Carnival

The proletariat never tire of saying how the bourgeois needs them, not the other way around. If that should be the case, then why do they stick around? As much as theories of false consciousness abound, they miss a crucial piece, which is the core relationship of the two. The rotten husband acts as though he retains all the power, his wife being a mere receptacle for him - if that were the case, then why is his wife still there?

Yang is eternally desiring to have itself dissolved into the ocean, to be lost in the maze. Yang is as water itself before flow, eternally hungry for emptiness to flow into. The proletariat desires the bourgeois as much as the reverse is true. The yin of the bourgeois requires the yang of the proletariat in order to fuel its empty conduits and pathways, but the yang of the proletariat just as much is constantly hungry for paths to inhabit. Yang can never remain still for very long, its nature being desiring eternal emptiness - empty land, virgin women, new paths, to tread upon.

The John Birch Society in their Blue Book laid out the oncological theory of communism which can be seen in relation to quite a bit of the problems of statehood. In brief, the corpus of society can be seen as disintegrating in the same fashion as a body does when tumors begin to grow from the inside, its cells now growing into new shapes and form untenable to the regular organization of things. The problem of communism is a problem of abnormal growths, growths no longer performing their proper contextual order and thus turning into something profane to the social order, a new life form which operates on bacterial logic and has no inherent value except that which it can attain via parasitism on the host on which its emergent.

Orienting the cell into the proper position in its cortex is the purpose behind so much historical stratification by caste and class. The corpus can only function with clear lines drawn in order to delineate the pathways flows travel in predictable fashion. The corpus’ injuries are those which damage its ability to do this - gunshots tear open tissue and the contents spill out, as fields are salted and resources are thrown into a black hole of burning. The enemy army consumes resources as the cancer cell does, the patient wasting away as the growth forces first dibs on all available.

Bakhtin makes it clear that the Carnival was never a place of genuine revolution - and his description is underselling. The “pressure valve” theory is inaccurate too however, as there is no such thing. Psychological flows are never liquid, but generating. To give a “pressure valve” is in truth to crack a hole in a dam and hope it “vents” the pressure against the concrete - in actuality, it’s the first step of overthrow, giving an inch that becomes a mile as more and more flows down that channel.

The fascination with “the oldest fetish” in bestiality or pseudo-bestiality (various forms of “civilized-barbarian” pairings imagined through history, often in the context of hyper-sexual rape fantasies, sexualized to the point of their losing any relation except lack of diegetic consent with rape) is the same fascination as with the Carnival. The lord is never truly degraded, their degradation is a reaffirmation of the same status quo which they preside over and reinforce through the Carnival. The proletariat’s relationship as the providers of yang through the channels of the bourgeois’ yin are shown in full lurid detail as the Carnival takes place, the pseudo-bestiality imagined showing the highborn woman supposedly degraded, when in fact, all that occurs is the recreation of what underplays the existing hierarchy. The peasant fulfills his place at no single more explicit point than his supposed rape of the queen, marking her, pushing his energy into her, spilling himself out, slicing his veins open to her open mouth, her supposed humiliation leaving her solitary amidst the ruin of his withered jing-less husk. 

Heartbeat

Stroke One - 木

Blood enters the system after a period of relaxation, emptiness suddenly filled, veins fattening after prior desiccation with fresh life. Limbs are moved for the first time, cherry blossoms opening with pink snowfall of sakura leaves hitting the ground, flowers bursting open as grass overtakes dead the rust-brown dead Earth of November. Someone chirps to call it in, flitting lightly between the newly thrumming branches, as roots awaken from dormancy to send out invisible messages deep through the Earth. After the first rain, mycelium sprouts fruiting bodies, the whole network coming alive to give burst to a new show of force in the newly livened wood. The last of the snow melts away, creeks overfilling, trickling into mammalian mouths as they lap up, shedding off their excess fat and fur.

