Foundations of Chess

Contained with a flow that breaks into chaos is all starting variables of that chaos. Every point in a linear flow continues on until outward dynamics turn the linear ordering of those points into something less so - the Reynolds Number in a literal flow, such as water or smoke. The original uniformity exists in anything which moves forward as a chain of deliberately sparked chaos. Games of billiards work by a cueball striking the balls arranged in an ordered pyramid, the micro-scale variables of individual inconsistencies and flaws in all the variables involved turning each game wholly novel. A game of cards has the deck shuffled before beginning, turning the drawing of cards into a slow revelation of the same sort of chaos struck onto with the billiard balls. In chess, the pieces are arranged in a courtly manner, with the largely predictable moves exponentially increasing the difference from the original parade-order of arrangement, until the true state of “war” has settled over in the mid-game.

It’s the manipulation of this chaos that holds all these games together. Each piece has a set of potential motions and trajectories which can be drawn from it via the various which the game has determined the pieces can move, the ultimate accumulation of which and the chain-reactions of their interactions with each other, makes the whole of the equation to be manipulated by the players in order to achieve victory. Billiards shows it most obviously, with the balls operating on literally textbook examples of cause-effect w/r/t laws of motion. But the others have the same. Card players attempt to control or predict the flow of the deck as it unfolds its chaos into their hands. In chess, the players are situated within frozen motions and allowed to attempt to direct their pieces in a proper directions such that the motion of the game is towards their benefit.

In zugzwang, this relation between chess and the chaotic mathematics of flows is realized. When the master traps their opponent in zugzwang, they’ve demonstrated a total control over the motion and status of all points in the game. They’ve fully redirected all possible trajectories such that any of them would benefit them. They’ve created a position which is, for them, antifragile, in the same way that certain financial instruments, with the opponent trapped in a subtle bind where they must find a way to make the least impactful movement in order to disturb (and thus feed) the system in the least amount possible.

The ultimate goal of all this manipulation is control of space. At the base of chess is go. As the game progresses, one player begins to gain more control of the board’s space by the threat of their movement, that movement guaranteed freedom via pseudo-ownership. The losing player loses via constriction, unable to defend against the maneuverings of the opponent, they find themselves constricted further and further until the center of their ranks is enclosed upon, until a state is reached where the King is completely entrapped within territory held by the other. The King dies automatically, not directly taken, but annihilated, its existence as a vertical signifier no longer abided by under the control of the other.

It’s this notion of territory and signifier that develops upon the go-foundation at the core of chess. Taking from go the two sides perpendicularly opposed by binary opposition, chess develops this further, turning the two sides into royal orders of their own, a court contained in the pieces like the face cards of chess. The player of black sees their opposite, themselves as the empty night snuffing out imposing day, the player of white sees their opposite, themselves as blank paper washing out staining ink. In further comparison to Go, the drawing of territories is this, the making-clear of these boundary lines, turning the board into a space of divisions, a presence and absence experienced as an opposite schema by each player.

These colors draw linkage to other opposing “teams” in games, notably with the court symbolism of the chess set, that of various forms of game-cards, tarot or playing. A spiraling into the center, to the innermost core of the suit. The chess team is based on the kingly center, as the suit is on the ace. Suits are divided along the same fundamental opposition as chess, white and black, spade and heart opposing as diamond and club do, or, sword and chalice, as baton and pentacle. These make up the corpus of the self in chess, with those of the other being the counter-self, the adversary. Chess is fully Hobbesian in this way, imagining the nation and the body as not only being like each other, but being made up fo the same fundamental composition, the organs composing a body to create its drives making up the humans, those humans composing organs of the nation. In all cases, there must be a superior intellect ruling, the Leviathan or the Ego. Chess in this way, is a form of Cartesian dueling, two bodies locked in combat, their “souls” fully removed from the body.

Subtle Growths

From the schizophrenia of the third reich, there came an entity, sublime beneath the feet of any participating in the orgiastic war machine of the nazi party’s twelve year seizure of government. The mess of competing ideologies, social groups, class interests, almost everything floating in the primordial soup of Weimar Germany, all that came together to flow along the orbits of the hollow vessel, Adolf Hitler, combined down into the structure of the Reich and in doing so, grew extensions of the Reich, its actions and organizational policies driven by the momentum of energy poured into it and its form dictated by the particularities of the mass that built it. It’s from this that the Schutzstaffel was born. Tellingly an agency originally created to protect Hitler himself, it upstaged and eventually purged the old martial organization of the Sturmabteilung, its 19th century ethos of thuggish brutality and homoerotic masculinity recognized by the Darwinian intellect of historical motion as out of date, to be purged in the Night of the Long Knives. No longer, would Hitler be guarded by a martial stability constructed around him, such a thing relies on the older notions already outstaged, of the nature of power, both in the organizations surrounding it and the importance of a single man, as Hitler. Hitler became Der Führer then, no longer the Napoleonic genius, but the middle-manager of powers far larger than he could comprehend from his station. Rather, the Schutzstaffel morphed into being the organizational template of power going forward. As a nation was constructed from the chaos of the era, from industrial technology, from mass-communication, new ways of power were constructed in line with it.

