Lightning Storm Mind: Pre-Ancientist Meditations
| Lightning Storm Mind: Pre-Ancientist Meditations* |
| Heed the Word of Our Ancestor! The Way is obscure, but it is the Way. The Logos is the Way. This Way is obviously obscure and obscurely obvious. The Naturing of Nature is Lightning Storm Mind. Awakening Mind has a Lightning Storm Nature. Thus stroke Heraclitus. Our Obscure Ancestor taught that “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Translation, at the risk of falling into the icy waters of unsalutary clarity: “Step into the river!” “For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to forget how to step into the river. For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to step only into their ideas.” Will these poor creatures survive all this unlearning? Will the river survive all this forgetting? The world is in fragments. The world was born whole, but everywhere it is in fragments. The world was born whole and not whole, but everywhere it is in fragments. The “End of the American Way of Life” was announced long ago.1 But has Our Ancestor’s Word of the imminent End of Civilization spread far and wide? Has his Word of the imminent End of Reality Itself, the seemingly immovable bedrock of Civilization, spread near and deep? This bedrock is that on which the civilized sleep and which turns them to stone. Hasn’t the quest for surreality for the past 2500 years—or for perhaps the last 30,000 years—been the struggle to pass beyond Reality and thus to signal its immanent End? Surreality and surregionality have been on the side of the Real in the millennia-long war against Reality. The Real is defined technically as “that which bats last.”2 The battle is reaching its conclusion. Our day is a cloudy day for Civilization. A pre-Ancientist wind is blowing. Il fait Grec. It’s beginning to rain on the parade of horrors in which happiness, wisdom, and virtue have all marched to the slaughter. We reach the inescapable conclusion about a seemingly inescapable condition. Reality was really bad, while it lasted. Now we face the Real. And we face the real question : What was our real face, before Reality began ? We must practice la Pensée Sauvage. This exquisitely beautiful French phrase translates as practice of “the Wild Flower of the Mind.” Our Ancester was a Savage of the City in a first flowering of Wild Mind within the walls. Our Obscure Ancestor diagnosed, several thousand years before the onset of its acute stages, the late civilizational disease : Attention Deficit Hyperpassivity Disorder. He also prescribed the cure: Post-Traumatic Surrealist Dialectic. Surreality is Überwirklichkeit or, to capture (if only in part) the multiplicity, the prepositional logic, of the motion in place of its being becoming, Anaufhinterinnebenüberuntervorzwichenwirlichkeit. According to legend, our Pre-Ancientist Ancestor renounced the throne. He rejected the arché of archaic archism. According to legend, he chose “playing knucklebones” over making laws. Our Ancestor invented logodecentralism as a cure for Civilization’s cult of the reified, mummified pseudo-logos, the ossified, non-dialectical logos of nogo-centrism, super no va ismo, in the end, the non-logos of the logo, the eternal return of the same, the ever-transforming same of domination. Or it invented him. According to legend, Our Ancestor came to “hate his kind,” and wandered the mountains “like a wild beast” munching on herbs and grasses. In non-reality, he was traumatized by the writing on the city walls, foreseeing the centuries of brutal Reality to come. As is so often the case, the legend reveals the truth in its opposition. Our Ancestor hated his kind only out of love for his kind, the kind kind who revere the Common, or are capable of such reverence. Out of deep love he warned them of their growing monstrosity. For Our Ancestor, the Neighbor Monster was rearing its ugly head but was not ex rerum natura. Our Ancestor was certainly a “wild beast,” begotten of Eris to terrorize the lethargic, domesticated beasts that had lost their ferocity of thought and action. Our Ancestor wandered the metaphorical mountains, the heights of spirit, and practiced the Wild wherever he roamed. Above all, and below all, in the city. He knew that nowhere are we closer to nature than at its wild center, if we can find it. Even the heart of the city, the stones cry out, and raise themselves up! Sous les pavés, la rage! Our Obscure Ancestor was the first to erect that fateful ontological road sign on the highway of history, “l’Ecart Absolu.” Warning to travelers in search of the Way! Dangerous intersection! Detour from Disordered Civilization via Chaotic Harmony.” Our Ancestor exhorted us to “distinguish each thing