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 The Possessed 2003  WRITE : nonfiction SummaryBefore we can talk about what America doesn't know, we need to tell what America doesn't want to know -- about the great American lies. America has all the freedoms, except for one -- freedom of mind.QuestionsDid you read Prison?NotesAnti-Oedipus Sophocles.05 * 2004 & After  The Possessed 2003
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Again I ask myself: aren't you happy -- the resurrection?! Why not?
We don't like it anymore -- the great long promise and dream...
What do you dream about when you have everything? And how do you enjoy it, the paradise?
What is next? Ask the Romans, returning home after seeing Christians killed by the lions. Good Sunday. Resurrection is very social, political, moral an so on...
Are you happy?
I am not.I. ODE TO MADNESSTo understand isn't normal. There's nothing normal about it. That's why it's not easy. I mean to understand. If I don't understand how my VCR works or why I'm here alive, that's normal. I live in society and I'm forced to understand. Everything I know about life was forced on me -- walk, talk, read, write! Even my natural ability not to understand has to be transformed into learned quality not to understand legitimately -- the stupidity. You see, a cat is innocent in his relations to VCR, he doesn't understand it and doesn't care, cat isn't stupid. I am. I'm expected to understand things, because I'm human. I have this thing -- the conscience. This thing as extra part of my body, a third leg. I have it and I have to use it. Even if I have no need for this extra leg. Very often it's not comfortable at all, it always there, and you have to deal with this leg. It's nice to have something extra. Hey, why not? But then as usual this free thing turns into a sales gimmick. Suddenly they get on your case -- why don't you use your brains, why don't you get more things for your "big thing" -- and before you know, this extra leg becomes the most important part of you. You serve it, work for it, run and roll around it! And they wonder why people kill themselves! What would you prefer to be, a drunk or an idiot to forget about the presence of this "special leg"?
So, the idea is how to use this damn ability to understand things in such a way that you would neutralize it. How to stop the monster? You call it a human life? All right, by teaching me to walk they stopped this madness of possibilities. Who knows, maybe I would swim all my life or something. They taught me to talk, so I can think better. We make use of this thing, when it works it has no time for God knows what could be its "natural" fantasies. So, I got hooked on talking and thinking. Once you learn this stuff, it's like a bike, it always with you till you die. Or some say even beyond it. At first, it feels good to understand, you've got the Thing, it works, nice. That's why we learn so fast while we are children, but then it gets tiring. It's one thing to walk to the fridge to get a beer, but to read Foucault is a different matter. I don't see how two things like that could be compared. You see, by the time of adolescence we make this organ so busy with different things to do, that it is almost neutralized. Although some manage to fall through the cracks of the educational system and get to Foucault. The reason is that they misuse the brains, they become servants of their own minds, instead of being masters. Brains are for me, and not the opposite. If I'm here for my brains it's like life in communist country. Who wants it? I need this extra leg only to walk around the civilized nature to enjoy it. It's in the constitution. By the way, nothing is sad about my right to think. Check it out. I have my right to remain silent, I have rights to free expression and so on, nothing about freedom of mind. It's not constitutionally protected. I have my right to be stupid. The first amendment! That's why we have the National Enquirer in every store. In communism they have no bill of rights and no National Enquirer. Boring, maybe, but stupidity is not legal. Now, let's say you want to express something smart. You can point at the first amendment and say -- I have my right to a free expression, stupid or not! What if it's not stupid, or not so stupid, something like Ted Koppel? Yes, you have the right as long as it LOOKS not stupid but stupid the same. Stupidity which looks clever. Even TV talk shows pretend that there's an "agenda," that there's something more into it. Ted, Rush or David Letterman can't say anything smart because it would be a new thing which nobody could understand, because it's new. It has to be known, a common knowledge, something we all, the public, can relate to. Like "presidential election"! Aha, we know it! We can discuss only thing we know, we can't get into questioning "presidential" or "election" -- because it would be questioning of do we know what we know? So, their discussions are reinforcement, a propaganda of what is known, as advertisement of the known. You see, our ideas are like our celebrities; we like them because we know them. We need to be happy that we know something. Intellectually, the idea of "democracy" is of the same quality as "Michael Jordan." What do I know about him? Nothing. The more they show him, the less I know him. He could be another O.J., whatever this O.J is. We need to talk about elections all the time, because this is how we can prevent ourselves from thinking about "election" idea. We can't stop and think about "Coke is it!" -- what is there to understand? If you start thinking about Michael Jordan, you wouldn't know what to think about. You better think about somebody else you know. Yourself, for one. Hey, that's exactly what the right of free expression is designed to prevent -- not let you get into such dangerous field. Don't even think about it!
