tumorigenesis

when the philosophy of the Tao is reflected on more than the Tao itself,

when the religion of Christ takes precedent over Christ itself,

when the name becomes irreparably mistaken for the thing itself,

and when the nature of 'man' overwhelms us

and we forget the humanness we are of nature

-- that is where mediation takes place,

where artificial digressions begin,

where forgetfulness defeats us,

and we find ourselves where we are now:

on the far epidermal end

of a growing

tumor

.

droititis

Human rights are a sham. They are sham(e)ful. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but the baby has begun to stink with the bathwater (probably because this system has drowned in itself). Rights are unsubstantial -- and most certainly not synonymous -- to compassion, co-in-passion. They are impersonal (instead of interpersonal), as that they leave movements -- being moved, moving toward, moving someone to... -- to the heart of the reader and the main resources for action to the individual in question. Heart in one and action in the other -- a dissonance between movements. Rights are semiotically discontinuous triadic complexes. Human rights respected (read 'allotted') by authorities and governments are not signs of love or care; they are mostly quotas of space to satisfy watchdog Judges. Rights to bear arms or vote are not naturally innate qualities we come recognize (Locke's God is dead if no other God isn't); rights are plots of territory given to (or at times taken away from) stewards by more powerful lords, an abstract sociopolitical fiefdom. My right to know or to express myself is the subject to an empty predicate of equally empty entitlement to discourse, private or public, "with limits." Boundaries to property; fences in a forest. Lines drawn on shifting plates of magma and temporary sediments. And you say, animals have rights now too? And rocks maybe?

Don't respect my rights. Open your ears to my words and your eyes to my gestures, my face. Be moved, or at least give me the opportunity to move you. Opportunities, not ordinances. Experience me. Love me. I do you. And you, and you. Yes and yes. No, not by default. Not because you resemble a human being; nor because you or I deserve it. Just because I know who I am (in theory) and I know who you are (in theory), and because the beginning of this sentence is a redundancy (in application). Opportunities, not ordinances. Compassion and crescendo, not credences (with bread and wine). Movements, not immunities.

If you want governments to respect and care about their people, don't throw human rights in their Face. The Christian God of the United States built the world in seven days and offers to save you; the Face of China was built by the hands of the people over millenia, and it means the world to them to save it. Both God and the Face have forgotten the people now, though; neither is as strong as the new ziggurat of the capitalist market. But remind them of their roots (after you learn them yourself); be radical (radicle) with Confucianism. Who knows -- maybe we'll learn how to revive our own inner Lazarus in the process, to see that building heaven on Earth means Creating out of love of the other (l'autre, tout autre), and does not entail justifying ourselves while waiting for the "end of days" (only Christians are convinced that the messiah has come already and is coming back now) with the notion that our neighbor had the right to choose between heaven and hell. "What Wills the Justice Deparment" is warn on everyone's wrists (of the right hand), when we should maybe be asking What Would Jesus Deliver? -- to all, not the few.

Or...reflecting and taking with us the important lessons of these antiquated systems of thought, perhaps we should face this time of closure of a sort. Maybe we should finally throw out the dead baby with the stale grail water. A change of system design over system improvement.

Whatever we do, we can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them. It isn't right.

the GoodHost

to my dear friend Kayoko, whose birthday was yesterday...

A tart smell

of
age and
pretty dresses
as she walks
into the
room
abandoning
for only A Moment
those at home

they need her
After All, leaving

them to
fend
forthemselves for
a
couple of hours,

she comes for
tea
and Conversation,
"Have you heard?"
she doesn't see the flowers
stem ends

pierced
by plastic

and soaked
in dirty water --

when she does finally
she tones silently
How
Pretty! they are --

"Such a Shame,
that boy,
what
a
Bright Young Man
he was becoming,"
sipping her tea&Conversation
with the nod of
her host

a neighbor,
a neighbor-hood-equal,
smelling older, who
cannot Afford
to
leave
the house

"And
How Is
your
husband?"

a carnation
wilts slightly,
almost but not
quite imperceptibly,
nods with
the host,
nods
to sleep
to death

"Yes..."

a pair of
swallows
skirt by the window
and
land for a
moment's gaze inwards

the host, as she is
a GoodHost
draws the
curtain over
the
outside

"Well, it's
Time to return.
They need
me after all" --

she hardly
notices
the
dandelion
she steps on
on her
way out the
front gate.

