Remember: you heard it here first
Ian M
Posts: 123
YOU WILL KNOW THAT YOU ARE DEAD WHEN:
- you can't remember the last time you did something new
- the world outside seems dry, unfocused and sterile
- you are content to see the same people and do the same things that you have been seeing and doing since when you can't remember
- you're always eating or drinking
- you look at everything and everyone with a cold, critical, cynical eye
- you're always trying to think inside your boss's head and do what he would have you do
- you let things break and devolve without doing anything to fix them
- you don't even notice the weather
- you catch diseases and don't try to cure yourself of them - you keep them and sustain them like pets
- you start laughing at things that aren't funny, just to give the impression that they are
- you start turning off electrical appliances that don't even belong to you, whether or not they are in use
- you can't feel your upper body
- you make sure that all doors are safely locked
- you try not to make suspicious contact with children
- you look at the people you used to admire and call them idiots under your breath
- you have no time for women
- you have no time
- you're always counting your pennies
- you watch your back all the time
- you get a kick out of buying something, no matter what it is
- you don't have the energy to listen to any music
- your shoes are always polished
- your neatly arranged ties are all drab in colour
- you can't wait for your day to be over before it has even begun
- you check the news at every available opportunity
- you complain half-heartedly about politicians
- you start to dream about what you could have done with your life
- you are always clean-shaven
- you only get erections when you want to
- your fridge is empty and there are cans and dirty laundry all over the floor
- you have no memories - be they happy or sad
- you start making a habit of going to church once a week
- you go to the gym to trim your gut, or to do your damnedest to
- you speak passionately about things that don't mean anything to you or to anybody else
- your music is always at a respectable and conscientious volume
- you find yourself smiling when saying something that is deeply important to you, that you are really angry about
---
Able to turn the weather with a thought.
Pure by no fault of his own, he is shunned as he shuns
Even the mosquitoes come nowhere near him, saving their deadly, life-giving gifts for others more deserving
All is balance, in redistribution.
Some see it as a tremendous curse overshadowing the lives they would fence off and have as their own for eternity
He sees it as sacred relief; his own fate over which a billion nemeses would fight to the death, is the curse of being apart, lamented with every breath that is drawn in, that is expelled having performed its function with no detriment to either pristine environment.
Take this as the lesson of a life led in lament.
---
One of these days you will ask of your body some function or other, and nothing will happen. Then you will realise that you are somebody else. You will look at someone's hand and you will try to lift it to scratch someone's nose but it won't work.
You will not give up in despondency though. You know from past experience that there are certain tricks to master, different indirect methods to assert you will and manipulate the surrounding biology to suit its needs.
You will look at someone's body until it feels an acute discomfort, until it succumbs and eventually in frantic circles of actions hits upon the one required to turn off your terrible stare.
---
A tingle in the fingers after the hands have spanked together to kill the flakey gold wingrush of the moth that might otherwise have lived to proliferate and leave its all-consuming spawn in my clothing.
I'll admit though that perhaps the incident might have been avoided had I not left the clothes liberally adorning the carpet, as is my usual habit.
So we create the conditions necessary for the pest species to flourish, complain vociferously upon their inevitable arrival and scrabble to an ugly clampdown that could have been avoided by careful maintenance on a regular basis.
The pests are a direct manifestation of our inner degeneracies.
---
Learning Helplessness
The way dogs are disciplined into an abusive family.
Punished again and again until it loses all meaning or relation
To their action, but rather to their PERSON.
They learn a new mode of existence - Doing Nothing
In the hope that this will spare them the next beating
They are fully trained. They are submissive.
This should sound familiar.
We've all been kicked in our formative years.
Over and over again with all reasons witheld.
So we learn to bring our master's slippers and to wag our tails
And look on our own desires with deep suspicion and distaste.
Just look how irate and dismissive the holders of power become
When confronted by some creative impulse they have no control over or experience of
And you will appreciate all the more these vents for their scarcity and import.
And these power relationships are everywhere.
Our gods are there to be loved and FEARED.
We must follow their strict example to the letter
Or be bitch-slapped again by their priests into the proper behaviours.
We must SUBMIT.
Maybe poetry is nothing if not a dialogue between consenting subjects.
We don't give thanks for the witness of our environment.