Stroke Two - 火 

Agent Orange never killed by explosion or simple ending, it killed by growth. The plants were sent into wild excitation upon contact, each part tearing apart its neighbors, every system overextending each other in a pursuit to reach the greatest possible heights. The plant died in an attempt to become infinite, an insatiable hunger for more until it expanded terminally - explosion. No wonder it caused defects then, children exposed left to grow in all manner of strange directions, this growth chemical seeping in god-knows-how, its effects almost random chance, where its mechanism would be carried out. Such orgies happen in cycles. An excess of undergrowth in certain arid forests leads to sweeping blazes, critical mass cleansing itself after the tipping point.

Stroke Zero - 土

Through its changes, the thing in itself remains stable. The river is different each passing moment, more and more different as the timescale is increased, yet it always retains its Being through this. Being emerges, the property of changes below its solidity. In this way, Being is more stable than if taken for granted as the thing in itself. Being emerges, thus its nature depends on whether it truly is or not - are the processes on which it rests real? Then the Being will continue to emerge. The river can never be killed. It can be diverted and renamed, it can dry up or still into a lake - but these are disappearances, not deaths. Beings suffer deaths by our clinging to their stability past any stability that exists. When Becomings cease, then Beings vanish, but nothing is ever killed.

Stroke Three - 金 

Aristocrats begin to stalk the streets, still smelling of the haze from which they emerged, a putrid fog of perfume, opium, and sex, their eyes wild in purple ecstasies, Slaanesh Sings Through Us! and the batons rain down. The sans-culottes flee, the weakest falling victim. A later reprisal occurs, a white banker, no relation, is found dead in her home, an islamic crescent carved on the wall. The critical point of the growth-orgy is long gone and now, the slow decline as the corpus eats itself. Overweight bureaucrats realize it first, swooping in with their flocks of the selfish and hedonistic to strip the bones and fly off with the meat, gorged with a needle in the arm in some distant fortress. 

Stroke Four - 水 

The last leaves fall as the ground dies to dirt, the whole land beginning to resemble the bones before the disintegration. The last weeks are falling sorrow, the sky grey, the frozen mud and dead trees putting on the air of a plague year even when no miasma permeates the air. The snow falling is almost a relief. Bone white, the blanket of death imprisons the world in a graceful end, a terminal elegance to the emptiness of it. Plains roll on forever, white sky and whiter snow, one track of footprints, if any. The wind is real, as are the dunes it makes - the basic matter of water and air and its motions is all that remains.  Entropy has finished, things returned to the zero they always were. Soon the lights go out and the last breath shivers out, until all is without form and void once again.

Magic Carpet Ride

The closing song on Love’s Forever Changes sets off a symphonic circle, looping around a set of macro and microcosmic rituals until arriving in indulgence in the circle itself. “You go through changes” turns into “this is the time” by the end, first beginning with the smallest observations and then ending in the largest overview. Within, as the spiraling-outward occurs, the rituals and prescriptions are laid out. The narrator speaks describing rules as laws, cause and effect strands of flow that carry behind the events. Water and burning are of particular interest, their status being controlled by the interactions between various characters described throughout, the chicken, the woman, the private, etc. The narrator identifies himself with their position in order to step outside, going through nodes, their relationships on networks (the man who can’t decide, man and father between ettiquetes), withdrawing eventually into the superior position. The song peters off into the simplest building blocks, blasting notes of horns and strings to a slowly fading tune, as the song becomes ever more simplistic, ever more macro scale. The village becomes the city becomes the nation becomes the planet, and etc, outwards until the All is known in the final stroke, closing out the song and the album.

Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit is twice invisible. Firstly made clandestine through the ring he finds in the cave and secondly when he’s knocked into sleep through the grand battle at the climax of events outside his interest or scope. It’s this pre-occupation with stealth that shows Bilbo’s place within the world he moves through. Bilbo slips through the world by making himself invisible, a proclaimed burglar. Each section of the book works in episodic fashion, an enclosed sphere of detail, location, etc, passed through as a non-entity by Bilbo. Bilbo’s power is his very removal from all things which the others are pre-occupied by, his ability to be within without entanglement.

