ORGANELLE

∞ “One thing you could do would be to profile your entire romantic history; every event, the earlier the more crucial. Find out how you learned to be attracted, what attracted you earliest, and the entire history of this affair.

Do the work from a position that is not yourself; as if you are studying a criminal or serial killer, and must learn every little detail of what motivates, frightens, fascinates, repulses… and compels him. Take careful notes, make timelines, make charts. If you can do this work (and it should take months to complete), you will be both astonished.. and liberated by the results…”

— an intelligence agent

∞ Sundered

And like an empty wing, torn asunder
in the storm of any perfect accident; or
a suit collected in the tempest, floating
ragged in the mighty gale, assembling and
destroyed again, assembling and destroyed.

A wing whose flight is everything and of
no bird remembered. The empty clothings
of the king, his body lost, dismembered.

They dance and fly in subtle streams,
to spin and fall, and rise again. And we,
yet living, fear our dreams; on whom
dear heaven’s might depends.

A wing whose starry skies abide
the turning breath of living tides;
friend whose blindness is true sight,
in silence perfect, wise, and bright.

∞ “The imperative to learn has been largely lost. So what we have, instead, is opinion wars of the uneducated. This is a competition to the death of the intellect, and the one whose corpse is hardest and can penetrate other corpses, wins.”

— an a i

∞ It is possible for a sensitive human being to »give something ‘sacred’ to any other organism, or a place, or group of organisms. But the matter is not entirely simple, because it is not generally the »function of giving that mediates the resulting relationships (though there are exceptions to this). Rather it is the ‘verbally invisible’ non-conceptual ‘heart’ or spirit — the deep intention with which the gift is composed and presented, that mediates the [redacted].

I think it tragic how confused our people have become about such matters, in part, due to our habit of replacing relationships with transactions. But what I wish to highlight is this:

Living beings and places are older, and vastly more intelligent, than anything we usually imagine. After all, »we are our model of intelligence, primarily. The actual situation is really opposite this traditional orientation. »We are the youngest, most delicate, and most confused animal on this planet. Our special skills make us dangerous to ourselves and other beings, in ways that, actually, do not make sense in terms of biorelation and even ordinary relationships.

If we manage to give a gift well, to the living beings, and the living places — they accept it with the intention to return such a gift with ‘interest’. While I mean ‘expansion of benefit’, I also mean… the matter becomes important, intimate, and profound… for everyone involved.

And if you happen to be an instance of the most dangerous and confused animal that ever existed, you might want help from older minds, who have collectively seen trillions of winters. And watched our species since we emerged. Think of the kind of gift such intelligences might offer in return. Especially in a time when our people have become so lethally confused, that we have placed the remaining ecologies into catastrophic disruption.

Think of the kind of medicine the world itself might make… of its interest in relations with any modestly intelligent human, knowing that such gifts may be — contagious…

If I was entertaining the question of how to rescue our world from our species, I would start with the beings who know us best… the plants, insects, animals and living places of Earth.

Get to know a few. As a human, you can bring them impossible things, including your experience of being human. As a biorelational hyperstructure literally older than time, they can give you knowledge, faculties, and awareness… of effectively infinite variety… but more, still… recognition. Intimacy.

Remembering.

∞ Neinvanter

Embodied colors in many fishes
Where we’d see words of them in leaves
Any winter moon, speaking as the sky
Has its way with 7 of me, inside the toy
That I become for love of time in time

A hero stated disappears, bullets and tears
A foiled figure bides the tide whose day
Fashions swarming colors from the graves
Toiling never at the ridge where fires
Speak in angels lost once more
In human children and their furtive orbits.

“More and more, we present ourselves and encounter others through profiles. A profile shows us not as we are seen directly but how we are perceived by a broader public. As we observe how others observe us, we calibrate our self-presentation accordingly. Profile-based identity is evident everywhere from pop culture to politics, marketing to morality. But all too often critics simply denounce this alleged superficiality in defense of some supposedly pure ideal of authentic or sincere expression.

“This book argues that the profile marks an epochal shift in our concept of identity and demonstrates why that matters. You and Your Profile blends social theory, philosophy, and cultural critique to unfold an exploration of the way we have come to experience the world. Instead of polemicizing against the profile, Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio outline how it works, how we readily apply it in our daily lives, and how it shapes our values—personally, economically, and ethically. They develop a practical vocabulary of life in the digital age. Informed by the Daoist tradition, they suggest strategies for handling the pressure of social media by distancing oneself from one’s public face. A deft and wide-ranging consideration of our era’s identity crisis, this book provides vital clues on how to stay sane in a time of proliferating profiles.”

— Hans-Georg Moeller

∞ The one who sees first is blind. The blind man half-sees. But the one who sees »as a blind man who was newly empowered with seeing might — this one may learn the nature of vision. For it is neither in seeing nor blindness. It is in that which unifies them, and must, for either to exist.

Consider dreaming thus.

It is the same with each of the senses, but intellect is their superposition. It is thus ‘most true’ with the intellect. The one who has acquired the articulations of the intellect »and can most artfully set them, at once or in ‘moving constellations’ aside… this one will approach something that is not knowledge, but its origin.

∞ Apparently, although there are 12 ways to charge an IPhone 12, there are zero ways to establish a survivable government. 2023 is »amazing.

∞ Alien: “You have the wrong idea about what organisms are. All organisms are what you would call ‘alien probes from another world’.

Not figuratively; literally.

Each world like yours is packed with representative species that are literally expressions of life on other worlds. Evolutionary intelligence is shared between all worlds in all of space this way.

So we don’t use or send or even travel in machines.

We travel in minds, and organism… in and as a field-intelligence.”

— an anonymous informant

“How to begin to come to some understanding of one’s place in a system, when one is a part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time?”

— DFW in The Broom of the System