We crawl away to our corner, turning it into our 24hr a day temple to squalor and depravity
And when we DO venture beyond its confines we sniff the air like sewer rodents with suspicion
Never to acknowledge the spirits that guarded our stay, even laying on a resplendent display of welcome when all past behaviour suggested its irrelevance to us late-homecomers. tsk.
And the fundamentals have come to the fore, into their own in order to validate,
Consolidate the lack of critical thought enforced on the populace for profitability.
In a world where men never grow up, reflection, dispassion, empathy count for nothing.
- you can't remember the last time you did something new
- the world outside seems dry, unfocused and sterile
- you are content to see the same people and do the same things that you have been seeing and doing since when you can't remember
- you're always eating or drinking
- you look at everything and everyone with a cold, critical, cynical eye
- you're always trying to think inside your boss's head and do what he would have you do
- you let things break and devolve without doing anything to fix them
- you don't even notice the weather
- you catch diseases and don't try to cure yourself of them - you keep them and sustain them like pets
- you start laughing at things that aren't funny, just to give the impression that they are
- you start turning off electrical appliances that don't even belong to you, whether or not they are in use
- you can't feel your upper body
- you make sure that all doors are safely locked
- you try not to make suspicious contact with children
- you look at the people you used to admire and call them idiots under your breath
- you have no time for women
- you have no time
- you're always counting your pennies
- you watch your back all the time
- you get a kick out of buying something, no matter what it is
- you don't have the energy to listen to any music
- your shoes are always polished
- your neatly arranged ties are all drab in colour
- you can't wait for your day to be over before it has even begun
- you check the news at every available opportunity
- you complain half-heartedly about politicians
- you start to dream about what you could have done with your life
- you are always clean-shaven
- you only get erections when you want to
- your fridge is empty and there are cans and dirty laundry all over the floor
- you have no memories - be they happy or sad
- you start making a habit of going to church once a week
- you go to the gym to trim your gut, or to do your damnedest to
- you speak passionately about things that don't mean anything to you or to anybody else
- your music is always at a respectable and conscientious volume
- you find yourself smiling when saying something that is deeply important to you, that you are really angry about
---
Able to turn the weather with a thought.
Pure by no fault of his own, he is shunned as he shuns
Even the mosquitoes come nowhere near him, saving their deadly, life-giving gifts for others more deserving
All is balance, in redistribution.
Some see it as a tremendous curse overshadowing the lives they would fence off and have as their own for eternity
He sees it as sacred relief; his own fate over which a billion nemeses would fight to the death, is the curse of being apart, lamented with every breath that is drawn in, that is expelled having performed its function with no detriment to either pristine environment.
Take this as the lesson of a life led in lament.
---
One of these days you will ask of your body some function or other, and nothing will happen. Then you will realise that you are somebody else. You will look at someone's hand and you will try to lift it to scratch someone's nose but it won't work.
You will not give up in despondency though. You know from past experience that there are certain tricks to master, different indirect methods to assert you will and manipulate the surrounding biology to suit its needs.
You will look at someone's body until it feels an acute discomfort, until it succumbs and eventually in frantic circles of actions hits upon the one required to turn off your terrible stare.
---
A tingle in the fingers after the hands have spanked together to kill the flakey gold wingrush of the moth that might otherwise have lived to proliferate and leave its all-consuming spawn in my clothing.
I'll admit though that perhaps the incident might have been avoided had I not left the clothes liberally adorning the carpet, as is my usual habit.
So we create the conditions necessary for the pest species to flourish, complain vociferously upon their inevitable arrival and scrabble to an ugly clampdown that could have been avoided by careful maintenance on a regular basis.
The pests are a direct manifestation of our inner degeneracies.
---
Learning Helplessness
The way dogs are disciplined into an abusive family.
Punished again and again until it loses all meaning or relation
To their action, but rather to their PERSON.
They learn a new mode of existence - Doing Nothing
In the hope that this will spare them the next beating
They are fully trained. They are submissive.
This should sound familiar.
We've all been kicked in our formative years.
Over and over again with all reasons witheld.
So we learn to bring our master's slippers and to wag our tails
And look on our own desires with deep suspicion and distaste.
Just look how irate and dismissive the holders of power become
When confronted by some creative impulse they have no control over or experience of
And you will appreciate all the more these vents for their scarcity and import.
And these power relationships are everywhere.
Our gods are there to be loved and FEARED.
We must follow their strict example to the letter
Or be bitch-slapped again by their priests into the proper behaviours.
