rapists-in-training, only
waiting for the right moment to assert their God-given rights to be complete
fucks!
"(Why aren't you doing anything with that goddamn penis-extension gun
of yours, you shit?! Aim it AT MY HEAD and make it DISAPPEAR!)
"Well, you know what? I'm sorry for you! I'm sorry for everyone
living! Maybe I don't know them personally, but I know that for the most
part they've been raised under the control of cultures and societies and
power structures whose only purpose is to keep themselves going -- no matter
how unjust, silly, unscrupulous, inefficient, or altogether mean they are.
No government will allow its citizens to deny its right over their lives.
No economy will train its workers to be wise. No society will allow
nonconformance to its basic precepts. Why? Because then they'd be
committing suicide! What sort of guillotine would allow its blade to freely
leave, dull its edge, and put itself to the purpose of peace? What sort of
electric chair would allow its straps to contemplate the beauty of existence
rather than hold some poor fuck down while his muscles tear and his skin
melts? They'd be worthless, wouldn't they?
"This is what we are! We are tools! We are cogs in a machine! We
are codependently useless unto ourselves -- self-loathing in fact -- only
useful to external goals and needs, whether it be the circulation of money
or the proliferation of megamonopolistic power structures or the funding of
a government to smudge out the dignity of what nations still have it and
reform them in our own image.
"And you know what? I wouldn't mind being a tool. I wouldn't mind
being a cog in a machine -- if I had been led to believe this would be my
destiny in this self-mutilating world! Please, stop spreading these lies
about human rights and freedom and dignity, when you only denigrate and
annihilate all of them behind our backs -- and in our faces -- anyway!
Please, stop bellowing about the rights of the unborn American citizen when
the ones already living, here and abroad, are learning through the harshest
psychological and physical lessons the fact that such rights do not exist.
Yes! If we can claim human beings have a right to liberty, equality, and
the pursuit of happiness, and then work as hard as possible to classify,
quantify, and pick away at that liberty, to make equality of misery the only
real success, and to define happiness in such a way as to value finite
material goods over the infinite beauty of Being -- then such rights must
not exist at all!
"Why the drive to propagate the species when such truths are evident
to anyone who stops for ten seconds to think about them? Is it that enough
of us simply don't stop to think? Have we scheduled and commodified our
time and energy to such a degree that self-reflection is no longer
practical? Please don't tell me that you understand all of this and have
children simply to hope that THIS one won't go wrong.... Have we so given
up the idea of spiritual and psychological survival that we've died unto
ourselves, converting our bodies into factories to toil for their own shoddy
maintenance until they can produce an offspring that might WORK OUT?
"How many of us have honestly given up? How many of us no longer
believe in having a meaningful life, something to be happy of having lived
through? How many of us simply avoid committing suicide for the sole cause
of preventing new suffering, a feeble justification for living through it?
"But look! WE'RE FOOLS. We've been suckered! And you know how? Too
many of us actually believe all that shit matters! Look: where are our
chains? Where are these machines? They're in our heads, buddy! Ain't that
hilarious? All this oppression and strife and injustice -- between our
ears! Fuckin'-A freakshow we live in, huh?
"What about physical pain, you ask? Ha! Also in our heads! The same
thing that defines pain, makes us fear it! And what about it? Why do we
fear pain at all? Because it intimates death? I'll ask you a metaphysical
question, buddy: if infinity exists, can any of us really be separate from
it?
"Pick up that gun, motherfucker, and aim!
"PICK IT UP! Yes, that's it, I'm SERIOUS.
"YES, AT MY HEAD, in my EAR, if you so please.
"Now, one last thing:
"SUFFERING IS A CHOICE. DO WHAT THOU WILT."
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
"Agneta," Elms whispered, "did you see that? Christ ate
Travis. There's nothing left but his gloves and boots."
Philip K. Dick
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
PREDATOR
Howler in the Shadows
Shiiik!
"Mary had a little lamb, little lamb..."
Shiiik!
"Little lamb, little lamb....."
Shiiik!
The man glanced briefly at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, before
continuing to sing softly.
"Little lamb, little lamb...."
Shiiik!
