ORGANELLE

∞ “This word we have. “Beauty’. We’re confused about this word. It does not mean what we suppose, namely, that beauty is a quality inherent in a being, object, process or situation. It is, I think, something quite other than this. Rather than a quality, it is a likeness. A likeness with our own origin, nature, potentials… and life. So when we see beauty, what is happening is actually recognition. Recognition of our own nature and origins, relationships, purposes… and forms. Beauty is a kind of reflection… but not of forms or frameworks… of Origin. And its consonance with our own moment of awareness within it.”

— an anonymous informant

∞ Babe Drops Gun

Light arrives by frog movements. Whose darkness spake the crevice true. Water shines, a dog shakes. Nets of foods and waste move invisible. Child conceived just prior to the impact. Moon faces directly into other time. Dead leaves conceal mouse chewing beetle carcass. Crisp sound. Machine noise into scene fade.

Stratified signals in asphalt. Networks of flash on steel or glass rise oracular. Beyond the silence, babe drops gun. Bus crashes. Schools of fish pulse and shimmer. The bullet pierces the duodenum. The calendar. The bullet drops a babe, and the babe drops gun. With world. The next frame of the sequence goes blank.

Tree flaming at the periphery of night. Living sounds write time. A gun walks the paths. It wears the body of men. Nets of children held incontroveribly hostage. The calendar emits fish. A flock of birds collapsed into a single letter. The envelope was you. You drop time, the babe grabs the gun, the bus uncrashes. Dead time reveals mice chewing the carcass of a bullet.

Sun drops water. Lightning sparks the tree. Color’s blur picks the champion. A child bends the equation, disappearing there. Where wings remain a flock of birds emerges as the moon. Babe drops gun, world pierces sun. Nets of trap and sacred blood burn like fish in men. A mechanism speaks the girl, she turns. The bullet is a man. His hands amend the gash.

Whose darkness spake the crevice true, and thus collapsed the trace.

∞ If it were possible for you to slightly correct your understanding of what it is that the English word ‘light’ refers to… to adjust the definitions and connotations so that they were just slightly more correct than those we currently employ… the resulting effect on your human and relational intelligence would be revolutionary.

The ramifications of that single slight correction would spread through your entire vocabulary and lexicons like wildfire, erasing the artifacted errors that were previously hyper-ramified throughout, and replacing them with new opportunities for prodigy, insight, and learning.

This is because the meaning of the term ‘light’ is an invisible element in the cognitive anatomy every other word or concept we can assemble. It is ‘multiply folded’ into every token we use. So there are multiple copies of our errors in every movement of our mind that involves language and reference.

And this correction is possible. In fact, you are made of the way of accomplishing such corrections. And, of course, light is not the only such ‘linchpin’ term in your lexicon…

∞ “They were born to become the living embodiments of the most terrifying and provocative of questions. Something else happened. Now, billions of passively hypnotized spectators eagerly await the proclamations of those who preserved the form for purposes that would obliterate the content. They are churchgoers to the structure of the envelope and have forgotten that the mail it once contained was their own soul — and without it, the empty envelope appears to them a god.”

— homily fragment

∞ Minds are strange things. But minds collapsed into language… are far more strange.

Most of the (very few) truly intelligent people I have known (and not all of them) remained both aware of and capable of opportunistically using… the staggering »incompleteness of human ideas and concepts.

Particularly about »identity. And not merely the identities posed in language. Their own identity, too.

Now, the curious thing here, is that people like poets, writers, artists, and even some mathematicians… understand that context and connotation… are factors in deriving meaning and identity.

The root elements of identity, referents like ‘the universe’, ’the sun’, ‘a dream’, ‘friend’… these foundational ideas that inform all others… even the words themselves… are bare. By themselves, they are almost meaningless. What allows us to experience meaning isn’t definition… it’s »connotation.

Connotation being what is »associated with a word or idea. The constellation of associations is web-like in our minds. And it transforms. But it can also collapse… into tokens. Frozen, static … usually rather verbal ‘definitions’.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. While it won’t really matter which word I use to indicate ‘a tree’ (actually, this is more sophisticated than it sounds, I am concentrating my focus elsewhere, it does matter, but not in ways we are used to analyzing yet), the connotation-web is astonishingly important, so important that people with different connotation webs live in differing experiential universes.

Some common connotations of ‘a tree’ include a structured vegetal organism, bark and leaves or needles, sometimes fruit. Shelter. Something that can fall on me. An organism with which I cannot meaningfully communicate. And so on.

This is an example of a modern connotation web.

But if one can »improve that web, by both including things left out and deemphasizing aspects that are merely conceptual or categorical… the result is »a different mind. Suppose for example that the connotation “a living being who connects me to all other living beings” is introduced. This ‘slight correction’ creates an entirely different world of meaning, identity, opportunity and relationships.

This path of improving the connotation-webs of fundamental referents leads to the possibility of broad-scale »prodigy in otherwise ’common’ human populations…

People who have undergone awakenings of various kinds, including those resulting from peak experiences or (sometimes) intoxication… emerge not with modified »words, but with »new connotation webs.

And that noticing is the doorway to other minds.

For all of us. If we can merely explore it together.

And I say we must.

“Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

“In all my travels to other living worlds over the past 7647 years, I have never encountered any candidate species that, at the group order, is as prone to insanity, strident ignorance, and inventing new ways to kill anything that moves and most of what doesn’t as homo sapiens sapiens on Earth.

Their propensity for military posturing, paranoia and omnicide staggers the imagination.

If I wasn’t aware of the actual cause, their behavior — no their »existence— would be inconceivable.

It’s as if timespace itself produced a species so violent that it would attack it’s own shadow—in the void produced by their defection from nature, organism and intelligence.

Give them technology and they will eventually threaten the entire (redacted).

Simply stated, they are the most dangerous species I have ever encountered, bar none.

They must not be allowed to propagate in the (redacted).”

— infraheard

“I know this will disappoint many of my fans and supporters, but today I announce that, in solidarity with the largely unknown Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, I, too, will not be running for President of the United States in 2024.

Furthermore, I encourage you to follow our lead here and defer your own campaign.

Especially if your surname begins with T.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Patriot Lounge

∞ Nature’s forms and ways are the lost and silent languages of our soul. There is no representation sufficient to deliver them to us, and the shapes and images we make to represent them cannot return us to them or them to us. But if we will set down our stories, fashions, and books, the world will invite us to directly participate in this impossible ecstasy of mutual recognition. She will show us into a living library whose real nature is beyond the wildest fantasies of human beings. Then, we will begin to remember how to call each other into being in the most astonishing ways. And not only each other, but the world who is our place, our way, our soul’s mother, our companion, and our teacher. We do not come from human culture. We come from the heart of the sky. There is no human book that will lead us to our heritage and return our birthrights. Only the wild world. Only our intimacy with the living places, time, and beings.

∞ “If one allows the structure and ‘subject-object-verb’ orientation of modern English to dictate one’s thoughts, perspectives and understandings of such matters as Identity, Relation, Qualities and Equivalence… the results will not only be incoherent and deceptive… they will only barely qualify as Thought. One must achieve the analog of escape velocity from the bizarre implications of noun-based languages such as English, and surpass even the original verb-based languages such as Hebrew in order to actually understand or experience the potentials implicit in our capacities for formal representational cognition — by which I mean — forming, arranging and comparing tokens in an attempt to properly structure memory, understanding and… the aspects of intelligence related to Identity.”

— an anonymous informant