quiet heart

Who said Love need be loud?

– The ancestral swell of a tympani drum –

That it could not be found in the quiet pattern of removing clothes from the washer, placing them in the dryer, setting the dials – ?

And I with my American Sensibilities forget too easily that it is everywhere, always,

A rush of birds past my window,

Bella staring at the wall,

Mistakes.

Even in the sorrowful and slow healing which comes when I feel I’m alone, alone, when all I can think is “I am alone,” when I am terrifyingly separated out and the world is moving disjointly.

If I am part of the universe then even when I feel disconnected I am not. The tension of this delusion must exist for some structural purpose which is, perhaps, a healing purpose.

Humans feel above and beyond animals, nature. We separate ourselves out. Perhaps we are healing some tragic wound. Perhaps we need time to cleanse ourselves before we can return.

Then life, and right, is healing, is work.

Struggle towards the light. You can’t help it.

Semen Dynamics / Masturbation Shield

So I’m single now, yeah? No sex source. Nowhere to put my semen that isn’t a tissue or my shorts. I take things into my own hands. I masturbate. Sometimes, afterwards, I think to myself something along the lines of “I wonder if I didn’t masturbate as much I would get all frustrated and high-tension and crazy and start looking around more fervently for someone to put some semen in?”

The thing is, I’m not necessarily into sex per se. I like physical intimacy. I enjoy touch. Certain parts of the human body are more sensitive and more pleasurable to touch than others. But I’m not aching to throw my dick into a hole. It just doesn’t really occur to me as something worth fighting for.

But I feel like the comingling of specifically desire for sex is somewhere near the core of a sexual or romantic relationship. If I want to be intimate in ways X, Y, and Z that requires that I desire to be intimate in this other very specific way. I need to want to put my penis into your hole and shoot semen in there.

And it’s better if I’m all pent-up and crazy, yeah? More energy, that way. My energetic fucks definitely come when it’s been longer since my last ejaculation event. Sometimes, when I was with Jen, I would purposely not masturbate for a while so that the sex was better.

There are dangers!

If you don’t depressurize the genetic material storage containers every once in a while then you’re likely to blow a gasket and shoot up a movie theatre. I suppose that’s a pretty extreme reaction, but I’m also worried about less extreme, less harmful actions –

– Acting weirdly around women in professional situations.
– Losing sensitivity to the feelings and thoughts of others (just wanna fuck! don’t care what you have to say!)
– Sacrificing standards and values just to get that fuck.

I mean, I’m not an alpha male. I know this. I’m not 6’5″ with a massive dong. People don’t line up to fuck me. This isn’t a kvetch, it’s just the way things are. Some people have that innate, raw, human sexuality that others are drawn to magically. I do not. I live in sexual marginalia.

There was some movie about penguins or some shit where some of the penguins don’t get to mate and they just go fucking bonkers. Does that happen to humans? I’m almost positive it does. I think it happened to me, sometime between 7th and 12th grades. I masturbated constantly. I never got laid – no handjob, no blowjob, no fucking anything. I didn’t know how to approach the topic at all. So me and my other unlaid friends would play D&D and discuss philosophy and mostly hate on the world. We were pushing ourselves out into the margins because the core had, genetically, sexually, rejected us. It had rejected our bodies. No warm cushy center for us. Our sentiments drifted towards: “Fuck Christianity! Fuck the State! Fuck School! Fuck the Mainstream!” It had nothing for us, so we had nothing for it.

Part of me believes that the “good genetic material” was really the good in short supply, in 7th & 8th grade. The hot kids would all fuck and get fucked up on booze and fuck and fuck and fuck. They’d fuck out of their bodies. They weren’t in control. Their bodies were giving them all the same signals that my body was giving me, but they had an outlet and by god they used it. I would have, too, but my genetic material was assessed as low grade. The fucked up thing is that, even if I had found someone else on the margins to fuck, a la ghost world/indie flicks/whatever, we’d really have just been masturbating mutually, yeah? God this is such a depraved, horrible view of sex that I’m not even sure if I believe in it, but part of me does. Part of me believes that the real human core of sexuality is genetic pressure – that anything else is some sort of spin-off or complicated misuse.

