an average analysis
The House of Evolution (what should I do)
Here, in the house with no roof, everyone wants to know just what to do. Everyone just wants to know what to-do Just as soon as humanity won the hour to look up, it sought out its answers in the patterns which prevailed over the night, where remained our heroes valiantly abiding, first stories, the great people which held us peasants perfect in their palms. They, with swords upright, winged artifacts, familiar animals, fantastic and unanimous, stars of high station, stoic on their stands, made-mistakes in turn immortalized, or cruder memories of damsels and dragons, of lovers entwined by wind in lofty barrels of tides, long libraries of ledgers of legends, enchiridions enshrining every ember that ever warmed an evening, they, the rustic rhymes of riders running to the rescue, they, the quiet architects, yarn of the universe, they, the smokes of hope which with rising incense clear obscure reaches, which house the infant truth safely in false swaddles, which recognize the undeserving invalid who unburies face overgrown as an estranged father addressed to his falling motherland admits his bygone undoings, and the wound thus exposed comes with shining face to heal between the clouds. They, the heroes, plucked from the Earth abundant, shimmering spectacles, frozen fireworks, littering the words from East to West, the matriarchs, models, madmen, they, the startling hand which lands like the bird of courage on our shoulder, and assured assures us, harks and heralds the same tune unto the certain rising of the sun they, the stallions of our dreaming they, the beams of meaning overarching great geodesics which guide us through the unclaimed orphan realms they, the them that then were once with we now sent upward by our faces wondered, the best of us we knew would wander with the turning wheel of law, though the sky lay open there above to catch our piece of peaceful soul our meaning yet unheard to race cycles innumerable and vigilantes overthrow out last our limits to finally bring us home, they are still for us, our heroes, whose graves lay open with yet no dirt to blanket them, those idle idols sleep eternal, waiting each for the other everywhere
Evolution, how ubiquitous, as if when Charles Darwin sought the reason for the finches beak he pulled each string which tied it tight from the front and it gave it up without a knot the long string which wrapped each pinch and mighty everything into a flailing massive whole of holes which switched its six seminal something systems for the seventh sentinel Sunday it was loaned— the day when came the rest. The organ and its environment, the micelle and jello coming together to a point, the atom and the evening, gnashing strings gnarly, light and landscape, dueling duality. Keep pulling. The string which best pecked all the pests, the wing which flew all purdy, replicate and freight it next, then say it to the birdie, the chicken or the egg and nest? It’s the crack between the sturdy, it’s process which the prince possessed, it’s an awful lot like flirting, if you follow something, follow that, it’s less work than being nerdy. In the end, the message which could message best, was the message less the wordy.
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The Universe is a place of tremendous chatter and trill, fanfares everywhere, trenchcoats masquerading through the yellow side streets, outside the labyrinth of cities, vast oceans, festivals of corals engaged in mysteries by the abyss, swimming glowsticks in every crack and crevice, for as many ways branch between the many bricks, expect two places planned to rip the eyes off of the blueprint. A living thing is always two— a body and its language, a foreigner and the field he passes through, and every time he gets his chance, he passes what he knows between his teeth to make his matters new, as the masses well inside him, air become song, burger become brain, water walking metabo-baptized from the tide pools. To become is be at risk. Having hands is being up for grabs. Life is living always on the line. In the parliament of all possibility, what can go wrong?
Oh, I felt it. The long chain of redoubled redbulls. It keeps giving wings and we keep felling angels. Do you know the broad streets? They get broader as you cross. Arms outstretched you can reach your hands until they wrap around. U Double You. U Have you met the objects of your objects? They object the more the more you see! Oh, I felt it. I felt the phantoms of my living deeds. How many millions of men melt for one man to me. There, I killed one. (They'll never see!) How I'd weep for him if he'd just have come to be. All lost beyond the fog of suspended mist opportunities.
Look, it’s all behind this. What are we? Every message ever written, every message in its own language, own body— intimacy immanent. The meaning of anything is what it comes to. You could say what it ends with, but I wouldn’t. Don’t get me started on where that ends… I’d rather say what I am meaning, which is what it feels like to be missed.
When I look at the world I see the question put forth immediately and repeatedly, in flickering bulbs and shuffling feet, by the changing chevrons of birds in the sky: What was the question? A trillion tries, permutations- How was that? A failure to ask it? What is missing? Is your refrigerator running? Well, You’re it, You had better Expect it.
