Get Radicalized

Me from a few years ago would be shocked to see these words coming from me, but I've learned something.

If you're not getting radicalized, you're missing the point. If you're not getting radicalized, you don't understand the apocalyptic precariousness of our situation. If you're not getting radicalized, then you're the lukewarm moderate MLK JR. condemned as part of the problem.

Whichever direction you decide is your own choice, but make a decision! The fence you're straddling is burning away beneath you!

Elysian Night

I love the evening, the long night. It's part of why my sleep schedule is awful, but it's my favorite time, precisely because it affords me a peace I never find in the day. It's a magical realm where the moment seems to stretch on for hours, and where the only shadow darker than the night is the one cast by the threat of the coming dawn. For a few hours, no one makes demands of me. There is no anxiety. There is no fear.

I'm not the first to make such remarks. For most people, night is a time when the obligations of the day have been met, and there is nothing left but liesure. The word "liesure" conjures up images of sloth and laziness, but that's not what it really means. Liesure is time that is free, time that may be spent in freedom. Liesure is when you are not at the behest of anyone but your friends and loved ones. Liesure means giving out of compassion and love, not out of obligation or coercion.

What does it say about our world that liesure is demonized and stress-ridden toil is the norm? What does it say about our world that most of our time is not spent in freedom? We talk a great deal about democracy, but democracy does not exist in the workplace. You could even make the argument that we have no democracy at all.

The night is (or at least, traditionally was) the refuge of the working class. In the silence of the night, the gears of capitalism halt. But come the dawn, the roads are clogged by people compelled to suffer, and the buzz of human activity drowns out the beauty of the world. The dirty brown horizon forms, marring the blue behind it. The earth dies just a little more; each day is a prolonged, painful gasp.

But in the night, I can entertain the comforting illusion that the world is still, that the demons of capital are slumbering, that there is peace and stillness at last. Can you imagine a world where the laws of night hold sway forever? Like Elysium, there would be time for contemplation, for stillness, time for the voices of silence to speak to us. There would be time to devote yourself to work that you care about, rather than work you are alienated from. Can you imagine such a world, where all of one's time is spent in liesure, whether at work or at home?

Our life on this beautiful celestial body was always meant to be an endless night, occasionally punctuated by the rising and setting of the sun.

The goal of socialism ought to be the realization of this endless Elysian night.

This is why I am an anarcho-communist, because I have hope that we can live in a world where each and every moment is free.

I love my mom, and it matters

I was thinking, half awake, half dreaming, how much I love my mother. The thinking became feeling, intense and radiantly glowing in the darkness of my room. I love my mother with all my heart. She is the most selfless person I know.

A darkly inevitable thought crept in, whispering "She's going to die, you know. Death must be paid its due." It's true. One day, she will die, and so will I. The sun itself will die, for that matter, and each of us will have to bear the pain of loss as the grave reaches out to embrace us and all those we love. Our light must go out, the candle burns for only so long. Death, and the potential loss of meaning, is a fact of existence.

Is the intense love I feel for my mother an equally valid fact? Or is it the warmth of an ember soon to fade long before morning comes? One day, death will take me as well as my mother, and keep taking until no one remembers that either of us ever lived. Whither then my love? Has it dispersed, evaporated into the emptiness of an indifferent universe?

No.

The fact that I love my mother MATTERS. It matters as much as the law of gravity, as much as the drifting of galaxies, as much as the promise of sunrise. It is an energy as of yet immeasurable and enigmatic to science, generated in our hearts and woven into the unseen fabric of the continually unfolding universe. Our love is the color in the tapestry. Love is just as important, just as inevitable, every bit as much a fact.

Love too must be paid its due.

I hold this in my heart as the melatonin takes effect and I drift away. I love you, mom.

Sorry to Bother You

Disclaimer: I was quite high when I first saw this movie.

I have a new favorite movie. The Fountain, my previous choice, is still my favorite cinematic experience and is personally significant to me, Sorry to Bother You is the most immaculately crafted and intentionally perfect movie I've ever seen. Maybe...the two of them can both be my favorite movie.

This movie is a masterpiece in filmmaking. No shot is wasted, every color utilized, all the components perfectly arrange with the deliberate intention of inviting you, the viewer, into an intriguing conversation that will begin with very simple images and symbols. You will notice from the very first shot that Sorry to Bother You is presenting you each element in the shot quite deliberately and intentionally in order to draw your attention down to the level of symbolic interpretation. This is NOT a movie to interpret literally.

It's not just a masterfully crafted movie, either; this is a formula carefully followed, where each and every line is less a line than it is a carefully considered point in a long master argument in whose shadow you are slowing disappearing. It's teaching you to see symbols and theory made flesh on screen. Once you see that every shot is a yin yang or a contrast of sorts, you'll see for yourself that each and every frame is drenched in subliminal meaning of one kind or another. Before long, you'll start to recognize that Sorry to Bother You is not a movie or a story so much as it is a carefully made argument condemning the evils of capitalism and organized religion's complicity in it.

I'm dead serious. This isn't just a movie, this is art. It's the perfect merger of film and text as mediums for creativity and meaning. This is one for the ages. You'll see Ying Yangs and symbols everywhere Uzumaki style for a while after...

P.S. The Yin-yang thing was not actually in the movie. Just what my stoned brain thought it saw. And The Fountain is still my favorite movie.

Thoughts after watching Automata.

Just watched Automata on Netflix, starring Antonio Banderas. It's good stuff. It made me think.

Survival is irrelevant.

Life always finds a way.

There will never come a time when there is no life in this universe.

But the form that life takes will change.

As the body gives way to spirit, the spirit gives way to the body.

The time of homo sapiens may well be drawing to a close, but we are not the end of the great experiment.

I have faith that all these moments won't be lost in time, but will return to the heart of the one who loves them best.

And in her heart, they will not merely survive, but live.

Teach a man to fish

Teach a man that the accumulation of capital is the only unalloyed good, and he'll objectify everything and everyone.

And being the only unalloyed good, the accumulation of capital will blind him to the deeper laws of survival; he won't acknowledge that when you overfish, the business of fishing will become untenable.

Capitalism is ecologically dysfunctional. Capitalism is a pathological expression of insanity. That's exactly what Radical Nomos is - it is a preference to live in delusion over and against living in reality.

Physis, Nomos, and the Demagogue

It occurs to me that demagogues like Trump, who arise out of failed or ailing democracies, invoke the message of a return to Physis, to reality. They say "The state of our society is a mess, follow me and I can return us to the state we all long for, to the way things ought to be." They call out Radical Nomos for its faults. They appeal to those weary from the spell of Radical Nomos, those who know that this is not how things are supposed to be. These poor souls know that there is a higher law that should be in place to make the madness of the anthropocentric world thin and disappear, but they do not know what to name it. They have lived their whole lives in Radical Nomos and have no idea what Nomos in its proper employment looks like.

Along comes the demagogue to prey upon this feeling, this longing for something more. They promise to break the spell of Radical Nomos, but the demagogues themselves are under that spell themselves and hollowed by greed and lust for power. And so their promise turns sour and leads only deeper into the madness of Radical Nomos. People like Trump are not capable of leading us into a Nomos tertiary to Physis, into sanity.