Hold on a minute.

Hey Nobs,
something is afoot.
i have decided to start writing.
i have decided to stop asking why? why write?
i have decided that the answer to that question is because i am a writer. 
why write? because i am a writer.
danger! simple danger.
i step out onto a precipice, feel the wind on my face and shiver at the dizziness of the greatness that lays before me...at my feet...how did you get down there? 
oh my.
such drama.
on the heels of such a decision i have stumbled across:

by Jack Cheng

I am reading it on a tablet. 

i am enjoying it. 

it makes me wonder about jack's process.

it makes me wonder about my process.

process.

thanks for listening.

b.

Princess Anne.

Hey N,
    I just med a psychotic woman...
         psychotic by her own admission.

Over medicated and senile and splintered and broken in her mind...
while in Hallsberg.
I took the train in the opposite direction than i was headed and ended up sitting in the Hallsberg station for forty minutes waiting to head south towards Göteborg.
 I sat next to her and we talked...I listened mostly.
she spoke non stop. it was exhausting.
i asked her at one point if she was exhausted and she answered:
"Yes, yes i am exhausted. i need a little quiet room to simply be."
she made me think...made me think of a lot of different things...
in a splintered and broken in the mind sort of way.
what a gift.
she made wild assumptions about my parents and family lineage.
at one point she mimicked the voice of her former husband, an abusive misogynist pastor who used his influence over those he cared for in order to seduce them....as he did Anne
....Princess Anne.
As he descended into a fog of alzheimers he divided himself and Anne into a symbolic dichotomy of God and Satan.
Anne played Satan.
Anne became Satan.
her voice as she spoke as her long dead husband...
her eyes...
her crooked finger pointing...
the room filled with his wrath...
then faded back into the simple madness of Anne.
This man had fathered her a son, now thirty, unemployed and immersed in World of Warcraft to the point where reality had no meaning
    "and he thinks I'm crazy."
Anne was also extremely paranoid while fully aware of this...
she was fully aware of much of her madness though aware enough to know that her own madness went much deeper than she knew and deeper than her ability to converse led most people to believe.
"But you understand...you understand that."
and i did.
and so I realized that karma works sideways through time...not on a linear plane.
Sideways through time.
what you are going to do is what you do...it effects what happens to you before you have or haven't done it.
Anne made me think.

My little brain likes bacon.

N,
Lately I have been considering becoming a vegetarian...yes i know how good bacon is.
But I look at our world and I see a distinct lack of empathy among us humans. We categorize into hierarchies and justify behaviour, oppression and atrocities based on the position of one entity relative to another.  It is in our genes. Alpha male gets the lions share. It's only natural, like eating meat. 
But we are not natural. We have broken the bonds of the natural. We have become death.
We can do so much more than we should be able to.
We are still waging a war between our little brain, the old mind that lies at the center of our grey matter, snarling and baring its teeth at unknown threats in the shadows of the future.
We need to tame ourselves...and we can.
It needs to be fundamental.
So we need to learn empathy for that which is not us. Our xenophobia is our little brain acting up again and i have devised a cold turkey approach to thinking. How about equating others as important as oneself? sounds pretty crazy right? We are taught that we can buy what we need to let people know that we are worth more than they are. why? it's messed up.
why do we need to feel that way? it justifies so much horrible, horrible behaviour. in our past and present we devalue humans to the point where their slavery and death is irrelevant to us. . 
Could not eating meat because it reveals a lack of empathy for the other help us grow a new layer of grey matter around that wicked little brain?
i don't know. no reason to think that it would i suppose but if we are working so hard to not be natural let's go big...
T.S.Eliot big.
 damn straight.
expect more from yourself.


Preceding rant evoked by the following letter:  

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

 Source: The Freedmen's Book; Image: A group of escaped slaves in Virginia in 1862, courtesy of the Library of Congress. via the amazing Letters of Note.

Do you see what i am saying here?

     

busy, busy, busy.

