ORGANELLE

“By defecting from himself, and embarking on self-destruction, he was overtly defecting from the group-family, all the while pretending to be doing something else.

He didn’t enjoy being shown this. In fact, it enraged him.

He envisioned self-destruction as noble, and had a narrative that one day he ‘would just drop dead’.

So they questioned him: that’s your plan? What if you just drop half-dead? This is how you see your role in the family? You’ll take care of it by dropping dead? The insurance money?”

— infraheard

“But what we have not yet understood is this: the left hemisphere is like a science-fiction universe or a space-station: it is not only uncannily prepared for rapid representational uptake — it represents something like a sketchpad within which entirely new forms of intelligence may be rapidly assembled and tested. The left hemisphere is somewhat akin to ‘personal’ experimental intelligence.

Unfortunately for us and our world, this experiment is failing. The sketchpad has become virulently infected with a certain species of sketch that has ‘come to life’ and is attacking the living hand that draws it. This particular method of sketching believes itself to be distinct from its source, and thinks itself to actually exist as a being — and since it believes this, every actually living thing represents at once an insult and a threat to its primacy and survival.

It is this intelligence that our religions have been warning us about, whether or not there are supernatural analogues. Due to our vast misunderstanding of these matters, our species has been largely trapped in a reflection of our own paranoid fantasies for (at least) thousands of years — and billions of human lifetimes.”

“But what McLuhan believed is that the communication technology itself shapes the way we perceive things and the way we communicate in ways that we’re pretty much oblivious to because we’re so focused on the information coming through the medium.

In the long run, he thought the technology’s way of shaping the way we think ultimately had a much greater effect on us and in our lives than did the content flowing through the medium, whether it was television or the internet or whatever.”

“But a long time ago I had what I consider to be both a mystical and pragmatic insight. It followed from the supposition that organisms ‘invented death’, and it came with superorganisms… the kind we’re mostly familiar with: plants and animals.

See, a superorganism is a time-ship, but it’s born in and adapted to a specific phase-state of the biosphere, and the relationships and transformations there operant. There’s a span of biospheric transformation beyond which the original body of the organism… cannot successfully adapt for.

From this perspective, you’d want death. Because you’d want vessels of embodiment suited to (and perhaps particularly adapted for) the »current world.

I remember thinking, at the time, that genetics was like a kind of (at least) partial reincarnation. What we inherit from our progenitors seems however, at least to me, to be far richer than mere genes, or anything easily explained away by some reductive mechanism…”

— fragment

“Breaking News”: I wish the news would break. Oh, shit, that wish was granted before I … but what I meant was actually ‘shatter and go away forever’ or something like that…

“Branding” is a term that has the connotation ‘to make a scar in an slave’s or animal’s flesh in order to declare ownership’. We would do well to question it as deeply as Krista suggests… with and for each other and our future…

“Bogus entries in a specific thing-class totally fucked my day.”

— infraheard

“Before you pay attention to what is being said, your subconscious mind becomes aware of the purposive character underneath the speech act. When this begins to become a conscious process, that is, when one is aware of the purposes that give rise to communications acts, the beginnings of linguistic intelligence arise in the conscious mind. Without this awareness, we are largely bereft of intelligent relations with language, and thus, of intelligence itself. The purposes precede and thus inform the encodings; to become aware of this is tantamount to escaping the charades these encodings enact.”

— a lexicographer

“Before desire or aversion, before awakening or ignorance. Before the first movement of the mind. The great mystery is incomplete! And in this incompleteness, in direct intimacy with this place from which all else emerges as a kind of play… there is the no-awakening that pierces the veil of birth and death, thought and ignorance, wisdom and folly. The lips of the mystery cannot be kissed but as our own lips tasting the instantaneous beauty that is the incompleteness of thought and language, concept and derivation.

Extingish the urge that drives distinguishing, and you will become alive again in the first place, which is no place, and thus all places and moments at once.

Before the mind can form its hand and move to grasp, there is the great liberation.

Yet all these words are not even shadows of this! If only they could unword us entirely… and return us to the before of language, concept, thought and description, only thus might they become a wing and not a cage.

So burn these words and seek before their source, before the movements of my fingers or the hopes that moved my heart and hands to scribe them. I will meet you there… in the place of play and flight.”

— an anonymous informant

“Because the injured bird found me, I was made whole. What I would not understand until [ redacted ] was that because I could not save it… I was liberated.”

— an anonymous informant