Akhado

Akhado is a small town constructed around a maze of canals and waterways - a small wonderland for small personal fishing boats. Each house has its own tiny pier and one or two boats attached to it. All the houses face towards the street so the water becomes an extension of all the individual backyards. There's very little access to water for anyone that is not a local citizen of Akhado. It is possible to drive through the entire place without ever getting a look at the water, without noticing the maze.

Upon our initial arrival some of us compared it to some old cities where canals flow around the streets like a liquid labyrinth. But there is a basic difference in the approach.
In the old cities there is the water, then a walkway or sidewalk and then houses - the water maintains a public quality by being accessible to anyone that walks by it. Here the water is hidden by the houses, and the walls around them - the liquid labyrinth is private and the houses themselves form an insurmountable barrier.
We saw it as a clear example of architectural ideology - here in Akhado there is a mentality of being closed off, of an inner group against everyone else, of protecting the private space against the encroachment of the Other - "Circle the Wagons! The barbarians are all around us.” The potential visitor is assumed to be an enemy until proven otherwise (and it is unclear what form such a proof would take.)

Several of us have a strong intuition that the hidden water is also a physical manifestation of secretly interconnected lives -
secret sexual fantasies, secret deviations, secret affairs, secret rituals - all hidden from outsiders and from the other locals. Everyone knows that everyone else has something to hide, but they don't know what it is. Or at least they will maintain the appearance of ignorance for the sake of courtesy and basic manners.

***

Photograph 1:
We see a tall palm tree overlooking a small boat covered in black plastic. The calm blue water of Akhado is in the background.

***

After many careful interviews, we have learned that the Citizens of Akhado hold a sense of absolute certainty about their own set of knowledge and beliefs. Even if their knowledge changes, even if their beliefs change, the sense of certainty remains,
traveling atop their views like an armored rider on a horse.

The locals only want to educate others but none of them want to be educated themselves. They see any sign of ignorance as a sign of weakness, so they will cling to absolute knowledge even in the face of factual contradictions. New ideas are seen with horror and revulsion, and they are rejected outright.

We have learned it is very difficult for the locals to release this sense of absolute certainty, even for a moment. If at a certain point they open up to the possibility that you or someone else may know something that they don't, they may briefly listen and learn. But the sense of certainty and knowledge will quickly return after that rare moment of openness
and it will hold within it a sense of vengeance: “you must pay for having taught me something”, “there must be something wrong with you or with your beliefs.” They will find (or imagine that they find) what is wrong with you and present it forcefully soon after in order to return to a space of proper justice, careful balance.("Nobody deserves to know more than I do.") As long as the imbalance remains, they will be uncomfortable and anxious as at that moment their inner experience clashes with their sense of justice. This imbalance must be corrected as quickly as possible.

***

Photograph 2:
We see a two-story home, surrounded by palm trees that loom over its tallest point. The windows are dark and quiet. The garden that faces the water is carefully manicured.

***

The Citizens of Akhado believe that once they have determined something rationally or linguistically, the world that surrounds them is obligated to change with them. The world must change in accordance with their own determinations, regardless of any other thoughts or opinions. It is a kind of debt that the rest of the world owes them - even if the world is not aware of it.They are in constant shock that the world doesn't automatically bend to each and every one of their inner determinations.
"Why are we still here? Why is this still happening?"

***

Photograph 3:
We see an old wrinkled brown tree. One of its branches bends towards the ground. A blue and yellow rope is tied around the bent branch, holding up a narrow swing, swaying in the breeze.

***

Excerpts from various interviews:

Citizen:
"What is wrong with you? We are not responsible. For this or for anything else. To hold such a view is plain sickness, mental degradation."

Citizen:
"It seems that you don't yet understand who we are and how we function. Let me explain. Our nature as Akhado citizens is conceptualized as a constellation of processes and practices
rather than as a discrete entity. Our nature is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels.These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to us. The study of our true nature begins with the premise that our privilege exists in both traditional and modern forms, and rather than work to prove its existence, it works to reveal it. Some of us are aware of it. Most of us are not."

***

From the outside, Akhado can be described as a foreign enclave of suburbia embedded within an agricultural landscape that stands in sharp contrast to it. Akhado protects itself against this foreign territory that surrounds it on all sides. Its sense of identity has grown around this need for protection. Akhado has formed a virtual and very real circle against the Other that surrounds them and threatens to swallow them. It is a kind of sustained cultural paranoia.

***

Photograph 4:
We see the back of a one-story house. Two very small piers face the water, two small row boats are tied to wooden poles.

***

Photograph 5:
We see a long stretch of asphalt, ending on a partly open view of Akhado's blue water. A trio of tall palm trees overlooks the single-story houses along the asphalt's edge.

***

We have learned that the Citizens of Akhado will only be loyal to the extent that this loyalty is useful to them. When someone stops being useful or when a better option arises, the Citizens will find plenty of reasons to abandon their former allies, reasons they have secretly stored over time in case such a situation arises. Listing all these reasons, it will then be easy to maintain a self image of total loyalty and honesty even at the very moment of their betrayal.
"I am not being disloyal, I am simply following a logical path given your actions, your mistakes, your imperfections."

***

Photograph 6:
We see the open blue water at the heart of the watery labyrinth that is Akhado. A sense of sleepiness, loneliness, forgetfulness. Most of the homes are empty, most of the small piers have fallen into disuse.

***

We have learned that they are arrogant at such a deep level that their arrogance has become invisible to them. To them, it is no longer arrogance but simply a clear vision of the way things are. It happens to be that they hold a higher place in the world, it is inherent to their being and it can't be changed. Their superficial claims of theoretical equality would seem to be contradicted by this deep perception but in this particular case the inequality is forgiven because it comes with a sense of benevolence:
"I may be superior but I will use my superiority in the service of others so there is nothing evil about it. I must deal with the burden of knowing more, of having more wisdom."

***

Photograph 7:
We see a single-story colonial style home. A bright silver pickup truck sits on the driveway.