We must SUBMIT.
Maybe poetry is nothing if not a dialogue between consenting subjects.
We don't give thanks for the witness of our environment.
We crawl away to our corner, turning it into our 24hr a day temple to squalor and depravity
And when we DO venture beyond its confines we sniff the air like sewer rodents with suspicion
Never to acknowledge the spirits that guarded our stay, even laying on a resplendent display of welcome when all past behaviour suggested its irrelevance to us late-homecomers. tsk.
And the fundamentals have come to the fore, into their own in order to validate,
Consolidate the lack of critical thought enforced on the populace for profitability.
In a world where men never grow up, reflection, dispassion, empathy count for nothing.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
see: http://anthropik.com/2006/11/alpha-dogs-wolf-packs-the-wandering-free-families/
That's interesting in relation to what you wrote above and I suppose that was your reason for posting it?
Experience tells me that a little background can go a long way in explaining whatever gibberish I've just uttered forth (usually with no obvious provocation).
Plus, I think it's always nice to publicly acknowledge one's inspirational sources!
Particularly revealing are comparisons (like the one in the anthropik article) to those species closest to us in evolved social make-up, i.e. mammalian group cooperators like dolphins, killer whales, wolves, hyenas and some of the other primates. We can learn a lot about ourselves from observing their reactions to the kind of no-holes-barred domination that is as entirely foreign to their innate "programmed expectations" as it is to ours, primarily adapted as we still are to small, egalitarian foraging bands and not to vast coercive hierarchies where we don't even talk to our neighbours...
If you're interested in group behaviours, the related Wolves & Dogs essay ( http://anthropik.com/2006/11/wolves-dogs ) presents a theory I found absolutely fascinating: that human cultures imported many traits from wolf packs with whom they enjoyed a long period of almost symbiotic "co-evolution" before heavy-handed domestication ruined the relationship around about the agricultural revolution 10,000-or-so years ago.
Thanks.
I'll have to check it out. Deconstruction's what it's all about
Of The Game.
I will be stalked
By this hapless hunter,
I will walk, I will canter, I will run
From his blade
Shining hungry
To bite into skin and sinew
In the small of my back.
But when I see
The precipice approaching -
Lumbering like a slow vibration
With every step,
The panting behind furious, thirsty, demented and blind -
At the last, I shall step nimbly aside
With one foot outstretched, a relieved grin in my cheeks
As the flashing body stumbles, spins, screams, sighs ever further below.
How are we going to tell them
When there’s no steam left to blow?
Arms the Tiger with claws
Brahman provided wings for the Dove
Thus spake the Super Guru"
But I guess those other points are up for debate;)
Why would you start was has no end?
Yeah, Orwell put me up to that one. I think it was in 'Coming Up For Air' where the narrator says something about how brain death was such an arbitrary distinction, when it was clear to him that he was surrounded by so many who may as well have been dead for all the signs of life they exhibited.
There should be a longer list of recognised symptoms. Although perhaps not in the strictest medical terms... A lot of people might get buried unnecessarily that way, cos this is the only definition of death from which you can, you know, actually 'rise again' (if you're lucky).
'Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.' - Norman Cousins (apparently)
die by the Free Market.
---
Parents and their dirty tricks!
It's a black heart that would threaten
privations of love and support
when in the face of simple disobedience.
---
Why are horses shod?
Is it because the hooves they were born in
are not adequate to the task of a long, healthy life?
No. They are shod because otherwise they would be
worn down too quickly by the strenuous labour
required of them by their human masters.
The same goes for people and all the hardening
they must undergo in order for civilised life
to be tolerable, even for a moment.
---
HARNESS YOUR APATHY & POINT IT IN A MORE PRODUCTIVE DIRECTION!
---
"Oh, you've heard about my sort, have you?
Well, actually, no you haven't.
You haven't been looking for 'my sort'
I have been looking my whole life,
and let me tell you right now:
I am the only fucking one!"
---
it's a mono mono mono monoculture
---
Somewhere back along there was so much
change, I doubt if I'll ever fully appreciate
all the different shades of being I flitted
nonchalantly through. Back when shape-
shifting fluctuation through the elements
was almost hysterically simple.
And can I lament the loss of my different
selves along the way? Can I feel a genuine sorrow
for the relative stasis I've settled on at the
expense of all that splendid, youthful dynamism?