Black holes have no hair
(See footnote 2)
hage : bald
Saitama, our hero, is tragically bald. He is also cripplingly empty inside. I don’t know how he holds it all together. Nevertheless, because of his adversaries inadequacies, he is yet to be finished off. It is natural, in such (and such) a situation, to seek the end, to expect it, and beg the question bring the quest right to its jaded end. To turn in and not be missed, just like this.
Only, OwO what’s this?? The siphon flew the fist? Bugger me sideways! What inconceivable… inconvenience! A real pain persists, When will you learn, When will you learn, That your actions Have consequences!! [1] Next time I should (,) Be suspicious, Who bit my wrist and spit in An esthetic of Insignificance?
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.
I should be suspicious
Of what I want.-Rumi
Villains come through every day from City Z to City A. Our hero doesn’t mind their villainness, though he is rather annoyed by their (bad) etiquette. They shove him around; he simply doesn’t feel like it. He carries with him, like a thorny nuisance, a suspended indolence which has no willingness to suspend his disagreements.
When the monsters come creeping, crawling, cawing, clawing, rampant, raucous from the closet, Saitama, closing his eyes to their appearance, takes them all to a much darker abyss (it scares away even the darkness). Scarier than the bated breath of a critic to the anxious, scarier than the glimpse of death, scarier than unconditional forgiveness (or is it?), Our Hero takes us to the blank realm of irretrievable insignificance, and he didn’t bring a blanket! No hair, no comfort, no purpose, if that isn’t the brink of madness… Saitama brings us back to the question which reigns over conscience like a vacuous nuisance, “Why is he so powerful?”, “Just because he is…”. That is, “that is” brings us to something every something’s up against, “why am I here, where is my place in all this, what do I make of it?” In this well? Well, nothingness.
Black holes have no hair is a reference to that defenseless refererencelessness. A message that never quite landed swirls down into ambiguity and never meets an understanding base to the world, it does not absorb or emit (if it does it isn’t it), its energy is devoted to a cloak of invisibility which does its best to cease to exist. Spacetime stops here, no detour, dead tourist.
The hole in the ceiling.
This space is full of black holes, you wouldn’t know them when you see them, you wouldn’t see them when you see them, cuz all the boring bits are full of holed up significance, and everything that’s interesting is really random radiance. Anyway, I’ve been cruising round for ages, you can stick with me, learned a few things from scattered pages, but it can be lonely looking at the stars warping by and trading places. So I took matters into my own hands, got me two framed masses for some Einstein lens glasses, started looking deeper, ended looking darker, but farther. One time I thought I saw someone waving, I felt my eyes strain to see them say hello, they were real small, real dark, real red, but I could see the fellow waving, it must have been 14 billion years ago that happened, how the time flies, as the crow flies, where was I? I kept on looking on and on, there were all sorts of doors and windows and walls, but none of em could stop this ding-dong! He had his quarrels with the quark-gluon plasmas, I saw him violate confinement, (and yes I wish I hadn’t), then came the regular plasmas, which at that point were light work, the way I saw him, clearly, there was nothing in the universe that could stop it, these boundaries aren’t nothing, you know, they’re holding back causality, yet I saw him waving like a pilot sailing into Copenhagen happily! He was so deep down, it gave me vertigo, alright! By then my eyes were squint into slits of slits, I’m not convinced they hadn’t both spaghettified, but it was me or the dark abyss, so I stayed focused on my guy. By then, I only saw his gravitas, I could tell by all them thens, his now was, you could say it was his Albatross. But there were lots of things that were torn to shreds as I peered long at a loss, there was no doubt, I saw him waving, nearly ninety-three billion light years across. You see, the way I see it, from the center, to the edge, there’s a history alleged, as you look out past each event you see a new horizon, an older horizon, a day reneged. To them? I couldn’t dream of what it meant to them, really, it’s causally disconnected. But from them, well their presence is as good as any present. And anyway we’re all dense inside each other, whatever it was that passed the message to make me, well it’s past in all directions! Which goes for you too. But back to looking back, stand back to back, and take six paces, get dragged away by our inflation… You see, the way I see it, space is stretching out, wherever it was you parked before, now you’re spreading all around, wood or iron, a point is still a point but whatever you’re made of is when a door is not a door, ajar, an empty jar, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. I told you, eye worried, spaghettification, but the way eye see it, you see, is not by televisitation, but by sensiness, which is much more immediate, and indeed it’s much more patient. Here again is my point, our point if you’ll take the tour, I used to have so many friends all shoulder to shoulder in our lukewarm point primoord, but a second passed and when I looked back, a dark bird: “Nevermore”, “well what the HeCk?!” “my friends are stretched” “and me I’m just a core…” So that’s been me, that bean is me, whole hole in the ceiling, bored, everything sucked to the sides, what I’m saying is that waving guy I’m seeing, far off every which way, every time, him, I’m seeing him, a lucky guy, a waiting Lord, a peasant of the past, whatever time moves towards, it’s me when there’s no going back, a wave from the other shore, the future came to me in a blur of the past, and asked, what are you for? — For: You — Love, For: You — Love, …
Sometimes I wish I could write with my etes closed. With ny fingers crissed. Inside me waits a quiet wish which inly wants a knot. It’s a scary thing to untangle, a sturgle, the nore lines I asd, the mire i am lost. Something I’ve nevr noticef, how flat it all was. A living thing, that’s something, it’s no facade, it peers on in through a hole in the ceiling, it’s looking for a God. I’m not sure which way that heaven is, I haven’t got that pigeon up above, wherever my home is, it’s brought a raven, a black whole full of love.