For the nature of Gandalf, Minecraft holds the narratological pattern. The player in their quest (referring to the linear, official story of the game) moves through the world in manipulation, the game’s mechanics being all carefully worked and drawn together to lead to the player’s driving goal. The earth is manipulated in order to grant food, the deep ground shifted, stone brought up to built shelter while the minerals are used in making a sphere of tools around the self. Gandalf’s interactions with the dwarves through The Hobbit are always mysterious, with him often darting off onto wildly divergent paths in order to partake in this form of action. Gandalf goes through the adventure as the magician does, making the adventure an entity in itself centered around the person pushing forwards, drawing strands of flow into himself in order to carve forward.

This drawing works in reverse as well. The thirteenth century Quest of the Holy Grail displays eloquently this. In order for Gandalf to perform this magical work, he must first know how to read the world. As all reading, it’s in truth an act of writing which has already completed its work before the grunt work of the “writing” ever begins, the text to be inscribed already present in the reading. The Quest is a journey through a world wholly organized around the eyes and structuralisms of the mystic grail knights. Each pathway, each wood, each castle is seen to them only in their writing of the world, reading it into the structure which they are capable of manipulating. It’s this action which is the basic mindset that leads Gandalf forwards and allows the knights to access their grail. The adventure is done in order to make this writing real, to draw all things together in full realization, the scribing to the writing inherent in reading.

Alienated Labor

The action of a variety of fan-made counter-strike gamemodes is to isolate and then extrapolate to its furthest conclusions a particular gameplay element. The action of falling is temporarily halted, harnessing it in order to surf. Basic navigation’s way of momentum is turned into bhopping. Sightlines and aiming are the primary object in the AWP maps, a gamemode based solely on the “apex gun” by which all others refer their skill to. Most deathmatch maps, in order to provide the thrilling rush of the kill-ping resort to bots, populating the server with a large number of zombies in order to make easy targets for player. The “ideal” of the default gameplay is sliced into pieces, with each piece isolated and separated out, in order to be treated in isolation.

Such an action has spawned mutations of its own. DotA originated from Warcraft 3’s older genre, with one aspect of gameplay, the control of an individual character raised above the others, extrapolated to the sole focus of a gamemode. In turn, this was balanced on its own and thus became in itself something new, isolated from the original by which it originates.

This mechanism, that seen strikingly as well in gym equipment, is the latest evolution of the mechanism that sparked the invention of tools. Corvids can be seen using various pieces of bent wire, weights, thrown objects, understanding various chains of cause and effect of physical reality in order to solve minor puzzles. All of the observed actions here are actions extrapolating from actions which exist elsewhere. Grabbing objects with the beak turns into manipulating them, which in turn is linked to causation of one object interacting with another. The beak can grasp the first object and then the tool is born.

Unique among tool-using animals, humanity took this evolution down a far different path than the raven or the fellow primate. Endowed with a higher capacity for abstract thought, the tool’s extrapolation from observed phenomena set off the same chain reaction that can be seen in the creation of the MOBA genre. A tool in interaction with another tool created a third, the machine of the difference between the two tools. The first truly human invention, alienated labor, was beget from this process. The difference of two tools in interaction (the machine) comes into being in order to interact with others.

The first machine can never be alone so long as more than the two tools which create it exist. Machines naturally couple with each other, with the tools linking together by being shared abstractions. One abstraction from typical processes harnesses the sheering of plants from soil by bare hands, another abstraction from typical processes harnesses the grinding of materials behind other solidities. 

It’s these machines in combination that then begets supermachines, a category of machine made up of smaller machines. This is obviously a category of perspective, with the supermachine becoming a machine as soon as its considered a machine coupling into a larger supermachine, but a useful category nonetheless. It’s this abstraction which makes the unique piece of human development, separate from other animals.