I understand why "freedom of mind" never made it into any constitutional documents. How would you put it? That every American has the right to think whatever he wants? Ridiculous. Also, the moment you make freedom of mind into a constitutional right, you institutionalize it, you make it into an obligation to free thinking. You see, it's one story to guarantee a pursuit of happiness, and another -- of mind. My constitutional right to be happy is doable, we can put on Rosanne, and canned laughter, we can work on it. "Right to think"? Oh, boy! We are talking the Supreme Court deliberations. Year 3000.
I don't know what they were thinking about when the prophets wrote about the Resurrection. Didn't they give a thought that all the stupid would be brought back and defend themselves at the Judgement Day? What is this resurrection for? To bring back all the screwed up souls and ask them to explain why are screwed up? What's the point? I refuse to be in line with all the idiots who ever lived. I'm not sure that I would even enjoy the place next to somebody like Dostoevsky or Shakespeare. I have the best of them without resurrection.
In short, it should be anticipated that resurrection would be the times of enormous stupidity. That everyone would have not 15 minutes of the world's attention, but all of it. Did you see it, the world about equality of all men under the US constitution? Here we go. Do you think that 9 to 5 talk show schedule is too much? Get on Internet. Usenet works 24 hours a day -- it's global. After first moments of excitement you want to throw up and exit the wonderful space of resurrection for all. Didn't I tell you that you have no right to be unhappy? That it is illegal to kill yourself or even think about it? Or, you didn't know that the right of happiness would could you freedom? You didn't know that freedom of happiness is even more tragic that freedom of mind? Hello?
Now you understand why you better learn fast how not understand. Better fat than sick. Better red than dead. Better is better than worse. Better is better. Better is good.
II. PRISONER'S FEELINGS
Rule number one:
The more you insist on freedom, the less of it you have. The very idea of freedom gave birth to prisons.My life's path is nothing but a fight for my own freedom. From totally dependent to some independence. They say, only death could be seen as a radical step of liberation. Freedom is this process of liberation. I can produce it but never to possess. Slavery taught me to crave for the free. I never searched for absolute freedom and saw freedom only as an instrument to surrender it to love -- my voluntary submission. Freedom isn't a final goal, but a condition for MY action. This "my" is most mysterious and difficult matter.
Trinity: does God know freedom? See Lucifer's Confessions.
Because of the separate existences of the same -- god is controlled and disciplined entity.Power of God's will is his absolute absence of freedom. Gravity knows no freedom, there are no accidents in first nature. What a discipline we see in chemistry, physics -- no tricks, nothing unpredictable, only the unknown.
My split between inner and outer body has to become absolute: in image and likeness. Alienation is a starting point. Existence of Son (could be seen as Father's simulacra?) makes existence of Father unnecessary? Or does it re-enforce it, secures, guaranties?
Dual life (cybering) dictates my presence, even if I'm about to reject it. Resurrection is absolute denial of will, and my (inner) existence. Isn't that what the Church was asking for always? Or was it Satan? Both were asking for my soul.
Rule number twelve: prison is the highest achievement of civilization. 1.6 million prisoners in USA 1996.
Inquisition, KGB, thought and feeling police, they can't disappear because they are our social inventions, our masterpieces of social ingenuity. They only could be reformed, i.e. perfected. Do we need concentration camps when we have television? We don't have death camp industry because we have entertainment industry. Social institutions (slavery, manufacturing, you name it) have never been abolished but transformed.
We treat history as a journey from one point to the next, without a clear understanding that our arrival is never a departure. Negation is an inclusion, the most powerful and radical acceptance when an idea becomes a tradition, a "natural" law of our nature, and doesn't need reinforcement. The invisible rulers, according to Tao, are the most powerful.
