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.