Throttle people, make bread and love

 

Skellig Michael - Wikimedia commons

    Supposing all you say is so, so what?  We are still beset by unwholesome weather, and eat muck.  And now we have been told by our noble leader that social security leads to infanticide.  Sethren, our noble leader may have the mouth parts of a six foot tapeworm, but he also has a first class degree from Oxford.  PPE, admittedly.  I have no more idea than you what cutting-edge intellectual content resides in a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford.  Nugatory, one would imagine.  But enough to rule.  And the tyro tapeworm clearly had enough brain to master it splendidly.  A first class degree.

  Sethren, the mouthings of the great leader may evince stupidity, but they are designer mouthings, crafted by years, centuries of evolution to embody a gargantuan gormlessness.  Not his. Ours.  Our  stupidity, sethren.  The stupidity inheres not in the crafting of these obvious, children’s picture book, fatuous lies.  The gargantuan stupidity is in us, who are the butt of this ludicrous mendacity.  And yet we believe in it utterly, and remouth it and remouth it continually, as if we ourselves were not as withered grey-green carcasses on the Huddersfield ringroad, but plump pink tapeworms whose every comfort is eternally assured.

  Surely, sethren, our so thoroughgoing stupidity needs some explanation.  The last person to try to explain it was Karl Marx; false consciousness, opium of the masses; spot on, old Karl.  But a century and a half ago.  The Communist Manifesto was published nine years before The Origin of Species.  Nobody has attempted to explain our moronic collective credulity since then.

  I will.

  But first the building blocks.

  An act.  A kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.

  In the human world, maybe in the Hominin world (and I read on my phone yesterday, sethren, that Sahelpithecus is likely to represent the divergence between Homo and Chimp, seven million years ago or thereabouts), in the human world, an act is seldom isolated from a thing.  “Manus amimam pinxit, my pen is in my hand” as the old fascist put it.  There is not much that we do with our bare hands.  Throttle people, make bread and love.  But by and large a human act is an obligate symbiont with at least one thing.  It is the nexus of doing and done to — obligate symbiont, Sether Albert? Have I not mentioned it before?  Oh.  No I fucking haven’t, then.  Two different kinds of organism living in a cooperative relationship upon which both are completely dependent; trees and root fungi, mammals and their gut bacteria; human beings and politicians.

  Think of sewing, sethren.  Sewing without needle, thread and two bits of material to be joined, is not sewing.  But a needle and thread and so on cannot be sewing without kinesis, fingers, musculature, neural substrate.  Most human acts can only exist in the context of things.  And most things can only evolve in the context of acts.  The old joke goes, when a simple lad had finally been taught to add two apples to two apples and get four apples, he asked, “does it work with pears too?”  Does the concept of obligate symbiosis work with acts other than sewing?  Pears, sethren, pears.

  At the level of demons, there is no distinction to be made between an act and a thing.  An act is a thing.  Sewing, like a needle, is a demon.  Sure, as with a needle, other demons consort with the demon sewing, many more than the minimal ones we associated with a needle.  We could anatomise the demon sewing into quite a lot, or if you prefer, a whole bunch of demons.  But if you are running your eye over the contents of a design technology course to see if it is suitable for one, oh ye paupers, of your profligate quantity of offspring (whom, because you may rely on social security, you are quite likely to go home and slaughter) and in the midst of a list of course components, joinery, web design, you note for the fraction of a second your eye overflies it embroidery before the epicentre of vision moves on to automobile aesthetics; then embroidery occurred as a demon; not totally unexamined, because there will be a locus in the neural substrate which awakes and leaps to life screaming me, me, and would be only too delighted to call up other demons into the workspace, needles, coloured thread, the Bayeux tapestry, whatever the fuck you like as long as you are going to take notice; but not a chance.  The automobile aesthetics demon is already having its microsecond flicker.

  So, at the demon level, things and acts are not differentiated.  But, you will say, we humans can distinguish between a thing and an act.