Inside
the arrangement
bends forward, bows
down
betrays itself
and the GoodHost
with
dew tears,

a Couple of Hours

After All,

is an eternity

for flowers.

The surface of
the
inland sea
smooth
appearing off-white and like
the blue
pale
of
robins' eggs,
millions
fast ened
togeth
er
and
teeming
with gaps
and cracks,
mouths feeding
on
oxygen;
and
all to keep
a float a
wrinkled top hat
steam boat,
rims
curled
in
ward
to
satisfy weary seabirds.

I
crescent
the staring moon
by squinting,
and
hail
the
wav(e)
ing
hand
of an
ignorant friend
trespassing
the risen
crest
of the
edge
of
the
surf.

(w)holier-than-thou

holes in ourselves. holes in each other. love is not a state but a motion (an e-motion), an intensity, a warmth and a 'warm feeling inside'. society is riddled with holes, multiplicities of holes. holes make up societies. and no more (nothing less) is the love-act than a holefilling, a voidlessening, a penetrating and filling of empty wombs and empty stomachs. empty lives. and equally, there is a motion or attempt to negate or prevent the love-act: the making of holes to retract the making of love, tearing holes in each other to watch our wounds gape and gasp for the first of two impossibles -- the reversible, reversibility itself. yet love, the love-act, only exists by way of a positive impossibility, an impossible of space rather than time: self-completion, a gestalt of the One over the many, a wholeness and a holelessness.

a showdown with my simulacrum (OR becoming an other)

the way a blind eye turns in on itself and magnifies the immanent -- i turned to me to propose a revelating experiment; no mastermind in his dreams could muster what it takes to invent such a scheme. for you see, it surfaces on what's already apparent: the surface of the mirror, the glass in the photocopier, bordering my words and a bright light; the internal architecture prime for reproduction, like a mime, smooth and without obstruction. if the machine of life can do this, why can't i?

slowly i began to reminisce, thinking backward and forward -- the mirrors, the glassdoors, the sidewalk's skyscrapers, a highschool photo album, the family videos. there were little tyke birthday parties on VHS, RGB settings just a faint tint too red; there were ceremonies and field trips, balls -- portraits that sleep on the shelves after invading the walls; stories by friends, at least the ones i've heard, girls telling boys telling boys telling girls -- a history, the way all histories are made: suggested, imagined, mutated and framed. i made it, my image, a copy of me.

and i put it to work: sit in that chair, at the desk, near the stairs, say hello but don't say hello if it isn't clear, sing the songs, do the dance -- and done! i was free. not from the cage of walls and windows beyond which the piercing light of the sun illumines the greens and blues and gentle greys of a nostalgic world of origin -- no, not free from that, but from myself. from me! god help it was irrational but one-hundred-and-two percent logical, a provision of intense proportions, expressing the given truth that we mustn't say yet we need to know: a copy does what a copy should do, stand in for what you want it to.

so i plugged my ears and strained my eyes and let my copy tell its lies. it tugged at me -- it beckoned me to come closer, but i was bolder, and older; and i stood in the fourth wall of each scene and at times viewed it like the screen of the TV in the den, up too loud, full of bad reception and barely perceptible glitches. it struck me then: the bad reception was on the side of me, the me in the TV: no life, no breath, no warmth, no hope, nothing but an empty image, hollow of meaning, of chemistry -- a disemboweled and distorted semi-simulacrum encoached in malformed phenomenology. and strike two: this frankenstein's monster of one-sided memories had the lethal potential to disown me, the me of the periphery.