The tool alone is nothing, an extension of a natural process that can be created by any being with limited intellect. The machine is beyond intellect, as it develops intellects of its own. The process of combination and recombination that creates supermachines is a process by which things beyond the original organic manipulators are created, entities which act as extensions from the actions of their submachines. 

It’s this continual abstraction that tells the story of automation and by extension, the developing relationship to technology. Development upon development in production technology comes ever-closer to the fantasy of the ultimate network of machines, the society as a complete supermachine, with the human input fully alienated. The fantasy is a fantasy of Neo-Eden of the future, where machines become such a complete alienation from human labor that the human can exist atop them, picking fruits of fully alien production as if it descended from heaven itself. Regardless of whether realized or not, this is often the fantasy of many futurist stories, with the ideas of foraging, of abandonment so common in apocalypse stories being the darker modern retelling of the utopian post-scarcities of earlier eras.

Immortals

“(…) in the Metal Gear-iverse if your name is an animal you’re basically a superhero that lives off the grid.” - Superbunnyhop’s Metal Gear Solid 4 review

The initiate descends into the coffin under the Tomb, their classmates chanting 19th century dog-latin around them, cartoonish recreations of Egyptian artifacts burning with electric light on the wall around them. Darkness increases as lights shutter, the almost sarcastic tone only making it all the more real, as if disarming prematurely any attempt to interpret or satirize the ridiculousness of the event, leaving only a pre-modern feeling of awe not often felt in this century. The coffin lid closes, as questioners are brought force, the exhaustion of the previous ceremonies coming to a head as the initiate sputters out, dragged along flows of words - is that my father? Whatever, hands on his cock, confession after confession until he’s desiccated, sucked dry of all that once was virile. He feels final blackness that carries on as the coffin lid opens. Sunlight twinkles in noontime brilliance, alighting off the waters around Deer Island, but the darkness remains. There’s an emptiness now, when cold comes to whip snow across his face, he doesn’t flinch. When speaking, he does so in mechanical fashion, rehearsed to a perfected etiquette of what’s expected. He’s come out the other end of the Eagle, seen beyond the solar radiance of the frontside and now sits on the steps of the pyramid behind, looking out upon the dunes of a desert in all directions, seeing only motion where the commoners see solidity.

A blizzard descends over her city, yet Madotsuki strides above, superior. Having spent her life dancing from the Yang-world into the depths of the Yin-world inside the mountain, having drowned in death at the bottom of the world, having emerged with dark brine where her lungs once where, she doesn’t feel any of it anymore. Winds scream like a sandstorm, the sky and ground covered in ice, heavy dunes of snow drifted without regard for the city’s need for smooth transit, sky blotted out white-grey as if snowed over upside down. Countless cars are piled up, a police officer in his winter uniform stands at the four-way stop sign to send them back, to enforce curfews and travel bans. Every ditch is a wreckage, standing in snow, frostbiting through worn out sneakers, jeans soaked in ice, shivering as their Ford Focus wheezes its last. Madotsuki steps lightly past the cop, through the snow as if it weren’t there, the wind passing around her, head high into the Northern clouds, making her way about the business she has above them.

Gordon could never comprehend the will of directions of the Gman and who could expect him to? The world around Gordon unfolds in the way he always knew it to - with himself as the center, pathways opening as he pushed his head into the oncoming tide, challenges passed and rewards given in turn. The levels always load in sequence, the world always functioned as a machine. He entered the right inputs and it gave the expected outputs. The Gman was someone he could never understand, someone who went out of bounds, someone who had directives outside those passing in front of him. Gordon always vaguely heard whispers when he looked too deeply into the eyes of the Gman about construct? flatgrass? bigcity? he pushed it out of his mind and took on the next challenge forward. There was always another cycle to complete, challenge-reward, challenge-reward, challenge-reward. Before long, the Gman would be out of his life and someone else would be giving him the cycle to grab onto. Gordon came to know better than to think too hard about it.