Airplane is flying not because of a violation of gravity but as an intellectual acceptance of the law, acceptance to a greater degree than before (technology). Establishing (or dismantling) the affirmative action is a recognition of the power of racial division with radicalism the former segregation couldn't afford. Even the future melted races into one wouldn't overcome race but would transfer it inside each of us. In resurrection world (kingdom of cosmic power of humanity) forgetting is remembering. Resurrection is mad archeology when the past becomes my present, and even my future.[1] This notion of "understanding" is very misleading. Understanding is far from being innocent, it's an aggression, an invasion into what is not mine. The labor of discovering should tell us that we are not welcome, that we violate the borders of our present, the real. Our so-called natural curiosity is no less insistent than of light or time, moving on without even a shadow of motivation. Mind (soul) has this "natural" tendency to occupy anything and everything it could. What could censor it? Us. We try. Stupidity isn't natural, but a trained quality, that is what a society is for -- not only to educate but to limit our ability to understand. Knowledge is the best defense against questioning. That's why we need so much of it -- informational revolution. This war can't be won. Knowledge is never complete, no matter how much we "cover" (discover) the world with "knowing," we create more to discover. We don't run away from as mystery (Einstein), we are the producer of it. The triumph of "critical" or scientific mind brought more uncertainty about the world than primitive mind of barbarians. Our world is less understandable than that of Plato. Our progress makes it more confusing and impossible to understand. A paradox?
Life is a paradox and we are the essence of being alive, we have to produce nothing but paradoxes.
Prison is a monastery without God.
Rule number twenty one: Don't be so sensitive.
We need it, the tabloid feelings. Why do commercials insist on seeing life as happiness? Why do we need an ideology of the positive? Why do we have to lie to ourselves? Maybe, because we are unhappy? Because we know it and need to be convinced to live. What if mankind stopped pretending and committed suicide? What about Last Judgement? What about life which would be left in its innocent mortality? What about the universe left without being seen? What about the prison itself?
Life isn't a simulacra, it's a lie. And therefore -- simulacra.
Rule number twenty five: be positive if you want to survive the prison. Enjoy your prison!
US prisons are correction facilities, to teach you how to be a good prisoner. There were 250 millions of them outside, on probation for good behavior.
Freedom means war.
We teach peace.
This is one issue which separates mankind in two -- the classes, Marx said. Masters and slaves, said the Greeks. Maybe, dead and alive? Alive are the ones who are sentenced to death, the free ones.Search for freedom ends in death.
How ironic that Alexis de Tocqueville came to study the prison system in America. It took a century and a half for another Frenchman to write about that system. His name is Foucault, and the name of the prison system in America is democracy. They should know what they are talking about -- America is a child of French political philosophizing. Maybe that's why they look down on America and Americans. The Statue of Liberty is not a gift, but a give-away. Political kitsch for primitive politics of uneducated street vendors -- take it, use it, it's simple. And, would you believe it, monseigneur, they, Americans, love it. This popular culture of mind made them a success story in the mass time history. The matter of a good taste isn't a simple matter.
III. REAL NOTHING
What do we do now, my friend?
In my handwritten diaries I resort to the same advice to myself -- accept it. Admit it all. The body and an absence of real, sense of uniqueness and swings of identity. Say yes if you wish continue your travel, and not to stop to concentrate on torturing yourself.
It's hard to accept life. Especially, the resurrected one.
The little things, the details are the hardest, the most painful. Much easier to agree with the concept -- Oh yeah, sure, why not, let it be resurrection, neat, cool, fine.
I suspect that my problem is something I should be ashamed of -- I need to be taught that indeed this is the Age of Resurrection. I behave as if I need to learn it in school. It's not the same when you teach yourself.Second, I don't understand why I'm not happy that I'm "nothing." Why don't I see it as good news? Who or what prevents me from the discovery of the real world as it was in my childhood, when grass was green, and it was grass? It had smell and taste, was touchable, and there was a lot of it. The world was a real seduction, it was big, endless, with geography and history, with great books to read, and it was a true promise, the one you believe.
I don't want to return, I don't want to be a child again, but I want this world of my childhood back. Let it go,I whisper to myself. Let it be. I only could dream of my dreams. I'm in between, me and the world. Of course, there's the simulacra of the world as well. It's summer, August, the grass is outside, I can walk out and have it... Only if I can get to that one "me" who can touch, smell, taste. But he is in a coma. From time to time he would come to life, and life come back to me, but he has no place in the world I live in. I have no time for him, our friendship dried out. He is too silly to stay through all the meetings my-selves having everyday. We are busy and he is not.
There are a lot of characters occupying this space "me" -- I wish I could get rid of them, but they are coming back, they always represent something important and urgent, they command, demand, they run the show. I'm like an old king in big kingdom, with too many things to do which have nothing to do with me.