Sediment is more prone to settlement in the
more mature age of the river. A vigorous current
might come along to remind of fond, torrential days
gone by, but it comes only once in a while.
---
Strange how the most prized virtues
are the least effective motivators for change
---
People are always trying to hit the cliché-
ridden highways of thought. They are most
comfortable with the paths that have been
trod by a thousand feet; they are always
looking for the first excuse to tap into the
fast flow of the main waterways rather than
taking to the slower backwaters that are
the domain of true pioneers.
They prefer to be swept along rather than
to have any agency of their own, so if you want
them to frequent the more overgrown pathways
(which will teach them the things of greatest value)
you will have to practically drag them along.
On the brink of memory's abyss
The generations have transmitted this news:
Truth is Money's bitch.
But Honesty was lodged firm on that distant edge
Teetering as it re-collected its balance
And now it's coming back, and
Pretty soon the roles are gonna be reversed.
I watched him leaning up against the bookshelf. Funny, these public-school chaps. Schoolboys all their days. Whole life revolving round the old school and their bits of Latin and Greek and poetry. And suddenly I remembered that almost the first time I was here with Porteous he’d read me the very same poem. Read it in just the same way, and his voice quivered when he got to the same bit—the bit about magic casements, or something. And a curious thought struck me. He’s dead. He’s a ghost. All people like that are dead.
It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working—hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste—but he’s not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.’
- George Orwell, ‘Coming up for Air’, end of pt. 3, ch. 1
Yup, sorry. I meant to say.
**SEE ABOVE**
Took me a while to find the quote is all
It's a good book to read if you haven't already. An understated experimental album for the die-hard fans before the anthem-filled world-beaters of 'Animal Farm' and '1984' which all the first-time listeners flock to.
hanging up my limbs to dry
I walked on my errand
into the heart of a small granite-grey town
a place you've had the major part of life
led before you like a leashed, muzzled beast
before the farmer's cheerless market;
where the changes you notice are small
but enormous cos they're the only changes you'll know
cars that crowd you off a slanting curb
old outhouses pulled down, cycleways built
big machines dredging the decades from under the lake
sneering shop assistants who make you feel like apologising
when they're the ones who've screwed up and messed you around
the ground peppered with studmarks, the unluckier trees felled
more ungainly crows swaying suspended in the breeze, it seems...
I eye my twisting shadow with new loathing
and angle an agitated gaze away from all passers by
steps that trudge heavier on an uneven passage home
dark fantasies of punching your assailant in the throat
& sticking around to see how the bruising blossoms out
You can say ‘Silence, my little one and enjoy this rapture in the moment,’ but to flutter maniacally it will continue until exhausted or free.
So you can tut away your disappointment as you leave your comfortable chair and make for the window, but with precious and fragile life held in your hands as you lift the latch to fling it wide open, you must realise that one man’s elixir is another man’s poison, that the air you breathe is not your conquest, it does not belong to you; it is your contract with the universe upon which it is written that you must do with it what you will, but know that it must be returned in full for an Other to inhale in it’s own way.
---
The disfigured mind is claiming life,
Betraying yesterday.
A vision like the ripple on a wave
Reflected green and yellow in boughs that might stoop and save
Think I’m going to follow that.
Forgotten thought, insatiable, ruddy-cheeked, is claiming life.
How many will it claim today?
---
Outside the world is growing
The world is decaying
In the eyes of those who behold it.
Inside the world is getting younger
As it slowly becomes absorbed
Undoing aeons, shrinking back to where it all began
That’s where you end, my friend.
You will know the universe
When you become it.
---
Three ants, long as your little finger, dull orange with agile legs and carnivorous eyes lie concealed in the loose binding of my book.
They’re restrained by intricate mechanisms of spiderweb-like threads that release them individually the first three times the book is opened, to scurry out militarily in search of any food that might sustain them after their long incubation.
---
Taking a swig from a half empty bottle
Singing the same song along to every accompaniment
Watching a girl out the window
Writing because it’s the lesser of two evils
Learning to tell the truth
Stroking a cat, watering my plant
Mending my guitar
Eyeing up objects in this new light:
Not that I was blind before
Just now I see things differently.
Thinking about the dream I dreamt last night
And what it could mean
For me or for anyone
Not that it really matters.
The older you get the better you sing.
The older you get the less people listen to you.
Make a sandwich and make your preparations
For to face the world outside.