By 1944, the Schutzstaffel had become a bacterial undergrowth within every avenue of power in the Reich. The organization had attached itself as the auxiliaries or parallels to every function of governance, in ensuring the total domination of the Nazi Party’s organization-technologies over all things. It did so by becoming bacterial, a substance inscrutable at the level of individual persons, but one that flowed through, latched itself onto, or replicated and replaced existing structures and in doing so, Nazified those structures. It’s this that Allen Dulles saw such potential in, during his mid-war jaunts off to Switzerland, holding court in Zürich, where he unsuccessfully attempted to broker a peace deal with Heinrich Himmler. In Himmler he saw, though never met (and perhaps would have had his illusions shattered, had he ever) a man of his own volition, a man who saw this form of power and desired to build it, to make it operate for one’s own idea of the proper functioning of things.

Dulles brought the idea back and found instant success. Truman made a statement in 1964 regarding the outgrowth and metastization of the CIA since its chartering after the war from its primitive early editions, the OSS and etc. In this statement, he recognized the state of things that had transpired, the entire nation now effected by an organism more akin to a bacterial growth than any vertical form of power. One year earlier, the power of this organization made itself clear. Attempting to steer the nation away from its codependent horn-lock with the Soviet Union, John F. Kennedy found himself targeted and removed by the machinery of this organism as it moved on its own, rejecting the attempt to change its host to a being less beneficial. 

When the Soviet Union was morphing into a new form of nation, its internal factions set to work warring against each other for the future of the nation. In a split that appears again in Metal Gear Solid 3, the KGB and GRU represent these factions, the former being the party leaders desiring a more global nation and the latter being the nationalist militarists. Regardless of the truth of this to the larger history of the Soviet Union, in it is a truth about the way in which these organizations function. Just as the CIA emerged from the cauldron of Dulles’ political location, the blue blooded WASPs of the Ivy League, just as the SS emerged from Nazism, these all emerge not as neutral hangers-on to power, but as their own organisms. This results in the situation seen then, where multiple of these organisms spawn in order to be an emanation of conflicts internal to the system, now made more and more explicit via their fighting-forces. The combat of these organisms, as can be seen in the 1990s wars over Russia’s future, or the CIA using Snowden as a blow against the NSA, provides a key by which to read the underground currents of conflict, those often not even explicit to the ones supposedly at the center of them.

National DNA

At the genetic level of White Africa, there is apartheid. Leftist race theorists have performed endless whining over the problems of micro-level recreations of larger power structures, microaggressions, unconscious bias, cultural appropriation, etc. All of these are absolutely correct. At the foundational level of each person in a caste society, that caste recreates itself in the ontology of their personhood and in turn, in the patterns of being they’re taught to perform at the structural level of their minds, creating their personhood in the form of the ontology decided by their caste. It’s from this basic pattern of being, inscribed as the ideal into their most unconscious assumptions of becoming regarding identity, that all the recreations of larger social systems occur, where systemic categories turn into individual biases, where judicial orders turn into ideological assumptions.

White Africa has faced its travails over the past decades as they attempt to exorcise this very heritage from their bodies. The modern nations of Africa still abide by the colonial borders cast originally, the nations with a large settler population still overrun with white ownership of much of their wealth. Attempting to undo this, reclaiming their homeland for their own rule, the black revolutionaries have cast these nations into dissolution, as is the case in the various Congo states and what remains of Rhodesia. These nations were nations founded from their very borders, from the most base-level mentalities of their subjects, from their very languages, as colonial projects and in order to undo this colonialism, the entire nation must be destroyed. Any nation which doesn’t go through this self-destruction to then rebuild from the ground-up is doomed to forever recreate the structures of older rule, as South Africa is gradually realizing, with the Zimbabwe-style communists beginning to rise up in slow realization.

This points to the structure of society being far deeper than can be ever done away with by mere shifting of those holding the reigns of power. It’s taken remarkably few generations for Maoist thought to be completely forgotten in favor of older Confucian centralist doctrines, as the territory remained consistent and the capital remained in Bejing palaces. The central imperial order reasserted itself, the people and structures having the DNA seed-material which would recreate that order. Within the territory’s boundaries, the culture, the people themselves, is inscribed via the overall flow of the greater nation, the processes which recreate the nation after catastrophe.

Overwriting or modifying these basic levels always requires incredible catastrophe, to replace some of the existant and replace it with a new. The nation of the thirteen colonies was destroyed and replaced with the nation known today by the destruction of the native peoples to the west. Bosnia became muslim by Ottomon invasion and overcoding, remaking the nation into a new form. It’s for this reason that an alien ideology must be imposed, that of the once invisible populations or foreign marxist ideologies, in order to attempt to undo the genealogical level in which the nation of the caste system is overthrown. Americans have since the beginning of their nation, due to their democratic delusions, been engaged in an attempt to undo this since the beginning of the nation’s history. With the society built at the DNA level, it must either be destroyed, in full or part, and replaced, or no change will ever come, as has happened since the 1960s, where the formal end of southern Jim Crow has done little to replace the racial caste system of the United States.

The Electric Trance

The time signature is drawn as an axiom and in the empty space of the notation’s lines, the beats come into being as the sequence passes over their places. None before, one after, one before, two after, two before three after, each of these silences between pulses determine the order of the next one, arranging things as pulses of activity between the emptiness between them. Play two of a beat and the third is anticipated without being played, filled in automatically by the relationship predetermined. “Keeping the beat” of the music is keeping to the sequential script of the music, anticipating as the song does, fulfilling the premade way of the piece.

The time signature in this way forms the piece’s foundation. As the initial imposition upon the empty silence, it forms the pattern by which the rest of the song follows. All rhythmic patterns upon it take the form of its boundaries, following where it is and isn’t as their guide for where they are and aren’t. Just as the rhythm has this relationship to the beat below it, the rhythm of bodies is the same, making their steps in response to the pulses of the beat. The waltz occurs on a three beat stepping, the march on two, the rhythm built atop, rolling like the tassels dangling off the dress uniforms and ballgowns of the revelers. Music flows by this pattern, by these steps, pulses that determine the outer borders along which the flow travels.