it was all over, unless i made one final move, one last synaptic convulsion, capable i knew of sending me, both of me, flying and dying into the ocean of molten thalamic fluids of the acutely neurotic; but the alternative was intersocial death -- so i played my hand. i threw myself back into the material world, into the mind's colloquial Cartesian theater, threw back the metaphorical curtains and bent all subjective space-time to my volition. all the shadowy reflections of my past were nearly gone -- fed to the cogs of my creation, teeth still nashing and grinding, silently resounding 'more! more!' oh, i'd give them more. return to the faces of family and friends, their souls, their tongues, their eyes. their eyes -- looking at me and searching me for signs, signs, signs of consent, all the things we needn't say but we must know: agreement, acceptance, convenience, displeasures and pain, brought to the forefront to pave the way for novelty, for change. i took it all in, in a breath, and filled the vacuous concavities of the copy with their jabber, their stares, the perceived expectations substituting at times their presence. natural channels of irrigation formed, veins and arteries, stretching between this and all other copies, traversing thresholds, restoring promises, reviving broken hearts, and procuring lovers. and when i'd finished my deed and looked into it eyes, it deeply bowed to me, and that's when i realized: if i could make one and God could make two, then with a bit more work i could complete me with you. so i did, and all was good.

now there's one small problem with this picture, something i've failed to elaborate -- too late to solve it, too little time to make a lecture, so i'll just say it once here and now. you see the problem with a copy is if you give it all that's you, then you'll discover unspoken truth number two: a copy is a copy until that copy becomes you. and as i winced at its glitch of a grin, a thought at long last came to me, that what it was thinking was beyond -- no, wait, more than me. MORE than me. and in the breadth of three words, all was said and done, glasses the world over shattered over a blink's millennium. and when my eyes opened again, there was only one -- one me, one 'real', no casualties, and the thing that had made me was gone, empty as it was of life, of breath, of hope. and as i write, i wonder if i'll ever see him again -- no, surely not. but the point of this message that i'm writing here to you is, when you say i've changed, lord, you haven't got a clue. i've just done what every living being someday has to do; and if there comes a day i ask what's gotten into you, then you can remind me of this story, of the natural progression of reality and the eternal assimilation of the simulating entity: the me, the you, the me.

history lesson

the history of our lives does not distantly resemble the history of the species. moments of dire importance are edited out of the narratives, at most times in an entirely habitual manner. the majority of us, for example, disregard our dreams, giving them merely the passing significance of their probably having occurred but leaving it be that we don't remember them; despite how extremely beneficial our lives could be if we each possessed the ability to analyze them, examine them for their symptoms of our innermost unconcious world. we ignore the fact that they even temper us for the following day, can hold us chained to subliminal influences throughout our waking moments.

the narratives of human history are so very similar -- so many dreams have been lost, unrealized, only acknowledged to having probably existed, as we 'progress' to future series of narratives.

taiko alley

the vibrancy,
vibrations,
tastes of clouds through
the street,
wadaiko
pulses
tremor of
the
heart
still caught in
my lungs

baachans
sigh-ride
under
looming
palmtree fronds
on the
side walk

our blinders are at
the very least
opaque
and
iPod soundbytes
can't
hold
water.

Impress-ions
made
stone-on-cold
-hard-stone
with the
mot-
to : Be
a lava-rock,
Fill
and flow like
water.
trans
forms
others
thru
time.
But
even the soft
-est mineral
fails to
break,
the rivers
bed
is
the
lot
of them.

t
he par
am
te
r
s
be
tween wake
&
sl
ee
p
e
n
caps
ul
at
e th
e w
or
ld we
'd for
eve
r
per pet u ate
...,
.
.
.
if
we
could on
ly re me
mber
upon
open-
ing our eyes
.



a poem to tom -- one of the few human beings in the world who defies all parameters in the shaping of a new world, and to whom i wish a very happy birthday

I look at a human being, even myself, and I see a fish, a monkey, a giant bacterium anomaly. A package of somatic intention, a temple of neurosynapses immersed in hairy foam rubber and assorted juices. I see a vector, a cloud of lines of embedded code, all projecting the phenomenon of difference.

How shall I address difference? Of so many things, difference seems to be a phenomenon – a deduction – concerned with distance: a farthering and isolating, then a bringing together, a uniting (or reuniting). These are the properties of a mosaic, with inconsistent fragments arranged together to eventually result in something (somehow) coherent. Difference is art and science, in purpose and in recursive motion. It is the permanent subject of mathematics.