according to its nature” Back to the Things Themselves! He was an Unfounding Father of Object Disoriented Ontology. The true non-nature of the Thing is absurd, irrational, or even inexistent, from the standpoint of Reality. And from the standpoint of the Real, it is not what you expected, off course. Our Ancestor lamented the fact that multitudes are “as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.” He taught that it is necessary to pay special attention to what we do while asleep. If our sleep practice is catastrophic, our waking practice will be a disaster(in the merely negative senses of these ambivalent terms). Above all, urges Our Ancestor, “we should allow ourselves be guided by what is Common to all.” “Allow ourselves,’’ he says, for it is what happens when we surrender our resistances, and let go of the reactive, desiccated, mineralized self-atom. The thing-like self opens into the multitude of Things. Thus, the most singular and the most particular are also in their most profound depths and their most vast expanses the most Common. Our Ancestor bemoans the fact that although “the Logos is common to all,” most “live as if each of them had a private intelligence.” But “private intelligence” is neither private nor intelligent. It is a private stupidity that turns out to possess only the illusion of privacy. It is instructive that the word “idiot” comes from the Greek idiōtēs, meaning “a private person.” Privatization is idiotization. No one owns the truth. It is community property, non-propertarian property. Propertization it the most effective means of killing anything or anybody, including the living truth. Proudhon, one of the most idiotic of all anti-idiots, infamously proclaimed that “Property is Theft,” but our Obscure Ancestor revealed long before that the much more shocking truth that “Property is Death.” Property, as Our Ancestor foresaw, has meant the slow death of the Common, and of the Community. As property has expanded, so has the ego, at the expense of the Common. Our Common wealth has been replaced by the Ego and its property. Our Common Dreams have been replaced by the Ego’s petty fantasies. The Ego and its Onanism. “Lovers of Wisdom,” advises our Ancestor, must “acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.” Dear Self: “May I have the pleasure of introducing you to some fascinating particulars?” But which Self to introduce? Oh, the dilemmas of social nicessities! As our Ancestor reports, “I have searched myself.” There is some work of searching, of preduction, that must be accomplished before we can undertake any introduction. We must be sure that we are not leading ourselves on. First, we must hunt down a self, a “suspect,” and then, when we finally interpellate some poor hapless “subject” of the investigation, we must search it and question it. Who? What? Where? When? Why? Finally, after working over our suspect without mercy, we find that the big news in this ontological police report is that there is no news. No news about the subject. Just some particulars. We may think that we have ensnared the self when we find that the self is “myself.” But then we have to begin the search for the “my” that has that self in its possession. We are tempted to conclude, as others have before our so-called selves, that the My is neither Mr nor Ms but Mystery. The “self” which is a self that is no self is neither a monad nor a nomad, but rather a communad and a meonad, a munad. The self that is ego is a desperately mad monad and an obsessively mad nomad, an I-go. It is driven by its atomic power to seek that which it already has (by not having) and cannot possibly find (by seeking). Our Ancestor noted that “Seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little.” As was later proclaimed by his descendent, the Mysterious Disappearing Anarchist, “gold's a devilish sort of a thing. When you have it your soul is no longer the same as it was before.”3 Our Ancestor saw clearly that, if allowed to, these seekers would keep seeking, digging, refining, and unfinding until there was no Earth left. And no Soul. In this spirit Our Ancestor proclaimed, “May you have plenty of wealth, you men of Ephesus, in order that you may be punished for your evil ways.” The greatest wealth, whether golden gold or black gold (brutish petroleum), always brings the greatest calamity to heart and hearth, home and homeland. Our Ancestor said, “Don’t follow the money. Follow the Common.” Don’t lose the Way. Go with the Logos. According to our Ancestor, Wisdom means “giving heed to the nature of things.” It means paying attention to the naturing nature of things, to their becoming and unbecoming themselves, to their animate and reanimating being. Our Ancestor