The beat thumps on like the regular pulse of machines, driving the Marxian base underneath the blooming flowers of dance and rhythm, the superstructure. No wonder then, that those who truly comprehended the immense power of art in religious music criticism were so desperate to rid music of the base, making pure cathedrals without laborers, forbidding instruments, scouring away drumming, hoping to create a music solely made of chants raising higher and higher to heaven. The beat has always had this allure, the allure of the real. Its hypnotic properties are like those of various natural plants which drive the user to ecstasies, pounded drumming inspiring ecstatic states by its primal allure, the call of the starving wilderness to the mind civilized by city or tribe or village.

In the 1960s, when ecstatic states were rediscovered by the west, one of the methods of introduction was the practice of acid tests, where ballroom concerts were given with LSD-spiked beverages, locking the revelers into a night of intoxication beneath both the drug and the blues-rock played by the band. It’s from this scene that the Dionysian forms of psychedelic music emerged, the long drunken rambles across blues rock rhythms alongside the Apollonian aspect of elaborate studio production and orchestral pomp, the balance of which informs classics of the era. From the same dark corners of the deep state that birthed the psychedelic revolution however, comes the electronic experimentations in the 1970s which led to the development of electronic music and thusly to music which left behind the eroticism of psychedelic rock. The flow of music has its primal level at the beat, but then grows into higher forms of linguistic layering in rhythm and ornamentation, the same as the unconscious libido is translated into being desire through eroticism. Electronic music developed in one strand as a way to undo this, to make a form of music of pure primitive trance, MDMA replacing LSD.

It’s this ecstasy which is the purpose of beat-centric music, made to be played in inducing spells and trances over mass crowds of listeners. Music made to dissolve, music made to hypnotize like poison, turning the crowd from a group of individuals to a melted mass of flesh, returning to animal thrills. This has been modulated in degrees as well, with modern iterations developing low key versions of the same, trance states induced to “chill, relax/study to”. The trances induced in all these cases is the end of this form of music, music electronically regulated to produce a trance along the pulsing regularity of the beat.

Reading Heaven

Above the linear time of the present, that moment of intersection between and including causation and reaction, a second cyclical time sits, like a platonic realm of unfolding, above and over all events taking place in the lower happenings. Again and again, mystics look up to the clouds and see the heavens unfurled, revealing the events of the sacred history taking place before their eyes in personalized hallucination. Art from around the world tends to depict the sacred through the lens of its readers. Jesus becomes Italian, Buddha becomes Chinese, illuminated manuscripts depict the apostles wandering about a Jerusalem modeled more after 11th century Paris than anywhere in the Near East.

Like an ideal informs the platonic object, this eternal scriptural text informs the texts produced locally in response to it. Each reader of the sacred history takes the history upon themselves uniquely, becoming from the higher object as it descends from heaven onto them. This descent occurs via forms, mapping onto the material content of the circumstances of the reader, the forms cause the sacred to be taken up locally and without direct reference to that which originated it. Such is the of the mythic narratives proposed by Campbell, Jung, etc. The narrative is already fully decided, the hero knows what will happen, in what order, where it begins, middles, and ends, because the temporal unfolding of this narrative is something which only occurs in the momentary reception of it. The form of the narrative is eternal and in all directions looking upon the encapsulated events of the journey, it was unfolding fully predicted as well. Such generates the cyclicality of myths, the mandala form. As this form is closed and eternal, it can only be a circle, a map with no true beginning or end, but a pattern that descends downwards, influencing those who look to the heavens for guidance. 

These heavens don’t form from nothing, nor do they have a single author. The textual history that led to the creation of what we know as the Hebrew bible is a history of accumulation, redaction, compilation, etc, and the same story holds true for the Christian bible. These texts formed as complete wholes at the end of long histories until the people who needed them as their mythic text came into full being. Christianity was birthed in its modern form along with its bible around the 4th century, just as the second Babylonian exile finally made what was once a splinter of Canaan into what we know today as the Jews. These myths emerge as emanations of the collective unconscious of the culture, the commonalities of all the creativities and dreams of the people as a mass, coming into being when all of these merge into one writing, as they merge into one entity. Legends and tales are birthed in the same way, vague ideas emanating from some collective imagination, added and redacted by their passing through minds of various people. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas players remember the countless tales of what lies in the liminal spaces of the game’s world, the map deliberately designed as a maze to create an illusion of space inspiring countless speculation. The backrooms has emerged in online lore as an expression of patterns of life in modern infrastructure, an extrapolation upon all the unspoken ideas of the spaces inhabited in day to day life.

It’s these creations from the collective mind that are channeled by those engaging in shamanic explorations. The spit-off dreams and hallucinations are taken within the mind of the shaman, who returns it to the culture in artistic form. It’s this action which forms the backbone of reading’s relationship to writing, of interpretation’s relationship to creation. Even in modern cultures, all artists must engage in this in some way. A film set in a house requires some concept of the house in order to work, the composition of this house being, even if unconscious, a channeling of cultural ideas left floating, forms of heaven reinterpreted downwards by the writer. Vaporwave artists regurgitate commercial products in this way, taking the abstractions and forms of the material they work with and turning it into new productions spun off these forms and nothing greater. It’s this action which makes the general way of reading into writing that begets artistic evolutions forward, as the context of artistic production shifts. This codependent relationship of culture channeled into the next generation of culture is the eternal accumulation that has formed cultural history in interlocking layers that can be peeled back all the way to the beginning of time.