Motion also requires time as well as distance. Emotion overwhelms the observer of excessive difference, striving with all due efficiency and means to recalibrate a worldview that incorporates, assimilates, homogenizes the disparate halves of known and unknown (familiar and unfamiliar). Indeed, difference is not heterogeneity, but the quaking phenomenon of experience between the heterogeneous and homogeneous. It is an elementary, essential rudiment to equilibrium and to relativity.

We – I – might feel morally compelled at times to minimize difference, but it absolutely mustn’t be mistaken for minimizing violence. We – I – mustn’t mistake stagnation for equilibrium. Peace is neither the ability to become, nor the state of becoming, accustomed to difference; peace is the side effect of complete recognition of the necessity of difference to health and progress. (In this way, peace can never actually be a goal per se, anymore than the Buddhist or meditator can call Enlightenment a goal.) Social progress will not come through a blindness or ignorance to difference, nor even a mere toleration of it; it will come through the transition from a fear of difference (a phobia of the unfamiliar) – the outcome of a geopolitically sensitive, culturally developed caution for impermanence and change, and coupled with a millennia-old biological inclination for conservativism toward one's immediate environment – to an appreciation of it.

Walking away

thinking

of what I said

disappointing

eyes

that I impose

on their faces

in contrast to

those imprinted

along nerve endings

the face of a better me

better to me

of course

but dare I ask

me to whom?

who stands the greater

of me as their object?

who waits for me

to evolve?

involving (of the) Super-fluous-

ego

in the next class

we'll demonstrate transitives

& intransitives

and the continuous form,

it's all a matter of pragmatics

.

it is important that we not view fundamentalism in an improper light; for by 'fundamentalist' in its colloquial usage, we often mean to simply imply an 'extremist,' and by 'extremist,' to take an extreme stance. in this layout, however, things are unfortunately distorted from the inside out. for we still view an extremem as a bilateral product, a position that is necessarily accompanied by a remote and more often than not dialectic converse, an opposite extreme. we view the extreme this way instead of as the nuance of an extremity, a line of growth projected outward from an indeterminable center of an asymmetrical body (indeed, indeterminable precisely due to this asymmetry). that is, not as a choice between the left and right hand, as (more or less mistakenly) posited on nearly all forms of modern globalizing governmental structures, but as the protrusive skeletal framework to one of multiple fingers, or manner of excess, like the penis or the nose, that shows no resemblance even to branching. while we have split the brain in two to further attempt to explain away our everyday behavioral functions and peculiarities via centralizing them in either one or the other half, we have maintained the heart’s basic holism, even allowing its oddly nonbisymmetrical shape and location on the left side of the chest. the circulatory system’s excessive faculty, serving the function of that name. the timelessly depicted rendezvous point for excessive emotion and stir for mobility. it is in fact the heart, not the head, that better portrays the nature of the extreme, to which the negative connotation in ‘extremism’ may be attributed where the results appear violent or undesirable. make no mistake, though, that we are all necessarily extremist at some frequent points in our lives, climatic stages to an unraveling storytelling and process of reasoning.

this more realistic portrayal of extremism is the only way through which to properly view fundamentalism. for in deriving the concept from the term’s ethnological roots, we understand it as an extremist adherence (which may or may not be conservative) to the most base literary fundamentals of a schooling. the Universal Darwinists are cemented to the principles of natural selection, with signs of their extremism appearing in the disregard (if not complete denial of) the other essential functions to evolution – ‘survival of the fittest’ is the world’s Absolute creed. the Sunnies and the Shi’ites now continue to dispel their rage of their political differences through violence and war sponsored by their each absolutely infallible version of Islam – despite that the Islamic doctrinal differences at the base of the politics is so trivial that such hatred and killing could hardly be proclaimed to have religious purposes in mind. and there are of course those Christians, most renownedly labeled fundamentalist Christians, who have perhaps spanned the course of history longer than any other form of fundamentalism (albeit in a wider variety of manifestations). it is also perhaps the most formidable fundamentalism, second to only one other in the world (which i will get to in a minute) but at the same time invariably linked to it. for Christianity, in its fundamentalist form, unlike the structure of Islamic fundamentalism which is foundationally religious and stems into a disparate but inseverable political arena, is political throughout; that is to say that the religion and its contextual political environments have since its propagation been so interwoven that the differences between them have by this day and age become inscrutable. thus why the insistence of a separation between church and state has nevertheless mostly resulted in its failure. thereby, the number one fundamentalist operation, so covert and widespread now that few would not hesitate to call it that, is the adherence to an American-based ultracapitalist model around which all developing conformist countries and globalizing societies revolve, beset from the start with past colonialist influences and reformations to thus be so conducive to this way of (the more subtle and thus perhaps more dangerous) neocolonialism.

