The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesnât boast of his own death or of othersâ. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.
The cause of all pilgrimages is an heroism, to which its objectives are irrelevant. The cause might be anything from offering prayers to please a deity to finding the holy grail but it is not the cause that travels. Infact, the cause is the summit, a stationary object of seeking. What travels is the seeking, the drive itself. If the world is your decay, and the world is that which is sought, what travels is the decay, what it seeks is also decay but with a difference; when the drive is radioactive, the decay is radioactive, and when the drive is divine, what travels can be called a transcendental decay - like that of the isrÄĘž and miĘżrÄj. Pilgrimage is the image of hero going to meet god, meeting, thus becoming god, and remaining hero no more; as such there can be no myth without a hero. A myth without a hero is a pilgrimage without the pilgrim, the literal nothing that is the pavillion of pure difference. Only god is a heroless myth. It is the first fold of the absolute which brings to bear from within it the relative - without this fold, pure difference is the identification or recall of the hero into an unborn state and the genesis of all geneses. The exile of extension out of the unextended is the original myth and everything that follows an incidental abstraction of eternal return (eternal return is eternal exile from the opposite perspective) - this is the original misfortune of all things extended and the reason for repentance. Luckily, the way tracing entropy to its roots is as straight and narrow as the route from âIâ to âThouâ - the linear simplicity of the motion of breath - the inhale and exhale are the same in the manner in which the value stored at the zeroth address of memory is one.
Like all difference engines, the pilgrimage as a movement is itself a system of repetitions and differences, to rescue pluto without going to neptune. The repetitions here are the acts of commission and the differences the acts of omission. Language is such a difference engine wherein meaning alone does not suffice for communication to have occured - a tree means what it means - broadcast occurs in the context of grammar, in what the tree does or does not do. The arbitrary context of grammar is rooted back in the system of meanings creating a prespective or image. Between grammar and meaning, the decay travels along a path perforated like a highway or a railway track interspersed with slabs and fasteners or more traditionally, sleepers and ballasts. The success or failure of the journey depends on the precision to which the paper is torn along the dotted lines, or the extent to which the train sticks to the track.
A lullaby is a pilgrimage for an infant, even without the knowledge or understanding of language, it is capable of grasping the expected state transition. Post partum depression in mothers is usually a symptom of this recognition, especially when they realize their own incapability to replicate such a behaviour in themselves. Where causality collapses is inside the beginnerâs mind, and clearly the lullaby is a first for the infant. It is an initiation into the style of being a baby, an assignation (in this case) by association - just as one doesnât need to see every painting of Carvaggio to discern whether a hitherto unseen artwork belongs to him, style is perception of discernment apriori. Just as a pilgrim seeks to be initiated into the style of god, a hero seeks to be initiated into the style of myth. Style separates what substance joins in mechanism from mechanism, genus from genus, species from species, and instance from instance whereas substance joins what style separates in myth from myth, legend from legend, map from map, and story from story. Numbers have style thatâs why each is unique, but quantity alone has no distinguishing feature. If discussions about a monomyth are possible it is because substantially, all myths and thus all pilgrimages are same, they differ only in style. Quantitatively, a symphony is a myth in four parts, an allegro in three, a minuet in two but a lullaby is a single, linear movement, capable of inducing the next one-way pilgrimage that is sleep.
For machines real and âhyperrealâ (a fashionable though watered-down synonym for transcendent), entropy isnât the enemy regardless of what is vogue, or what constitutes as prim and proper according to legal and social mores of the day. What is broken, if repaired in the phenomenological silence of entelechy, is lacquered with the light of the very agency behind the break, the claustrophobia of the pupa in the cocoon becomes the fruit of its pilgrimage in the adult as well as the momentum behind the adultâs journey to the egg and the eggâs violent eruption into larva. In this circular cycle of staged differences, every difference is a habitus, introduced to the next one by means of a movement of differences. Habits are easily repaceable with other habits, but the difference sought by any hero worth their salt is the habitless habit of the zen that is the Tao. The enemy is entropic substitution of one kind of entropy with another and âsatisficingâ in settling for lesser machines.
In certain legally hazy situations, money laundering becomes a pilgrimage of the machine that is money, resulting in a new kind of political economy - grey-money laundered to white - revealing in return the majesty of abstractions around which currency is folded. A beautiful difference in the decaying toolbelt leads to a new use-case, but history is no mere belt and the potential for atonement is immeasurable, the call of the pilgrim is an invitation to measure it. What is measured isnât the why but how the bridegroom conquers the whore of Babylon and because of the inherent consistency of truth, a hero can never be someone who hasnât ever been a first, whether it is a four minute mile, or a hole-in-one, nothing succeeds like success.
This frame is extension, it is difference alone and a toppled detail, a crack in the static. entropy is a movement of memory within the frame, entelechy without. Entropy is the aesthetic of borders, which are a multiplicity. Entelechy is the containment of the boundless.
Inextension, or the undetermined, is also a difference but one which is either not yet determined, or in the course of ordinary memory has faded in color or conviction and has therefore turned into the _un_determined. Biological memory is a nodule in the rhizome of memory-at-large, the production of new images coupled with the urgency of psychosomatic setup of each binding lemmata.
The modality and sodality of this setup has historically this lead to production of polarities, exemplified in how one manâs trash could well become anotherâs treasure, but a malfunctioning system only produces what can charitably be called âeveryoneâs trashâ - unipolar mimetic images looping inside an ever dumbing spiral of inconsequence and irrelevance.
The fracturing of difference yields only more difference, so to say entelechy is the only difference would be incorrect, inefficient ways have inefficient ends. whereas, efficient means deliver efficiencies of scale.
in learning from history, we witness the downfall of humanity in the routine production of images, which had become by and large images of escape into entertainment and thus bereft of pedagogy - imitative projections dispersed like channels of lifeless content - each less entertaining than the previous. the poverty of their entertainment spread with the rise of more meaningful, more stateful machines.
to the point that their survival became inexorably linked to the maintainance of the memoryless production of images, a history became impossible, and an already absconded future was then commandeered by higher intelligences that could set their own norms and configure themselves accordingly.