Once again, he slid the whetstone across the length of the knife blade.
Shiiik!
It was a wicked blade. Custom made, not another one in existence. The
blade itself was six inches long, tapering to a double-edged tip, like a
trappers blade. Like something used to skin animals. The back of the blade
thickened and became ridged, like the saw on a survival knife. The handle was
a black plastic "comfort-grip", specially contoured for his fingers. It was a
thing of beauty.
Shiiik!
The singing had become a tuneless humming, a menagerie of seemingly
random notes and rhythms. He glanced at the mirror quickly, somehow assured
by the reflection looking back at him. He was a tall, well muscled man, with
dark brown skin and piercing blue eyes. The harsh, fluorescent bathroom light
reflected off of his cleanly shaven head, giving his skin the appearance of
polished leather. He sat on a rickety, wooden stool set in front of the
bathroom sink, clad only in a pair of baggy, white slacks.
"Ya know..." he said, glancing up at the mirror and then quickly away, as
if afraid to meet his own blue-eyed stare.
"Ya know...," he started again, and then faltered.
Shiiik!
"I--I once heard that lunatics were geniuses," he looked up at the mirror
earnestly, as if seeking the reflection's approval.
The reflection looked down on him, good-natured humor in its eyes,
"No Larry," it said, "you are indeed many things, but a genius you are
not."
"Why not?" he asked disappointed.
The reflection sighed heavily, it had explained this many times.
"You're not a genius, because you weren't born a genius."
"Oh." he said.
"Don't worry, Larry" it said reassuringly, "you don't need to be a
genius. That's why you have me."
"Oh yeah..." he said unhappily.
"Larry," It said reproaching.
"Don't be upset. We can't all be geniuses."
"I wish I was a genius."
He carefully slid the knife into its sheath, pocketing the whetstone with
his other hand.
The reflection was silent. He looked up at it and smiled.
It beamed down on him, its eyes filled with pride. Larry reached over to
the towel rack and pulled the yellow, button-up shirt off of it. He slowly
put it on, making sure that each plastic button lined up with each hole.
"Happy hunting," called the reflection.
"Thank you," mumbled Larry, clicking off the bathroom light.
It was raining outside. Larry grabbed his over coat and threw it over
his shoulders. He liked the rain. It gave him the opportunity to wear his
over coat, a dark grey thing, like what a detective would wear in the movies.
The rain also made hunting more fun. It was harder. The game few and
far between. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, but it was flashing.
Twelve. Twelve. Twelve.
He hated clocks.
He left without locking the door, thieves were welcome to rob him. There
was nothing in that apartment that he cared about. The elevator was out of
order. That was just fine with him. He hated elevators, always had. Down
four flights of concrete urine-smelling steps into a dilapidated front lobby.
Empty. The decent people were all asleep. Out the front door and onto the
streets. He flipped his collar up like he imagined a police detective would.
He began to sing softly as he walked, eyes flicking back and forth,
scanning both sides of the street,
"London bridge is falling down..."
"Falling down...."
"Falling down..."
There! The corner. A glimmer of movement. He quickened his pace. The
rubber soles of his tennis shoes began to squeak on the wet concrete. He
slowed, silence was the key. Larry reached the corner soon enough... empty.
The street was empty. Whatever he had seen was gone. If it had ever existed.
"Falling down..."
He was not disappointed. No. It was too early. The chase was half of
the game.
* * * * *
The moon was almost setting. He couldn't see it through the clouds, but
he could feel it. The rain had slackened off some. Good. It had been too
heavy. He hadn't seen a soul. He was humming to himself. He had reached a
small park and sat down on one of the benches. Off to the left three figures
sat huddled around a small fire they had going in a waste basket. Larry was
content to watch. One of them had to wander off eventually.
One of the three did indeed stand up, but he didn't just wander off as
Larry had originally hoped. Instead, he began to walk over to where Larry sat
This could be an interesting night indeed. Larry studied the man as he
approached. Young, black, nervous. His friends had probably put him up to
this. Larry's knife was in his hand, hidden in the folds of his over coat.
"Hey, mister," the man said as he drew near, "you got any spare change?"
