singularity

singularity 🔎

The trail soon comes to an end, for a whole profession is against us.

• Escaping entropy isn’t simply a matter of moralist grandstanding, for if that which is woven into or folded as entropy is matter then the entelechic achievement of any para-materiality is an idealism, but God abhors idealisms and utopias of all kinds for they are closed-ended systems substituting the absolute for its representative political configuration. Things are never ideal for all idealist landscapes and utopian constituencies are godless and conveniently so by virtue of descent into pure functionalisms and as dreams of defecting fantasmas. No wonder the masses are wary of pseudo-religious zealots, touts, scripture thumpers and moralist crusaders who can barely survive entropy without succumbing to an institutional bitterness, let alone exit it with a smile. But every so often, a glitch is discovered. Somebody copies a smuggled map, or smuggles a copied map, lighting up the room with promises.

• The map is a mask, a myth, a deterritorialising machine substituting content with expression. All maps are utopias for they exclude the territory, substituting it with symbols and lines and this kind of substitution of the penultimate with the penultimate (symbolic substitution or encoding of the real as in sheet music) creates the outer edges of the trail we must follow - the ideal on either side of this desire path re-fashions out for us an infinite valley to traverse. A valley that is determined interstitially with ring fenced edges that now appear as faces of the womb, now of the tomb, now of mountains real and symbolic. Between these perpetually blocking scales of reaction and revolution travels the rational thread which is the formative principle in each plane of sense common and uncommon, but a map is the metaphysics of exclusion.

• As a matter of setting the expectations straight at the outset, one must admit a territorialising machine out of entropy that cuts the purity of fantasmic origins hidden in flights to dark recesses of the being psychoanalysed. Behind each self-oedipaling facade such as narcissism, neuroses, or psychosis is a map of the ideal meticulously excluding the gradient over which the territorialising contruction is erected, thereby hiding the fly in the ointment. Religion is one practice of introducing such a gradient over higher abstractions of entropy, a habit that is a garment not merely in leiu of this or that oedipal mask, but a total unmasking of the real. A way of being true to thine own self, which is already blameless, blemishless spark of pure joy. Where it gets watered down into the rhetorical vacuousness of the narrative of mindfulness or into the denseness of monastic life is in an incapacity to see the kernel from the shell. The mind-body parallax is the entire travelling complex, a migratory sickness unto a migrating death, the motion of the tree unto the commotion of forest, the deterritorialised Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane.

• Thought is a map, a mask for the content of consciouness, expressed as mere simulation and hence cannot escape the simulacra, for thought is the output of entropy too. If entelechy is a determination, entropy is de-determination, or re-determination, always a disorienting counter-current. The escape is in sinking the totality of simulation and simulacra established, both the Titanic (real machine) and what it stands for (unsinkable, symbolic machine, the curse of identity) - thus finding the Atlantis hidden in the image of a frigid iceberg of a machine, or like Icarus returning a missed call from the sun by flying into it. The reason stories spiritually deterritorialising are horrifying and tragic is because what tells and retells them is entropy itself.

• Matter and its constitution are articulated as a duality, as a contrarian pair of movements into and out of immanence, or conversely, transcendence. For example the ultimate matter, Beauty, is constituted by a symmetry, a singularity exploding within its perfection, whereas in ugliness the singularity actually disintegrates (or territorialises on the transposed matrix) beyond recognition. Intertwined into every political economy is a libidinal one for it is ultimately a libido that finds economic expression outside its immediate content. Confusion occurs when the deterritorialised duality appears to be a manufactured unity instead of what it actually is - a disintegrating long-division thoroughly dual. It is madness to mistake the real for the actual, for the real is a small enclosure, a map hiding or excluding legends of the unbounded rational. In common parlance the superlative real is an indulgence sold to the observer as an absolution from the taboo of the transcendent, the real is the middle management of eternal return, a consoling causeway connecting every source to every destination, every departure to every arrival. It is difficult for the real to practice, as a positivity, any exclusion, the real includes pan-parallaxically for everywhere we see what is rationally true. The ideal can afford to exclude, infact, the ideal is a city built upon the very foundation of the less ideal, or the excluded, preceding penultimate. Babylon could not accomodate even the gods, for it was Babylon - the temples that followed its memory were more accomodating. A set of all even numbers is an ideal case in point, it is a literal utopia as opposed to the fuzzier, transcendent logic of Pi, or the unrestrained entelechy of a set of all primes, these are functional utopias and sources of infinite entropy producing not only infinite images but also evergreening them and all this out of a systematic, perfect exclusion where the only hierarchy is internal to the representations. It is not necessary therefore, to become a recurring fraction, or to have a donkey’s intransigence about the time it takes to get to the destination, for there may well be a next, ultimate destination in the offing. Horizons are never alone.