***

The Citizens of Akhado don't realize what it means for them to be Citizens of Akhado. Whatever they believe is simply natural and good and beyond question. Whoever believes or sees things differently must be re-educated. One way or another they must be brought to see the light.

***

Photograph 8:
We see a red and white sign which displays a single clear message: "No trespassing. This area is under 24 hour live/recorded video surveillance. Violators will be prosecuted."

***

Excerpts from various interviews:

Citizen:
"Given that the study of our nature assumes what it seeks to reveal, it falls prey to circular reasoning, though we should acknowledge the modern philosophical ideas (however much they may misconstrue the nature of language, or corrode into crude historicism) which undergird its premise. But there is another fallacy at work. Our nature is reified in society. We embody the ideology of our nature and thus we will remove books from libraries because they embody our nature and take up physical space on the bookshelves. The reification proposition fails logically, and conflates the impact of our legacy with the nature of Akhado itself."

Citizen:
"We need to tighten up our gates. Let Akhado keep our superior culture and let them keep theirs, simple as that. We have worked hard to achieve what we have achieved. We will fight hard to keep it."

Citizen:
"It's just no good. No matter how much we give them, they still ask for more. They won't ever be satisfied because what they really want is to drag all of us and our entire Akhado culture to the bottom. The few real men among us won't let this happen. A war is coming and the men of Akhado historically know how to win wars. It's in our blood."

***

Photograph 9:
We see a small pier with two boats and a small sun deck. Toys are scattered over the wooden surface as it sways gently on the surface of the water.

***

Excerpts from various interviews:

Citizen:
"Are you trying to claim all cultures are equal? Our culture is clearly superior. It takes only the slightest bit of observation to ascertain that."

Citizen:
"I would most certainly judge some cultures better or worse than others and thus think it is moral to defend the values of Akhado. I do find it a superior culture to most others. I have no desire to live in the world beyond Akhado. This is my home. I will die here."

***

After several months of study, it has dawned on us that the ideology of the Citizens is the ideology of an invader - an invader army or an invader race - "we are making this our home now - but we know that the others who used to live here don't like us - so we must forever be on guard against their attack."
It is the ideology of someone who never feels quite at home- someone who always feels a sense that something is about to go wrong- because consciously or unconsciously the ugly truth cannot be erased.
"This place is actually not mine…"
"We stole this place and now occupy it."
They must constantly emphasize the rightfulness of their ownership- "this is MY LAND" - "Akhado is for us!" -as an internal bulwark against endless waves of paranoia and regret.

***

Excerpt from an interview:

Citizen:
"This is how this all happened. I will explain it to you in detail. The turning point was forty years ago. It was the end of the great war against the barbarians. The movement that started against the war just kept on going in the form of them hating us. They called us baby killers and spat on us. We were being defeated by our own tribe and they told us we were evil, so we were forced to act it out. This is a logical outgrowth of our destruction. If they cannot see our destruction and demoralization then they are blind. This is the secret to what is happening to our Akhado today. Look at that date, forty years ago, on the chart. See with your own eyes and understand who did this. It was them. They did it. Open your eyes and realize that we are lost and there is no one helping us. Just anger from these outsiders. And it will get far worse than this. Civil war? Yes, very likely. Stop destroying us Citizens of Akhado. Stop destroying our beautiful Akhado. It is really simple. We are under attack. But who is reacting to this? Who is ready to stand up and defend our land? Wake up."

***

Through our study of the Citizens, we feel the concept of "ideology" becoming more Real to us - it is becoming less intellectual or theoretical and more visceral. We still need to study more- now with a clear sense that there is something there to learn and explore, something that is very close to us but somehow has formerly escaped our grasp. It's becoming clear that we will soon be able to apply this knowledge to the world directly around us.

***

Photograph 10:
We see five tall palm trees overshadowing a large pier and sun deck. A ceremonial gateway is painted white and highlights a single family name written in golden letters.

***

The Citizens believe that they know not only what is good for them but also what is good for everyone else. If anyone in the world disagrees with their clear vision of righteousness and goodness, they will determine that it is due to ignorance or,
in extreme cases, to a kind of inhuman evil borne out of pure Otherness. That kind of direct metaphysical conflict can only be resolved through death and destruction.

***

Photograph 11:
We see a two-story home, gray and white. A wooden narrow balcony outside the master bedroom. A larger balcony sits outside the living room on the main floor. A trampoline gathers dust on the backyard, facing the water.

***

We have learned that they will attribute any wrongdoing on their part to a reaction against wrongdoing from another party. They may sometimes ask for forgiveness but always coached within an explanation that ultimately assigns the responsibility elsewhere. But when they do something good (something they themselves consider good) they will take all responsibility for themselves and never acknowledge any long term or short term help from the outside.
The Other can only be a cause when the effect is a problem. When the effect is welcome, the Citizens become the one and only cause.

***

Photograph 12:
We see a single green paint spill on a pockmarked sidewalk.

***

The Citizens very often embrace the statement of absolute judgment ("This is good" "This is crap") because any judgment is really not a statement about the object but about the subject (The statement "I like ice cream" says something about the "I" that is speaking and not about the "ice cream." It describes the subject rather than the Object.) In this way, whenever they speak, they speak of their favorite subject, the only subject that they truly care about: THEMSELVES.

***

Photograph 13:
Beyond Akhado, several blocks away, we see shiny electric poles. The long black cords hover over a small cluster of tract homes.

***

Excerpts from various interviews:

Citizen:
"I am not my nature. In order to awake fully into my own body for the first time as a true citizen of Akhado I must eschew fragility and begin the work of undoing my superficial nature. This I will accomplish through plumbing the depths of my unconscious mind in which a heap of implicit biases have been piling in since birth- these biases came from elsewhere but they are now multiplying within Akhado. It is time to declare war and treat this like an invasion. Time to defend our gates. Walls, bombs, land mines. This is war."