On Astral Companions

This is an issue to consider in sexual terms. When dealing with entities, the interaction between the two always is an interaction of give/take, of presence and absence, yin and yang. Such is the reason behind daoist gender divisions being as they are, with the genders being formed at a conceptual level by their interactions with each other, the receiver and the giver, female and male. From this, when considering a relationship of two, the individual and their spiritual companion, the relationship is one of the same, in the terms of gender and sexuality from a foundational level. This is not to say these are immutable or mutually exclusive across different times/events, but rather that these are the beings inhabited when performing one or the other side of any relationship.

In Ps 91:11-12, the purpose of angels is written as being guardians and assistants along a journey, helpers sent from on high in order to bring one smoothly along whatever path they follow in the course of their life. Life here imagined as a path, with the attendant obstacles and difficulties a linear journey entails, has its way temporal way smoothed out by the higher intelligence guiding subject along it. This guiding function appears again and again in holy instructions, guardian angels or patron saints are sought after in order to bring one through the travails of life’s path. For the soul, such fulfills the function of providing a narrative. Women, as emptiness, are narrative in itself, the labyrinthine passages the soul wanders in, searching for the sublime core. These guardians, in being feminine if not female, perform this same function, inspiring love in order to lead one along inside them. Love being the core guiding-force behind all of this is the essential way in which the feminine spirit-guardian works, inspiring the single force of attraction deeper within her in order to be led to her ends. Such appears as well in less traditional spirit guardians. Succubi and tulpae appear as manifestations of love, a more romantic desire, in the same way that the sublime maiden in the castle functions, the woman from whom the narrative blooms. It’s often said that the goal of these entities is sucking-away, vampirism. While this demonstrates their form, it remains ignorant to their true nature, moralizing one into nothingness and remaining blind to the same function elsewhere. The woman here is always sublime, herself being empty as all women are, “the journey as the destination” holding true to the benefits conferred by moving within her.

In her “Master” letters, Emily Dickinson writes of filling, of being within, of accepting and receiving a love great and terrible. She speaks of vessels filled to breaking point and of offering herself, exclusive right of passage within herself to the subject of the letters. Just as presence is pulling, desiring for an absence in which to insert itself, absence is yearning, desiring for a presence to fill it, a sucking force as opposed to a seeking force. Mishima desired for the ecstasy of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom, his hollowness pierced and filled with the anonymous force of the crowd as they slung their arrows into his form. He looks towards the sky in ecstasy, made complete by the pain of fulfillment. While the guardians yang are just that, guardians, advisors, helpers, an emptiness bringing-along, those of the yin are husbands, leaders, fathers. Only a virgin is capable of vibrating on the frequencies of a unicorn, a spectral creature yet to be made-real by interaction with the brute physicality of the sexual experience. The function of the present is providing that which is missing, the orienting force of a hollow being, an opaque signifier to fill the dark void at the center of orbit, around which the chaos of emptiness can be whirled.

Against both of these is a fear, a fear at the core of the composition of the individuals in question. For the male, the fear is isolation, his soul like a rock, a core at his deepest layer left to rot, decaying without contact, without direction, stagnant until it becomes ash. For the female, the fear is disintegration, no axial center of orientation leading to a scattering, like dust left over and blown away, lost to tidal currents of the endless nothing. The desire for these companions is a desire for the missing piece, that which is left empty in the need of their being to become something greater than the mere consciousness it was born as - the something that will facilitate creation of the ego. Succubus lore speaks of becoming like the devil-woman more as the relationship progresses, a woman takes her husband’s last name. The companion completes what was hollow and the two unify, forming the immortal being at the end of alchymical marriage.

Leviathan Flexes

The entity is positioned in a place of tension, standing still and firm against its resting state. The machines to which its a part and a result churn desperately, counteracting forces against it from every direction in order to keep the order of its stability. Crucifixion kills in this way, enforcing a state of tension on the body until the engines of power can longer handle the immense strain of attempting to keep things as they are, giving out and causing suffocation when the pectoral muscles can no longer even make the minimal movements of respiration.

A dam strains under the enormous pressure of the water it holds back. The dam acts, in its stationary position, as a force, a vertical construction disallowing the natural course of things from taking place, preventing water from following its natural course. This strength is reliant upon continual processes of upkeep, where the dam is forcibly made to be in stasis, in the state it was at its strongest point, the moment of conception. Invisibly, energy is pushed into it, construction and material costs sunk again and again into the dam like engines burning away on a tensed muscle. Should this ever falter, the natural flow of things will prevail against the vertical arrogance of the concrete structure and burst through, flooding the valley before it.

At the peak of societal wealth, a moment is achieved, subtly without any possibility of knowledge about its passing, where the society reaches the closest it will come to its ideal form, that image of perfection it was always moving towards. This form, existing over and above the real as a spectral goal, a target of societal motion, is just barely missed from being kissed, like the fingers of God and Adam, in this subtle moment of the peak. The ideal form promises stability, an Arcadia of harmonic unity of all things in their proper order, suffering eliminated by perfect and timeless functioning of the orders of the society. All the wealth of the society on a political level moves towards this spiritual state imagined collectively, the orders being maintained by the constant motion of wheels driving onwards to an unreachable perfection. Such is the tension of any stability which does exist. The economic wheels spinning towards the goal, their axels are stationary, generating energy to counteract the forces of time and decay that would prevent the order which does exist from being fractured. Food remains on the shelves, crime remains low, people live comfortably and can make an existence of relative stability. Without these engines powering this tension, the whole of it would burst open, chaos flooding through as natural ends complete themselves in disintegration.