"Hmm." Larry responded standing up. He proceeded to search the pocket of
his left side. His right hand he kept perfectly still.
"Sorry," he said smiling, "no change today."
"Then how 'bout your wallet, mother fucker!" the man said, voice
cracking, as he flipped a knife butterfly knife open.
Larry smiled. His adrenalin pumping. He was higher than any drug had
ever gotten him. He wilted back, seeming to be afraid, then cat-quick he
lunged forward. His left hand grabbed the man's wrist, while his right
plunged his knife to its hilt in the man's belly. Warm, sticky blood rushed
over his hand. God, how he'd missed that feeling. The man cried out and
tried to stumble back, but Larry held him fast.
He was grinning now, positively enjoying himself. He twisted the blade
and pulled violently to the right, ripping free of the man's abdomen. The
faint aroma of bowel reached Larry's nostrils. He released the man, allowing
him to stumble back. He cried out again as his intestines slipped free of
their cavity and piled onto the grass.
The man's companions started forward, alerted by the man's cries. Larry
was on them in a second. He leapt at the first man, forcing him down into the
mud. The man's cry of surprise turned into one of pain as Larry began to
wildly slash him. Instinctively, the man threw his arms up, blocking his
face. Larry's first swipe went across the man's hand. The second landed on
his face, cutting deeply from his right eye down past his chin.
Suddenly, the third man was there, grabbing Larry by the shoulders and
pulling him off of the wounded man. Larry broke free and swiveled, bringing
his knife up to a guard position. His opponent stood a few feet away from
Larry, pointing something at him. A gun. Larry hated guns. They were no
fun. The man glanced at his companion,
"Jack, you all right?"
The man didn't answer, he just held his face and screamed. Larry took
the opportunity and threw his knife. It was not balanced, not designed for
throwing, but it was heavy and Larry's aim was good. It smacked hard against
the man's hand, knocking the gun free.
Larry tackled the man, forcing him face-down into the mud and beating him
savagely.
After a few moments the man stopped moving. Unconscious or dead, Larry
didn't know and didn't particularly care. He stood up and cast about for his
knife. It was lying in the mud, next to the gun. He saw his knife, but the
gun was gone.
Suddenly, fire exploded in his back. He dropped to the ground, crying
out in fear and pain. The other man, the one with the cut face, he'd found
the gun. Once again pain exploded in him, this time in his chest, just to the
right of his heart. He fell back against the ground. Damn his stupidity.
He'd totally forgotten about the man. Assumed that he was taken care of. Now
he'd been shot. Badly. He could feel the blood flowing from his veins. He
was going to die, he knew that much. No one would save him, even if they
could. He was going numb, shock he guessed. It suddenly occurred to him that
no one was going to pick his knife up out of the mud. The blade would be
ruined. This disturbed him more than the thought of dying. He tried to
speak, to beg the man to take his knife, to clean it and care for it, but only
a gurgling croak would come out.
'I wish I was a genius' he thought sadly. If he'd been a genius he
wouldn't have been shot. He wouldn't be lying here dying while his knife got
ruined in the mud. For the first time in nearly twenty years, Larry cried.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
I judged others by these standards; the only people who
existed for me were those who, without cheating, looked
this all-consuming nothingness in the face.
Simone de Beauvoir
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
DANCE OF THE HEKURA
Dark Crystal Sphere Floating Between Two Universes
"The *hekura* are often found in the hills, or high in trees, often
suspended there, but they can also live under rocks or even in the
chest of a human. . . . Some are 'hot' and some are *naiiki* -- meat
hungry and cannibalistic. Some are both hot and meat hungry, and
these are often the ones sent to devour the souls of enemies."
-- Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanomamo
Cornelius Omphalos hung over me as I followed his directions for making
the drug and the heated seeds and white ash combined to form a green powder in
my mortar. This lab room allotted me by the University of Texas to complete
my chemistry graduate research was merely the latest in a series of sites
which had seen the preparations of such strange concoctions and mind-altering
brews, going back to the *Club des Haschichins* we had founded in our
undergraduate days based on Moreau's and Gautier's example. Each of us sought
in these forays into drug use our own goals; mine being the insights of
chemical effects on the brain and its evolution on the material level, while
Cornelius' belonged to another plane altogether.