Vibrations, Excitations

Graphed traditionally, frequency is either a solid line considered on the time axis, with the whole band being filled spatially across time, or a singular point upon the space axis, with the change in position now longer marking the point as anything in wider context. It’s only through this dual relation that the frequency comes into being, a motion of total filling between its outer boundaries (bandwidth) stretched out by taking place temporally, ie, via motion. It’s through this that a law of communications derives, that a bandwidth transmits the same amount of information no matter the frequency’s intensity.

These waves travel through solid matter, transmitting by proximity, radiating outwards to excite nearby atoms. The closer the proximity of atoms, the quicker they become excited to reproduce the waves traveling through them. This transformation is one of dissipation. The original intensity of the wave loses as it disperses outwards, transmitting through further and further atoms, a trajectory akin to Zeno’s paradox of the marathon or the arrow, until zero. At the terminus of entropy, all movement ceases, heat having been fully equalized to essentially nothingness.

Bataille writes of entropy in his writings of consumption, of construction. The solar descends and its travel to the abyss is prolonged as its captured, sublimated into creating the liminal region between infinity and nothingness. The real number line comes into being in an attempt to prolong life against death, to slow entropy through countless constructions and buildings, through ever more inventive, larger and grander methods of capture. It’s from this that Bataille derives the concept of the solar anus, the point of ultimate expenditure. The wealth captured is only reaching its potential in its reaching of death. All energy captured is destined for the same fate, a fate only reached upon expense. The cathedral becomes detritus as soon as its built, energy now sublimated into another skeletal trash-heap sinking into the abyss. it’s the pomp of the battlefield, the orgiastic triumph where this is most evident, the timescales sped up far beyond that of the supposedly conservative expense. The prolonging-death, the human consumption, of solar energy is drawn out far quicker in the orgy than the cathedral, though both would be graphed identically.

Such a graph is the origin of “vibes”, those of the Beach Boys, of slang. The atmosphere of a situation described not in experiential, but metaphysical sense. The air vibrates with the atmosphere, is energy is expended through the room. The orgy creates the headiest of all, immense energies compiled into the fogged mists wafting about oriental cushions and hedonistic decay, the attendees at Woodstock or Altamont or Haight-Ashbury through the summer of ’67 all remember the same thing - you could feel it in the air.

Solar energy collects at various points throughout the world before bursting open in this way. Beginning with the romanticism and neo-mysticism and ending with the repressive puritanism of the middle 20th century, solar energy built up like a straining dam until it broke free, exploding outwards into the vibes of the hippie era. By the same mechanism, wars occur, as do historical openings. Luther gave voice to the long building tension between secular and ecclesiastical authority in constructing the embryonic State. World War One was the orgiastic death-knell of the political order that had been stagnating since the Enlightenment first reified it.

Small Comforts

All our names are fake, all seeming to default to some Anglo-Biblical middle ground by at least the second generation, if not already switched on the journey over. Carried over on the crossing or linguistically interbred to the basic minimum, it’s a rare sight to still see the last few holdouts who’ve retained enough patrilineal stability to hold onto their unpronounceables. With time, even the dimmest traces of heritage disappears as Kevin Nguyen and Shelly Ivanikov fuse down to a corium-mass of every gene and no nation, some sixth generation Jimothy Orangegrove, a beige intermediary between whatever new mutation will result centuries ahead and what once was.