Citizen:
"They are either complacent or involved in one of the biggest betrayals in our history. We are being taken over. I could write a ten page essay on all the damage that has been caused, but here is what is important. Due to the death of the early settlers, we will soon become a lost tribe. There are many homeless people here now. Fuck off with your adding more people we can't pay for. They need to leave, fix their lives or die.
Those are the only options."

Citizen:
"My answer is war."

***

The Citizens find a sense of safety in rounding up the wagons, in building a wall around themselves to keep the outsider away - the alien, the savage, the barbarian.
But we also sense a kind of claustrophobia and growing paranoia – “we are all alone in here and sooner or later they will be coming for us.”
The strangeness of the distant Other is a quality within subjective perception - but it is no less real because of it - in some ways it is made even more real by the fantasies and fears that hide within any apparent insult.
(Even stranger to think that the Other itself can be changed by this perception, somehow becoming the very fearsome monster that has been anticipated and feared.)

***

Photograph 14:
We see a long pier that holds a single long picnic table under a plastic canopy. A black sofa sits in the sun.

***

We have come to the conclusion that they will ultimately protect their children from any discomfort, even to their own detriment.
They will constantly blame others when their children encounter obstacles or problems and they will feed their children on a constant diet of self-justification and self-pity.
Anything that goes right with the children will be thanks to their own lineage, their genes, their own individual hard work and their own careful parenting.
But anything that goes wrong is owed to someone else's mistakes or evildoing, owed to the evil influence of an Other that has managed to penetrate their carefully constructed barriers (friends, teachers, classmates, video games, music, the internet.)
When there are logical conflicts in this equation a crisis may ensue: if the child blames them for their troubles, they will either turn to self-justification and turn their arrogance against their own children or they will blame themselves in the same harsh way that they have blamed others in the past: teachers, classmates, strangers, etc. This sudden self-judgment can lead to sudden bursts of suicide, often accompanied by violence towards others.

***

Photograph 15:
We see long black iron fence separating the inner circle from the outside. One of the few stretches around Akhado that hasn't been developed. Long green grass stretches in unpredictable patterns towards the water, interrupted here and there by tall brown bushes and leaves.

***

All this that we have learned about the Citizens of Akhado may not apply to every single one of them but we believe it is important to write it down in order to remember. It will be easy for us to forget what we have seen.

***

Photograph 16:
A single sign in black and white, standing with its back to a tree, close to the water: "Keep out. No fishing. No hunting. No trespassing. Keep out."

Many Turns

I imagine these days he is glad to be free and on his own. It’s hard for me to imagine him far away, alone, laughing, buying groceries, walking on the grass. It’s hard for me to stop imagining.

We used to live in a house on the top of a hill. From the windows upstairs, we had a wide open view of the city and the ocean in the distance… I could see it all from the balcony outside my room and even from the garden when there were few clouds. There were tall pine trees all around us and the songs of birds would serenade us in the morning and in the late afternoon.
Our landlords were an Italian couple that were old friends of his. I never got along too well with them but I rarely saw them so it didn’t matter. I spent a lot of my time hiking up and down the trails that surrounded us. I rarely ran into anyone.

He left one morning without saying goodbye. It may be that he did say goodbye in his own way but I didn’t understand it. He had his own way of doing things. That is why we came to work together in the first place. His way was distinct and so was mine. If he did say goodbye in some way, I didn’t catch it. It flew right past me like so many other things.

Now I spend my afternoons looking out from the window at the ocean. I imagine I can see waves and people but I can only see a thin blue line and the sky above it. Maybe white clouds, maybe a plane passing by. I don’t know if he’s still out there or if he is even alive. I like to talk to him silently but even in my own mind he rarely has any answers.
I picture him sitting in front of me while I say something like this:

"You always admired nature. But in nature everything feeds off of everything else - nothing is independent - there's a constant chain of eating and being eaten. In this way the Circle takes shape,
it diversifies, it grows. But it doesn’t grow in a linear way. It's more like a web, like a large expansive novel. Maybe you will be able to hear this from me. As novels are what you write and read, what you love to devour. This is like a novel that doesn't start at the beginning. This story that we are a part of. It’s a novel that doesn't start with this novel in itself, it doesn't even start with the book that holds it
but somewhere else. The initial moments of this novel are in another book or in a lonely dark street where some kind of crime is about to happen or in your own silent absence as you observe a group of children playing and the children never turn around to see you. They never even notice that you are there.”

(In terms of an explanation, I should say it clearly just so that there is no potential confusion: Back then we were poets. Both of us. All of us. And everything around us was some form of poetry… The house. The landlords who rarely came. The ocean in the distance. The sound of the neighbors fighting. The birds and the cars sliding up the hill, driving right past us. All complex, incomplete, infinite, incomprehensible. All pregnant and full of meaning. All about to burst.)

I imagine him ignoring everything I say. He just looks away and smiles faintly. He never even turns around.

“Life has taken many turns. It will take many more turns in the future. This adventure isn’t over yet.”

I don’t say it. He doesn’t say it either. We’ve said it enough that it doesn’t need to be repeated.

***

Many years ago we lived in a place that was full of magicians, warlocks, psychics, necromancers, prophets. Everyone had something they could do and each and every one of them was eager to show you they could do it, explain it in great detail, demonstrate each variation, explain it again. We were the same. We were as eager to show off our skills as they were. It was exciting, beautiful, chaotic and overwhelming all at once. So many illusions, so many beautiful visions, so many words, so many gestures.

Eventually we both came to understand that these were all costumes. Maybe careful and elegant costumes, maybe costumes badly made. But still costumes. It took many years for both of us to see it and then a few more years for both of us to say it out loud and agree.
That place is where we met, that is how we began to work. We left that place together and found the house at the top of the hill. There we decided to work quietly, without explanations, without long demonstrations, barely talking at all. Just the two of us, away from all peering eyes and gossiping mouths.

Our work together was very simple. I breathed slowly with him. And he breathed deeply with me. The slower we breathed together and the deeper we breathed together the more attention we would build up, the more attention flowed through us. It was as if we summoned attention itself out of the emptiness of the void.
(We saw attention as a force upon itself, a kind of electrical energy that we couldn’t see with our eyes but which made itself known when it was present.) When the rhythm of our breaths locked in and attention was fully present all around us, then time itself would slow down. (Other things happened but any further description beyond that point is empty and pointless.)