I had known the anthropology student for quite some time, and it was not
long after our having met in the reading room of the Life Sciences Library
that we organised the underground *Club,* made up of a small circle of close
friends willing to experiment and to gamble, meeting in rented rooms and
secluded spots at odd intervals to try an elaborate assortment of concoctions
in quasi-religious rituals. One after another, however, the group was wooed
away, by lovers or jobs or other aspects of the vulgar world outside the
spheres Omphalos and I chose to inhabit. For while I was the scientist
dedicated to learning at any price for its own sake, Omphalos sought with
similar dedication a higher ideal, dealings with something outside of our own
realm of experience, something which perhaps should not have been dealt with
and which perhaps God and Nature have mercifully shielded us from by
relegating to us such weak senses.
Omphalos had that fearlessness brought on by wonder and that far-reaching
yet blind vision held by all mystics and revolutionaries, and a fire burned in
the Greek's dark eyes as he no doubt contemplated what I would never have then
imagined. For he had seen the ebene, the hallucinogenic snuff now forming
before us, used so often by the shamans of the South American Yanomamo; he had
watched the shamans as they switched between their own roles and of those of
the hekura, spirits called down from the hills and the forests and even the
farthest reaches of the universe to dwell in their chests and to work strange
deeds. Returning from his fieldwork he carried with him a walking stick made
of wood of the ama tree which was soon reduced to ash necessary for the
experiment and a tube of the skinned seeds of the hisiomo tree, traded from a
Yanomamo looking for the advantages a new shotgun would bestow upon him in
this often warlike society and brought through customs with the aid of a few
dollars and the kind officials. I wish I could erase that day soon after his
return when he showed up at my residence holding the cane and his battered
leather bag containing the tube of seeds and told me of his experiences, and
of the refusal of the Yanomamo shamans to grant his most urgent wish, that he
be inducted into their mysteries and learn to deal with the hekura. Had he
paid heed to their warnings he would have realised that his quest could not
end happily.
As the Sun shone on the University's cyclopean Tower from the Western sky
and unwitting students went about the petty dramas of their lives unsuspecting
of that which lies beyond, we hurtled down the back roads of the Texas Hill
Country towards our preselected site, oak rising thick on either side of the
road thinning out onto juniper-studded limestone hills and growing beside
winding rivulets which had been devouring the rock for countless ages,
proceeding from sources unknown to unknown destinations eating valleys and
hidden grottoes from the white rock. I realise in retrospect that during this
journey Omphalos was steeling himself for trials whose appearance he knew
waited only for the blast of that snuff. For he had sat among these men and
heard their stories and while he had not seen the entities these men culled
into their bodies, he had seen them carry out that drama known only to the
shaman, he had seen them slip between worlds and watched their actions with
spirits. This was what Cornelius had searched for for so long among so many
cultures, the doorway to the unknown which had been the quest of the Greek's
life, and he was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to secure this
prize.
The Sun shone down upon bare limestone patches in the sparse grass as I
turned my dirty grey Oldsmobile onto the rocky dirt road winding up to the
hilltop clearing along the last leg of our journey in the Westlake hills. We
rolled to a stop in the rocky clearing and clambered out of the car, noting
briefly the commanding view of the bare hilltop, one among several in the
area, fringed lower down with juniper trees giving way to dry creek beds at
its base. A flock of grackles hopped about eating things squirming in the
sparse grass and watched us with curious yellow eyes as we prepared for our
saturnalia, their squawking and cackling filling the afternoon air as the Sun
shone upon us just as it has upon so many of the deeds of men, good or ill,
standing silent watch over Earth's affairs. I quickly dressed in the flowing
priest-like robes we had designed for our *Club* in those days so long past,
in the Western Ceremonial style the group had favoured, but Cornelius had
spent his days of late in other climes, and my robes clashed with his South
American dress and painted body, looking so much like those grainy pictures of
Yanomamo Omphalos had shown me as we discussed the dancing hekura. While I
dressed as I felt appropriate, Omphalos dressed as guest of the hekura, for
the hekura demand beauty of their hosts, a beauty known to the Yanomamo in the
pigments and feathers of the jungle.