The fantasy of air travel has always been the fantasy of comfort, in freedom, in sterility. Crossed between a train station and a hospital, the Apple-store opaque shine promises cleansing, renewal, breaking free of the hypertrophied mold grown over long days of captivity, a suitcase full of case and an easy-breathing, disinfected set of clothing, darting on a slim contrail through the becoming gates of the clouds to end up at some dreamed-of home, in whatever color palette you’ve found appealing of late. Like a garden of pasteurized delights, each fruit in the duty free store is polished in the same, the newest and best of whatever you’re carrying, outmoding the old shackles of your dusted suitcase, your torn jeans, your unclean sneakers…

The land of the country is surreal to any not raised among this strange way of organizing. If it had been seen in history, it would have been used as some obscure system of calculation of distance for trade routes, a method of locating lost merchants in the empty tabula rasa of the Arabian sands or Mongolian steppe, not an honestly-stationary parceling of economic meaning. A forest is quadrisected along square boundings, lines cutting as if there were no topography, hydrography, flora, fauna, environment, in open regard for the lack of traditional meaning on the land at all. The forest promises the same meaning it once had, the wilderness that’s as a library, an infinite density of mystery in an infinite labyrinth of abyss. No longer, the forest’s promises all fall flat, laid bare in cold maps named blandly for their writers, sectors named like columns on an enormous spreadsheet.

The highest fantasy of the scented candle is to ignite a perfume cloud, misted nearby into the air, only to catch the entire room, the Aramis or Chloe spreading about the building as it catches, a final orgy of conflagration to burst, a final orgasm releasing the pressure of what could have been decades of performance. Bathrooms are typically brightly lit while cloistered, if there is a window, one to a picturesque scene, a skyline well above any street-level movement, a beach immune to tidal drift, or frosted-over to be as if it were a lamp. The orientalist bathhouse is still, after all this time, the ideal strived for in so many dirty masturbations of decor, overplushing furniture, aerosol perfumes, like little tokens hoping to bring the same opiate-comfort in a stiffly limited microdose.

The American worker oftentimes has a fantasy, one scarcely realized even in the day it supposedly was, of the permanent company. Without regard for profit or pressure, the company that stays like a surrogate father, gold watch when you’ve attended at his bedside at enough time, six figures in the final five years to settle into an inheritance to last out another fifteen wired up to the parasitic tendrils of hospital equipment. To this day, Enron still catches the blame for all the failures to realize this fleeting image, with its fetishistic idea of itself as an energy company leaving many stranded without raft or floatation when their dreams of simple enslavement were denied them. As countless others have said however, “it’s not about the money”, and they’re right. If every need were provided in a total package, the prole would gladly resubmit to company rule and just the same, portfolios fluctuate wildly in their monetary value seemingly without cause or reason. The reason? Who can bother with the reason? The company was a brief fiction that never was, a fantasy that was financialized into complex instruments, resold as securities, prostituted to the joint-stock casino floor mere moments after it was brought into being. It’s not about the money is correct - it never was. It was never about the company either, that ever-so-fleeting signifier at the center of some transnational motion of value distantly representing power.

The fantasy of water is that it can make itself to be the whole of the river. That there can be no rocks, banks, obstacles, directions, no bounding solid to make the river itself, only the water as if cutting the course through space. The water images it to be flowing across the milky way, like the figure-eight in Mario Galaxy, bounded by its own will to move forward against all costs. At the same time, the fantasy of the bank is that it can remain stable in ownership of the water. That its meandering won’t take the banks on which houses are built, that the loping s-curves won’t crumble and be remade through that grove, that the rocks making the bottom, making the little trickling falls, won’t erode into a smoothness and then a nothingness over time. The fantasy of the river is dual and contradictory, each part imagining itself to be not only independent, but in opposition to and eternally existing beyond its opposite.