  Sethren, we can distinguish between a trillion things and another trillion things, had we but world enough  and time.  We have no difficulty telling the difference between angels and fairies, between cricket and baseball, between a virus and a bacterium or a gigue and a saraband.  But we do it at another level.  We shall come to concepts in time, sethren, but you will not be amazed to know that concepts, like everything in the metaverse, are also alliances of demons.

  For it is only at the demon level that evolution can take place.

But, you may say, the ancestral organism became the hippo and the whale.  Surely it is at the level of species that things change?

That is what we see, because we cannot see genes.  Darwin didn’t even know they existed.  But it was genes, sethren (and epigenetics, of course).  Evolution takes place at the level of the cell, and it is only the sum of cells that is the organism that represents the, to us, apprehensible species.

  And you will say, but culture doesn’t have to be like biological life.  Just because evolution takes place at the level of genes, not the level of the hippo and the whale, there is no reason why culture should follow suit.

  Agreed absolutely, sethren.  Give me another explanation that will lead to an account of why we believe the simple lies of our Great Leader, an explanation that does not rest on metaphor and religious platitude, and I will go along with you.  Until then, the evolution of culture takes place at the level of demons.

  The question still lies open, can there be a non-kinetic act?  Clearly.  Acts can take place in an ideoverse unexpressed by any kinesis.  You cannot look into the face of the beloved and know of whom they dream.  The raven surveyed the meat, the string, its perch for several minutes before it acted.  The high jumper clears the bar before she starts her run-up.  This, sethren, is why I call it an act, not an action.  All that we do happens in the theatre of the skull.

  Sethren, tomorrow, sabbatical.  I go to the monastery of Skellig Michael to watch and pray for a week.  You must wander the streets of Huddersfield alone.  Watch the behaviour of your fellows, and ponder my words.  Dwell on our stupidity in especial.  When I return, and if, in like case to the Earl of Groan, I am not consumed by puffins, then concepts.

Demons get kinetic

Sethren, we have serious work to do.

  We have mastered demons.  We can juggle with them now, we can spin them on our fingertips like iridescent gyroscopes no bigger than a midge.

  And we have covered things.  A thing is anything in front of your eyes now.  That ballpoint, that mug; and including animals, insects, birds.  And maybe people as well.  With people, we are in the zone of the ethical.  A dead horse is a thing.  A dead human being?
  But let us stay away from the edge.  We have anatomised a needle.  We know what a thing is, and how in the metaverse it is an assembly of demons; while in the real world, it is a bounded material existence.  Think of a needle.
  What's next?

Demon    thing    act    concept    map    praxis    Culture 

  Next up, act.  Act. 
  Here it becomes crucial to fully realise, not just "Yes yada yada yada", but actually stabilise the concept, even though we haven’t dealt with concepts yet, that body, brain and  the E=mc² universe are a continuum.
  An act is a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of demons.

  In 2007 Heinrich and Bugnyar did an experiment with Ravens.  They put a raven on a perch in a deep narrow cage.  A bit of meat was hung from the perch on  the end of a piece of string too long for the bird to heave it up in one pull.  The raven did nothing but look at the meat for several minutes.  Then it reached as far down the string as it could with its beak, pulled up a loop, trapped the loop between its foot and the perch, reached down again with its beak, and pulled up the meat.

  This looked like a raven analysing a spatial situation, organising an act in the neural substrate, and then completing a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of demons.  What components of logic, rationality, foresight, mechanical analytics, and general universal philosophy contributed to this act are not our concern, sethren.

  It did demonstrate something.  Ravens have an ideoverse, a four dimensional space in the neural substrate where demons exist.  Acts are not the exclusive preserve of Homo sapiens.

  Here is another thing ravens did, this time not an experiment, someone just watched them.