if we approach these real world schemas with the left-hand-right-hand gestalt of extremism, we can, however painfully, justify these courses of theory and action as a very far right wing affiliation (the Son sits at the right hand of the Father), just another sort of manifestation within the diverse spectrum of beliefs. as such, it deserves the respect and toleration that all sorts are due, especially amid the ever growing awareness and necessity for international, intercultural cooperation. but that is precisely what throws fundamentalism outside of the categories for belief systems at the pragmatic stage – for Christianity rises among Christians, but fundamentalism is itself blind to the veracity of its host beliefs except as to whether or not the conditions of the host are sustainable – for it is at its rudimentary praxes uncooperative, unnegotiable. fundamentalism is not any kind of belief; it is a function by which a system of beliefs can assume a tyrannical or at least dominant position against other systems. and what is partly so dangerous about this is that it does not retain itself within the order from which it originated but breaches all manner of diplomacy, protruding further and further into eventually raping the substances of other intermingling orders – überChristians are captured by the fabricated rhetoric of politicians raving world progress in the name of the Father and are at once moved to challenge, and respond to being challenged by, the sciences, in converting by forgery the observations of their religious reality into those of a scientific one (i.e. Creationism); Universal Darwinism not only confounds the sciences (for it is not itself a science but an approach to science) by castrating of them their necessary degrees of complexity and permanently vague teleological conclusions (wherever they have any), but also destroys God. it is thus not anything so innocuous as a choice of the right versus the left (which is itself too limiting a model by which fundamentalism can operate), but an uncompromising literalism with solely proselytizing intentions, a forceful insemination by a distorted and relentless intercultural phenomenon.

a supposition for spirituality

involutionary niche 1: conservative ritualism

this is the most stagnant of the niches in spiritual development and is primarily a top-down determined expression of a religion's or culture's (mostly past) intention to incarnate the spiritual into symbolically meaningful praxis. the ritual performed from this niche in its relationship to one's spirituality greatly resembles the crossword puzzle or riddle to one's mentality, or even masturbation to one's physicality, in that at most it sustains or merely stimulates the faculties of the respective aspect of human being. change in respect to the ritual is mostly passive, derived from custom or ruling (thus the top-down scheme), and in fact the conservatism of its application requires a minimal of internal reflection or external informative influences.


involutionary niche 2: symbolistic institution

this requires knowledge of the ritual, if not the ritual itself, but expands it into the symbolic order of the religion or culture, as the responding procedure to the event of inquiry regarding the ritual -- the consensus to the inquiry 'why do we do this?' as it might possibly be answered with regard to the nature of what is spiritual. manifest ritual is explained through its relationship to the world.

(here is born the misconception of disparate worlds of being, that is, not that different modes of being [that accompany the diversity of perspectives and responses a person or a people may have to the world] occupy one existence ["we're all in this together!"] but that separate dimensions of existence [e.g. the divine and the natural] mysteriously occupy different times within one's singular mode of [potentially eternal] being. thus, we can also see from this the drive to submit oneself to [supposedly] unending occupation by forms of a separate existence as a goal to one's spiritual development [i.e. the invitation for the presence of christ to never leave me throughout my temporal Earth-based life].)

thereby, ritual is signified, made significant, by the education of its indoctrinated meaning. this niche is occupied by the greatest number of those whose vocation or inclination is to share doctrinal information ('spread the "Good News"') as it is by those who relate a tradition's signifiers to life as the final significance (or aspect of the final significance) to living.