The Hobbesian account of power-creation is one of self-limiting. The natural appetites of all people being to consume endlessly, to take the whole of existence, the Leviathan is generated from a collective castration, a figurehead to which all their powers of expansion are halted and sublimated into. From this point of entry, society blooms, the corpus of the nation under the head of the king on the frontispiece. Their drives being now given a social machine to input into, the energies once devoted to personal ends are now made to spin on the generating treadmills of the Leviathan.

It is these energies which are the foundational meat of civilization. Bodies sacrifice themselves for unnatural machines in a collective sublimation in order to continue the momentary stability Leviathan offers when it's well fed. When this is broken, when excess energies are left to wander the barren wastes without structure, then, as a dam bursting from the natural course of things being now stronger than the temporary verticality holding it back, the natural ends of the body, the infinite motion of desire, takes hold and shatters the stability, coursing through to flood the valley below.

The Geology of History

Before the dam burst open and Europe was cleft along its equator, the divisions of the protestant reformation slowly formed over the course of centuries as one ruling power enriched itself against the monopoly of Rome. After the decline of the original pan-occidental empire, the Roman Church took the throne and declared itself the superriding authority over all things. The Empire continued by becoming the state, allowing the various kingdoms to exist under it so long as they declared allegiance to its centralized power, allowing free travel, monastic ownership, and ultimate ideological conformity to the papal will. Below this, independent power developed by the gradual enrichment of the secular kingdoms, who eventually began to declare their sovereignty. These new secular authorities declared their side when the secret war split open and allegiances were openly declared, thus splitting Europe between protestant and catholic.

The same process occurred in Rome itself. The senate, the scattered gentry was upstaged violently by the growing power of the military when Caesar crossed the rubicon and declared the Empire, thus instituting the new ruling faction. A tension deeply embedded became explicit at this point, one faction declaring itself real and striking against the ruling faction from which they emerged. In Germany, the cartel-industrialists struck against the Weimar State, Hitler coming into power to replace the republic with the reich. IG Farben themselves ultimately fell to the dogs, exiled and replaced as all their peers were. The mechanics of their faction remained in place however, the cartel becoming standard business wisdom, technocratic rule becoming, by the 1990s, the ruling orthodoxy across the NATO-sphere. Denazification worked in the way it did for this reason, only the figureheads decapitated, while the apparatus itself, that which “made the trains run on time” was kept intact, able to continue on what was began in the late 19th century by those who dared to imagine a ruling ideology more fluid than aristocracy.

Nazism is a vital point of investigation for being a completely schizophrenic ideology. As some have pointed out, Hitler was, more than he was an important figure in himself, acted as a conduit for powers to flow through. The nazi party was internally at war with itself, Prussian militarism of the Totenkopf, Himmlerite traditionalism, the last gasps of the dying aristocracy, the technocrats previously mentioned… The fates of Nazi party officials were fates determined by their allegiance to these factions. Himmlerites were purged into obscurity, Prussians were reintegrated into the police-militarism of “counter-terrorism”, aristocrats were sent back to slowly decay in their crumbling palaces, and the technocrats preserved if not in direct forms, the most visible figures cast out, the companies cut up and repackaged, the last Krupp dying without an heir, the dynasty’s economic apparatus being subsumed into Thyssen.

As shown by those who reacted so violently against it, the direct ideological content of many modernisms was, as the individual beliefs of these actors previously mentioned, almost totally irrelevant. Modernism came on sprouting thousands of microscopic religiosities as a result of its overriding structure, the thing to be productively questioned. Each new pamphlet, each new manifesto had identical structure that came into full form in the totalitarian modes identified by Arendt. In these, the deeper structure behind all these isms was made explicit, brought into full form through the excuse of whatever brought it to life. Larger than any individual movement, larger than even those who found themselves made into kings as a result of riding it, all these beneath were caught up in the subtle flow beneath them.

Confucius wrote his theory of socio-political practice around a conception of the nation where it exists as a way, a dao around which to harmonize. In this, he recognized more than any western writer of ideal politics ever has. The nation is neither a spiritual identity-forming object nor a meaningless abstraction blocking the path to eschatological paradise, but a flow, a subtle current of spiritual energy. While nations themselves are a tricky way to analyze this, this overall picture shows the way of all history. Since the beginning of human-scale time, systems have been undergoing process of emergence, stratification, and reabsorption. Flows express themselves form within strata and recreate themselves as the new stratum, until the next movement, the next dissolving or reintegration or tectonic shift. As below our feet, the Earth moves on timescales impossibly vast compared to the timescale of species, below our political imaginations, history moves on timescales impossibly vast compared to our ideological imaginations.

Powers That Become

“What the fuck happens when shit happens” proclaims the narrator, a mute and hollow channel of higher orders.  Rebuking anticipated questions, giving answers forward, as if blows, rained down upon the head of the listener, the narrator becomes violence itself. Inviting retribution on the same level of his communication, denying his personhood in favor of larger systems of participation, the narrator has fully made himself the instrument of The Powers That Be.

As a song rather than a text, a larger trend in music is made visible. Violence comes from media as a flow of inspiration to act, in ways often determined by the music. The semi-comedic comments on the Kendrick Lamar song mAAd city speak of experiencing another, wanting to act out the part of a black gangster by one who speaks from the outside of this. Within the music, they temporarily become this by the actions of the music as they transmit through them, the listener becoming a conduit by which the music and its form pass.