Beside the city of Las Vegas, a dam-made lake begins to run dry. Beneath the southern plains, pumps over an ancient aquifer begin to suck fumes. On the emerald isle, fields long thought eternal begin to go fallow. With a lifespan of only eighty years, few realize the immensity of history, the periods that rose and fall in descriptions now relegated to footnotes, despite magnitudes easily reaching out own. Over a thousand years, the fertile crescent reigned, crumbled, unified, broke apart, and finally fizzled out. The modern nation of China only makes itself after the cauldron of four thousand years fused an ever-decreasing plurality of warring kingdoms into the Imperial mass known today. Very few truly desire immortality, in fact, the common desire is for its opposite, a crunching, not an expansion of time. The terror of entropinous decline is a terror of being denied the glory, apocalypses of triumph or defeat unrealized. In brilliantly colored Victorian paintings, Rome feels like a pair of rapturous orgasms, an explosive expansion before götterdammerung, and if one squints, one can almost imagine it being a single lifetime. The fear most common is not that eternity should never come, but that eternity should be made so painfully present. That Rome should fall in a slow, barely noticeable decline. That Rome should rise in a steady expansion. The fear has never been of change, but of lack of it, a fear of dying too soon, of living too slowly, to feel the raptures imagined.

Reformation Paganism

In his polemics against Romanism, Luther writes of the Babylonian Captivity of the church. Such a metaphor is an interesting and apt choice - it’s never Luther’s intention to claim that the core elements of the church are invalid, but rather that they are held captive, frozen within a prison preventing them from being free and virile as they should be. An interesting comparison here can be drawn between the Babylonian Captivity of the biblical narrative and the on Luther claims. In both, “freedom” is the ultimate goal, with the implication being of a sort of castration, or life halted from its natural outgrowing, by the strictures placed upon it. The church appears as the Lovers card appears in the Devil card, the male and female once wed in a blindingly glorious marriage now twisted into chains held by an alien beyond and above, the iron shackles restraining them to be as if they never were.

While the most cowardly of Protestant theologians have backed down on the smearing of Romanism via the phrasing of “works”, a more intelligent response is not to capitulate, but to double down, instead first accepting that the “works” of Catholicism are entirely superfluous and as broadly reaching as some fear them to be, with a mechanistic investigation into the way in which ritual becomes empty action. The selling of indulgences, a granting of leniency for time spent in purgatory, by Pope Leo X, makes an important case study for the route that once sacred actions take through the process of institutional stratification that the Roman church underwent. When the original church swallowed the Roman Empire, the Empire’s institutional corpus remained intact, like a time-release poison that soon spread through all the arterial pathways and infected the entirety of the church. The church went from the community believes to a hierarchical and imperialist organization, with financial and legalistic bureaucracy taking precedent as the new linguistic form around which its mysticism would be hung. In doing so, it was only a matter of time before economic interest, in this case the varying ways patronage and favor worked in Renaissance Europe, would direct ecclesiastical policy, to generate the process of selling indulgences. It’s from this action, that the captivity the Roman institution puts the church under is shown, as the Roman captivity is one of a secular political order which has under its dictatorial control, a divine order of magic.

By the time of the reformation, the Roman Church had long wore out its welcome and the breaking-open that took place was only inevitable. Long under the surface, tensions between the secular and ecclesiastical authority over the nations of the Christian world reached their breaking point as the Church began to consolidate ever increasing levels of power, as the middle ages drew to a close. In the preceding years, the church reached new heights of power via the increasing wealth and thereby ability of centralized powers to exert control, of the Christian world. Ideological unification, economic centralization, and tighter leashes placed on local authorities, created a church newly empowered in a way it had never been before, with the medieval order of the church as one among many of the routes to the various spiritual and mystical forces in ones life falling to an ideological dictatorship not yet seen. By reasserting their own secular order, the monarchs who sided with the reformation sided with a return to an older state of affairs, where the authority of the church was again partially lost, with the once suppressed natural (or ‘pagan’) forms of religion breaking through once again the form of various protestantisms. Such a transformation occurred through christianity via the very same process that once made the church such a widely spread organization in the medieval era. Just as the priesthood was once a scattered collection of locals, the vernacular bible and its ensuing priesthood of all believers, restored the rights of divine contact to the common person, freeing them from the recently instituted centralization around Rome.

