Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent.
Jung. (1915:244). Liber Novus.
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Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent.
Jung. (1915:244). Liber Novus.
[Bühiküva] is philosophy with a hands-on attitude [...] based on the acquisition of extreme experience.”
McKenna, T. (n.d.). UNKNOWN SOURCE.
Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow [...] Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.
Rescher, N. (2000). Process philosophy a survey of basic issues. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, p. 5.
English as an animal, a kind of amoeba, extending its pseudopodia of description into every nook and cranny of reality, a kind of syntactical Los Angeles, ever growing, expanding and including more and more empty or natural territory into its grid of meaning. Wasn’t it Burroughs who observed that 'Language is a virus from outer space?' [...] how can we trust [it when] even the act of deconstructing it involves a total commitment to it as both means and end?
McKenna, T. (3 SEP 1996). ‘Re:TM--Reply to rh 9/3′. Orfeo — A dialogue between Robert Hunter and Terence McKenna, Part III. Levity.
An image cannot be a symbol in my opinion. Whenever an image is turned into a symbol, the thought becomes walled in so to speak [...] That's not what image is. [....] Although image cannot be explained, it expresses truth to the end... Its meaning remains unknown. I was asked once what the bird on boy's head in The Mirror meant. But any time I attempt to explain, I notice everything loses its meaning, it acquires a completely different sense than intended, moves away from its rightful place. I could only say a bird would not come to an evil man but that's not good enough. A true image [...] cannot be explained, it only transmits truth and one can only comprehend it in one's own heart. Because of that it's impossible to analyse a work of art by utilising its intellectual significance.
Tarkovsky, A. (1976). ‘Taiteen on jaloselettava katsojia‘. Interview with with Risto Mäenpää and Jaakko Pyhälä. Filmihullu (8), pp. 7–11.
I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us.
Tarkovsky, A. (1984). ‘Ein Feind der Symbolik‘. Interview with Irena Brezna. tip. 3, pp. 197–205.
'Lumpers' and 'splitters' are opposing factions in any [context facing the problem of placing objects] into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them [...] A 'lumper' [...] takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, [viewing] differences [as] not as important as signature similarities. [...] 'Lumpers' [may reject] differences and [choose] to emphasize similarities [...] evidence that [does] not fit [... may be] ignored as aberrant. Splitters [... emphasise] differences, and [resist] simple schemes. While lumpers [prefer] coherence, splitters preferred complexity. 'Splitters' emphasise the heterogeneity within the diagnostic categories and argue that this heterogeneity drives the 'splitting' process'. 'Lumpers', on the other hand, point to the similarities between the diagnostic categories, and suggest that these similarities justify the creation of broader entities. The earliest known use of these terms was by Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1857: 'It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers'.
‘Lumpers and splitters’. 7 DEC 2021. Wikipedia.
What I want from the river is what I always want: / to be held by a stronger thing that, in the end, chooses mercy.
Baez Bendorf, O. (2019). Advantages of Being Evergreen. Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis
Cummings, E. E. (1926). “since feeling is first”. Is 5.
The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. [...] Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
LeGuin, U. K. (1976). ‘Introduction’. The Left Hand of Darkness.
I don’t like communication it forces me to realize what I did to myself
TUMBLR USER 000540123’s POST. (n. d.). Tumblr.
So great is our monopoly on species-superiority that we are willing to take it to its logical conclusion. Nothing can come after us —we will ensure it. Extinction proves the superiority of the species. Baudrillard calls this 'feral humanism.'”
Thacker, E. (2018). Infinite Resignation. p. 102. via TUMBLR USER forbidden-sorcery’s POST.
To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.
Weil, S. (2002). Gravity and Grace. Routledge. p. 65. via TUMBLR USER existential-celestials’ POST.
A written text is itself a static object [...]: It is language to be processed synoptically. Hence it projects a synoptic perspective onto reality: It tells us to view experience like a text, so to speak. In this way writing changed the analogy between language and other domains of experience; it foregrounded the synoptic aspect, reality as object, rather than the dynamic aspect, reality as process, as the spoken language does. This synoptic perspective is then built into the grammar of the written language, in the form of grammatical metaphor: Processes and properties are construed as nouns, instead of as verbs and adjectives. Where the spoken language says whenever an engine fails, because they can move very fast, ... happens if people smoke more, the written language writes in times of engine failure, rely on their great speed, ... is caused by increased smoking. [...] Pairs of this kind are not synonymous. Each of the two wordings is representing the same phenomenon, but because the prototypical meaning of a noun is a thing, when you construe a process or property as a noun you objectify it [...] If there was no natural relationship between the semantics and the grammar, the difference between the two kinds of wording would be purely formal and ritualized; but there is such a natural relationship, and so the metaphor brings about a reconstrual of experience, in which reality comes to consist of things rather than doing and happening. Learning [...] involves learning to understand things in more than one way. In a written culture, in which education is part of life, children learn to construe their experience in two complementary modes: the dynamic mode of the everyday commonsense grammar and the synoptic mode of the elaborated written grammar. Any particular instance, of any kind of phenomenon, may be interpreted as some product of the two—once the adolescent has transcended the semiotic barrier between them. Modern scientists have become increasingly dissatisfied with their own predominantly 'written', objectified models and often talk of trying to restore the balance, the better to accommodate the dynamic, fluid, and indeterminate aspects of reality (cf. LEMKE, 1990, especially Chapter VII). They do not know how to do this (I have commented elsewhere on BOHM’s 1980 search for the 'rheomode'; cf. HALLIDAY & MARTIN, 1973, Chapter VI). [...] Teachers often have a powerful intuitive understanding that their pupils need to learn multimodally, using a wide variety of linguistic registers: both those of the written language, which locate them in the metaphorical world of things, and those of the spoken language, which relate what they are learning to the everyday world of doing and happening. The one foregrounds structure and stasis, the other foregrounds function and flow.