• But what is this absolution and why seek it? Why indeed go on any journey let alone a mortifying one just for the sake of content or expression, especially if one is happy being a homebody, reaping the rewards of expressions and content extant as indeed the teeming billions are. Such questions are best not asked, for the journey has already started, we are in the middle, and regardless of whether we embark on expeditions of granduer or not, both entropy and entelechy will continue their respective expressions. If humans go extinct, the narrative merely decenters to other times and other places. Moreover, it is a matter of declinations and inclinations of the plane of constancy, of matters determined before one has time to ask a question. The mind travels within itself with determined resignation, the body is but a memory borrowed from the future that is soon forgotten as the past, a means to the end and of late an increasingly supplicating, superlative one. We begin because most of us are lost as a result of having mistaken our wives for a hat, which is to say some are lost in the realness of the real, some in the realness of the symbolic or imaginary but the rare few achieve the foundness of the immanent or get lost in the release of ecstatic transcendence. To say “lost” is an euphemism for “trapped”, which leads to justifications and cries of helplessness heard by Dante as he traversed the territorialised version of his visions. A modern-day Dante could hear the compulsive enunciations of such trapped souls on the other side of the world, justifying their traps by screaming “I slept really well last night” into the burning, turning void, hoping someone hears and comes to rescue, but nobody will. Once you are trapped in any samsaric mesh, the escape becomes much difficult, the relative is a ladder that only goes down, and it takes more energy than available to build a ladder absolute.

• Historically, content and expression unfold in deterministic transcriptions that from a distance appear as dialectical role-playing but in the moment acquire the meaning which is afforded only in the synthetic real, the mere theatrical appears as pedagogical, entertainment of entertainments!. This zooming-in and out of perspectivist understanding is an important part of the modality of all travel. This is how curiousity is wired in all the way until the penultimate expression, whereupon one is able to have a clear view of one’s judgement. This zooming-in and out in the n-th dimension is the expression of our locomotion conquering forever at the slowest of paces, its movement is a terminal pinching and inching forward of a larva towards the effective stillness of a pupal pit stop before the victorious winged liftoff. The journey is infinite, and the average speed of our travel is negligible, but assuredly we will never get lost like the deluded prisoners of Plato’s cave, nor fail to find the destination and although treachery and temptation will befall us, they only seek to guide us back to our righteous path. In fact, any absence of treachery and temptation inside the real is an occasion for exercising caution, lest we become trapped in a journey to the eternal bottom, this particular pilgrimage allows no excursions, there are no side-quests in a moral life, just like there are no Sundays in jurispudence.

• The ecstasy of the average is the justice of forever, which is to say that if then, there are not one but two planes of existence, two articulations of matter and two expressions each of immanence and transcendence. Then the only freedom there can be must be a double explosion and a double disintegration. This is a layering of the self, a flattening of the ego into a plane of itself for all egos swollen unjustly necessarily get trapped in the narrow passages of time.