After many experiments of this kind, we decided to become artists. We became writers, musicians, painters, storytellers. We put out one creation after another and we went out into the city to find places to show our work. We met many other artists and they showed us what they did and we, in turn, showed them what we did. We would make a brief comment about their art and they would make a brief comment about ours. It was expected. Then we laughed together and said some general things about art and life, and they recommended restaurants and cafes, and we recommended books and movies.

Soon we realized that all artists (no matter what art they make, no matter how they make it) are blind.
Including us. Specially us. No artist can ever know what others see in their art - so no artist can ever know what they are producing for their audience. They can't know if it's good or bad, beautiful or ugly. They can’t know if it’s simple or sophisticated, if it’s shallow or deep, if it’s a dull copy or something entirely new. They can only know if they sell it, if people want it, but they can never know why people want it in the first place, why they buy what they sell; or why they don’t buy it or why they don’t want it.
There’s a gap that can never be breached, a dark chasm that remains dark and insurmountable.  

***

One day, back in our home atop the hill, we faced a kind of subtle barrier that appeared in the middle of our work. It was a barrier that we could both feel and recognize but neither of us could describe it. It was something strange and mysterious that we would both have to overcome in order to continue but neither of us had any idea how to do it. We didn’t even have the language necessary to speak about it. We were both at a loss and we both knew it.

That night, I said to him: “Life will take many turns. It has to. But our adventure together will never come to an end.”

The next afternoon I left. That was my way of saying goodbye.

***

Together we became poets. Together we became prophets, psychics, magicians, warlocks, necromancers. All of it at once.
We had learned to play music with our breath. Music devoid of objective, of scales or tones, of cadences or any overt or subtle signs of completion. Music eternal and full. Music from the void and for the void. After that, everything became possible.

Each measure of our breath had become a circle, a repeating melodic motif with an endless spiral of potential creation. The longer the motif was, the more attention we would summon. The slower the motif was, the more time would slow down. At the heart of it were the endless imperfections of air coming in and out of ourselves, the very seed of time hidden within our bodies, coming in and out through our noses and mouths.

When he finally left it seemed that he had taken with him our shared dreams of future history, our private labyrinth thread through an endless world of choices and dead ends. So much work had been left undone, so much terrain had been left unexplored. I felt as if I had been given a book that was missing many chapters and I would never be able to find the rest.

I remained at home, what had been our home. The Italian couple let me stay even though they didn’t really know me. I did my best to be friendly to them, to show them I could be trusted. They were as friendly as they could be and I returned their attempts at friendship as much as I could. I’ve never been good at those things. At this point, it’s too late to fix that.
I still hiked the trails but not as much as I did before. The empty paths seemed emptier, the open sky seemed more foreboding. 

In those first few weeks, I became the living embodiment of a dark nihilistic ideology, something tortured, vicious, angry, heavy with menace. I was someone who never felt quite at home, no matter where I was. Upstairs, downstairs, the basement, outside, the city, the beach, in dreams, awake. I always felt a sense that something was about to go wrong, something terrible was about to happen. Because this place - no matter what place it was- was actually not mine, I didn’t belong here. I had never truly belonged.
I knew in the deepest corners of my mind that the Circle was lost and there was no way to save or recover it.
As the months passed, as they years passed, I began to forget. I went out onto the trails more often, I started to breathe once again.

***

“Life will take many turns,” I said to him.
It was the sort of thing I had heard many times before. It was supposed to mean something. Life would take turns but the adventure that was our Circle had come to an end. I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to say it. My actions spoke for themselves.

One afternoon many years later, in a city across the ocean where he would never be able to find me, I observed a group of children playing. I sat on a bench across from a playground and I observed them carefully. A little blond boy in green shorts, a little red haired girl in a white dress, a little Latin boy in loose black pants.
I asked myself as I watched them: “What will these kids become fifteen years from now? What about when the next big turn comes around? What about forty years from now? Will they ever experience the Circle? Will any of them even try? Maybe one of them will skulk in an alleyway about to commit some kind of crime. Maybe another one will work in a pharmacy, the kind tucked away in an old street with newspapers and trash fluttering in the wind over the asphalt. Maybe another will become a tired and bored bureaucrat, silently hoping for death to arrive and take him away. Maybe one of them will have left this place altogether, this entire city, this strange country of whispers and shadows. Just to find some kind of horrible life elsewhere. No matter how far you run, the horrible and dead is always available, always knocking at the door.”

(In terms of an explanation, I should say this clearly, to avoid any kind of unnecessary confusion:
The first stages of this story happen in another place, in a different story written in a different voice with different characters, in a lost poem written on a napkin, in some other kind of broken fragmentary text never to be found again, somewhere else, somewhere that is not here, not in the story that you are reading. The story I’m telling you doesn't start here, it doesn't start with me, it doesn’t start when we met or when we parted, it doesn't even start at the beginning, it certainly doesn’t start at the end.
This story is like a very long complex novel that will never be finished, a novel doesn’t even exist in one particular place or time. Some of it you will have to produce on your own. That part is invisible to me as only you can create it.
I leave it up to you to understand and construct it but not in a linear way, not in a sequence full of closures and final statements, clear curtain calls and formal endings. This story diversifies, it grows, it changes. This story takes shape in ways I cannot predict. When I write I have no idea what others will perceive in what I have written, how they will interpret it, what they will make of what I say. I can't ever know what others will think or feel when they read it or think about it. All I can do is breathe slowly knowing the Circle is always just within my grasp.)