Thus Spoke Nietzsche:
Love thy neighbors is wonderful, since we then have nothing to do about ourselves; but when it is a question of "love thy neighbour as thyself" we are no longer so sure, for we think it would be egoism to love ourselves. There was no need to preach "love thyself" to people in olden times, because they did so as a matter of course. But how is it nowadays? It would do us good to take this thing somewhat to heart, especially the phrase "as thyself." How can I love my neighbour if I do not love myself? How can we be altruistic if we do not treat ourselves decently?[2]I'm my neighbor and whole my life I try to learn how to love myself. In fact, I made a truce with myself only when I learned to love the Other -- woman. To love thyself is the most difficult task in the world. Let me confess, I don't think it is possible. Actually, if a civilization is good for anything it is to teach you how to love yourself. You don't seriously think that a dog loves itself. Or a tree grows because it has fallen in "love" with itself. A newborn loves nothing.
[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.[3]
My personal will to power and the combined will of humanity do clash; we both are in the same time and space -- there's no solution for our conflict and immanent war.
I'm not about to fight any ideology as I do not fight a natural disaster. I'm studying it to survive it. Leave it behind, forget about, indifference -- that's how ideology loses it powers.
Dissemination of knowledge is against origination of knowledge? SECRECY of knowledge, isolation, concentration is needed for anything original to be born.
IV. CONFESSIONS OF A LIVING SOUL
Post-POMO Monologues:
It's coming! The universal theory of fields waited for Einstein to include himself into the big picture of cosmogony. The missing link in new physics was us, the "human field." [The coming attraction of 1996 is a marriage between computer and TV set? (Telephone is included)] What next? What a speed of "collapsing together" of first and second nature. (What does it look like, the reverse nuclear explosion? That's progress. Creation of matter.) We can't wait to get into everything and make everything ours.
POMO: new pre-history
Vertical world is ahead! Not two classes but two types.
Predators against the rest, the prey. People are the new nature. You live on them the way at the beginning of time (before time and history) we did it with animal kingdom. Human kingdom? Hunting and gathering. Harvest them. Domestication (we educate them). It's not a hard war, it's a soft life, military existence. Life is cheap? Life is free...
I don't belong to any party and there's no "family" anymore. It's just me and the rest. I'm not against the forest but I have to be up, aware, on guard; there're many like me over there. You're for one. And you're fine till we don't cross each other's path. We could be even partners in big game. Not friends, just collaborators. Business, you know.
The thoughts:
So many people and shadows of them. Voices, pictures. It's abnormal for paradise and normal for hell? Everything that is right in paradise, is wrong in hell. Whatever is right in hell, is wrong for paradise.
In paradise everything makes sense, in hell -- nothing. Paradise and hell have no borders.
Nothing new about us, the masses, except we got right to speak.[It's not a book, it's an event. My own, at least. My last chance to hang around history.]
Brutality from God's hands isn't acceptable anymore, only from invisible man-made things, technology. Accident? Death on the road, at the hospital. Nobody's guilty.
If life is a miracle, there could be no reconciliation in my conscience. We can't accept a miracle as a norm. That's why we don't notice them anymore. And the biggest of all -- ourselves.
From "Dialogues With Myself":
-Reproductive cycle must be controlled? In majority cases -- to be stopped all together. More gays or lesbians! Sex is a weapon in this war against procreation.
1. NEW (SUPER) FEELINGS
Crying is a wrong thing to do in America. Land of no pity? No, simply a common sense. Why would you cry in Paradise where everything has a happy end?
There's no privacy in Paradise; Adam and Eve is the story of the first defectors from communism.
Communism is a necessity: human *purification* is a condition of resurrection.
Death itself has to be renewed -- free (will) death (by choice). Death as an act of my will, a decision.
All religions are our Want, our Will. We didn't guess the future, we made it possible.
After the resurrection? The resurrection is "the after" -- we create the world (eternity), to eliminate death (and therefore have to kill future, ie. time. How insulting is the very idea of resurrection. You thought that to be born is a brutal force! They know what is better for you! Sure, what do I know.
Internet as a collective conscience, AN ORGANISM? I only can be with the other when I break away from the others.
Do I need more nets and webs?
Integration?
More division, more separation.Clone = independent copy. Copy with the rights of the living. Life copy (the double in past mythology), live picture of life.
My problems with historical resurrection of Christ and Lazarus: not imaginative, not detailed -- it's not OUR resurrection, all the nature isn't involved. Private miracles, local. Nobody in China noticed it. I thought that Christ was risen because of love (others). Isn't that the case with Lazarus? Maybe love can't save from dying but could bring loved one from the dead?
Tele-phone, tele-vision = far vision. Distant presence. Remote viewing? (Almost tele-pathic?) The weapon in pm civil war -- cold war. Not bodies but souls are judged and destroyed at resurrection. Consumer? Paradise -- parasite culture!
Shame on you! Next to Stalin and Hitler your response (ideas) isn't radical enough. In proportion = natural disasters.