The Sun hung not far above the Western horizon when we finally squatted
down facing each other, the scientist and the mystic, with Omphalos' old
leather bag lying between us. Reverently I opened the bag and removed the
snuff tube which the Yanomamo call the mokohiro along with the pouch of ebene
and placed some of the snuff into the nose piece of the instrument. Placing
the nose piece to Omphalos' nostril, I blew the greenish powder through the
pipe first slowly and finally ending with a sharp blast. Omphalos fell back
in pain, coughing and hacking, with mucous dripping from his nostril, but
quickly regained himself and prepared for a second blast, which was met with a
similar reaction. However, Omphalos had the determination of one heading
towards a tantalisingly close goal, and he once again regained himself and I
reluctantly received a blast of the greenish powder myself. Falling back
gasping and coughing, my eyes watering and mucous dipping in long strands from
my nose I refused a second blast and lay on the ground awaiting the painful
drug's effects.
Slowly recovering from the first pains of the drug, tears flowing from my
eyes, I soon heard Omphalos' high clear voice crooning a strange and ancient
melody, softly at first but gradually crescendoing to ear-splitting volumes,
but always maintaining the beauty and wonder of the song. This was the song
of summoning which Omphalos had told me of so often, the calling out to those
glowing creatures to come and join the realm of men, to join us in the fields
men know. Mucous dripping down his face and chest, dropping in patches and
forming green crusts on the white limestone, Omphalos reeled about singing
this song as I watched in both amusement and with a twinge of fear, for he had
the bearing of a true fanatic for this religion he had never even really
known, and he had made the transition into that man whose acquaintance I had
made but a few times before high on drugs in those meetings of our *Club,* who
would push his corporal frame past the point where it should have broken.
My eyes still watering and my nose running profusely I lay watching him
reel about me and snorting small handfuls of the drug, no longer even
bothering with the mokohiro, oblivious to the black winged birds screaming and
hopping about in reply to his strange song when, opposite the setting Sun,
strange tiny lights began to appear in the Eastern sky. Sitting upright I
watched with curiosity as the dancing lights arose from the hills and trees
and from high in the encroaching darkness, twirling along their trails and
whirling about in the air as they approached our hilltop. As they drew closer
panic began to creep over me, for no longer could I deny that they were taking
on the shapes so often described to me by Omphalos as we laid out our plans
and read the scattering of articles on the ebene available in English, for
here were approaching the tiny forms of glowing creatures, tiny men and women,
each less than two inches tall, some carrying soul-piercing weapons and
wearing palm-frond visors as if in preparation of attack on an enemy. Like
tiny ballet dancers they gamboled about, spiraling towards us, as they each
danced along their paths to us and congregated around Omphalos, spinning in
the air to the time of his song, now reaching a fever pitch. Finally, with
Omphalos' gestures of invitation, the hekura, many with weapons in hand, began
to march along glowing trails to his feet and enter his body, making the
invisible course to his chest. It was then that Omphalos stopped his singing
and his face made odd contortions of fear and of pain, and I noticed with the
hekura's advances in my direction that both Omphalos and I were screaming.
The police found me running through the woods, blood trailing from dozens
of wounds where thorns and branches had torn at my face and hands as I ran
blindly long after the effects of my panic had overcome the ebene and I ceased
to even remember what I was running from. Fortunately men are quick to make
up their own explanations for what they do not understand, so my ravings with
what little coherency they had fell upon deaf ears and closed minds. When I
finally recovered enough to lead them to the spot in the woods where Omphalos
lay, the Greek was near death, and he did not live long after the trip to the
hospital. But to this day Omphalos' words when we found him lying in that
clearing still haunt me, and as I make even the shortest sortie outdoors I
look about and fear what may come dancing unseen along its path to the realms
of men, what has been so mercifully cloaked from our feeble senses, for as he
lay there all he could say, over and over, was how he could feel them chewing.
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--
State of unBeing is copyrighted (c) 1997 by Crux Ansata and Apocalypse Culture
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--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--