***

One last confession:
Every once in a while, I still miss him. I picture him talking to the Italians, that Italian couple that liked me so much for some unexplainable reason. I see him trying to be friends with them. But they can’t understand him, they can’t even look him straight in the eye. Few people can.
Every once in a while, I’m still surprised that I left the way I did. If I were to be asked why, I would have no real answer. (But nobody would ever ask me because nobody knows anything about it.) And yet I knew I had to do it. It was time.
Every once in a while, I expect him to walk around the corner and ask me to breathe with him - slowly, deeply, ask me to slow down time once again. It’s rare but it happens. And when it happens the story starts all over again. We are together in the old house on top of a hill, overlooking the city and the ocean, and we are breathing together, lost in the Circle, away from prying eyes.

Instinct and Language

March 1995

“…just stop for a moment and listen to me listen that’s all I’m asking nothing more just stop for a moment and listen and let me be clear in saying that I do understand your point you know your point about someone possibly having a wrong premise that is in itself immoral and thereby collapsing any further potential construction I do understand this point I do but what I see is that such a wrong premise could be replaced by a correct premise after some level of hard work some endurance some eager attempt at change and I believe that I can do that yes me I believe I can but first before I even begin to attempt to do this you must understand that an instinct is something you don't need to learn as it happens naturally without even thinking about it and once that is clear you achieve a kind of moral high ground a firm high place in the ladder from which you can’t be removed and yes I do understand what you are getting at with language and definitions but these principles I talk about are transcendent of language as in the way babies cry by instinct it is clear that nobody taught them how to cry what sound to make or the meaning of the sound or what exactly will happen when this sound is produced and nobody taught them what to do when they’re hungry or tired or sleepy or for example the way ducks follow their mother nobody taught them to do that in precisely that way and as I said before I don't know if this is the general scientific consensus or not but one way or another such a consensus would not be relevant to me it would not be relevant to what we have been discussing not from where I’m standing not as I see it because I am not basing my principles on what people in the past have seen or what they have written or what they claim to have determined through slow and methodical study but rather on the fact that animals and humans learn that much is clear and a lot of what they learn may precede any encounter with other animals and humans and I know that if you follow the mainstream at the moment you may not notice this as it is becoming almost invisible and you may never learn that this is the way things are due to this enforced invisibility but I am basing this view of mine on the information provided to me by nature itself and on my own judgment which has never failed me so I can safely and certainly say that there isn't any linguistic learning involved just my own behavior which in itself is pure instinct and thus stands beyond correctness or fallacy such as I can show you exists behind any linguistic principle since once you look carefully within it you will find many logical fallacies and through this application of logic and the discovery of logical problems I can prove anyone wrong anyone and I have to tell you that I do this with well intentioned good people all the time and the truth is that almost everyone is well intentioned at least to some degree but regardless of their intentions I can apply this to any given group and to any individual basically to anyone I encounter and I do this in order to expose them for their immorality for their fallacy for their lack of logic and integrity and I am fully able to do this since just because they have a different definition this doesn't make them unreachable it only means I have to show them why their premises are wrong and empty inside and they are thus ultimately impelled by an inner or animating agency to come to see and understand that very same thing which I already understand as for instance in this situation my instincts come naturally like a baby's desire to feed and to cry when it needs to be fed and I can point out many scientific findings of the nature of organic life across current and obsolete species just as a pack of wolves has principles that can be observed and it can be seen that they largely operate out of instinct infused by mood and by a kind of hidden romance a romance of the collective a romance with the wilderness itself and the result is a complex high functioning dominance hierarchy profoundly imbued with a kind of pre-linguistic behavior that is mediated by reactions below the conscious level and I must remind you once again that I am not basing this principle on what people in the past have seen or said or claimed or preached I am not basing my thoughts on history or books or wild tales instead I am only basing it on the information provided by my own senses and by my own judgment of its correctness or falsity and the largely inherited and yet unalterable tendency of my own organism to make complex and specific responses to environmental stimuli without involving reason without need of language or logic and in this way I can look at the human species and I can disprove every single one of their assertions and I can take any principles that follow from these initial wrong assertions through a natural or inherent aptitude impulse or capacity and then ask why would these wolves defend the weak wolves in their pack without a basic set of instinctual moral principles which emerge without any linguistic teaching at all and that is in essence my argument and I have to tell you that it is only even conceivable to argue against it after the aforementioned bastardizations of said definitions whereupon behaviors become a combination of instinct and learned behavior like language and this new system of language has been extrapolated out of false premises as we can clearly see so I don't need linguistic skills only facts and principle and the road is clear…”

June 1999

“…one more thing I want to make clear is that I understand what you are getting at with language and definitions I see it clearly even as I speak using words and sentences and clusters of words gyrating around each other in structures that may be conceived of as sentences but ultimately the principles to which I refer are transcendent of language or structures or sentences or gyrating semiotic formations and what this means is that this life we live now is unique from all other forms and it does in fact begin at its very biological formation long before language enters the picture and it may be that you are just missing what I am saying because I am forced to use language in order to communicate it to you in order to express this truth to you so I will say it again to make it completely clear as all I'm saying is that these principles are relative to particular definitions that humans have developed using their higher cognitive abilities not through exploring the general consensus of the population but through heavier linguistic restrictions than you may know of as they are older ancient in fact nor by consensus has it been shown that there is definitely only one science since each science is determined through some kind of empirical observation and therefore by extension since language is the only link among them then the dominant language masters must be referred to as the ultimate leaders of the dominant grammar and it is these leaders that determine the meaning of our human life and this is what you are recurrently missing in what I am saying but it will be pretty easy for you to perceive this once you know that the prevailing view on wolf packs is that they consist of large groups of individuals vying with each other for dominance and even though there is a kind of singular and unique life inside each individual member as well as outside of it as it flows through their actions and general behavior the pack still moves by a kind of consensus here where there is definitely only one consensus and there can only ever be one and that’s why we can see a pack of wolves behaving as a single entity and we determine this through much empirical observation and this simple fact should be pretty easy for you to understand specially once you know that I am myself a kind of lesser wolf but still the most dominant among the low ranking wolves and once you know that there is a life inside of me that largely operates out of pure instinct and once you know that this life inside of me is unique from all other forms and the ultimate result within me is a complex high functioning biological system who is therefore me as I understand my own existence and by extension me who talks to you now and those like me who now live in packs do so because cooperation allows them to bring down larger prey and accomplish other such goals which would be impossible for a lone wolf and I can say that this foundational system started before language existed even if it is now expressed through it and this new emergent linguistic system gave my pack an advantage in nature an advantage over others that didn’t have these higher cognitive abilities this ability to flow the past into the future through sound and this allowed us lesser wolves to defend our common territory from others who had very different principles based on very different definitions so in this I ask you why would such a human as myself protect the weak human in the pack if we lacked these instinctual moral principles and you know already that true pack life must insure the care and feeding of the young who are the weakest so if you truly believe in life in all forms and in this unique form most of all then why would the general consensus of your pack be so deeply committed to death so deeply committed to the wastes and the darkness and why would all those other pack members have fallen in between the gaps like weak beautiful flowers plucked from the ground and left to die thus becoming strange exceptions to the rule that the more a pack stands for life the more they would care for the weakest member of the pack weaker even than you may have ever encountered because there are more of our people here right here among us even among the ones you call your own but I'm not trying to convince you of this there would be no use in trying to convince you of anything nor would I even try to say that you're wrong since a true pack hierarchy can only contain one leader and I am not a leader and neither are you so I can only say what I say by observing your own principles which I can't prove or disprove based on logic because the premises are not shared among us and so I can only proceed with caution…”