exhorts us: “Don’t act or speak as if you were asleep!” Practice mindfulness. Practice worldfulness. Smash Reality! Smash the Stasis! Our Ancestor revealed the perils of mere sleep, whether nocturnal or diurnal. That is, he urges us always to dream. The Common reveals itself above all in dreams. Our Ancestor implores us to learn the language of the Oneiric Commons. Our Ancestor warned that “the waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.” But we must realize that this private world is not private, this “own” world is not one’s own, except in the privative sense of lacking the Common. “Ownness” is nothingness. Our Ancestor predicted the cyber-consumptionist culture of spectacular mass somnambulance twenty-five hundred years in advance. Our Ancestor taught (perhaps at times obscurely) that “Nature loves to hide.” Therefore, awakened experiencing is the practice of ontoanarchaelogy (the anarchaelogy of ὄν), and especially, meontoanarchology (the anarchaelogy of μή ὄν), the explorations of the historicity and regionality of being and “non”-being, being-empty being, interbeing. “Non”-being is the fullest kind of being, being that overflows all boundaries. The practice of the “ology” of that. In short, awakened being, being awakened, is surregional exploration! We become Hidden Nature uncovering Hidden Nature, both having been buried under layers of brute Reality. Yet, brute reality prevails. As Our Ancestor predicted, in Late Civilizationism, we murder to dissect. Murderous clarity reigns over the obscurity of life, the vagueness of the Way. Dissectarianism emerged with the religious fundamentalism and obsessive literalistic reductionism of sixteenth-century protomodernity. Dissectarianism triumphed with the archic and agoric fundamentalism of political and economistic pararationality, raison d’état and raison d’achat. Dissectarianism perfected itself ideologically in dissectarian analytical technological pararationality, and its Evil Twin, dissectarian analytical philosophical pararationality. We are left with the spiritual desolation of dystopian dissectarian paranormality on Evil-Twin Anti-Earth. Still, the hidden remains hidden, and continues, with imperious subtlety, to unhide itself. Our Ancestor warned that “unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it.” Or worse, that we will find it without finding it. We all have a Ghost Problem. So recognize it, by practicing recognizing it. The truth is always unexpected, hidden under a mountain of expectedness. The struggle for truth is the struggle between everydayness and everymomentness. So follow the rule against rules: Always expect the unexpected and always unexpect the expected. Our Ancestor revealed that Reality trashes unexpected traumatic truths and leaves us with everyday ordinary expected banalities. Dialectic teaches that Truth emerges from Trauma. Surrealism teaches that Truth emerges from Traum. One way or the other, it is a leap into the abyss, the abyss of the world, and the abyss of consciousness, a return to the source, a disorienting encounter with the Shaktian Shock of Traumamatic creative energy, a return to Pre-Ancienticity, the Shaktian Age, to B.C.E., Before the Currentless and Commonless Era. Our Ancestor observed that “everything flows and nothing abides. Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” You can’t step into the same river twice, and the river can’t flow by the same you twice. The fantasy of controlling one river once produces the reality of destroying many rivers repeatedly. Our Ancestor taught that “all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.” Throw yourself into the maelstrom. Feel free to be compelled. Think contradiction! No, don’t! Think contradiction! The late civilizational They is increasingly inclined to say “The thing is, is that…” One even hears that “The thing is, is, is that. . . .” But the They is wrong! “The thing is, is that, no, “The Thing isn’t!” To begin with. And to end with. And to begin with again. The They claims repeatedly that “it is what it is.” But the They is wrong! No, it is not what it is! Smash Isism! Smash Isismic Fundamentalism! By the canons of strict Heraclitean dialectical logic, and Object Disoriented Ontology, The Thing always is what it is not and is not what it is. Think contradiction! Thing contradiction! Think contra-Ding-tion! Be unrealistic, the Impossible demands you! The Impossible Real demands you! Our Ancestor taught that the universe is “the same for all.” In its very difference, in its absolute difference, it is the same for all and common to all. Vivez la différence! Or, as surregionalists say, “la différonce.” May we have profound reverence for the uniqueness of each and every