involutionary niche 3: spiritual roundedness

the conditions of this niche have undoubtedly been most affectively experienced (though perhaps not yet sufficiently explained) by the world's most sincere mystics. however, most of these have likely failed to fulfill the niche, as i believe it requires as much a growing religiopolitical awareness as (if not more in the beginning than) the full-fledge impression of the real upon the sensible. for we must understand here that the real does not contain distinctions between the aspects of human being, and so the mental is as essential to pronounce in the symbolic order as the physical if the demands of the niche are to be met. human history and cosmology are quickly becoming active ingredients to this awareness and seem to promise to resolve the ritual to the most necessary praxes per individual or people, to suffice and sustain the remaining priorities of the spiritual that institutionalized religion and culture (qua State) cannot. (it may even require a further breach in consciousness that characterizes the stereotypical enlightenment of mystics, and scientists or artists.) among the terms of its range of perspectives is a dissolution of the human/divine dichotomy, and may include the same of the staticity to the self/other, Self/Other binaries. in any case, i believe it entails a consecration of the All, with oneself as fundamentally divine and Natural, as opposed to a consecration of merely one or the other. in a sense, it is dialectic, but to posit it in its explanation as merely a dialectical process is to miss by far the elements of its verity.

The Church

and the Word

the

tatemae & honne

of the West.

To stress

works

but give little

signification

to what they

imply;

to judge without

knowing someone.

I

say to you now,

that there is

no

better human.

A function

a

function

-- add the element

of

love

but don’t forget

the variety of

our effects.

There is
surface
and there is depth.
The
waters bow
under in
some

the universe

caves in on itself

bends

in

at the center

to see

another part.

Where in space

and

time it does this

we attribute

everything;

we

foolishly wish

not to see

the absolute arbitrariness

of

it.

We tie
all significance
to the
face

like a line

to a bobber

-- is this
a good spot?

--

unaccustomed to

the fact

that it simply happens
it
must
happen.

That which pulls

us in

isn’t hidden

; it

just

isn’t

seen.

By all means

love the

face: plucking

out our eyes

is to throw away

a Go
d-gi
ve
n

miracle,

a furtive center
to so
many joys.

And yet,
couple your sight
to your
sensitivity

and witness

the

unbearable

simultaneity

of the
Many-face and the

One-.

as such

how can
anyone
love
and
hate

?

A person seeking inner development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one’s mind. They must be so incorporated into one’s being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never conclude anything inwardly about these truths.

-- Rudolf Steiner



whether or not this altering of the soul by one's "own will-power," this lifting oneself by one's bootstraps, is a metaphysical possibility is against the point. the power of self-discipline, in both the effects and process, is a remarkable thing. there is also, as is obvious here in steiner's last statement, an incredible amount of faith that is required that these things will come with time. but such is the importance of the means, the process, even sometimes over the ends.

"Teaching is only demonstrating

that it is possible. Learning is

making it possible for yourself."

-- Paulo Coelho

「指導というのはなにかの可能性を

学習者に示すことだ。そういう可能性から

できるようになれる行為は、学ぶといわれている。」

－パウロ・コエーリョ

(my translation)

Death teaches us, not

that we should do as much

as

possible

while we're alive,

but

that we,

within the span

of

our lives, must

discover

what is meaningful

for us

to do

.

in the parks of chuo

in the early morning

the cry of the cicadas is

deafening

A street chant

to quake

one

sea-weed green

shingle

off

your neighbor's

roof ---

the pre-agential

one,

if only

because

it lacked the

life

span

to know

to act,

a mutatedmutating,

a gelatin-center

wax bean float-

ing in the deadly

still waters

of nobody,

eatinganddying

mouth less

absorption

until its

no-eye

body collapses

disintegrates

disinterested and

seen by

no one

------- before

the

miracle:

one touch

multicellular adhesion

extraterritorializing compilation,

progressive patterning

of the deoxy-

nucleic that

learned

the

art&power

of

atomic anatomic

reformation ----

the logic of touch

---- cell upon

cell upon

cellup

on,

inside our

apartment rooms

our refridgerators

our bathrooms

our bigtv living

rooms

Can you see?

Can you see?

the chant through

the window

to wake

up to

a mess

on the floor

and my passion to

clean the

outside

soto

&

uchi,

because we touched,

to want for

one without

the other

our egoist and altruist,

or the primitivist deconstruct-

ionist

a desire to

explode,

and the one who

cleans before cleaning

our biobuddhist

and

contemporary

onlooker.