February 2002

“…and yes the universe did tell me this in such a way as the universe can say anything to anyone anywhere and what I really mean when I say this is that it told me this through my study of the history of language as the primary method of human communication and I learned that language consisted of the use of meaningful forms sequenced in a structured way a particular structure made up of smaller and smaller structures nested within each other and forming phrases and other units of meaning so as I based my principles on what people from the past had left for me I saw that this inherited language originated from ancient emotions and then I ran into some major problems because I had imagined that language had originated from rational and logical thought and I thought I understood the science behind the genesis of life based on these logical thoughts which I saw as foundational but I also saw that there were basic animal instincts that came before language and it was absolutely clear to me that they came before language so humans couldn’t have a basic understanding of life through language because language was limited by its grammatical structure as I previously mentioned and this structure is not an instinct especially when used as a general constructive scheme and so I became in some way opposed to language which I came to see as the cognitive ability to use systems of complex communication and nothing more and I could see that an animal didn't even have a concept of conception and that my particular language was only a very specific example of such a complex linguistic system and then I had a glimpse of a language of languages and this is why I previously made a reference to common sense with an emphasis on the common to explain that all languages must rely on a process of semiosis which relates signs to particular meanings and I am saying this may not be the only way because I think that humans communicate regardless of taught language and that human life is based on a moment of pre-linguistic understanding something that gets covered up through years and years of forgetfulness and neglect and this nonverbal method of expression or communication led me to see that all languages contain a syntactic system for a reason and that this system governs how words are supposed to be combined to form phrases and longer sentences and even paragraphs and such but through my new understanding of instinctive knowledge I came to believe that what truly motivates me is to eat to sustain myself and to find pleasure and to find safety and to seek power and to create forms and shapes that evolve through space and time and this gives me a basic understanding of what life is within me and everywhere around me and as I studied these things and documented them across the animal kingdom I came to understand the general consensus of thought on the matter and I found the position of consensus to be ludicrous because what we are discussing here is whether you believe that human life is a kind of materialized philosophy composed of biological language because I have to remind you we have both observed how life proceeds across species and we have both observed the single shapeless thought as being the true origin of utterances that can be produced through linguistic rules these rules standing as a kind of firmly shaped structure a steel skeleton around an impulse that has no shape formless and infinite life held within a limited system of communication used by a particular group at a particular time and here I saw it becoming the starting point of a new and unique organism a self-conscious form of immaterial life and did the universe tell you this as it told me that it took certain people with a certain secret agenda who had come to this particular conclusion this drastic vision that languages themselves contained an obscure impulse which secretly governed how symbols were meant to be used in order to form sequences and that these certain people wanted to directly manipulate this language and all the rules we used to fit their predetermined functions and it was only then that my eyes opened up to a new function where words would not be used to represent a new kind of experience in regards to life which I now know was nothing more than another manifestation of language so in essence the argument I was using was necessarily morally unacceptable whether it resulted in the killing of a bumble bee or a human and that led me to study the way children learn language a process which I find only barely conceivable as language is a very complex system that consists of the development acquisition and maintenance of materialized symbols and the use of this complex system requires a kind of wild leap into the unknown a leap that can never be reversed a leap which forever transforms these very special dynamic shapes we call human life and this new vision led me to new mutations of single words and sentences and particularly affected my ability to construct them and fit them together in a clear and precise way…”