---
How is it that all the best talent in the world is magically drawn to the imperial centre of the time? Does it get sucked there by the pull of capital or is a thriving economy the only True Prerequisite for Real Art?
With sportsmen, they will be most able to excel in lands where food and leisure time (to devote to such non-essential activities) are abundant. Look at the decline in Russian Olympic successes post 1990 - it is marked even when you factor in the athletes who were competing for their new home countries.
The best musical traditions have historically been linked to the cities and courts of great affluence. Even today the entire world is under the sway of music made almost exclusively in Britain and America.
What of ‘being the best you can be’. Does this rely on being born in the right place so your talent can be ‘developed’ to its ‘full potential’? Full potential for who? Is it not good enough to play for a local team or musical group? Whose is the satisfaction when you finally ‘reach the top’ and ‘conquer the world’. Not yours.
Is ‘being the best you can possibly be’ a remotely innate human attribute? Where is the motivation for such an all-consuming task when there is no huge cash reward, as there wouldn’t be during a Dark Age in some backwater town in decline, or for that matter, in Cro Magnon France? Is it a tragedy that all this talent wasn’t properly refined — was it wasted on a backward people who didn’t know any better?
Empire treats human natural ability the same way it does the resources of the ‘natural world’. The bottom line in both cases is Plunder for Profit.
I waited too long!
People having to make their conclusions
After hours on the last day of the job
But their mind was already made up
By the stack of payslips in the corner
They were saying the same thing over + over
Even when they knew it was a lie...
All I needed was One Person to pour
Into the regret of having no regrets;
Just a slender walkway across the ravine;
Just a second rung to hold the ladder together
I needed liveable truths that weren't just
Convenient excuses to carry on like nothing had changed...
I want one fix to last my lifetime long
So I don't have to keep coming on back for more
But for once I'd like to know just what I'm doing
While I'm about my business.
How to slip out of this chainmail windowframe
& into something more comfortable?
To prove my love for myself, I will drive my self away.
(Stranger things have happened—when they were permitted us;
When we allowed our senses to give them birth.)
want to pay attention to the clothes he will wear, to the untidied state of his hair;
She makes him replay their conversations with an ear to future elucidity;
She makes him want to prepare his set pieces in unhurried pauses
because the words he wishes to use are special and easily waylaid;
She makes him want to forget personal history in the slow germination of a white wrist
in the space between them.
She makes him want to buy another drink to steady his nerve and quicken his smile;
She makes him want to share in solemn experience;
want to avert his gaze when it chances upon hers intent;
She makes him think in an earth of friendly thoughts all through the sticky night;
She makes him want to change her into a powerful woman
with fuller knowledge of her supple strengths:
She makes him rediscover the pleasure in acquaintance.
what i think is really cool though, is that this goes both ways. he wants to be a better man, AND he wants to make her aware of her power. there are far too many women out there without a clue
Tell me/him about it!
I've a feeling he doesn't get too much luck going about things his way though. Far too many people out there who are seemingly incapable of coming to terms with their own power (submission is the name of the game they're most comfortable with). Everybody walking around on tiptoe, trying not to wake the sleeping giant, trying to 'tread lightly' and 'minimise their footprint'; trying to act as though they didn't exist.
Bullshit!
"Walk like a man, my son"
(Walk like a woman, my daughter)
yeah "don't make a fuss", sit and be quiet
don't argue when the devil wants to buy your soul
just sell the shit and get it over with
you're nothing, totally unimportant
everyone else is more important than you
(as long as you of course believe in yourself, all the while... just don't make it public... you might make someone else feel bad or have a shitty day, or god forbid... hear the truth)
you are not a god
you are a speck.
you are nothing
pisses me off
And what of my predictions? Can I not hold some small authority in the taste of the air, by the rustle of the bushes, in the swoop of the swallow, by the texture of the tracks in the dune? No - it's another small wisdom that has been robbed of its individuality - of it's connection to the lives of individuals interlinked in a web of the living - and is now a hand-me-down dictation of the way that things are.
What will we do when the reports stop coming? How will we know what to expect when finally there's no abstract authority to consult? Our local knowledge packed up, removed piecemeal to be synthesised until nothing remains grounded in real experience; we are the dependants, the children of the morning, the first for the cull at the crumble of the central command.
They tell me the Great Cold is coming and there's nothing I can do.