Today I have gathered you together, the anointed and the garlanded, in the hopes that God may not trespass against us, hoping to divine all those precious artifacts that we might carry with us like the ancient pharaohs to whatever awaits us on that others shore…the one pronounced and promised in the bluegrass music of old Kentucky. I am the sermonizer and I carry along with me nothing remotely resembling wrath. I am an imperfect man searching not for perfection but rather hoping against all odds to become better at being imperfect right here and right now because that’s all we got. In his sermon on the mount, God advises us through his embodied son to be more like the bird of the air and the lily of the field. The hereditarily doomed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is saying the same thing when he advises us in near-desperation to prioritize ethology over ethics. When you don’t understand something just ask. What ethology means for Nietzsche is very close to what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they talk about becoming-animal, which is to say that ethology means natural creatural behaviour without subordination to higher human values but with survival and coexistence still in mind. “Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism,” admonishes Donna Haraway. The three wounds are the Copernican wound, the Darwinian wound, and ultimately the Freudian one. The Jewish and Viennese Dr. Freud was not above a certain amount of equivocal self-laceration. In the 21st century, to look at what we’ve done to the earth and persist in believing in our exceptionalism is both monomaniacal and a crime.
The quickest way to reach God is to look within. You are made of the same subatomic building blocks as everything else. God and the devil are the same thing; sensorial life is polarized. To take care of yourself and look after your body is to fend off angels and demons. You don’t want angels and demons crawling flickeringly through your windows, believe you me. Tibetan Tulpa and Haitian Loa and the Great What-Have-You. Romantic Angelicate, Closed Circuit, Secret Gnosis of the Central Nervous System's Basic Operational Polarity. What is time? You’re too terrified to even really ask. Time is three cherries on all the slot machines at once and they suddenly blow their top, like in Twin Peaks: The Return. The owls are not what they seem. Little birds chirp in order to mock us; owls arrive with the full force of God-sanctioned death. Your are no more than an enabling formal vessel like a puppet and you do not yet have any idea what kind of damage can be done to you remotely. Memory orbits around itself and it is impossible not to get dizzy; you can only stand on two feet for so long. I plead with you not to let your relationship with God grow toxic. You do not want to become one of the malefactors of eternity. “You pushed forward even while pieces of you were falling away ravaged and bleeding,” writes Paul West, “and you did not bother signing your name to your life…” Indeed it is the person’s name, the proper noun itself, which prevents that person from apprehending the greater world.
The other shore is the contravening non-side of all theoretical sides that might be taken or adopted. A distorted consonance of sides and a constitutive differential of alliance. The side of Eve is the side of life. Death’s side is the pigpen, mortuary of mud and shit. The slow and stupefied suicide of the human race turns power into a verb and the earth into a rendering plant. There is a real divine mandate that is hopelessly obscure to us. Any triumph of livingness over death would have to strip this world of the sociopathic reign of the human individual. It is impossible for us now to imagine a utopia that isn’t despoiled from without or within. Let us pray. All clarity is a true clarity we would rather not possess. You are not made to meet it without suffering, your joints and sockets and their errant carpentry. All of the current models are horribly compromised, new models are needed. My humble advise is to sit in a pasture and read indefinitely.
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