The raven in the Pallas.
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
In the speaker from “The Raven”, (Edgar Allan Poe), in Genos, in Asura Rhino, in the head scientist of the house of evolution, and, most importantly, in the scheming minds of the audience (really, any audience), there is a doubt. The doubt will not be dislodged. The anxiety is the zenith of patience, always waiting out the energies at play with the other emotions, always upstage of the attention. For its pride, it is always seeking challengers, anxiety invents where it lacks, anxiety alienates from the inferior, it won’t be forced, it won’t be controlled, it wills what isn’t from what is, summons shadows, searches ceaseless. Why? It replies, oh for that, its favorite line, it replies with its progress and replies with its regress. It races circles like a dog who heard “walk”, it chases tail, it never ends and never mores, the spiral hypnotizes, spins the zoetrope. Why? The cause and its effects— can you see the rest? Why? The start and the end— can you see what it meant?
The Raven lands on a bust of Athena, at the top of her head, perhaps it nests a hole in her roof. One myth goes, Pallas (young woman) and Athena (Athena the Wise, Athena the Warring) are playing before Zeus raises the Aegis, a shield of ultimate protection, which draws Pallas from her focus, and Athena, lost at such a lapse, can not stop her spear from killing Pallas. Pallas is betrayed by the symbol of security, and by Athena, her friend. Athena creates a statue to honor Pallas, the palladium, and takes her name. The palladium is prophesied to protect Troy for as long as persists inside her walls.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
Merely this and nothing more.
-Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
I like the idea that at the crown of wisdom sits an absence, it’s something that can’t (don’t try it, Anakin) be extracted, nor from which we can extricate ourselves. Rather, for us it is our reminder, not for all the space around us crammed into our every volume, read and recorded, repeated and recited, never will we be to all we miss reunited. So we carry their emptiness too, our palladium, spared by our protectors, angels speared at the tops of trees of ornaments.
I just keep looking, looking out, reading up, pushing on, like “heyo Lenore, what’s up, what’s going on?” I get back what she saw that day, what happened to her, I get back and I listen to her song, I listen in all the languages she learned me, I keep on listening until I’m wrong, She shuts up all right then and there, she turns away before too long, “I’m sorry Lenore, you heard me?” “I’m sorry that you’re gone” “I missed you, skylight-curly cloud like I never saw” “Lenore, baby, stop your twirling, you got me dizzy spun along” I get back and I get back And I say back “I never said that, It never could have not been wrong” Lenore, she was someone who saw quite early she ripped a different bong what tried compare got burned severely but the way it yeeped sang out her song. When I get back these days the creaky attic and pealing paints, leaky pints percolating through the rusty plumbing maze, I try to remember Lenore, in a way, I try to remember her face, Somewhere in this noisy neither nor, I hear “no, Lenore, I’m crazy” “No, Lenore, wait” “Lenore, Lenore, you’re not a ten or a rose or a cake or a dime or a dun or a coral reef or a babe or a miracle not bird nor bee not a snack or a meal not even sunshine on a cloudy day not mine nor yours, Lenore I was wrong before I met you And I exchanged all my change for more than I can ever say But what I did say I said it for not to. Facts, though they are immune to our beliefs, I pray Believe me when I say I need you to believe me when I say I love you.” Lenore kept a diary, loved her history, she left its imprint on my wall. When I look there to find her I get taken back between the empty volumes parted by her hands She found her place among the sacred books, beside encyclopedias, under memoirs, on the backs of magazines. She carved her life from their loose lines and raided through their trains of thought Delayed for just a moment more and she surely would be caught. But that missing story, the written record of everything Lenore was not, my missing missing Lenore who I loved a lot.