Virtue ethics relies upon a linguistic schema of morality radically opposed to that proposed by Plato & company. Each virtue is not a quality applied downwards by epistemic access to some truth above the individual judged, but a verb held by performance of it. These virtues as verbs is interesting enough, but the language of them borrows from Plato into positing these virtues as being not only performed, but being performed vertically, as subjects captive to larger entities, these flows of action that capture one as they’re drawn along them. Performance, doing is here imagined as a whole becoming by external taking-up, like a rip current carrying the swimmer to the brine, a flow capturing, moving, and passing through the subject caught within.

Much mocked but never considered, the public has yet to fully consider the consequences of “only obeying orders”. Collective responsibility and collective consent imply each other by their shared core of collective being, all citizens under one collective imagined as a group larger than themselves. Rarely, does anyone fully recognize their own acceptance of this idea, as these collectives informing downwards and becoming ontologies of the individual (race, nationality), thus making that individual politically responsible for their collective, for good and ill. This has governed society in large part, even at the peak of individualist delusion. What also moves downwards upon individuals are flows of the collective, the collective imagined here as a self-contained entity with its own desires and motives, spreading those goals forth by coursing itself through the veins of the individuals caught beneath it. When the nazis claimed they were “only obeying orders” they were closer to the truth than expected. The higher entity they served (what this entity was is conflicting due to the schizophrenia of nazi politics) spread itself through them and animated their bodies to act for it, furthering its goals at the speartip of its being.

The intoxicating allure of nightriding, of bashing, of policing, the low class pastimes of dutifully carrying out the violent speartip of systemic oppressions, has often beguiled journalists and authors trying to find some rational motive in them. In all of these cases, the answer of what was occurring is obvious - there was no motive at all, at least none which could originate inside. When the nearly two dozen men of the Mississippi Burning case were arrested, with only a handful of them even involved in pulling the trigger, these men were arrayed and seen as they were, not criminals, but as servants, manifesting as if they emerged from the air to carry out the will of the land, carrying out with a fervor they could never hope to comprehend the source of. This is the power of the individual gripped in the throes of Powers That B, the power flowing through from beyond and for beyond, their body an empty conduit, someone else’s hand bringing their fist down in someone’s else violence.

The drivers of history have always been entities far larger than any individual will or life could ever hope to grasp the outer edges of. The wills of history have always been entities, never individuals, but processes, systems, organisms, existing in forms beyond any control and which move downward in verb-form to control the lives below them. Such is the true nature of the NPC - the countless masses of peoples whose existence is made solely as conduits, servants of passage for verbs from entities higher than they could ever hope to comprehend.

Becoming Arborescent

After the game, tradition holds that the players retire to their hotel rooms to soak in an ice tub. After the sauna, one steps out into the cold air or plunges into the frigid lake. After the excited dissolving of the muscles set into motion, they’re returned to a stillness and singularity of being by their being brought back to nothing. A car engine is turned off to let it cool, control rods are dropped in to prevent meltdown. Ice and snow have a crystalline, solid form, the highest degree of still individuality beyond the dissolving states of steam and water. Frozen again, the object returns from rhizomatic to arborescent form, constituted in solidity again.

A tree is nurtured to grow in a specific form. As an organic system, the structure produces from itself, taking inputs and converting them into continually greater expressions of its own system. Taking in the proper diet of sugars, minerals, solar energy, and water, the system grows from the ideal being encoded into its DNA that informs the continual reproduction of each part, remaining identical in form across all sizes.

This growth occurs safely only when this safety is secured by external force upon alien growings which may intrude upon the solidity of its being. Pruning is done in order to keep growth along a path contingent with the ideal encoded into the base of the form. The bonsai is kept in shape by cutting away, keeping it growing in proper directions by preventing the unchecked hypertrophy from causing mutationary deviation. The corpulence of a human form results from these mechanics, like kudzu vines, sucrose becoming an invasive species overgrowing the once firm structure of the body. This is the metaphoric quality of cancer. From the ideal form, a mutation occurs, an invasive other sprouting from within to grow out of it, a line of flight against the entire organism, taking the tree by its roots down to the miasma of the swampy ground.

All growth is kept in line by freezing. Free of motion, free of ability to draw these lines of flight, becomings are made into stable beings to be examined and dealt with. Motion of growth is halted in frigidity, processes of expansion, mutation, stopped before they can continue on. Cancer can be seen, separated, split from the main organism. Humans see the tree ripe for pruning as if it were a being, unable to comprehend the much wider timespans of plant-consciousness.

Sweat grows from within, the signs of life extruding through pores. When left to mingle with the products of becomings out into the world (accumulated dirt), it becomes a hypertrophied mass of contamination, life whose existence is not tolerated by the ordered hierarchy of the ideal form. Mutations occur by unchecked growth, the various cases of disease-ridden hoarders whose backs have become fused to their chairs, the skin and fabric dissolved away to make a unified mass of filth, the “life” worshipped by the followers of Nurgle. 

Upon the filth of bodily production, soap comes over as a murderous fire, burning away all manner of life that has bloomed beyond the bounds of acceptable existence. Dirt is first frozen, bonded with and entrapped within the soap particles carried along with the water. The soap leaves with water, its mass bonded with what must be shorn away, dead skin, bacteria, sweat, dirt, etc, sloughing off back into liquid form, excited to flow off the frozen body, stepping out of the bath in the perfection of a sculpture, momentarily free, momentarily arborescent, momentarily frozen.