The case to be made against Romanism is a case not against the authority of a succession based church in itself, but a case against the authority of any sort of vertically structured order to be the ordainer of the linguistic forms by which an individual is contacted to the divine. The Romans can be disregarded entirely, not on the basis of the falsehood of their claims to authority, but on the basis of their making that basis, ie, the concept that there can be any authority to be had in the first place. The long con of Romanism has always been to identify itself with God, thereby identifying the institution of the Church with God’s faciality. In doing so, the situation of the believer becomes as the woman in Song of Songs, now, if entrapped within the Romanist discourse, forced to marry and bind herself beneath the legalistic superstructure of the church in order to interact with God through his faciality.

It's both against this binding marriage and against the opposite trend of total removal from any church, that the value of protestantism comes into being. The church’s mystical aspects divorce in every moment from the church via linguistic transmission, making them travel far afield from vertical organization as memes - such is the cause of biblical literacy being the catalyst for the reformation’s popularity. At the center of it, remains the Christian religion’s heart, the relationship between oneself and the masculine force, represented in Christianity by the phallic God. As this God is the genuine tradition of much of the western world, the answer is not to disregard all aspects of it as some judaic force upon an original paganism and then impose a “true” religion through tedious reconstructionism, but to embrace christianity as the form through which the content of paganism will re-emerge, as happens when christianity is freed as a meme to freely evolve in the world.

LSD & Remixes

As the common example goes - if one were asked to name every book they’ve read, they would stumble and falter, unable to recall even ten. If one were presented with each and every book by the questioner however, they’ve able to easily tell if they’ve read it or not. Perhaps over generations of mechanistic and Platonic thought, the delusion of a computational mind has overtaken the popular understanding of the self. That the opposite is true, that the mind works on literary, not scientific laws, is scarcely understood today.

In the film Inland Empire, the utmost concern is the creation of a film which privileges becoming at all costs over being. Such can be seen around the one-third mark, where Laura Dern’s character makes the transition between herself as an actress, movie character, and finally retreating inwards, as the various beings she inhabits by her becoming strain and break, leaving her to break free and forward from them. An affair with her partner as the movie character leads to an affair as the actress. Both break as her identity as a married actress disallows her an affair, not as a code of morals, but as her husband explains it, a law of reality. She breaks from both, retreating to the identity she inhabited when becoming-desire, going into the limbo-house with the prostitutes where she spends much of the middle third of the film.

The function of the superego is in many ways to resist this movement. The superego fulfills the function of restoring Platonic order to the mind, keeping beings stable as becoming (the flow of thought) travels through them. Such is turned around in dreaming. Being, the static noun-thought stored in memory, is subordinated to the freely moving becomings of thought. As such, dreams often take forms unrecognizable upon waking, requiring interpretation to uncover the becoming which produced the manipulation of beings. Freud uncovered this in the split between latent and manifest content of dreams, with the former being the becoming of thought and the latter being the being of thought.

Like the memories which dreams distort to suit the latent content, the manifest content of LSD Dream Emulator is made up of a rather small handful of objects. Around fifteen maps, each of which occur in half a dozen or so variations by different texture sets. There’s a variety of objects, most of which appear in the same place. Triggers of new events are consistent, with the only randomization being the dynamic links, which carry the player to one of a half dozen or so more central hub-maps. What truly changes from dream to dream is the latent content, here shown through the waking graph. By grading on an X/Y scale and then transmuting that grading into a shape representing the self, the latent content is not only described, but shown in relation to the self, the player-character of LSD.

Before anything else, the concern of LSD is in emotions. The latent content of the dreams are described through the emotions experienced, as shown by the texture set, and the motions of the player, as described by their path taken through the links. Rather than treat thought as an unlimitedly sovereign entity however, LSD destabilizes thought from any question of free will. Emotions work on a four-period cycle, almost astrological in nature, with the normal, kanji, downer, and then sexual textures appearing in sequence. The player’s self is forced to confront not only their emotions, but their unwillingness to be determined by any specific action, with only the X axis being under any control at all.