  A couple used to tether their large dog to a post in the yard when they went to work, with enough space that the hound had a full circle to wander about in.  They put its bowl of food on the edge of the circle and drove off, except one day they just pretended to, and stayed and watched.  A pair of ravens flew down.  One stood on the edge of the circle and cawed, danced and jeered.  The dog naturally bounded over to kill it, and was aggrieved to find that the rope pulled it up just short.  A prancing raven and a rearing, fang-gnashing slathering hound.  Meanwhile the other raven ate its fill of dog food on the other side of the circle.  Then the ravens swapped places.

  Maybe, nothing to do with acts, but maybe when we search for the origins of human cooperation, we should have more regard for the behaviour of others in the animal kingdom; African hunting dogs, wolves, orca and porpoises, social falcons.  The interactions of a pack of hunting dogs, from first waking to kill, has enough complexity to give us work for a while.

  I wander off again.  I become embroiled.  Let us rather, sethren, look at an act, borrowing a pair of the excellent “Darwin’s goggles” from Jonnie Hughes.

  It is the act performed with a needle; not the needle we anatomised all those days ago, but a needle in functional terms; a thing for puncturing a plane of material and drawing a thread through it.

Okay, we are going way back, to just the epoch before the first actual needle evolved.  Two lads are sitting against a rock in the sun.  One has a needle, a rather hefty and clunking thing, with a thin hide strip through the eye.  He doesn’t call it a needle, he calls it a dirip (this is not the same dirip as the quantum toy entangled with its twin a billion light-years away in a kids room on the planet Xerk which we discussed a few weeks ago.  The coincidence of names is just that, a coincidence.  You may think, that’s very strange, but the universe is full of coincidences).

  So he’s sitting there with this dirip, which we would recognise as a needle, forcing it through the square of hide on his lap, drawing the hide lace through after it, and then repeating the action, time after time.

  After watching for several minutes, which do not yet exist, the other says, “Bro’, I been watching you what you doing and I have to say it, Bro’ what you doing is teleologically opaque to me.”

  “I’m diripping, Bro’.”

  “But why?”

  “Because this assemblage, the pointed rigid body, the flexible strip it draws after it, is a dirip.  Thus, I am 

diripping.”

  “Yea, Bro’, but all you doing is making a series of holes in that hide.  What’s the point, Bro’?”

  “Bro’, you can’t dirip without making holes in the hide.  That’s what you doing when you diripping.”

  What we have witnessed is an act (repeated), a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of demons.  But it is an act that is very unlikely to have ever taken place, because such a thing as a dirip, and such an act as a single unit of diripping (which could in time evolve into 10^{whatever you like} acts of diripping, think all the sewing machine needles in the world, all at full chat) could not have taken place without the evolution of countless other acts preceding it, the act of joining two things together (which has eluded our diripping lad) being just one of them.  Sewing will not evolve before a whole series of things and acts and concepts have evolved.  Just as a demon is a locus for alliances of demons (a needle), a thing can be the locus for a whole agglomeration of things (a bicycle), and an act is made up of a sequence of acts, most of them involving things (a root canal filling).  Culture sometimes looks fractal.  We cannot generalise until we have the detail.

  Sethren, we must eat.  Same time tomorrow.  We have to ask ourselves whether there can be non-kinetic acts.  Among other things.  But kinetic first.  Have we signed the petition, sethren?  It is a demand that one of the plump pink London tapeworms should put his money where his bothria are and live on £53 a week; week after week.  That is one of the things we shall understand in time, sethren.  Demeaning and destructive poverty is not a condition.  It is a praxis.  We may get there in the end.

Look, there's a dirip

Durga wins at kickboxing - Wiki

  Sether Mahishasura, you enquire of the chthonic in relation to “Umwelt”.  Yes, sether Albert, rather over mine, too.  In fact straight over the top and into the nether distance, curving with the Earth’s curve behind that barren ridge above Sainsbury’s there, where the poor are regenerating themselves, disappearing without a sound.  Not the poor.  They will not disappear without a sound.  Just removing them from the gut of the metropolitan tapeworm won’t do the trick.  The notion, sethren, the notion of the chthonic and the “Umwelt” as it passed over our heads like an iridescent but somewhat shapeless angel.