Missed Me
When I look into the sky, I don’t think so much about what else is out there, or how small Earth is amidst infinity, I mostly just think about why I don’t end up there, as if to leave the window open would let the stars fall in like roses as a little green man delivers Neverland in lederhosen. Or, here’s a river most of us haven’t stepped in yet, but it’s out there lurkin’, why when the smile lines and forehead creases come a creepin’ why we can’t just up and jump out of that ragged old sore skin like an old bear carpet as we live a long, deep pipe-dream at the ottoman edge of a wine-warm fire pit? We’d read of Antigone, and Odysseus (but our Cello’d play Penelope), and avert our eyes to Oedipus, and we’d fall in love like Romeo and Cupid and Juliet, yet still our arrows are a violence, or we’d find among a little hamlet, a farmer who’d read Hamlet, I didn’t, or I forget, like the names of Alexander and Caesar, who once took the world in their name, now get wielded above cafe tables next to melting iceberg lettuce. And maybe we might read about a truer love still that meets our eyes and only our subtle eyes like a robin rapscallion rapping on the windowsill, who’s really just ruffling, so the corner of the eye would see a wind-scraped fluttering, a message long delivered that’s sat there cluttering a bookcase or a desk or a picture frame with a sign and a name and a message on the back face which only shows itself to you when you find yourself in that place. That place. The robin in the room. It’s a place, should I describe it? Could I? On the back face of things, where the commonplace come and count the aftertastes of mystery that follow each and every object, every space, every history, the place is that time when nostalgia was effaced from a shimmery living gemstone of wizardy aquamarine, our azure belle, not erased by forgetfulness or absence of our mind, but cast in the light of the living in a still-living vase, as if to say of nostalgia “I wonder where he’s gonna be someday”.
It’s not the point, we just call all of that “old age”. The point is that old, like any other state, “terrestrial”, “biped”, “human”, “ape”, it’s not something that goes at all when we go and look away. In fact, it calls us back with its fluttering, “you can’t fly”, “you can’t escape”, “bet you wish you had wings, try the surgeon for the grape”. You’d naturally reply, “Not so constructive, you little tweeting twat. In fact, I’m starting to question how you were raised!” And, really that’s the rub that’s gone the wrongest of the ways because we are now barking up a tree that’s rooted deep in our brains. Where the question ever comes up, the quiet and invisible “Who? Who?” that was once swallowed (owled) down the throat of a cretaceous lizard and choked down as every passing tyrant king and master race strolled along clueless to the imminent immolation falling from space. Whereupon the question, with the slap on the back of a meteor dislodged a pea-brained people who asked “who?”, “why?”, through a mouth of incisors two inches in size, out into a world of unknowns, secrets deep and dark, but mysteries also white, like the first burning of the palm on the hearth of deliciousness, and the cursed learning that any balm of any real worth doesn’t work in Gilead, if it’s working anywhere, it has to work through you. The work we do here may not work beyond, but here’s where I really have trust, and here’s where I’ll always be, always me with the whole in the ceiling— I love to see the change of season, the moment of pride in the memory and anticipation, and the exotic species growing in the cracks, drinking dizzy in the discarded lack. The organism is the one that spreads the message, but with no other difference to where and what is there to spread?
So here’s what it feels like to be missed. Infant hands stretched out before our eyes, casting shadows locking talons with the light, cartwheeling to the brink of annihilation, taking scrapings from every jagged mineral, escaping every every-angled barrier, each way we grow together and fall apart, attempted, the strength of every circumstance tested again and again with unwavering resolution, ejecting out sparks, explosions, the clashing song our secret dissolution from our memories to the matter of our memories, which could only be the what and why we made them, finally, what was seen meeting what was sought, why we made them go through it with us to the other end of the love tunnel, filled with its full hearts pouring out their rhythms in support of our poor bodies, so that they can float sustained in the ephemeral for just enough duration to learn just what it takes, that what it takes, it takes from them, them that make, so that what is made can reach above to over and over embrace its mold— what made made real, for them, the possibilities of necessity, the mediums of freedom, which on one shoulder bear their falling, and from the other raise their torch. For so long we have seen the shadows on the wall, pursued a lack, followed the signal of an exit, and behind it dreamed our dreams of the sun. (“What are we missing?”). All images are, as images, false. The destination of the light and dark is not its landing on the wall, but its reflection. But it is not more real to dispel an illusion, which only grants it credibility, nor is it more real to retreat from them until the source immolates the emanations. Rather, there is a hole in the roof, where the light shines clearly through, and never lands. Together, hands holding holding hands, totems stacked on empty tombs, wrapping our presence and guarding our proudest beneath our clapping roar like the last air kept between the heart of beating palms serves as the first breath we take in the next world beyond the stage door, together we explore the credits we missed.