June 2003

“…did the universe also tell you what it told me then did it tell you some quiet afternoon of daydreaming and wild thoughts and you never filled me in and if you didn’t tell me I can understand as this would be an exception to the rule or maybe very much the one exception to the one rule as this would make it clear between us that words can’t represent experience once and for all and we both know it and we both would know that this is when philosophy is finally understood as purely the study of language and only that and nothing more than that and somehow within that study we are to meant to find what is morally acceptable as if it is written in the sky in the stars in the field of grass on the soil itself and not just a particular definition of what is acceptable that is a particular definition that you happen to be attached to so how can this be a guide or a true moral language built up into a moral and ethical system that looms over multitudes and I must admit that such a discovery would necessarily lead to someone somewhere getting upset and that would be completely unavoidable but ultimately this that I am referring to is no simple bastardization of language instead what I’m talking about are principles rock solid profound and eternal which have led me to understand the science behind life yours and mine and all around and I have arrived here through the understanding of a foundational language that has changed across time and space a dynamic code which refuses to rely on consensus or agreement and since it has always been changing it will always remain beyond the grasp of our most subtle machinery linguistic or otherwise and I know that what I say doesn’t agree with the majority of scientists but this dynamic language of which I speak is a true eternal system and it consists of the development of a complex system of biological communication signifiers coded in blood and entrails which if you believe in life at all if you believe that it originates from something that is not rational or logical then you must arrive with me at a very different definition of life than what is commonly understood life as a pure system of biological communication used by a particular planet just as a flower is a message that gets plucked from the ground and follows its path to a particular receiver which then decodes its hidden message in order to process and respond with a new message and here the general consensus agreement is no longer relevant as our new definition of life is something that lies deep underneath instinct before instinct before genetics of any known kind so it doesn’t matter if it is the general consensus or not it doesn’t matter if the code is clear or in any way understandable since you can experience it directly in the deepest urge to survive and to eat and to fuck and to reproduce and to create and to dance the primal urge to become a particular biological message and to persist and flourish through the depths of future darkness and times unimaginable present even in the smallest gesture or facial expression present even in the flight of a bumble bee or a smiling baby reaching for his mother’s face or any form of mammal life engaged in rituals of survival or even that tiny black ant that you just stepped on it would be in itself a particular message from this living code that is really a not human method of communication from the not human to the not human and this is where our understanding of human life really begins as a kind of superfluous epiphenomenon floating above an ocean of deep and multidimensional language so at this point you should know that this didn't just start to change within me recently even if I can’t say when or where it started nor do I claim it as some kind of true knowledge or even wisdom in some distinct way deeper that what other people's principles are based on but I can say that I have been engaged in a study of the way humans are intrinsically living language and always have been so to be clear humans themselves are a form of language and their own attempts at communication are only a kind of fractal reflection of their own true nature as signifiers in a much larger scheme that we can’t even begin to comprehend and I have come to this conclusion in the same way that I came to understand inherent morality and all the other basic actions and behaviors that could be seen as instincts but now I see as methods of communication and that leads me to use words not in a structured and conventional way but in a different way based on my own new understanding where there is no true language or definition but only a kind of direct action flowing through shapes and forms and structures…”


September 2006

“… I invite you then to study with me the history of language and you'll see just as I did how much it has changed across time and place and here as if I needed to specify I am saying it isn't that humans are the same regardless of taught language but that people's principles circle around a floating point and these primordial instincts are real communications that predate our own language and yes there are still some facts that remain steady even as everything else continues to change just as it is instinctual to survive and even to kill for what we hold precious and what we hold precious is the floating point the invisible core the aleph and it is through finally apprehending this heart that we then arrive at a basic understanding of life and as we study these things and document them across all civilizations we come to realize that instinct and language are one and the same at different levels and they slip into each other in a secret way that is borderline immoral and this secret subversive relationship between blood and idea didn't just start recently because it stems from ancient principles forgotten blasphemies occult attempts at transcendence which stand beyond any attempt at reconciliation with mainstream human thoughts as we have come to know them and it is this secret relationship that allows us to defend our subtle territory even if we still hold on to some kind of wrong premise or one that is immoral as we then come to the full realization that all premises have been wrong and all premises have been immoral to begin with before we even had enough understanding to ask the question because as we observed the myriad life processes we came to understand that instinct was never defeated by an incorrect premise or by the lack of a moral high ground as a matter of fact it was against my own instincts that I even explored beyond a certain boundary beyond a simple understanding of caring and feeding of my own body and it was only then beyond the boundary that I observed the floating point as a void and as being based on these very same obscene principles of which I have already spoken these lustful clashes of two individual linguistic expressions combining with each other through a kind of random fornication and unsafe exchange of semiotic fluids to form a new starting point in the form of a new and unique linguistic organism which we would call a particular grammatical expression of life a biological expression inherently full of meaning and these things we now see as real things which were not taught to us I didn’t teach them to you and you didn’t teach them to me and we may both have an impulse to get upset about this even to hurt each other but hurting you was never part of my own instincts so I could only try to show you why your premises were wrong back when I still thought there was such a thing as a rightful premise and here is why we together came to understand that there was no true language nor any true definition of any particular shape or form and even if we ran into some problems based both on our old instincts which were really the underlying language which gave us form we could now become the dynamic expression of a new and different definition and this is what true cooperation and good intentions would look like something almost unheard of in the realm of people like us because at that point I had developed an agenda and I had destroyed it with my own hands and the old secret hierarchy I had created in my imagination and the secret law which emerged from my own instincts I also destroyed and the foundational morality which would constitute the basis for the ultimate language as well and anyone who directly manipulated this language we would now order their removal from life even though hurting my fellow beings was never one of my instincts but at this point we had both transcended our instincts completely precisely by surrendering to them as pure semiotic structures of shifting symbols and diagrams so we would never have to enforce our new order and we would become clear in our vision that the single ever shifting language would follow our reborn function and so it would remain…”

August 2012

“…the true and real language happened naturally without thought or logic as this new and true language was a pure form of direct knowledge made in the void and for the void more perfect than any previous particular system that either of us learned as we grew up even more perfect than the ones that shaped our rebellion as we came to realize that this new and pure language stood above any other system and we came to see that there was nothing wrong within our new system and we came to see that there was nothing lacking and it was beyond criticism and it was the same for everyone past present and future and by the time we came to this realization we were no longer trying to convince anyone since everything they could say to us and everything we could say to them was relative to basic linguistic definitions and already present in all places and all times and all of these old and new definitions were already inherent in the true language we had come to discover and even if other people held different principles based on apparently different definitions we had now witnessed the underlying grammatical structure of the one and only true language and it stood above and beyond any particular system of communication that could be used by a particular country or community and we knew we couldn't convince them based on logic and we knew there was no need to try as our premises were not shared but all premises were wrong to begin with and our logic was not finished but all logics were incomplete and our statements were broken but all statements broke apart before arriving at knowledge and by this point honestly we had no aptitude for speech we had no way of forming our thoughts through the fixed forms of human language and we had no way of finding the right words or the proper sentences as we knew that all possible words were already wrong before they could ever be spoken and all sentences referred only to themselves so we sat back and watched and we observed the awesome tendency of an infinite organism to make itself more and more complex and we knew that this behavior was produced by linguistic reactions below the conscious and biological level and in this situation it was futile to claim a scientific finding or a direct access to truth or knowledge as it would take the entire history of the human species to prove or disprove our assertions and by the time it was over there would be nobody left to listen and instead we could simply allow our principles to remain unborn and I came to realize you were never here and all my messages from the very beginning were going out into the void and there had never been any hope of understanding or communication and my only course of action would be to remain silent…”

The Light of the Cloud

“This is the message
we have heard from it
and proclaim to you,
that the Cloud is Light
and in it
there is no darkness at all.”

