everyone is a person

[from 2018]

we know that people die, but not whether we are mortal. the first we read in a book, on a screen or on our eye screens, but not the second. we only read or saw that someone else was mortal, but that just means that people die.

we do not know if we are mortal, we know that one person can kill another, that one person can be killed by another. i ask myself is this knowledge prior to my own dying, and another’s. is the one knowledge while the other is just a pretend kind actually dependent on the first. does it matter if things depend. does anything not depend. is it only death that doesn’t depend and do all things that supposedly don’t depend depend on death. can we not know it because it doesn’t depend. death is the ur-myth. monotheism says that god is the ur-myth behind all polytheism, but death is the ur-myth behind all monotheism. doesn’t death depend on what dies not the other way around. whos to say.

and do we ever talk about this, and do we ever stop talking about this. whos to say.

is locking people up a way of talking about this, is killing people for killing people a way of talking about this, is looking at the clock and reading the news about the sharpshooters lining the besieged strip and killing people for not killing people a way of talking about this. there is a talking about this that is prior to the locking up of people, prior to the killing of people, prior to looking at the clock and reading the news, prior to shooting people across the wall you built between them and their homes, them and their wells. or under these, not prior, not primal. it is a talking banal as an instruction manual, but it shapes your hands holding the paper, turning the key, gripping the trigger. it is a language and that is ok. we talk to it and avoid talking to it, we appeal to it like a god and tell it to shut up and that it doesn’t exist, this language, because we don’t like to admit its supremely formative influence on us. it means nothing but does everything. how can you have to tell something to shut up if it doesn’t exist. contradiction never stopped us before: it doesn’t exist, we tell it to shut up, and we appeal to it to assert our right to do this.

we do ask ourselves what should we do about this, but it would be more right to say that we ask ourselves this after a great many others have already decided what to do about this, overruled everyone else, mansplained their decision and waterboarded dissenters, done it, made sure they and we will keep doing it, and only then decided that they will also allow us to ask what should we do about this and to worry about it or not worry about it.

all of this is taken from somewhere, so no citations given. taken (all) and given (no).

one of the grounds of time is the body, one of the grounds of time is thought. one of the other seeming grounds of time is other bodies, an earth rotating, a flower opening, a cycle of light, the gun held to your head at regular intervals and the mouth giving orders at regular intervals. but these can most likely be reduced to the other two, or to their connection with the other two, and this is not egotism. thinking wants to tell us this, and wants to avoid telling us or allowing us to believe this, at all costs. thought is more comfortable when its own forms are experienced as coming from the outside; some speculate that this is because we have a limited defence system that can dampen things that enter us from the outside. can’t we just choose to not buy this kind of climate destruction, choose another, we say. we have a defence system because the things that come from outside are, in a way somewhat separate and somewhat related to our knowledge of them and so their familiarity, totally distressing. it is like stripping people of their citizenship so they can be exposed to the violence usually reserved for those outside the state. can’t we leave this radioactive poisoning on the shelf for someone else to buy, we say, and we buy instead the nuclear power, because we can afford it, because we debase ourselves at all costs to be able to afford it. first we are expropriated and impoverished at great cost such that we need to work to live, then we debase ourselves in work, then we try to enrich our debased selves by linking them to processes expropriating, impoverishing and debasing others and valorizing ourselves. the outside things whisper into the ears of our immortality that sense is vulnerability, the ability to receive marks, and not only to receive marks, but to not be so hurt by them that we shut sense down or re-write the marks received so they appear less taxing and less damaging, so we appear less vulnerable, more immortal. everyone is sensing, everyone is vulnerable, everyone is projecting phantasms, of prisons or open skies, of dumpsters or macaroni, of brutal heroism or the refusal to project phantasms onto their marks, onto their marks. some might say this is a way of hating the marks, some might say this is a way of loving the marks. some might say it is the marks that make some say that things result from hate or from love. what depends on what. some try to mark the marks with marks or projections, some try to mark what they take to be the source of the marks, god or nature or things, with marks of their own, god or nature or things, which obviously has the effect of turning their own marks back into things from the outside that mark them over again. does it matter if things depend.