A Boundary-Bearing Message
There are many times when our words, which we think of as our world, come to a full stop. There are words that walk adjacent, like loss, inadequacy, incompleteness, absence, gone, disappear. They’re all done up in the blackest pigments taken straight from solemn earth unspoken. They file near but arc around, glancing down without a voice before turning away to wipe a tear that could have fallen. In their procession, for all their powers, all they can do is miss. There are only a few lucky people who can face these limits to extend, at the crumbling edges of what perception grants us can be conveyed, the meaning that goes beyond the symbols of this world, as if for the first time being uttered, the ones who were meant to understand it take part in its definition with those who were meant to be understood, and are in that moment definite themselves. As if to say “there are no words that can bring me near to you, but I hear you anyway”. Where words lack, the shortest poem is a name. Few people separate what stands in from what is standing. There comes a time on no one’s wrist to escape discernment, it is a new time, it needs a new kind of kind equipment. Living thing is not a category, nor is its boundary monolithic, it is our kindred, don’t bind it to a definition! When one of us is lost, we gain nothing, they refuse to clue us in, to let us limit ourselves to whatever it is that is “our business”; it is off limits. All those names that have been lost keep a certain kindness, something like a nothing, a certain keeping quiet, they don’t speak up about what did them in, where they’ve gone, where they’re going, because they know that boundary needs a bearer, and that, to us, is their love letter, the empty space that wins for life its freedom, all its simple symbol pleasures, a parting gift which alone parts missed. We see behind its orbits, its accretion disk, the presence of an absence which patiently sits. Whatever it comes to, it doesn’t end with. We all flee our sufferings until we’re finally snared, where we wait something like a nothing that doesn’t appear to care. But to us, it appears despite our fears and our nightmares, all the sadness in the world, from the starving, from tragedy to tragedy, through war and strife, injustice, simple life, through joys, toys, silver dollars, golden kois, kids, boys, lice, oops! sin, noise, through choice, through by and by, through friends, and passing them I’ll never meet again, through the invisible cage of a mime, beyond our oceans and our mountains and our creeds, there our certain is keeping quiet, waiting, for us to be free, for us.
Mosquitos are vacuums, and nature abhors vacuums.
Really I wanted to get across (transcend) the idea of ideas, transformation, progress. Evolution: the idea of ideas! It’s not so easily done; it fills the universe from edge to edge (if there are any). It’s a tremendously interesting idea, irresistibly pandemic, how can anything resist? To me, the possibility of independence (separate species, separate worlds, separate universes, separate people) gets completely choked by the “will to power” if it’s taken simply as the insurmountable urge to be insurmountable, to perfect permanently. I think that Nietzsche guy understood it better, it’s not “power” alone, but will too, as one, self-overcoming, seeking the gaps which spiral fractal to the substrate, a base made from patterns perfectly fractured and filled, a place made from only space, freedom to move, and every means to move, freedom to grow, and gates in every ground, freedom of meaning, and being free to mean it too.
Overall, I’d say I wanted to honor all the things we’ll never see, being subjects of physics and all sorts of lesser laws (which still seem the greater), and I wanted to sense this sense of absence not as usual, by its uncertainty and by my apprehension, but by its certainty (two handles on every problem) that it is a mark of no mark of completeness, assuredness in agency, the home for hope, but also what that means. It means: you will be missed. No quantity of corpuscles can constitute your character (don’t try to count them). None of this is simulation, or simulateable, and sincerely I am grateful that what is lacking in me I can see cherished inside you, and we continue like croissants café-crushing on each other fold over fold bringing downsides up and swinging upside down and wondering, as we are wont to do, why, why why? Well, you’re up, now it’s up to you.
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!-Feynman
Your actions have consequences!
(Aside about this Sammy Classic Sonic Fan fella seems to have grown up just fine in spite of what the world wanted to make of him and it’s great to see)