  I think, sethren, I need to state the obvious, sucked into emptiness as it may be by its own circularity.  Everything that exists, exists.

  We could add to that its opposite.  Nothing that does not exist, exists.  But you will see problems there that I needn’t point out.  Nothing does exist, otherwise we couldn’t give it even a passing mention.  Nothing exists just as much as a stone exists, a stone which is a mere a millimetre short of being a rock which I might drop on your foot.  We may feel that that stone exists a little more assertively than nothing does.  But there are no degrees of existence itself.  It’s an either/or thing.  That is why I had to assert that everything that exists, exists.

  I think we need to talk about the real world.  We are closer to it than most, standing in a layby on the Huddersfield ringroad, the temperature a uniform grey 1^o Celsius, the tyres of the frenzied traffic, locked in that see-saw of desire, craving the back-pull of heavy braking as the brain atop accelerates, the surge of uncheckable acceleration as it brakes, pummel a miasma of exhausted hydrocarbons, grease, metal grime, benzene and cabin deodorants into a thousand  woven vortices of oncogenic gas which we breathe in because we must, you do, you die, you don’t, you die quicker.  That is part of what we think of as the real world, and that is why we say, one to another, Jesus fuck, there must be more to it than that.  We are the mind in the cave and that is why, as sether Mahishasura says, we reach “into the reality behind the rock face”.   Except that I would put it the other way round.  We reach from  our cloud of reality in a vain attempt to try to touch the rock face.

  Which brings us back to the real world.  I have news for you folks.  It is the real world that is “the rock face”.  It is the real world that we can hardly perceive.

  It’s like this.  The real world is what there would be if some clever virus were to overreach itself and wipe us out, every one.  The real world is what existed before Culture.  Culture has taken over the real world.  What we perceive now is the metaverse.  Not all of it, of course.  Just as far as we can see.

  I use Culture with a big C to refer to anything that has been through a brain and out again and into another brain.  And then, to avoid the complications of fish, insects, and cows, I add a qualification to the word brain.  The brain has to be in a skull, and that skull has to be, or in our history have been, atop a spinal cord which, in active life, is, or was, most of the time vertical. Brain on a stick.  In, out, and into another one.

  That’s it.  That’s Culture.

  Thus, anything you can think, know, dream, imagine, touch, taste, draw, is part of Culture.  Okay, you can say bollocks, sether Albert.  But I’m willing to go out on a limb here.  If you win, I will buy you for the midday repast the choicest item on MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits menu.  She has no menu?  I was not apprised.  MagicMeatyBits is the menu.  Those it shall be.  Ah, undifferentiable?  That it shall be.  And if you lose, all you need do is bow down and touch the hem of my garment.  Not fucking likely? A very right and proper response, given the state of the pavement.  Okay, without the bet, introduce me to something you can think of that has not been into at least one brain, and out again, and into another brain.  A tub of MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits?  Well, it clearly has.  Your brain, my brain.

  A diamond-studded tub of MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits?  Sether Albert, you are a genius.  The tub is yours, though not diamond-studded.  Clearly diamonds were not a part of the bet.

  You have indeed shown a deep flaw in my argument.  Sethren, we can say something, as sether Albert has just done, which has never, ever been said in the world before.  And were you, sether Albert, to stand in the middle of the great Thar desert with no other human being nearer than a hundred miles, and enunciate most clearly “An emerald studded tub of MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits” and then never in your life say it again, that unique utterance would not have been into one brain on a stick and out again and into another brain on a stick, I agree.

  Am I therefore saying it is not a part of Culture?