It’s taken a long time to get even a little closer to that warm human core. There’s a question – if I were to start get well-laid by genetically viable men/women would I change? Would my values shift back into the mainstream? Would I enjoy hollywood blockbusters again? Obviously it couldn’t happen overnight, but would it happen eventually? Would society start to push into my body-house and infiltrate my body-mind?

Perhaps I use masturbation as a shield against the world. I hold my dick and scream “You don’t get this, World! You don’t get my body! You can go fuck yourself!”

he said / she said

He said, “let me touch you.”

She said, “don’t touch me, you’re empty.”

He said, “I’m just lonely.”

She said, “Want to see a movie?”

He said, “Yeah, let’s see a movie.”

Against weak antithesis

To analyze “antithesis” as such:

I feel like last night I had the same conversation that I’ve had a million times – someone (with all the best intentions) forwards an antithesis, but in so doing makes the same crucial mistake inherent in the thesis.

In this case, the guy I was listening to was rattling off some permutation of the usual ultra-progressive/anti-privilege banter. The thesis being the progression of white culture along genealogical lines – his antithesis being an racial/sexual pan-egalitarianism. But the thing is that he was making the same mistake that got white people in trouble in the first place; namely, he was over-committing to materialistic concerns. 

This is problematic in two ways.

First, even if his rhetoric were to become widespread and powerful enough (“if the truth is told in such a way as to be understood then it will be believed”) that it gained real political/social capitol, he would have accomplished nothing. Who cares about the color of the hand which holds the whip?

Second, ideological commitment to materialism is the crux of white privilege. If you buy into the framework then you are stuck in the web. You may feel like you’re arguing against privilege, but really you’re working on its behalf. This is because the power structures that be are powerful and intelligent enough that they will learn how to co-opt and transform your rebellion into Yet Another Tool of Oppression. So good luck with that.

—

More generally, we can think of a discourse as being generated by a teleological yearning [1]. To oppose the discourse  we must oppose its core. We cannot oppose the forms generated by the yearning! To do so would merely be to participate in the yearning and give it yet more power.

I run into this repeatedly!

– Atheists who participate in consumerist religiosity – who have religious sentiments which are co-opted by any symbol pedlar within earshot. 

– Anti-consumerists who fall into anti-consumerist consumerism. Oh you buy Dr. Bronners? You must be sooo fucking off the grid! Oh you watch TV on your computer? Yeah, I guess that’s not TV then.

– Anti-racists who participate in bigotry oriented around political ideology. They need an in-group, but they define their in-group by careful selection of the in-group they’re part of.

—–

A crude geometric/physical metaphor: I imagine a hole and particles spinning around the hole. As the particles spin more quickly, their power increases the probability that some will enter the hole and exit onto the next plane. To oppose the progress of particles into the next plane we must act to stop up the hole – attempting to mess with the particles will only increase their kinetic energy, thereby increasing the probability that balls will enter the hole.

—–

If you want to oppose something, do it purely, or shut the fuck up.

—–

[1] I’ve written about this before (https://bigsleytheoaf.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/transcending-teleologyspastic-forms/)

The Rules of the Place

I woke up this morning to a new poem in my inbox which reminded me that I am a well of infinite emptiness and well then I went to the cafe and got a croissant and a green tea and then I finished The Rum Diary in the park and sobbed.

I took a picture of the word FURY written in a box. I’m drinking Templeton Rye and the cat is snoring in a ball next to me. My keys are lying next to me, also.

Look

The dogs won’t even look at you, here. Their eyes are fixed straight, they know what not to look at. The people shouldn’t look at you either and, if you want to exchange glances, well forget about it.

This city has placed walls everywhere, between the dreams of ours. We, our dreams, are smushed against each other messily – not woven into any sort of coherent harmonic pattern.