bramble that rambles through the Field! Vive l’Auto-géronce! Ride the Lightening Boat! Our Ancestor taught the Vajrayana, literally,“the Lightning Boat.” “The lightning,” he said, “pilots all things.” La Nef des Foudres. Our Ancestor noted that “every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.” This signifies that even the most domesticated beast in its lethargic state can be awakened by a sublime shock and spurred into motion. But such a beast is aroused by the whip or the stick of state only enough to be sent to pasture and then led to the slaughter. It is only the wild beast that roams freely and exposes itself willingly to the violent shock of unleashed lightning. Out Ancestor saw “the best and wisest soul” as “a dry beam of light.” With an identical inspiration, bluesman (cafardian) Blind Willie Johnson wandered from land to land asking, “What is the soul of a man?” Like Our Ancestor, this ascending descendant discovered that it was “nothing but a burning light.” The Soul, the immanent, indwelling Logos, is a nothingness that is nevertheless Really Something! A burning, blinding, eye-opening light! Our Ancestor observed of fools that “when present they are absent.” Their absent presence proliferates in the Empire of Absence, the Globulized Empire of Neo-Libriumism. Their ranks populate the vast Armies of the Undead, and supply the Rulers of Reality, the Floundering Fathers of the United States of Absentia. Whereas Reality is the absence of the present, Surreality, on the other (empty) hand, is Real Presence, including the Real Presence of the Absent. It is true that the truth of the truth is always deferred, always absent, but at the same time what is most crucial is that one defer to the truth of the truth that is present in its deferral. With acute insight, Our Ancestor judged bigotry to be “the sacred disease.” Mere reasonableness withers beside deep conviction. Reflective equilibrium falters in the face of fanaticism. Only the sacred can successfully combat the pseudo- sacred. What mystification can withstand the mysterium tremendum? Our Ancestor offered the indispensable house-cleaning advice that “corpses are more fit to be thrown out than dung.” Reality is a process of hoarding the dead. It is the endless accumulation of corpses. Throw out the corpses, but don’t waste the dung! says Our Ancestor. The Way up and the Way down are paved with dung. What is true of the Way of things is true of the Way of thoughts. There are dead ideas and dung ideas, sterile ones and fertile ones. If ideas are rotting in the mind, throw them out. If they are dead and buried, throw them out once more. Our Ancestor teaches the absurdity of the illusion of “the rational individual,” for, as he points out, “there is intelligence only in what encompasses.” Indeed, he shows that there is no “individual” at all, only dividuals, that is, divisions—that are provisional, at most—of the indivisible. Rationalism is a fraud. Don’t ration mind. Yet, there is a larger Surrationalism. It comes whenever one is open to the en-compassing, when one is open to all. The en means both “around” and “in.” The encompassing Logos is identical with the Logos “within” the dividual, and wild imagination is the link between the two. That’s why our deepest and widest dreams are dreams of the Wild Logos that leads beyond beyond dividuality. They are Dreams of the Earth and Dreams of the Universe, of the encompassing Cosmos/Chaos. Our Ancestor warned that “there await men after death such things as they neither expect nor have any conception of.” His advice was not for the dead or deadened, but only for those who are capable of awakening from death.. After awakening comes the unexpected, the inconceivable. After the Death of Reality comes life. Our Ancestor held out the hope that some will “arise into wakefulness and become guardians of the living and the dead.” Our Ancestor’s guardian class is composed of the Night Watchman Flame Keepers, the class that is no class and that rules without ruling. These guardians guard through their awakened mind and all-embracing spirit, showing boundless compassion, even for the dead, watching over them in the Dead of Night. Our Ancestor taught that “greater dooms win greater destinies.” Destiny demands its doomage: the demanding path through disaster, dark nights of the soul, dhy¬ānic disease. Pay the price. Your Doom is your Ticket. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, unveiled by Our Ancestor two and a half millennia ago: “They pray to images, much as if they were to talk to houses; for they do not know what gods and heroes are.” Which is to say that the struggle over fetishism is a struggle, to the death, or to the life, between a degraded imaginary and an awakened one. Our Ancestor noted that “when defiled,” madmen “purify themselves with blood, as though one who had stepped into filth were to wash himself with filth.” The most concise précis ever given of the functioning of the primordial Law of the Father and the eternal Déraison d’Etat. Our Ancestor advises that “extinguishing hubris is needed more than extinguishing a fire.” That is, we must refrain from extinguishing the fire. Some life forms can only germinate through fire. In the end, hubris immolates forests while extinguishing fire. In the Spirit of the Dreaming Butterfly, Our Ancestor once observed that “sea water is at once very pure and very foul: it is drinkable and healthful for fishes, but undrinkable and deadly for men.” His message was that Reality demands no less than that we swallow the sea and die. He was giving us an antidote, a Black Drink that will help us vomit up Reality and live. Our Ancestor, the Great Tour-Guide, revealed that “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” Opposites are not opposites. That is, of course, why we call them opposites. He advises us to tear up the map and read the territory. It tells us that if we continue on our present path it is likely that we will end up where we are headed. We are about to see the downside of the downside. The situation shows tragic promise. Our Ancestor said that “we do and do not step into the same rivers.” We and not we. We do and not do. We do without doing. Our Ancestor was among the first to see that the Spirit is a Bone. And not a Bone. “The bones connected by joints are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole.” He has a bone to pick with oneness and a bone to pick with manyness. Bone up on this: “To be in agreement is to differ; the concordant is the discordant. From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness comes all the many particulars.” A single step begins with a journey of a thousand miles. One only follows the path when one is prepared to go nowhere. Our Ancestor (or his Logos) judged “the hidden harmony” or “attunement” to be “better than the obvious.” The best harmony is most obviously hidden. The most obvious harmony conforms to an imposed order that is hidden in the least obvious ways and is the most disastrous form of disorder. This is contrived harmony, the harmony of domination, the stasis of chaos. Such a bogus reconciliation and an ersatz harmony is sometimes called “law and order,” sometimes called “winning hearts and minds.” It must be replaced by a real reconciliation and real harmony that blocks the way to reconciliation and harmony. “Hidden harmony” is only an ironic term for the most obvious and chaotic nature of things when things are attended to. Our Ancestor advised that “listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.” And, as he added, without needing to say the word, “None.” Our Ancestor taught that “Wisdom is one and unique.” It is Zeus and Anti-Zeus. But Zeus non-Zeus is also “day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.” This is the point of contention between the one-sided many of Reality and the many-sided one of the Real, which constantly blind-sides the Cyclopean Monster Reality. In the long run, the Real will win in the duel against dualism. Raise your eyes. Our Oneiric Ancestor revealed that “even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.” If they are awakened dreamers. Our Ancestor discovered the Secret of the Dream Work, work that begins long before we realize that we are engaged in it, and that we can continue, with various degrees of awareness, long after the dream itself has seemingly and dreamingly ended. And what if we are not awakened dreamers? Even the merest of sleepers are diligent workers and collaborators, if only with Reality and the Regime. Our Ancestor warned that some “know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.” We must, he taught, maintain awareness in sleep. We must learn the Art of Awakened Sleeping. An essential anti-essentializing part of the Noble Common Upward Downward Path is Right Dreamfulness. Our Ancestor reveals that the essence of wisdom is just “one thing.” How simple, we might think. But it turns out that this one thing is simple only in its momentous complexity. It is “to know the intelligence by which all things are steered through all things.” The “one thing” leads to the chaotic harmony through which “all things” are related to “all things,” the infinitely expansive, infinitely mirroring Jewel Net of Indra. Note that things “are steered” through things. There is an interpenetration and identity of all that is seemingly opposed. Externality is also internality (in the cosmic economy as in the