  No.  Any fool can produce an infinite number of unique utterances.  We could say “a tub of MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits studded with one sapphire”.  Then, after deep thought, we could say “ a tub of MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits studded with two sapphires”.  And so on, for ever.  And then we could do the same with, I don’t know, garnets, lapis lazuli, coral, pearls.  But before that time, a certain tedium might creep into the operation.  So we probably won’t.  Especially as my ill-advised mention of sustenance has brought on an epidemic, or what would be an epidemic were the multitude of my followers to be as Paul’s at Ephesus, of foot shuffling and gazing afar with an impatient gaze.

  But, “a diamond studded tub” is an utterance, and is composed of demons and alliances of demons.

  So now I can say again, anything you can think is part of culture, because anything you can think is composed of demons, and every demon has been into at least one brain, and out again, and into another brain. 

  Good question, sether Pritchard-Achebe-Wajda.  What if I see a dirip, but haven’t had a chance to tell anybody about it yet.  I take it that a dirip is something entirely novel, let us say a quantum toy entangled with its twin a billion lightyears away in a kids room on the planet Xerk, such planets have to have at least one X in their names; which for a few seconds materialised in front of your face, clearly such a thing as no human had ever seen before, and you thought it looked as though it should be a dirip.  “Dirip,” you said aloud, but there was no-one but you to hear.  The dirip briefly existed in your world, then it didn’t, then it was just a memory, a conjugation of properties, iridescence, you recalled, a certain intransigence of topology, reminiscent of a Klein bottle; and it winked at you, you thought; not literally, as it had no eyes, but nonetheless it contrived to wink.

  This memory was a locus in the brain which if triggered would connect with other loci, those that dealt with vision for instance, and pop up thus in the workspace, a demon.  The dirip demon.  And if it’s a demon, it must already be part of culture, you suggest.  What need of a second brain?

  Okay, I sort of give you that.  But it cannot survive.  Culture has to survive.  To survive it has to replicate.  And it can only replicate by going into another brain.  Maybe when the dirip appeared to you you were shipwrecked on a desert island.  You were rescued in due course, and at some point, maybe in the middle of a conversation with your sister about birthday presents for kids, you suddenly, clear as anything, recalled the dirip, and told her about it, its strange topology, its iridescence, the undeniable wink.  Well, she may look at you as if you were mad, or anyway prone to worthless fancy.  In which case the dirip is going nowhere.   But she may be intrigued, and tell a friend, and then that dirip has form, it is about in the metaverse and in the world.  Somebody in time might write a whimsical sci-fi story about a dirip.  In fact we could bin the whole bit about an actual dirip actually appearing.  It could be entirely fictional.  It wouldn’t matter if there was no such thing as a dirip.  A dirip now exists in the metaverse.  Not very substantially, not very durably.  But it exists.  There are no dirips in the real world (okay, as far as we know, sether Polly Agnostica) and never were.  But the real world is composed now entirely of Culture.  The real world as it would be if we no longer existed is very hard for us to perceive, and usually only in moments of confusion or disorientation when the workspace  has become disengaged from the metaverse.

  A stone was and will be a thing in the real world before we Homo sapiens were and after we are no more.  But while we are in the world, a stone will exist beyond the real world, in the metaverse, distributed across it between all the demon stones in every ideoverse, and the discrete things in the world that we know stones to be.

  Thus everything is now Culture.  The real world still exists, just as it did in the days of dinosaurs, or indeed before our planet coalesced.  But though we are continuous with it in a material continuum that goes from our bodies to the furthest reaches of the universe, we no longer have, never have had, much access to the real world.   All we have access to is Culture.  All that we have access to is demons that have already been through, usually, countless brains on sticks. 

  So just before you go to mill with the careless throng, let me tell you again what Culture is.  Culture is the total sum of all, every and each demon; together with their alliances and alliances of alliances beyond number; but particularly Culture is the total sum of all, every and each demon.  And everything in the real world was at one time not a demon, but now is, because it has been through a brain on a stick and then through another brain, at least once.
Okay, off you fuck.