Precise Points

At the exact point, plotted precisely across all dimensions, (a) and (b) meet, projectile and target, lining up to form the terminal perfection. The finished product, the basket sunk, the paper pierced through, all of these are corpses, the terminus of a long line of change. Both engaged in continual becoming, target and projectile are drawn onto trajectories that cause their motions to merge at a final point. Their lines converge until they both zero out in relation to each other, emerging in negative distances, their compositions changed from the positive, moving-towards, to the decaying, corpse bodies, moving-after. At this single instant, this minute point, there is a true ending, a state of all zeros, of all things coming together, all becomings reaching their fullest potential and existing in a state of being.

When Quiet strikes down the enemy jetfighter from a helicopter’s side door in Metal Gear Solid V, she demonstrates the symbolic role of accuracy. Attuned to the world around her, she extrudes the firearm from herself, taking in a perfect knowledge and putting forth a perfect theory, meeting one trajectory with another and effortlessly generating these beings of projectile and target. The advice of firearms accuracy given in any introductory lesson is following in her footsteps. Let the firearm be an extension of your being, squeeze don’t pull, keep your eye on the target, all of these meant to allow one to make themselves a transitory being, a flowing channel between one trajectory, the read trajectory of the target, and another trajectory, the written trajectory of the projectile. Training for accuracy is training this specific action, this highly specialized conduit state that allows for the differences of motion to be met at will.

This bringing together via the conduit flow is a deconstructive process. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop is the target, the rockets falling the projectiles, while the firing of these rockets, the mechanics bringing them down to Earth upon his position make for a conduit between the binary halves that structure the novel’s circular path, the two opposing parabolas of the rocket’s rise and fall back to Earth and the implied inverse from the impact back to launch. One parabola forms another by the implied ellipse and in doing so, victim and shooter (x-intercepts), target and projectile (y-intercepts) are deconstructed, their meeting forming a unified ellipse that Pynchon walks us through as a mandala, showing the political and social transformations of the 20th century by a careful dissection of the deconstructed binary of World War Two.

The marksman looks through their scope, connecting through the eyes of the target, closing the loop. The perfect marksman is this, a closed circuit. The laboratory test for a rifle is where it’s affixed by machines to be as close to direct connection as possible. Making shots again and again, perfect accuracy unifies all things in question to a single equation of the battlefield. Quiet is unseen, making shots appear through the heads of the russians and afrikaners, terminus after terminus, micro-conclusions of the conflict occuring again and again to pile up, a sandpile of beings accumulating to the totality of the war.

Burning, Purging

Temperature is a change in a quantitative quality, changes in degree that make up one aspect of kind of the substance in which the motion takes place, the heat quality of the substance being the measure of its particle excitation. When substances, differentiated by contrasting temperatures, are mixed with each other, the difference is equalized by their effect on the other, both influencing to settle at some medium between the two. This differential, when equalized, can act to unify substances of similar enough character by their shared temperature-action causing melding. This can be seen in the process of melting metals together in welding, in crystalline water returning to a flowing liquid as rain and previous melt wear at it, in chemical mixings which require beaker-boiling.

In the practice of Tummo (the general idea of which is known to the west more directly via Wim Hof), an inner fire is ignited deep within the body, piercing upwards to heaven. The goal of this practice is in aiding more direction meditation practices, as a way of annihilating the self. Inner fire leads to this via disintegration, a process known to many other writers in the annihilatory tradition. In Sun & Steel Mishima writes on his discovery of the sun and its ability to destroy and cleanse beyond words, to do away with illusions, to purify back to essences. He remarks of a total ecstasy of nothingness when he saw the rays of the sun reflecting through his sweated muscles after a long workout.

The goal of the modern world's infrastructure is entrapment and force-feeding. Driving through the average downtown, one is surrounded by an infinity of snares, advertisement arrayed all along the street like bait skewered on fishhooks, hoping to draw one in and take them and milk them for all they're worth. As the games as a service and advertisement business models have shown, the 21st century's way of doing business is where the customer themselves is a product, the extent of which can be seen in the extreme financialization that led to our last recession, caused in large part by undue speculation on assets made up of chopped-up pieces of once individual assets, assets made up of highly personal debt (home mortgage) sold as if the person themselves were being repackaged and sold.

This is unavoidable. In order to live, one must engage at least in cynical part, with the entrapments of modernity. The return end of engaging in these systems is having what was lost be replaced with something grotesque, strange organic compounds made from petroleum and corn-based sucrose. Such is the cause of the obesity epidemic, where these systems have been able to implant themselves as the providers of food and thus degenerate the forms of those forced to engage in them, turning them into skinnyfat revenants or corpulent mancubi, as the end result of sacrificing something of themselves and having a poisonous replacement returned to them.

These poisons that saddle us make it infinitely more direct the need for purging, though hypertrophy and shit accumulated and burdening the body and soul have existed since the dawn of humanity. As such, the methods of purging have remained unchanged, as has the ways in which poison is stored in the body. Poison does not live on the body in alien form, as it enters, but rather enters the body's normal being and becomes part of the normal process, sucrose calories converting themselves to natural yellow fat cells. In order to purge out the unclean things which have already been digested and converted, grown from within now into fat and other such products, one must engage in temporary disintegration, where all things of the body are collected together and flushed out as one, allowing for rebuilding after the fact. Such is the purpose of Tummo, the lighting of an inner fire to burn away impurities towards heaven. Such is the role of many practices which generate internal heat and purge from within as a result - hot baths, saunas, physical exertion, etc. Mishima's recognition, of his own body in pure form for the first time, of the sun burning him, of the brilliance of light and heat, is the utter ecstasy of temporary disintegration, the liberation of the purging powers of heat.