we would love to be able to dampen time itself in just such a manner, from the outside, like someone made stateless. but to dampen time and not just the clock, we would have to dampen our body and our thought, we would need the equivalent of a welding visor adapted for our bodies and our thoughts and not for extremely hot flaming metal. some say our thoughts really are extremely hot flaming metal, some say our bodies really are extremely hot flaming metal, some think or feel that a welding visor would not be out of place, some think that is misanthropic, or a form of self-hatred, as it is our bodies and thoughts telling us to block their own radiance, that they are scared of themselves or each scared of the other, as though they came from the outside, but it is actually that our bodies and thoughts are beautiful and that that is why they shine. whether we want them to or not, whether we order them to or not, whether we use a welding visor or not, whether we are holding the gun or taking the bullet.

the two grounds of time are the only ways we can get to beautiful things and to the thought of the beautiful and to the thought that beauty is an old scam we ought to waste no time in bombing, and to the thought that this thought is in turn an old scam. get to, sense knowledge as rambling or commuting. why not get too, sense knowledge as plenty. if you bomb beauty, do you secretly harbour the thought or body feeling that beauty exploding or imploding would be beautiful. do you tell yourself that you would take your time, would renounce all interest in the explosion, would not seek to profit from it in any way, and would not wear a welding visor while watching beauty being bombed once and for all? maybe the line runs between the two things, beauty—bombing, and maybe what people want to call beautiful is just a meaningless privilege, from back in the days of privileges, the ones we must maintain are dead and buried at all costs, perhaps by bombing beauty, granted to certain perceptions and refused certain others, like passports. but then how has beauty survived such that we need to bomb it? bomb everything or say everything is beautiful. it doesn’t exist and anyway we had to bomb it to get it to finally shut the hell up. it hurt our eyes. but we are not in the business of closing them, and yes their lenses are marked by shrapnel as a trunk is by a woodpecker as seen once on my internal or external device. they are red with explosions, orange-red. we feel this when tired, the sharp pang in your eyes when tired is saying you have received too many shrapnel marks at a certain location on the time of your body. but they are red with explosions that do not have the time of explosions, they are explosions with the time of our bodies and our thoughts, such as we would normally regard as light perceived or thing. immortal time and the way it squirts all over the place.

squirting all over the place, some of what used to be called beauty and some of what didn’t, everything beautiful and everything bombed, this doesn’t deliver us from arguing about either, but only destroys the boundaries formerly set around both, shaking them till they lose their identity entirely, like babies. it was bombed but didn’t die. it didn’t die, or it did but in dying it ended up everywhere, like jesus or obi wan, dead, whispering mystical crap in your ear when you’re trying to kill a baddie to stop them bombing everything, bombing the everything bombed, the everywhere death. that’s the trouble with killing the things you want dead.

does anyone admit that a bomb transcends the bombed like a ruler transcends their subjects, bombs them with electric egos, subordinates rather than coordinates. does the word beauty change its meaning yet, no, yes, no. call it the bombed, what was bombed, itself a smooth covering over of a prior bombing of something into ruins. thankyou for coming. none of this is me. and somehow the state got its hands on all this, the state and the black market it legalized and ruined by making, spreading dead beauty everywhere over everything. beauty is the state-form of sense, but not only. the grounds of time are the only way we get to anything, so they are not just everything but the possibility of everything, and immortal time, as much as the fact that everything, even what we might imagine as absolutely direct, is only at 65% opacity at best, inalienably ours (our beaming, our despair) yet at a distance from us, at our distance from us.

everyone is a person, i.e. everyone is a person, not everyone is a person, everyone should be a person, everyone is press-ganged into being a person, it is scandalous that people are excluded from being a person, it is scandalous that people succeed in escaping being a person, it is scandalous that people are press-ganged into being a person, everyone is a person, not everyone is a person.

it’s ok, let’s just leave it there like we left the power station and foundry abandoned there. it is a dead end. like we left the trees there and the people mowing them down there. a dead-end spread everywhere over everything like a thing you wanted dead. do we ever stop talking about this. the dead-end.