How rules operate, in this sort of context:

The accumulation of frictions between dreams, the noticing of the accumulation, the bubbling up into the Zeitgeist of these noticings, the accumulation of the noticings, the noticing of the accumulation -> the writing of editorials, the discussion of editorials in workplaces, the accumulation of these discussions and so on until the knowledge of small disturbances becomes a common-knowledge-froth. A city of sensitive young fools who are too afraid to step on toes becomes aware that there are literally toes everywhere which must be avoided at all costs. This whole internet thing being a great big tool for broadcasting the location of toes.

People used to drive drunk. People used to have sex without condoms. People used to laugh out loud in the streets. People used to shout at each other. People used to have sex in public. People used to smoke in bars. People used to rape. People used to murder.

Man

In the park I saw two women with strollers and the two men tending the two children. The men were acting like boys, so carefree. It’s not that I hated them, exactly – it’s that I couldn’t even begin to empathize. Do you need to be a child to have a child? I no longer feel like a child, at all. I’m desperate for return. I felt the many walls between me and them.

I do feel like a Man. I identify as a Man. I worry about becoming homeless – that’s a Man thing to think. I’m no longer swaddled in children’s clothing, I no longer live in a comfortable womb. There is a real possibility of death, for me – of falling off the edge of the world – of complete and total alienation.

I don’t know anyone who identifies as a Man in this way. Maybe Graham. I don’t know what men think about being a man. I’ve read so much about what women are, who they are, what they feel like. Who are men?

Men have so many rules. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t rape. These are rules for women, but they don’t seem to constrain them as much. I’ve felt urges to kill, steal, and rape. I’ve been constrained by the rules.

Men need rules and war, yeah? That’s what everyone seems to believe, anyway.

Atheist

Context:

The gum surrounding my lower right molars is inflamed. I have a growth on the bottom of my right foot which causes me a great deal of pain when I walk. I have skin tags running up and down my sides. Chronic cough. Nasal congestion. Hypochondriac manifesting destiny in polyglot &&& kung fu kung fu kung fuck you!

These days, walking down street, memories of real errors past rise sharply out of Void and, felt viscerally, cause ejaculation of underbreath epithet. I must seem like a lunatic.

—–

Statement:

You’re an atheist? As in, you don’t believe in god? You think you get to choose what you believe in?

I am overwhelmed by the hubris of my fellow humans, lately. I cannot perceive any entity-born phenomenon without immediate realization of its dual and the resultant unbalanced nature of its fact. This includes phenomena associated with the various levels and forms corresponding to “I.” The fact that I must act in any way at all betrays my manifold alternative potentials, betrays the possibility of non-action, betrays the possibility of more abstract speculative options.

You choose what you believe in? Since when? This must be a modern invention. If you once believed in God then you still do and if you didn’t, then you still don’t. I cannot conceive of a transition on this point. As if belief in God were not foundational – as if such a belief might hinge contingent on another fact as if there could be a fact more fundamental than God/No-God based upon which you might form your belief.

As if there is even such a thing as “belief in God,” attained. As if the religious mindset weren’t a striving towards an impossible belief. As if Faith weren’t an act of pushing towards an ideal. As if belief in any ideal were not isomorphic to belief in a corresponding God.

We flatter ourselves that we are not Animals. We flatter ourselves that we have not Spirits. We flatter ourselves that we are not Primitives. Do we not have instincts, essences, rituals? What are we, then?

What are you, Atheist?

“Some types of neurons have no axon and transmit signals from their dendrites.” – from Axon / Wikipedia

What are you, then, Atheist?

—–

Circle:

Atheist, what am I? Am I not a God?

I’d like to be helpful without hurting, critical without the burn. I’d like to be able to show, gently. Why can’t I do this? Perhaps it’s false, false. Perhaps this is what must be rejected – the Will to help. It is arrogant and wrong. I need not be a God.

I want to be a human, a spirit, a primitive, an animal, a rock, the sun, the wind, the moon.

One day.