Explicating the Cat

Cats are extraordinarily sensitive in a particular way. Painfully nearsighted and with some difficulty in high light conditions, but with extreme perceptive abilities in other faculties such as details, motion, scent, and hearing, the cat’s scents are tuned to pick up tiny bits of information commonly ignored. The cat is able to pick up on vibrations of frequencies often ignored or unhearable by the human, able to perform over and over the same stunt as Bowie when, during his Thin White Duke era, was able to predict a gas leak and an explosion before it happened.

The cat hunts with acute and immediate trauma applied to precise targets. Unlike the dog, which uses a pack to exhaust its prey, the cat will spend seconds in the life of its prey, stalking it before pouncing to quickly kill. In hunting this way, the cat is capable of selecting its quarry carefully, watching across all wildlife before. This allows them, as animals which survive exclusively on meat (capable even of forgoing water, getting it from flesh), to be as trophy hunters, selecting the finest specimens and carrying them back in carcass form. The cat here performs the maritime-consciousness of the great authors who built their craft upon before even pen-to-paper inscribing, curation and compilation, as in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.

The cat’s mind has been thought to work on a spoke and hub system. While the cat has great memory and is capable of recall and event-formation during dreams, the cat is incapable of understanding cause and effect. All of this points towards an understanding of cats vital to their overall being. The cat takes in all things as images, the collected nouns of their maritime-consciousness hunting style. They experience reality as a wunderkammer, which, importantly, is unfolded before them in semiatemporal fashion. Incapable of understanding cause and effect, the mind of the cat branches out into memories and sense-data, giving them a broad surveying view of time, not as a sequence of events but as a series of episodes made up of side-by-side images and episodes, occurring semi-concurrently.

Stories abound of the help provided by cats. The waiting companion, the cat assists in finding, in knowing, in giving access to, providing some secret information unable to be read from the world by the human. The cat’s role allows them this. With their extreme sensory abilities, their roles as guidance and companions fits naturally into human lifestyles. This role developed over millennia, not so much by forcible domestication, but by gradual acclimation and development of linked lives, humans learning to keep the animal around as mousers, with their presence being incredibly low impact. The cat becomes, from this, a coterie animal as the presence of useless things becomes viable through wealth. Just as increased privilege allows for the independent lives of women, outside the primitive structures of family, the coded-female cat is elevated to new status in the same way women are, as objects, beautiful products from the privilege of the upper class. The cat, as the guiding companion and as the coterie animal shows its role, as the priest of the nobility, as the oracle of the elite, as the apex of civilization.

Wired Archaeology

If a large enough website such as Reddit, SomethingAwful, Twitter, Tumblr, were drawn out as a three dimensional city, it would tower over the surrounding flatlands by the tell below it. The volume of content, whether produced at a gradual pace over a longer lifespan, or produced all concurrently in a shorter lifespan, would pile up like the layers upon layers of compacted detritus below a modern city still on the site of an ancient one, each previous age’s refuse accumulated to make up the foundation of the present structures rising to the sky and to immediate access. Reddit locks posts older than six months, as the older posts are stifled beneath mounds of dirt, confined to archives, catacombs, subterranean bones left to fossilize, uninteractable as the surface buildings, the latest posts and constructions are.

In order to piece together narratives from these accumulations, internet archaeologists have spent quite a bit of time digging through these deep layers, sorting unsortable piles of refuse to piece together findings in a string. The SomethingAwful archives are not searchable. Link rot kills much of what existed before the internet became monopolized, the internet archive drops weighty content like images and videos. In order to put together something usable, a common thread has to be pre-established as a heuristic with which to sort through the findings, to order and direct it along a common narrative goal, as can be seen in the likes of Fredrick Knudsen and Geno Samuel, focusing on a single individual to direct their searches through the depths and order their findings between valued and not.

The ARG has grown ever more sophisticated in response to this form of archaeology, hiding itself among traces, linked by a subtle clue across dispersed artefacts scattered in obscurity. The ARG creators have learned their craft from the archaeologists who act more like Indiana’s father, desperately searching for a single “X marks the spot” at the end, tracing down single paths to a final goal. In the traditional case, a goal such as the tomb or city, in the modern case, the dox or history of a person. These archaeologists engage in something more directed than the previous, more malicious, with the former type being more concerned with cataloguing while this often goes hand in hand with targeted harassment of some kind, but both are engaged in the same activity.

From where does the data to be searched emerge from? The archaeologist looks through tells, piles of detritus, the materiality cast off from living. With everything connected on a single medium, the internet, the detritus cast off, the materiality that results from living, this form of generating data by the traces of one’s life turns to extreme degrees. As some have remarked, the most well studied archaeological case, Chris Chan, may be the most documented human alive due to decades of interaction with the internet being findable and thus catalogable and insertable into the grand narrative these researchers can create. The new form of text created by the internet is in fact the oldest form of text, the text of a life, written in the wake of that life’s movements, the text written by human traces. The new form of text created by the internet is a form of text which is unique for being the oldest text, pre-existing even the most primitive deliberate art, now in a degree unprecedented previously. Where once, a single trashpile would speak for an entire city, now volumes exist to catalogue the minute movements of a single individual, writing by motion.