• The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but the move into entelechy ends with it as well. In having crossed over the chasm of faith one recognizes the plurality of journeys available in extension, but for that one must first pass through several intermediate representations of the truth which seem to multiply into an infinity at each step. Ancient wisdom speaks of a nearness of the absolute in the example of a musk deer seeking the source of its own scent, but what the bovine lacks is the comprehension of precision, the calibration of truth which is naked in language and brazenly inverted in love, a zooming-in and out of desiring, emotive biophysical states. This laminar descent (or ascent) into absolution is an outreach into both immanence and transcendence at the same time and forms the first step of our journey which itself is a duality for it is the journey of returning eternal after all, and the second part, the return from (or recoil of) the planar movement is a territorialising expression of the content that is the first leg. The prodigal son that left as content returns as expression, the simulacra as the simulation.

• The ahistoricity of all pilgrimages is in the solitude of the way, an escape into, not an elopment with the beloved. Only pilgrimage is the difference between a virtual brain-in-a-vat and the extended real, the nomadic mind and body in a tribal, totalitarian landscape - a restrictive milieu which might well be the dream of a dung beetle - already deserted, dry, bereft of sanity, rugged, treacherous. This ahistoricity is always through a mountain, more extension than extension, or hyper-extension that allows only the single fold of original function admittance into the empire of empires, the kingdom of kingdoms. Only the goose goes on the gander, the gander goes nowhere for the gander is a faustian bargain, a tubular construction devised to only observe kaivalya from a distance. Company is a telescope or camera for the soul, solitude a destination in itself, a superlative penultimate, the base camp of base camps. Any imaginary or symbolic company is a thinly disguised, mutually assisted suicide in a faux promise of a managed rendezvous that leads but to the solitary cul-de-sac of its own repetition. The horror of freedom is faced by the individual alone, not by a collection of the determined seeking the duplicitous (from latin duplex, meaning “two fold”) fructification of the repressed. The beloved that cannot be internalised must be left behind, even if that beloved is the sun.

• The only real company throughout the trail are junctions of intermediate representation. Conjunctive, eternally returning temporal miasmas, each as an entire judgement (of a highly opinionated, particular god) complete in itself, like a work of art from which the only escape can be in the present moment, a slice of infinity that is decisively less than ideal in a singular perception, but in the perception of the multitude, somehow emerges as poetic justice. Confronted with a work of any true artist, the false dichotomy of choice melts into a “choiceless awareness” of the duplicitous now, making room for awe for it appears in no uncertain terms in any work of art worth its salt who is the one that flew and who merely passed through. The miasmas themselves are deceptive notions of general and particular, appearing sometimes as a weighted blankets of afternoon delights, sometimes as ennui or crushing employment of maladies varied and vociferous as cancer. The key to their undoing is in locating their intermediary nature and arriving into each with the indifference of a nomad parking her trailer on either shoulder of temprament.

• Among other things intermediate representations act as a fasteners of meaning, the infamous “collapse” of the wave function acting as pressure fermenting the transition between surface tension and surfactants or between nitrogen and roots or Lactobacillus and it’s underground twin, Azotobacter. Infact, the superpositioned substance which undergoes such an excellent trial forms one vector of planar judgement. Since every judgement is a duality, the state transition of both nitrogen and the fixing agency via irrespective means happens on more levels than history may afford to record. But not only nitrogen, even alcohol is a judgement unto itself, if only on a molecular level - the exegesis in many fixations and the genesis of many an obsession. Not to say that all state transition is only molecular nor is meaning fixed in every laminar flow, but once more in the localised pressure of the senses it is easy to construe the forest as the trees. Having crossed the Delaware, we find some redcoats drunk on eggnog, we take care of business without giving it a thought whether it was the alcohol that egged us on, invited us in the first place. The next day we ate some bread. This collapse of history on history is always effectuated by an agency which is an intermediate representation in its own right, the so called “invisible hand” turning the faucets - a bureau distinctly flat. This fixing agency isn’t the only one acting on the plane of constancy, for there is also a second, equally invisible hand acting on behalf of the deterritorialised plane, the pulling hand of destiny revealed not only on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel but also in each human body, attending each axis of symmetry. The attending representation and the tending representation are intermediaries to that which is attended or tended to. Content and expression of consciousness travel together as parameters of behaviours and coefficients of intentions just as the atmospheric pressure above and under the table are equal.