Don't waste yourself; know what you should know. Death? Leave it to the unknown. Them -- leave dead to the dead.
Interesting how many traditional topics and issues (of metaphysics) have no interest for me.
2. ABOUT NON-BEING
Notes After My Death and Feelings of the Dead
Since we have arrived at angelic world of virtual reality, it's time to talk about the world beyond it: God's Being. The Nothing, the Non-Being. The Resurrection Age brings us closer to our original home -- the place of no space, time or matter, where thought is a being, where I'm not disturbed by living.
Life taught me to value the absence of life. And what a ride it was! What a shock. And everything that followed the birth, with stages of learning to live. Doesn't it tell you how un-natural life is ? And how my mind was used to explain unexplainable. Reflect, justify! So many words, so much talking. Anything to confirm that life is a gift, the best, the only thing. This war, this ideology of living is an insult to my brains. And all this during the times of so-called postmodernism!
Life is an endless journey of excuses. Everything is a problem, obstacles are everywhere. So-called laws of nature. What nature? This gravity! What does this law have to do with me? With my body -- yes. Soul knows no physical laws (?). POMO human (proto-human) got so tired of trying to reconcile soul with life that they decided not to mention soul anymore. It was left to religions, not physics, or at least, philosophy.
Russia is my shame. Maybe because that's the place where it's so obvious that my life is a shame. Not a guilt but a shame.
What else could life be? Soul compromised by physical presence.
I reject even an idea of life. Is there anything in life which is absolute? I'm not sorry that I lived, but I'm happy to think that my life will be over -- back home. The place where my mind belongs to -- non-being. That's the source of life with (real) freedom.
Life is unclean. Full of experiences which I'm sure why they're there for me in the first place. Never mind the quality of feelings, I understand why to live is a sin. Forget the "social" aspect, the attributes of life are so primitive -- the birth, body, aging, death. The arrogance, as if nothing better, as if life is a value in itself.
The presence -- that alone makes me crazy. This "being" when you have to do something all the time, when you have to take care of "your" body.[4]
This "being" itself -- human or not -- was very tiresome.
Oh, the joys of life! Only lack of imagination can make you forget how stupid they are. To lose your mind, the only source of sanity and freedom left for you. Once you accept life, you are gone, you're stuck. You'll be dragged through those multiple experiences trying to make sense out of nonsense.
So much was said about being a human, without stating a simple fact that human is outside of life. Anti-life, something else besides life. I understand animal's will to live, a child's, but Christ's crying the night before? What was he crying about? While you live you're never sure that you're human. Life makes you into an animal, lowers you into emotions of a plant.
The things I liked about life all were on the border -- art, thinking; the useless activities.
Life, especially, human life, is an extreme of being. You're not only there but also you're aware of that fact. What can we do with it? Nothing. Just remember that you don't belong there. We are so busy with living, we forget who we are.
Look at our basic definitions -- "human being," which is a contradiction in terms. Humans are not beings. All right, "being" could be human, but this is the end of "being" -- a borderline. You know what our problem is? We think that non-being is non-existence. Strange. After existentialism we should know better -- now with VR it's time to learn that things could exist without "being" (?). The opposite is true as well. In a way the new French is a ridiculous discovery of the obvious. Disappearance of reality, simulacra. What were Kant's thoughts or Mozart's music? The phantoms. Are they real? More real than a potato. Technology proved that a potato could reach the status of an idea, or image. Big deal! What's new? It always was this way -- what about literature, language? We have to manufacture TV sets to bring German idealism to cowboys; now they know about Plato. Kind of.
Nothing exists. Relax. Non-being is nicer. Death has nothing to do with it. It's a part of life, the best life could offer -- a release. It's not comfortable, but what is comfortable in life? All life's pleasures are nothing but work.
I can make peace with life, and death is my guarantor. Hurray for a mortality. Eternity awaits for me beyond life, why should I desire of immortality? Believe in Nothing if you have to believe in something.
Don't you love life?
What else do you know besides life?
What is better?
Learn how to take it, to enjoy the rape.They were right in silencing me, the state had obligations to protect life, the people and their happiness.
If life is a accident (miracle, they say), I am an accident of accident.
New commandment (or amendment): Shall not speak!
How to make this law into an order? Let all speak all the time. Mind and books are silent.
[ no notes ]
[ my shows (some) : Glass Menagerie * Reckless * Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? * 3 Sisters * HamletDreams * Dangerous Liaisons * Shrew * The Possessed * Oedipus05 ]
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