Halliday, Michael A. K. (1993). ‘Towards a language-based theory of learning’. Linguistics & Education. 5(2): 111-112.
I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”
Tarkovsky, A. (12 MAY 1983). ‘Le noir coloris de la nostalgie‘. Interview with Hervé Guibert. Le Monde.
Language is both our most effective tool and our most powerful weapon. If you want to see how powerful this weapon is, look around. [...] Dishonest use of language is one way of using words as a weapon. Another is designing, and enforcing, linguistic—and thus, cultural—orthodoxy. [...] But while language—and thus, thought—policing is most obvious in totalitarian regimes, some form of it goes on in every culture. Language policing is a timeless method by which a cultural or political elite establishes and holds on to power. [...] These are the swamps into which our linguistic weapons have sunk us. [...] What ought to be our most glorious tool—symbolic thought, abstracted and represented in words—has become a crude weapon of warfare. Why? [...] But the ability to read and write is also the ability to abstract. [...] meaning is conveyed through a shared agreement about abstraction. [...] Sometimes writers can forget how pointless, or just baffling, writing for a living seems to many people. We can forget how much we deal in abstraction. We can confuse these words for the reality they are intended to convey. This confusion—of the signifier and the signified, the original reality and its distilled essence—is one of the reasons we end up with language wars. We think, at some level, that if we can control the signifier, then that control will bleed out into reality. We think that using our symbols to define reality will change the nature of reality itself. Words are not real. I think we have forgotten this. In a culture that increasingly deals with abstracts, it is a dangerous form of forgetting. [...] Written language was no longer visually tied to the world of physical, real, naturally-occurring things [...] Language had become internalized. It no longer represented the forms of the world around them. It represented only what they saw in their minds. The question then became: what kind of minds? In his 2009 book The Master and his Emissary, writer and former psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist posits, in exhaustive and often fascinating detail, the notion of what he calls 'the divided brain'. Drawing on neuroscience, history, and philosophy, he suggests that the two hemispheres of the human brain have different functional approaches to perceiving reality. While popular mythology might perceive the 'right brain' as dealing with 'emotion' and 'left brain' with 'reason', McGilchrist suggests the division is more fundamental. The brain’s right hemisphere, he suggests, understands the whole picture; the left hemisphere understands how to examine its parts. Both are useful—necessary, in fact—to human life; but a sane way of relating to the world outside our heads requires the left hemisphere to be a servant of the right. In other words, the ability to pick life apart is only useful if it is in service to a more holistic understanding. Modernity, suggests McGilchrist, has been the process of the 'Emissary'—the left hemisphere—usurping the 'Master'—the right. Now we are paying the price. This, if true, explains rather a lot. It explains why we believe 'reason' to be the supreme human achievement, and the basis for our society, when it is more likely that reason evolved as a tool for serving our intuition. It explains why concepts like 'intuition' are dismissed in our reason-obsessed culture, despite having a clear evolutionary basis and day-to-day utility. It explains why atheists don’t understand religion. It explains why we fail to grasp the utility of myth. It explains why we imagine the world to be a 'resource' rather than an intertwined network of living things. It explains the subject-object split which has bedeviled us since the Enlightenment. [...] It explains, too, why our language has become utilitarian and abstracted and often toxic: why it so often serves the purpose of those who would dismantle the world or repurpose it for human use. Language no longer serves the part of the brain which, in McGilchrist’s words, 'believes but does not know'. It serves the part which 'knows but does not believe.' Our words no longer serve wholeness. They serve fragmentation, and we have used them to justify the building of a fragmented world. If you cannot solve a problem with the mindset, or the tools, which created it, what does this mean for those whose tools are words? It is the question I am coming to now and cannot avoid. Because I have a suspicion—a suspicion I have long held but have circled around, not wanting to fully face. It is this: That words are the problem. That language itself—or at least the kind of language we use, abstracted [...]—is part of the process by which we desacralize the world. That writing, especially, is a tool of ecocide. [...] In 1980, Russell Means, member of the Oglala Lakota people, of the Sioux tribe, activist in the American Indian Movement, occupier of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, gave a speech about what he stood for, and why he, with many other American Indians—his preferred terminology—were rising up against established structures. Means had been reluctant to make a public speech and had to be persuaded to do so. He agreed only on one condition: that he didn’t have to write it down. He explained his reasoning in his address: 'The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.' Any notion of 'liberation', for American Indians or anyone else, said Means, had to go way beyond battles about surface structures—way beyond arguments about economics or politics. It was not a question of Marxism versus capitalism, religion versus secularism, right versus left. These, according to Means, were just different shards of the same broken window: 'Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction … Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three, Answer!' What does this abstracted code lead to? According to Means, this 'European mind'—what McGilchrist would call the left hemisphere, or the mutinous Emissary—leads to the dis-enchantment of the world; to its reduction down into parts which can be utilized for a narrow, poisonous version of human 'progress' which can only end up destroying the human spirit and the web of life itself: 'The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person … In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open—in the European view—to this sort of insanity.' [...] originated in Europe [...] but it has spread so fast to all continents and cultures over the last half century. It is the triumph of the Emissary, freed from his chains by our unmoored words. How can servant be put back into his place again, if he ever can? Primitivist philosopher John Zerzan’s ongoing explorations of the source of humanity’s 'alienation' from the rest of life led him at one point to the same question which began this essay. [...] Two things detach us fatally from the rest of nature, says Zerzan here. Firstly, our conception of time—of the past and the future, which prevents us from simply existing in the moment. And secondly, language. If this is true—and it sounds convincing to me—what is to be done? What is to be done? As I type that question, as the symbols which represent its meaning appear on the screen before me, I can’t help smiling. It is the kind of question which only the Emissary would ask. It is a left hemisphere question, a subject-object question. 'One two three, Answer!' as Russell Means put it. And the answer to this non-question is, of course: nothing. There is nothing to be 'done' about who and what we are, at least if that means identifying a problem and then fixing it. The notion of identifying 'problems'—of using language as a tool to pin things down, define them, dissect them, and then improve upon them—is fatally flawed. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a state to be dwelt in. To believe anything else is to walk the path toward tyranny; the path we have long been walking, even as we believe we are on a pilgrimage toward liberation. No, there is no 'solution' to the 'problem' of language, any more than there is a 'solution' to the 'problem' of being human. But there are other languages, and other ways of using them. Standardized globalized English, written down and spread throughout the networks, will always serve its Master, the Machine monoculture that is killing Earth. Form defines function. The Machine speaks through our words. Global capitalism has squatted on my native tongue, English, and transformed it into the language of its attendant globalized 'culture', which is not really a culture at all but the product of a world-spanning economic machine intent on erasing all boundaries, borders, and particularities in the name of Earth-eating growth. [...] If this language—and not only this language—has become a tool of control, what kind of language could be a tool to undo it? Another way of framing that question: what languages does the Machine not speak? If the Emissary runs our world, then we all speak his language, because we have all been trained to. It is the language of clarity, dissection, parts and not sums, specialization, dis-enchantment, reason, theoretical rather than practical expertise, technological 'solutions', bureaucracy, abstraction, mechanism. The Emissary will, left unchecked, turn our world into a machine, because he thinks it already is one. In the process, he will turn us into machines too. Linguistically, then, we should all be encouraging the Master to regain power. This means working with the ways of seeing and communicating which Machine culture downplays or ridicules, but which every traditional society before modernity’s advent understood and worked with. That means myth, religion, practical expertise founded upon physical work, rooted imagery, holistic conceptions of life, communication with non-human beings, poetry, complexity, questions that do not have answers, questions which are not questions at all. It means seeing time as a circle, not a line, life as a process, not a puzzle to be solved, death as a part of that life, not an enemy to be defeated. Sometimes—horror of horrors—it means embracing unknowing. It means learning to stop and be silent. It means, in short, upending Machine society’s ways of conceptualizing the world we are part of. Impossible? Well, of course, if you are 'thinking globally', as we are all instructed to. This is no political solution. But then, this is not a political project. It is not work for a bureaucracy, a state, a 'movement'. Think like that, use those words, and you have fallen right back into the pit you just crawled up from. No, this is small, intimate, personal work. It is the work of a life, or several lives. Until you know how to speak, you will have nothing useful to say. Until you understand what kind of weapon your language was designed to be, you will never learn what war the Machine has sent you out to fight, and how you might flee the battlefield for the mountains. On our long journey into the age of ecocide, we forgot how to speak, or even what we should be saying. We certainly forgot how to listen, and what to listen to. Silence beckons, now. Attention must be paid. The Master must be returned from his long exile. Come. Begin.
Kingsworth, P. (8 Mar 2019). 'The Language of the Master' [essay]. Emergence Magazine.
[Language] replaces authentic [experience] with [objectification]. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, “that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,” instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception. What the psychedelics do is they burst apart this cultural envelope of confinement and return us to the legacy and birthright of the organism.
McKenna, T. (n.d.). UNKNOWN SOURCE.