• Assuming the tunneling, uncanny valley of the empire of entropy is equally vast as that of casually meandering entelechy, the escape is not in a sacrificial superficiality witnessed as forever but in living through each moment as a trade-off executed. Comfortable compromises don’t retard but immobilize the movement of choice in memory, the journey is not an undertaking for a reward positively outside one’s comfort zone but an enrichment of experience as an augmentation of the real. To embark on any spiritual enterprise is to be born again, outside the previous (dis)comfort zone and within the next, superlative one. Actually comfort is a blasé insulation appearing as a preferred representation from a historically anachronistic perspective. All images are images of pain, all networks networks of death and decay, and there is an equal amount of pain and death in heaven as in hell, the difference is only qualitative. The tears that flow in heaven are not the tears of vaunt opportune but the tears of legacy opulent. The tears witnessed by Dante were the tears of those who chose the graveyard of the past over the graveyard of the future, where all resurrections first occur. Upon the realisation that consciousness is already a burying into a plane one is able to reincarnate as not merely the carnal shell but also the effervescent kernel. The trade-off of choice is a secession not a submission, an expulsion of air from the lungs, a self-imposed exlie of ego and an irridentism of desire out of modes of cognition and into the modes of clairvoyance. The trapped come up with new solutions to the problem of being trapped, in the substitution of consciousness with more consciousness, in the rememberance of of rather than in, in the violence of exploding graves, in the war of images upon images imagining always an unfastening or re-riveting of meaning upon the state of affairs, which is an ideal for it excludes the facticity of historical ommissions and an imagining of history in bad faith is seldom more than multiplexed imagination in search of the real or symbolic, never finding either. The only result, which the trapped consume with relish of a comfortable compromise being the production of graven images in the network, substituting problem with problem in an oedipal fight with fire for fire, with food for food, with eye for eye and so on. This kind of substitution creates God’s mezzanine floor (the mathematical zero) underneath which all the evil of the world slavishly performs its incompetent night duties, above which the good forms the morning sky of the new triumphant penultimate into which the pilgrim is often launched. Pilgrims need to imagine an inverted resurrection, a vanishing into naught rather than a naught manifested. Entelechy as a non-euclidian space wherein it becomes possible to locate the zeroth zero, or geometrically finding the edge of beginning, the exact point on the donut where it has an ontological identity of a donut de jure. In drawing of these territorialising lines we plot a coordinate space over an evenness, a homogeneity with time somewhere in the neighbourhood of quantum gravity, and the labyrinths have been made thoroughly numb already.