human economy and the earth economy). Our everyday experience of Reality belies and betrays these truths (reveals them only secretly in its contradictions), but they are exactly as we know them to be in our dreams. Dream logic is the logic of things. Our Ancestor observes of “It” that “it scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires.” That’s what It does. The It that gives. Reality, on the other hand, seeks to gather infinitely and to advance infinitely. Reality thus encounters infinite disaster. Our Ancestor noted that “it is a weariness to labor for the same masters and be ruled by them.” Our Ancestor found domination to be a drag. Therefore, the only good rule is a non-rule—certainly not “a dead rule,” which is the kind we find all around us. The Undead rule through dead rules. The way of non-rule is to be ruled through the non-rule of the Way, the Logos. Our Ancestor points out that “dogs bark at every one they do not know.” Domestication and confinement to the cage of reality provoke fear of the stranger. But a dog does not ordinarily begin by barking at every dog it doesn’t know. Our Ancestor called them dogs because they are not dogs. Does a dog have a barker nature? Moo! Our Ancestor, in his assault on Reality, laid the foundationless foundations of surreality. Or perhaps he deliberately mislaid them. The “sur” in surrealism implies “getting beyond,” or “evading” the clutches of Realism. It should be read as meaning both “above” and “below,” in addition to every other direction of escape from the Oppressive Pernicious Prison of Reality. Our Ancestor was a traumaticist. “As beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” has been translated as the experience of “the effects of a systematic bewildering.” This is also Our Ancestor also taught the beautiful and brutal necessity of revelatory trauma and ecstatic brain transplantation. Our Ancestor would be appalled by today’s professors—perhaps they should be called “contrafessors”—of philosophy who devote much of their contrafessional lives engaged in the effort to convince the youth of Absentia that the most crucial of philosophical endeavors is to determine whether it can be demonstrated that it can be proven whether an “external world” exists. The very endeavor, the mystifying treatment of the issue of whether one can live in complete alienation from the real as an abstract, detached thought-experiment, proves that the world does not truly exist—for them. Thus far, our contrafessors have succeeded only in convincing the most perceptive of these youth that the brains of many philosophers dwell in vats, while the brains of most other humans do not. On this topic, the grotesque Nain de Jardin of modern philosophy was far ahead of the rest of the pack when he asserted the priority of the rich and traumatic world of life over the barren and anodyne world of abstraction. We discover in an authoritative Encyclopedia of Philosophy that Our Ancestor “is generally considered to have favored aristocratic government as against democracy.” Our Ancestor himself suggests that what is “generally considered” is most probably wrong, while what is specifically experienced is much more likely to be right. His view of democracy cannot be determined by counting noses, even aristocratic or academic ones. The same Encyclopedist asserts that Our Ancestor “stresses that the message is not his own invention, but a timeless truth available to any who attend to the way the world itself is.” “To any!” How more “democratic” could one possibly be? Add to this Our Ancestor’s exhortation to the Ephesians to die and leave the city to children—children in general—and it is clear that he does not advocate the rule of any elite, but rather the healthy non-rule of just any old body, or, more likely, young body, whose mind has not been corrupted and destroyed by illusions and abstractions, whose days are not numbered. Perhaps Our Ancestor went too far in his radical democratism. But if so, it was because he knew that you and I, like the Ephesians, would not be able to go far enough. Even if we are not willing to kill ourselves entirely perhaps we can at least go part of the way down the road, and become, though it might be rather unbecoming, more like those children. Our Encyclopedist explains that Our Ancestor “cannot be both a believer in radical flux” and also “an advocate of monism,” for “either he must believe in a merely illusory or at most a limited kind of change, or he must be a pluralist.” Of course, he cannot be, but in actuality, he is. Our Ancestor shuns the circularity of such a path to nowhere. What, indubitably, he cannot do, dubitably, he does. Our Ancestor rejects all such Encyclopean single vision. |