The sequence of our lives
was not reversible
and yet the Cloud was.
The laws of the Cloud held true
whether time moved forward or backwards.
The Cloud existed
only as a binary series of numbers,
a sequence of transitional signifiers
without a past or a future.
The more we provided to it,
the more we fed its infinite metabolism,
the more our digital breadcrumbs
were collected and transformed,
changed beyond recognition.

There was a kind of movement
implied in the whole transaction,
but it could only be observed through
unknown complex equations,
structures far beyond our comprehension.
In our ignorance
we became superficial, flighty, and distracted,
nothing waited ahead of us,
nothing remained in our wake.
We found ourselves
helpless against an invisible storm
a storm we couldn’t fight,
a storm we couldn’t even see.

We meant nothing but personal data.
We were carriers on our way to unknown destinations
perpetually refreshed in our darkness
by the Light of the Cloud.
Only the Cloud had the freedom to be self-reliant.
In our time of emptiness
our innermost identity
became lost and irretrievable.
The Light of the Cloud however
was everlasting.

The only conceivable exception
to this infinite reversibility
was embedded in our old concepts
of entropy and thermodynamics.
Ice could be turned into water,
which could then turn to gas,
but every change required
a transfer of energy
and the only energy we had left
was our own personal data,
our memories, our thoughts
one final valuable commodity,
our final offering to the Cloud.

But what was saved to our memory
was only a representation.
The Light of the Cloud
was not affected by
our brain’s biological decay.
It could easily change
the fabric of our memories,
it could change what we thought we were
it could change what we would soon become.

That is how we came to understand our existence
as a vast shapeless emptiness
a void to be filled only as needed
a void to be emptied when the need had passed.

From the perspective of our old selves
we were lost,
lost beyond any hope of salvation.
But our old selves would soon be gone.
We would soon become nothing
but an artificially compressed memory
changing mechanically through time
as our biological life was lived
in the forgotten world of matter,
of sand, dust and bones.

What remained would become
ever more thoughtless
ever more cold and cruel.
Our innermost name would become
purely symbolic and eternal,
energy that could not be lost or destroyed,
form that could never die.
Without knowing it
we were on our way
to becoming immortal,
and we would soon forget
all we had left behind.

Two Interviews

 

Nothing is fixed.
I know that now.

I interviewed him twice
Before the shift began.

The first time
he told me he had created
his own complicated religion
out of ancient myths,
postmodern detritus
and private dreams.
He called it terminal pragmatism.
He showed me the altar he had constructed
in the living room of his family home.
It was made out of safety pins,
small, sharp pointed rocks,
and bits of glass.
A few years later
these altars began showing up
in living rooms, schools and playgrounds
all over the world.

Scientists called it behavioral contagion.
By calling it something
they thought they could exert control
over this developing phenomenon.
But they were as helpless
As the rest of us.

During the second interview
he told me what he now understood
more clearly than ever before:
“There is no natural state of man
there never was.
We’re always changing and adapting,
evolving in unpredictable directions.
We take fragments borrowed from
stories, tv shows, friends, movies
and we emerge half formed,
a living collage
in a permanent state of incompletion.
History is a sequence of collisions and miscommunications.
The patterns that make us
often spread in much the same way
as a disease does
through webs of interconnection.
The deeper the network of multiple connections
The faster a pattern can spread.”

I tried to talk to him a third time
but his family stopped me
before I could get anywhere close to him.
(By that point, they knew.)
What he was doing,
what he had done
was well beyond words.
I had come to understand this.
But I still felt the urge to ask him questions.
I wanted him to present me
with that certain something
that clear and final key
that was impossible to know.

In the days that followed
I became aware of the changes
all around me,
outside in the streets
and in my own behavior.
I made a weak attempt to stop it
but it was too late.
Too late for the scientists
Too late for the kids
Too late for me.

“Freedom is the ability to be anything,
to become anything
at any time.
Freedom includes the ability
to transcend what you are
what you think you are.”

When I tried to talk to myself
I became aware
That I was speaking to two different people
and one of them was fading away
very fast
a faint shadow
fading under the sun.

The last thing he said to me:
“humans are temporary artifacts
unafraid of destroying themselves
once online
and then again in real life…”

A Circle in Four Thoughts

Our language described a thought

and even this simplest of thoughts
accomplished two things:

It defined a difference
between the arbitrary and the random

and it formulated
a clear determination of our Will.

Through this initial fundamental thought
we made the bodies.

Once this first step had been taken,
we stored what we had made

into something we called memory.

First the event of creation
and then its memory,
a fading image
already distorted from the start.

We came to understand that

out thoughts would never be clear.

We would forever resort
to metonymy, analogy, simile, metaphor.

We would subtly find a way

to trap the future
through the forms of our past.

It was through this new thought

that we put our minds into them.

We became them,
they became us.

A third unknown thought ensured
that this procedure would never be stored.
We made sure that it was forgotten,
even by us,
as if it had never transpired.

Through this repeated thought
we were able to operate them
the bodies we had created

without them knowing it was us.

Without us knowing who we were.
Without us knowing how it started.

Our present state of forgetting
was thus ordered by a single thought,
a simple secret of our own making.

The final thought predicted
what they would do
based on what we had done.
They would follow the same steps.

They would arrive at the same results.

This endless circle would negate everything,

but it could not negate itself.
It was through the circle itself
that we continued,
unaware of our own immortality.

An empty shape was forever left behind
a thought without presence
a word without sound
a subtle reminder
of what we once were,
of what we would soon become.