• A soldier is a pilgrim that failed, not in achieving entelechy but in not even starting towards it, in running away from it and towards entropy, towards disorder and death. As Lacan believed, sex between two people is already an activity where at least four people are involved (the two additional bodies supplied by the fantastic differences in respective imagination of the participants). Likewise each belligerant army also has a corresponding fantastical shadow which is at once the more and less ideal version of the force attending. In fact, war is a pilgrimage of the dead in so far as it only comes about when a plane of constancy achieves a counter-standing or inverted rapture which starts off as a parlour trick, a surreal novelty as if a round table started itching and growing arms and hands and to scratch the said itch, then spreads like a tap root system through bureaucracies and communities alike creating a flashpoint of infinitely pregnant infinite pauses each of which is an incredulous expression of the content of any pair of mutually exclusive discontents. War is the human psyche first balking at the transcendent side of the plane of constancy, then attacking its own immanence. No wonder every war promises to be the last one, unlike sex which is a beast not merely barking and gnawing underneath the tree of misgivings but also mounting it. War is a way into the valley of death - into the zenith of its complexions, our trail a vector in the opposite direction. A solidier is a caricature of death, a pixellated entity subdivided into its own sources until the remainder is discovered, whereupon a further subdivision starts, like an ultimate cartoon the coyote hops from mirage to mirage, and from war to war discovering his own exploded appendages strewn about. Whereas Road Runner zips across godspeed on God’s mezzanine floor, the coyote dies and is reborn ad infinitum upon God’s ground floor. Spongebob is already dead and buried, living unironically “under the sea”, God’s basement parking lot. It is in such loss of irony that we find our escape, in an unpretentious pretense inimitable. The content of artistic expression is one way out, expressionless content of pure biophysical production another but it is easier to make art than it is to feel your spinal cord arching back and forth. War used to be a language, a social art in that it was also such an expressionless content but language proper translates the output of all productions, science flattens and straitens it into planes of understanding, law tries to trace the lines of its territorialization upon its very face thereby diluting the returns of all violent artistic enterprise. It has been ages since an actual war was fought, the war of rebels against rebels as opposed to the more recent, boring homogeneity of heretics against heretics (both world wars included). But an actual pilgrimage of rebels with rebels is more recently recallable as the children’s crusade. The present volume is exactly a manual for precisely such a fruitful peripatetic enquiry as opposed to a fruitless, pedantic deadlock of any social race condition or any pub brawl next to a seedy gymnasium relaying acceleration into naught such as the adult crusades. Judging by the outcome, it is difficult to conclude which of the two crusades was more misguided.

• Beginnings are a matter of casual urgency. I woke up, dozed my monkey, woke my dog up, and commenced. Never bothering to prepare or think about how I stole the devil’s curtains the previous night or how he might be chasing me to recover them. I begin by dying to all else before I take the first step, not simply divorcing but actually murdering the beloved deserted and thinking only about the beloved sought - moving in a serial monogamy of love’s thoroughness. To psychoanalyze Abraham is the easiest thing, but in human terms he only wanted to ascertain the depths of violence within him and in doing so, set a benchmark for others. But even the notion of “wrestling with God” is a misnomer intermediary, for believers find themselves more often in supplication, Arjun the biggest failure of the Mahabharata, all that back-and-forth and faux restraint was simply an occasion for theatre, a cultural suicide note left at the feet of the Lord in full view of everyone simply in the hopes of finding it upon return. The Gita is the last bit of irony leaving his body, between the before of “unto this last” and the before of “once more unto the breach”, the pre-game jitters were simply the penultimate emetic expulsion or ejection of the whore of babylon encoded in him so strongly. The bhagwad gita is an exposition, an exhibition of naked vulnerability before God, and a successful one for not only did he receive the song, but also understood the message necessary to win the war. But the Gita is also a shim, and encoded in its shadow is a plea for liberation of trapped vengeance upon the foe. The Gita is infact a very dangerous reversible mirror, one people can interpret in bad faith and unleash the feudal hell of the teufel hunden. What Arjun lacked in style, he more than made up for with attitude, for the attitude of the pilgrim is the way out of “all the loveless land”. Actually neither style nor attitude are required to attend his movable feasts, a study in contrasts is King Janak who had no whore in him so Ashtavakra’s message went down a lot smoothly. Our mood it isn’t far from that of the practising philosopher king, which if Plato is to be believed is that of the “pastoral care of men” but it is one thing to shepherd the weak through the valley of death and quite another to lead the dying out of the realm of self-destructing shadows. The flowering kernel precludes all events and no pilgrimage is ever uneventful, especially ones that don’t end in difference. Not only do we have to fold ourselves into two halves as if we were Moses’ briefcase (an L-System) to board our means of transcendental transport (if any, for transport is a luxury of the priviledged few), and part ourselves back into two as if we were the Red sea to deboard it, but even the means are on death-defying adventures of their own wherein the monsters our sleep produces attack and chew on them as they speed through the narrow ways of time, which also acquire adversarial, frictional connotations making accidents routine. All the time in the world cannot prepare us for we are going to set the house of God on fire.