N,
I have too much to do..
.instead of a lengthy and overly wordy rant you can watch this...
it is a beauty and wonder, yet fills no true function.
 like my blog.
i am feeling saucy today.

culektiv enteligenz

Dear N via M

have you heard of the acceleration of history?

it is the idea that history is accelerating, as we speak, to the point that we have no shared cultural framework with each other even within our own lifetime. the generation gap occurs within ourselves, faster and faster. we have no points of reference to tell us where we are or what we are supposed to be doing here. 
it could be considered scary...who are we supposed to learn our morals from? but as emma says:
" I am wondering if we need to get to a place where we cannot even remotely relate to that history and we leave it behind because we have created something so radically pure and different that this place no longer exists."
my passion is literature and the terminology that many of my ideas express themselves in are pretty crazy academic interpretative theory but only because literary theory and method are merely the effort to interpret narratives or stories...they are used on literature but the methods usually grow out of philosophers and thinkers looking at the world around them and wondering Why? why did these characters (people) end up believing in the story that is their lives...
and what is changing...and what is it changing into? ad infinitum
example: modernism was a faith in man's ability to figure out life's great narratives and in doing so provide humans with a framework of how they are supposed to live...it demanded more from people based on the narratives it discovered...then along came post modernism that questioned the idea of grand narratives...to put it lightly...it basically called out any concept of meaning as self negating...and the academic world fell into chaos again...
right now a theory called hyper modernism and even super modernism are being observed...the tendencies discussed aren't thought up by academic but manifest in society and the theories try to accommodate them.
accelerated history is one trend that is emerging. culture changes so fast that we don't share it with more than a few people at time...so again no great narrative to "know" 
BUT

this hypermodenist philosopher Pierre Levy predicts a new sort of collective consciousness that will evolve out of the disconnected mental environment. 

he theorizes that a new way for ideas to form will emerge.
he compares us to Neanderthals watching the Homo apes coordinate their efforts with verbal utterances and how the mechanics of what was going on must have been well beyond their comprehension... like magic...he supposes that this collective consciousnesses, when it manifests, will be as beyond our ability to comprehend as spoken word was to our Neanderthal cousins.
so i am hoping that a greater understanding is upon us. 
not based on cultural epochs of norms or ethics based on temporally finite conditions but upon the infinite.
answers to questions that emerge from man..not from men.
i reckon that they will have a lot to do with needs of all not wants of the individual and Love.
they will be love manifest as an infinite truth and acted upon rather than merely felt. 

what was i talking about?

probably wasn't important...

oh yeah and i don't believe in individual life. just fragments of the whole (read god) going on short excursions into the loneliness of physically and psychically disconnected existence in order the enrich the whole with what it experiences during the infinitessimally brief time apart from the rest of us...god.
we come from god and return to be part of god again. 
like the water cycle but with consciousness and bodies instead of raindrops and mist. or like matter if you will...borrowed for a time then returned atom by atom to rejoin the ebb and flow of being..

identity in flux as expressed by Urban Camo artist Lui Bolin

matter is sometimes free...sometimes part of something else...but always in flux and always matter...
       no matter what else it happens to be. 

puns are fun

Sick of the word "occupy"...what's next.

Bad news Nobody,
Sorry to say but i am getting pretty sick of the word "occupy".
I tend to use my own feeling as a kind of gauge for what other people, who lead similar lives, are feeling and
          sadly 
              this is how i am starting to feel.
though I held my breath with anticipation when the murmurs of revolution reached me,
 in this place, 
and i heard them and listened for once... and i didn't change the channel.
I sighed with relief when the murmur reached america and laughed when it broke through the media blackout it met there
i felt remorse when it turned in to the media circus that it needed to become.
it is hard to understand what is really going on.
it is easy to be cynical when something hard to understand and even harder to explain.
i felt this...so i assume others felt this too.
the commodification of this movement is the inevitability of its historical context.
it is the result of what is wrong with us
it is why i am becoming bored with the word "occupy".
it's getting old and i want something new...always.
i want something that will fill the hole in my sense of self
for a little while
until something else comes along...soon.
and i move on
some call it the acceleration of history
i call it my own participation in a culture of dissatisfaction. 
i call it my own internalization of an ideology of greed.
and i hate it about myself
so maybe others hate it about themselves too
i believe that you hate it about you.
sitting in front of the TV eating cheese doodles isn't a reward for anything
it only feels good because we don't know any better
but I do know better
you know better
we know better
like a splinter in our mind.
and waking up sucks
but
i expect more from myself
so you expect more from me too
and i expect more from you...so.
I am starting to expect us to do more
so maybe more people are also starting to expect us to do more
expect us?
expect us indeed.
i guess that the question in my mind...and in our mind...
is expect us to do what?
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world"
what does the occupy movement mean?
what does it mean to you?
that is what it means.